“Writing Off The Unemployed”: Republican Imperviousness To Evidence Goes Along With A Stunning Lack Of Compassion
Back in 1987 my Princeton colleague Alan Blinder published a very good book titled “Hard Heads, Soft Hearts.” It was, as you might guess, a call for tough-minded but compassionate economic policy. Unfortunately, what we actually got — especially, although not only, from Republicans — was the opposite. And it’s difficult to find a better example of the hardhearted, softheaded nature of today’s G.O.P. than what happened last week, as Senate Republicans once again used the filibuster to block aid to the long-term unemployed.
What do we know about long-term unemployment in America?
First, it’s still at near-record levels. Historically, the long-term unemployed — those out of work for 27 weeks or more — have usually been between 10 and 20 percent of total unemployment. Today the number is 35.8 percent. Yet extended unemployment benefits, which went into effect in 2008, have now been allowed to lapse. As a result, few of the long-term unemployed are receiving any kind of support.
Second, if you think the typical long-term unemployed American is one of Those People — nonwhite, poorly educated, etc. — you’re wrong, according to research by the Urban Institute’s Josh Mitchell. Half of the long-term unemployed are non-Hispanic whites. College graduates are less likely to lose their jobs than workers with less education, but once they do they are actually a bit more likely than others to join the ranks of the long-term unemployed. And workers over 45 are especially likely to spend a long time unemployed.
Third, in a weak job market long-term unemployment tends to be self-perpetuating, because employers in effect discriminate against the jobless. Many people have suspected that this was the case, and last year Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University provided a dramatic confirmation. He sent out thousands of fictitious résumés in response to job ads, and found that potential employers were drastically less likely to respond if the fictitious applicant had been out of work more than six months, even if he or she was better qualified than other applicants.
What all of this suggests is that the long-term unemployed are mainly victims of circumstances — ordinary American workers who had the bad luck to lose their jobs (which can happen to anyone) at a time of extraordinary labor market weakness, with three times as many people seeking jobs as there are job openings. Once that happened, the very fact of their unemployment made it very hard to find a new job.
So how can politicians justify cutting off modest financial aid to their unlucky fellow citizens?
Some Republicans justified last week’s filibuster with the tired old argument that we can’t afford to increase the deficit. Actually, Democrats paired the benefits extension with measures to increase tax receipts. But in any case this is a bizarre objection at a time when federal deficits are not just falling, but clearly falling too fast, holding back economic recovery.
For the most part, however, Republicans justify refusal to help the unemployed by asserting that we have so much long-term unemployment because people aren’t trying hard enough to find jobs, and that extended benefits are part of the reason for that lack of effort.
People who say things like this — people like, for example, Senator Rand Paul — probably imagine that they’re being tough-minded and realistic. In fact, however, they’re peddling a fantasy at odds with all the evidence. For example: if unemployment is high because people are unwilling to work, reducing the supply of labor, why aren’t wages going up?
But evidence has a well-known liberal bias. The more their economic doctrine fails — remember how the Fed’s actions were supposed to produce runaway inflation? — the more fiercely conservatives cling to that doctrine. More than five years after a financial crisis plunged the Western world into what looks increasingly like a quasi-permanent slump, making nonsense of free-market orthodoxy, it’s hard to find a leading Republican who has changed his or her mind on, well, anything.
And this imperviousness to evidence goes along with a stunning lack of compassion.
If you follow debates over unemployment, it’s striking how hard it is to find anyone on the Republican side even hinting at sympathy for the long-term jobless. Being unemployed is always presented as a choice, as something that only happens to losers who don’t really want to work. Indeed, one often gets the sense that contempt for the unemployed comes first, that the supposed justifications for tough policies are after-the-fact rationalizations.
The result is that millions of Americans have in effect been written off — rejected by potential employers, abandoned by politicians whose fuzzy-mindedness is matched only by the hardness of their hearts.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 9, 2014
“The Silence Of The Austerians”: Here’s Why 2014 Could Be The Year America Finally Ditches its Inane Deficit Obsession
The year 2013 will be seen as a year of crushing intellectual defeat for advocates of fiscal austerity. There were many smaller victories, but this big one came in April. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts examined the Austerian ur-paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, which said that countries whose debt-to-GDP ratio reaches 90 percent experience dramatically slower growth. The UMass folks found not only dodgy statistics and backwards causation, but a goof in the paper’s Excel spreadsheet. The causation and statistics errors were more serious, but the fact that elites around the globe had gleefully embraced something with a flub any office temp could understand was horribly embarrassing.
