Nicholas Kristof reminds us that the structure of our economy is not an inevitable outcome. It's a choice.
The eruptions in Baltimore have been tied, in complex ways, to frustrations at American inequality, and a new measure of the economic gaps arrived earlier this year:
It turns out that the Wall Street bonus pool in 2014 was roughly twice the total annual earnings of all Americans working full time at the federal minimum wage.
I'm going to pause here to let that sink in. The bonus pool, not the salaries of everyone on Wall Street, but just
the bonus pool of a few people in a single city, working at tasks most of us could not name and few of us would miss, exceeded the total income of everyone across the nation who waited on you at a restaurant, who picked up your trash and recycling, who stocked the shelves in your grocery, and a hundred other daily things that you would most certainly notice if they were to vanish.
We've been walloped with staggering statistics like this long enough that although this used to be a Democratic issue, Republicans are now speaking up. “The United States is beset by a crisis in inequality,” warned Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican with Tea Party support (although he added that his concern is gaps in opportunity, not wealth).
Yet another ridiculous Republican rephrasing (RRR) of income inequality. This RRR is almost as good as the old saw that the real problem is that the rich are paying too much in tax, while lazy poor people pay too little. Which causes income inequality...to...not be as big as it should be?
We as a nation have chosen to prioritize tax shelters over minimum wages, subsidies for private jets over robust services for children to break the cycle of poverty. And the political conversation is often not about free rides by corporations, but about free rides by the impoverished.
Kansas’ Legislature is so concerned with this that it recently banned those receiving government assistance from, among other things, spending welfare funds on cruise ships (there is, of course, no indication that this was a problem). Will Kansas next address the risk that food stamps are spent on caviar and truffles? We all know that public money is better used to subsidize tax-deductible business meals by executives at fancy restaurants.
Well, Missouri already took care of that caviar business. In fact, the Missouri bill would keep people from using food stamps on any fancy sea food, like say Mrs. Paul's Fish Sticks.
But the point here is this is all political. A yawning income chasm is not a given. It's something we've created through a thousand paper cuts.
Come on in. Let's see what other punditry is afoot.
Ross Douthat provides a master class in: cake, having it, and also eating it.
For decades now, conservatives have pressed the case that public sector unions do not serve the common good.
The argument is philosophical and practical at once. First, the state monopoly on certain vital services makes even work slowdowns unacceptable and the ability to fire poor-performing personnel essential, and a unionized work force creates problems on both fronts.
Several other points skipped at this point.
These points add up to a strong argument that the rise of public sector unions represents a decadent phase in the history of the welfare state, a case study in the warping influence of self-dealing and interest-group politics.
But as we’ve been reminded by the agony of Baltimore, this argument also applies to a unionized public work force that conservatives are often loath to criticize: the police.
The rise of public sector unions. The
rise of public sector unions. Yes, the utter ass-kicking that unions, both private and public, have taken over the last three decades, that rise. I suppose in conservaspeak "refusing to lie down and die utterly" = "rise."
Not only have conservatives been eating up everything the police have said—and supplying the spoon—in Baltimore, in Ferguson, and elsewhere, Fox and other conservative mouthpieces have made stars of the police union officials even as they've made the most outrageous statements.
Trying to use this situation to prove that unions are bad, is like saying that insulin is a bad idea because it prolonged bin Laden's life, or that clean water is a mistake, because ISIS also drinks it. Ah, six cups of heavy affirming the consequent, spiced with a dash of circular reasoning, and layered with inductive fallacies. That's the recipe for a classic Douthat column.
The New York Times revisits gun legislation in Colorado, just two years after the Aurora massacre.
Colorado is now reliving, in the trial of James Holmes, the 2012 shooting at a movie theater in Aurora in which a military-style assault rifle was used to murder 12 people and wound 70. Yet even in this painful moment, the new Republican majority in the State Senate seeks to repeal one of the gun safety laws enacted after the massacre.
The law, enacted a year after the shooting, banned large rapid-fire ammunition magazines that hold more than 15 rounds. Despite the tragedy, repeal of the ammunition limit became a priority among Republicans, who gained a majority in the Senate last year. They voted to repeal the limit in March. Fortunately, the Democratic House did not follow suit. “We’re not going backwards,” the House speaker, Dickey Lee Hullinghorst, vowed. The standoff dramatized the disconnect between state politicians in thrall to the gun lobby and the carnage suffered by their constituents.