It was an intellectual rout that badly wrong-footed the Austerians, who have since been notably half-hearted in the face of a resurgent left now campaigning on economic justice. This includes, for example, increasing Social Security benefits, which was unthinkable two years ago, when the fight to stop benefits from being cut was nearly lost.
The question for 2014, then, will be whether this triumph can be consolidated and expanded into the policy sphere. Because despite the intellectual collapse, Austerian assumptions and reasoning still dominate United States policy, which is undertaking fiscal consolidation at a pace not seen since the WWII demobilization. If the current Austerian death grip on the framework of policy negotiation can be broken, there might be a chance.
The answer to this question turns on how one views intellectual debate. Given the history of the last few years, one could be forgiven for thinking it’s pointless. As the Polish economist Michal Kalecki demonstrated brilliantly, there are powerful cultural and class-based reasons for both political and business elites to favor austerity now.
We see this today, as Steve Randy Waldman has demonstrated, in the blatant double standards applied to austerity as compared to inequality or raising the minimum wage. Consider a recent paper by the liberal economist Jared Bernstein, which while outlining much excellent evidence about the economic harm of inequality, is stuffed with unnecessary hedging and hesitation. The Reinhart and Rogoff paper, by contrast, was weak even without knowing about the Excel and stats errors (as Paul Krugman, among others, observed at the time), but elites nearly tripped over their own feet seizing on it anyway. Their bogus “90 percent” conclusion was stated as economic fact by everyone from Paul Ryan to the Washington Post editorial board.
However, biased reasoning is different than no reasoning at all. Seizing on a fig leaf paper fulfills a deep psychological need. Current elites may be largely greedy, corrupt hypocrites, but the cultural credibility of science is such that what amounts to outright class warfare must have an “evidence-based” patina. It’s far too gauche to simply ram through one’s favored policies because you want all the money or to kick the poor.
Therefore, fiscal policy in 2014 and 2015 will hinge on whether the Austerian coalition can be split (assuming, as is probable, that progressive Democrats don’t sweep the 2014 midterms).
Roughly speaking, we’re talking about the center and the right, and there are good reasons to suppose that neither will be brought around. For the center, it takes an intellectual defeat roughly akin to the Battle of Trafalgar to get them to grudgingly abandon austerity. (And if some hack economist churns out another pro-austerity paper, they will probably grab it eagerly.) Meanwhile, “straight” reporters have been culturally conditioned to code deficit reduction as a non-ideological good thing, so even very recent straight reporting still contains buried Austerian assumptions.
And on the right, things look especially hopeless. Denial and motivated reasoning are so epidemic that even Mitt Romney believed the “unskewed” polls before the 2012 election. Ivory tower arguments alone are useless here.
However, all hope is not lost. The key is to change what is considered acceptable for budgetary negotiations. Right now, they all assume that any new spending must be “offset” by cuts elsewhere. That aversion to deficit spending is 100% Austerian.
So while Republicans are largely immune to evidence, it’s also true they don’t actually care about the deficit in and of itself. They favor reduced taxes on the rich, and cutting social insurance. What’s more, conservative reformists at places like National Affairs have gotten louder and bolder in their advocacy of new thinking, even including infrastructure spending.
So if the center, especially including President Obama, can be persuaded to drop their deficit obsession (and again, it’s hardly possible to overstate how badly this debate has been lost), we could trade tax cuts for some austerity relief, like re-extending unemployment benefits and food stamps. And, it’s important to note, both spending increases and tax cuts count as austerity relief. Tax cuts, especially on the rich, aren’t very good stimulus, but they still put money into people’s pockets.
But the main point is to shift ground for negotiation. This strategy of “tax cuts for more spending” has been suggested many times in the past few years and gone nowhere. But before that, it has been the basis for many successful bipartisan deals, including expanding Medicaid in the 80s and the CHIP program in the 90s.
So while the deck is stacked against the anti-Austerians, continuing the intellectual battle is by no account useless. It’s highly possible to influence even a crooked debate.
By: Ryan Cooper, The New Republic, February 5, 2014
“Not Just For The Few”: A Government To Love, One That Works For Everybody
Rep. Steve King of Iowa told a local TV station a few weeks ago that “the best thing anybody can do” in Congress is not come up with positive solutions, but to “kill bad bills.” He wasn’t just speaking for himself. He was explaining the philosophy of today’s right wing.
Of course elected officials should oppose bills they disagree with. But King and his party have taken this to an extreme, opposing any efforts to use the power of government to fix problems that affect ordinary people. This anti-government strain of the Tea Party that is calling the shots in today’s GOP doesn’t represent just hands-off libertarianism, as many would like us to believe. The Tea Party does want government to work: but they only want it to work for a few of us.
This growing movement that claims to be anti-government has caught us up in almost daily skirmishes over federal programs and budget line items. But these battles have obscured the real issue. It’s not a big government vs. small government debate. It’s a debate about who the government works for.
It’s not enough for progressives to fight these selective battles. We must also go on the offense, envisioning and proudly defending a government that works. A government that works serves the needs of all Americans. A government that works provides a safety net that allows us to take reasonable risks. A government that works is one that helps make the American Dream possible for everyone.
It’s important to note that the bashers of big government aren’t really against government in any form. They’re fine with the government that they want; they just don’t want one that serves all of us. When the Ted Cruz wing of the Republican Party shut down the federal government for weeks on end last year with their bluster about cutting the size of government, not everyone was hurt equally. Hundreds of thousands of government employees were sent home without pay, and government agencies shut down many services for low-income people, veterans, pregnant women, and National Institutes of Health patients. Also on hiatus: yes, environmental and financial regulators.
When the Senate refused to confirm any of President Obama’s nominees to the influential Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, it wasn’t just a refusal to let government do its job and thereby limit the work of the court. It was an attempt to preserve a Republican-appointed majority on the court that had been consistently rewriting the law to favor the interests of large corporations — that kind of government, they like just as is.
When the House Republicans voted to make drastic cuts to food stamps and Senate Republicans filibustered an effort to extend unemployment insurance to the long-term jobless, they weren’t concerned with shrinking the size of government. Instead, they focused their “small government” rhetoric on the minor portion of federal spending that goes to helping everyday Americans get a chance.
Unsurprisingly, the right, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, also favor “small government” when it comes to letting corporations and wealthy individuals give huge amounts of unaccountable money to political campaigns, drowning out the voices of individual Americans. Limits on campaign spending, some of which go back more than a century, are what allowed us to build our strong, vibrant government of the people — a government that is now under constant attack.
When President Obama said in his State of the Union address that “it should be the power of our vote, not the size of our bank accounts, that drives our democracy,” he wasn’t offering a platitude. He was outlining a clear vision of government that works. We must remain aware of what the government-bashers are really after and proudly stand for a government that works for all Americans.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way; The Huffington Post Blog, February 7, 2014
“Incidents And Events Can Tell Us A Lot”: The Teacher Commitment That Cannot Be Evaluated With Tests
Teachers, parents and students are pushing back against high-stakes testing, over-testing and the fantasy that education is made better by preparing for, conducting and evaluating tests.
As American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten says: “The current accountability system has led districts to fixate on testing and sanctions, has squeezed out vital parts of the curriculum that are not subjected to testing, and has sacrificed much-needed learning time. That is not what high-performing countries do, and it is not what the United States should do.”
That’s an increasingly common sentiment, even among former advocates for testing-obsessed initiatives such as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top. Diane Ravitch, who served as Bush’s assistant secretary of education, now says: “I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools—or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not—because I always knew children’s test scores are far more complicated than the way they’re being received today.”
How then should we “evaluate” teachers and schools?
The truth is that many measures exist, some structural and some practical.
America asks a great deal of teachers. And while carefully developed and cautiously implemented testing can tell us a little, incidents and events can tell us a lot.
Take, for instance, the response to the winter weather that last week brought the Atlanta area to a standstill. State and local officials—led by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal—neglected warnings and failed to respond appropriately. Thousands of children were stranded overnight in schools, on buses and in firehouses and stores. Teachers and school employees were faced with an unexpected, and in some cases overwhelming, new demand on their time, their energy and their ingenuity. And they rose to it.