You know, when i hunt, I can't tell you how many times I've found the need to rapidly fire off more than 15 shots to bring down a target. Oh, wait. Yes, I can. That would be zero.
Michael Kraus, Shai Davidai, and David Nussbaum ponder whether the American Dream is is more of an national delusion.
Economic inequality in the United States is at its highest level since the 1930s, yet most Americans remain relatively unconcerned with the issue. Why?
One theory is that Americans accept such inequality because they overestimate the reality of the “American dream” — the idea that any American, with enough resolve and determination, can climb the economic ladder, regardless of where he starts in life. The American dream implies that the greatest economic rewards rightly go to society’s most hard-working and deserving members.
Recently, studies by two independent research teams (each led by an author of this article) found that Americans across the economic spectrum did indeed severely misjudge the amount of upward mobility in society. The data also confirmed the psychological utility of this mistake: Overestimating upward mobility was self-serving for rich and poor people alike. For those who saw themselves as rich and successful, it helped justify their wealth. For the poor, it provided hope for a brighter economic future.
Hope is one thing, but if we made different choices in our politics, we could actually
have a brighter future. Hope is good. Reality is better.
Ruth Marcus on the weakness of the EPA.
Today’s topic is toxic substances and the appalling gaps in the current law that is supposed to protect the public from dangerous chemicals.
For example, before a new chemical enters the market, the manufacturer must demonstrate its safety and the substance must win approval from federal regulators, right?
Not even close.
When it comes to new medications, the Food and Drug Administration conducts a rigorous review. Same for pesticides and the Environmental Protection Agency. But chemicals — even chemicals used in everyday household products — are presumed safe until proven otherwise. Companies don’t even have to test chemicals before using them in consumer products. ... Not only that: The EPA, which is responsible for overseeing chemical safety, is all but toothless even when serious questions are raised about substances already in use.
This is my new cleaner, Arsenostrychnine Glow. It's so safe you can drink it. Once.
Timothy Egan wonders if the drought s the end of an state that was the creation of ample water.
In a normal year, no one in California looks twice at a neighbor’s lawn, that mane of bluegrass thriving in a sun-blasted desert. Or casts a scornful gaze at a fresh-planted almond grove, saplings that now stand accused of future water crimes. Or wonders why your car is conspicuously clean, or whether a fish deserves to live when a cherry tree will die.
Of course, there is nothing normal about the fourth year of the great drought: According to climate scientists, it may be the worst arid spell in 1,200 years. For all the fields that will go fallow, all the forests that will catch fire, all the wells that will come up dry, the lasting impact of this drought for the ages will be remembered, in the most exported term of California start-ups, as a disrupter. ...
Surprising, perhaps even disappointing to those with schadenfreude for the nearly 39 million people living in year-round sunshine, California will survive. It’s not going to blow away. The economy, now on a robust rebound, is not going to collapse. There won’t be a Tom Joad load of S.U.V.s headed north. Rains, and snow to the high Sierra, will eventually return.
But wait, other states have lower taxes! And lower services, lower education rates, lots of lower stuff. Why aren't you people running to get away while you can?
Leonard Pitts on what really brings change.
On the Thursday before Baltimore burned, Mr. Lee went to Washington.
He didn’t have far to go. Rev. Tony Lee is the 46-year-old pastor of Community of Hope, an AME church housed in a shopping mall in Hillcrest Heights, Maryland, just minutes from the D.C. line. ...
Too often, said Lee, African Americans have focused solely on protest — an important element of social change, but not the only one. He used the analogy of weightlifters who focus solely on building upper-body mass while “their legs are toothpicks...In many ways, our policy legs are like toothpicks. Most people don’t know how to engage that. What you find in the policy area is more the politicos, more the people who have been doing this stuff a while. But we want just everyday brothers — and sisters — to see how they can get engaged in policy and to make sure that their legislators, whether it’s federal, or...local, city, state, know who they are, hear their voices...”
If you're not in Baltimore and you're wondering how you can help—especially if you're white, not in Baltimore, and wondering how you can help, read this Pitts column.