There are plenty of tales of humanity and heroism from last week. A cafeteria manager at an Atlanta-area high school made it home and then learned that hundreds of students were stranded at the school. Unable to drive a car on the gridlocked roads, he walked back to the school and prepared 800 dinners. The next morning, he prepared 800 breakfasts. Bus drivers cared for and comforted children.
All the stories mattered. But this one from an Atlanta Journal Constitution article published the morning after the storm stood out:
At Centennial High School in Roswell, about 33 students—most of them with special needs—slept in classrooms or on wrestling mats in the school’s media center after only five out of 50 buses arrived and students relied on their parents to get home.
Fifteen teachers and staff members that work in the special needs program stayed with the children, some of whom are in wheelchairs or require special medication.
For some of the children, it was their first night away from home, and teachers kept worried parents informed through cell phone calls and text photos. One group of teachers walked through the snow to a nearby Kroger to get emergency prescriptions filled, including seizure medication.
Few of them got any sleep, and they’re not sure when or if they’d be able to get home.
“I’d love to go home,” said teacher Traci Coleman. “But this is where I need to be right now. This is like my second family.”
All the students made it home, thanks to teachers and bus drivers and cafeteria workers and custodians.
“That no children died or were even seriously hurt is testament to the caring and resourcefulness of those frontline workers,” noted the Journal Constitution’s Maureen Downey.
That is right. We will always expect more of teachers than just getting children home safely. But the response from teachers like Traci Coleman when the storm hit offers a measure of an essential commitment that will never be measured by standardized testing.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, February 5, 2014
“Rand Paul Remains Preoccupied With Bill Clinton”: Beware Of Those Who Protest Too Much
Nearly two weeks ago, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) decided to go after former President Bill Clinton, focusing on the Lewinsky affair from 19 years ago. The former president, Paul said, was guilty of “predatory behavior.” He added that this would be relevant if Hillary Clinton runs in 2016 because “sometimes it’s hard to separate one from the other.”
Asked later about the comments, Paul suggested that Clinton isn’t really on his mind. “It’s not as if I’m bringing this up 20 years later. I was asked a direct question,” the Kentucky senator said. “However, if I’m asked a direct question, I’ll usually answer it.”
For a guy who only mentioned Clinton because he was “asked a direct question,” Rand Paul seems oddly preoccupied with the former president.
The senator’s original criticism came on “Meet the Press” on Jan. 26. Paul then took another rhetorical shot at Clinton on Jan. 28. And then another on Jan. 29. And then another on Feb. 5. And then again later on Feb. 5.
This morning, there was the Kentucky Republican, once again talking about the subject he only reluctantly broached in the first place.
“[Democrats] can’t have it both ways,” Paul said on C-Span’s “Newsmakers” set to air Sunday.
“And so I really think that anybody who wants to take money from Bill Clinton or have a fundraiser has a lot of explaining to do. In fact, I think they should give the money back,” Paul said. “If they want to take position on women’s rights, by all means do. But you can’t do it and take it from a guy who was using his position of authority to take advantage of young women in the workplace.”
This is getting a little weird.
To reiterate a point from last week, much of this likely has to do with 2016 and Paul’s concern that Bill Clinton remains a very popular national figure. Indeed, even Republicans who hated Clinton with a passion during his time in office – up to and including impeaching him – have since decided he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Robert Schlesinger labeled the phenomenon “Clinton Nostalgia Syndrome.”
The senator is no doubt aware of this, all while remaining cognizant of the fact that Hillary Clinton is a possible candidate. The calculus isn’t subtle: Rand Paul is probably worried that Clinton nostalgia will make the former Secretary of State that much more difficult to defeat. As a consequence, he’s become oddly preoccupied with a sex scandal from the mid-90s, which the American mainstream has long since given up caring about.
But I also wonder if there’s a touch of defensiveness lurking just below the surface. After all, Paul not only supports government intervention in restricting reproductive rights, he’s also voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Violence Against Women Act, while voting for the Blunt Amendment on contraception.
With a record like that, the senator may be understandably concerned about alienating women voters. I’m not a political strategist, but I don’t imagine constant complaining about Bill Clinton will address Paul’s underlying trouble.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 7, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
