“Free To Be Hungry”: Conservatives Believe That Freedom Is Just Another Word For “Not Enough To Eat”
The word “freedom” looms large in modern conservative rhetoric. Lobbying groups are given names like FreedomWorks; health reform is denounced not just for its cost but as an assault on, yes, freedom. Oh, and remember when we were supposed to refer to pommes frites as “freedom fries”?
The right’s definition of freedom, however, isn’t one that, say, F.D.R. would recognize. In particular, the third of his famous Four Freedoms — freedom from want — seems to have been turned on its head. Conservatives seem, in particular, to believe that freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat.
Hence the war on food stamps, which House Republicans have just voted to cut sharply even while voting to increase farm subsidies.
In a way, you can see why the food stamp program — or, to use its proper name, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) — has become a target. Conservatives are deeply committed to the view that the size of government has exploded under President Obama but face the awkward fact that public employment is down sharply, while overall spending has been falling fast as a share of G.D.P. SNAP, however, really has grown a lot, with enrollment rising from 26 million Americans in 2007 to almost 48 million now.
Conservatives look at this and see what, to their great disappointment, they can’t find elsewhere in the data: runaway, explosive growth in a government program. The rest of us, however, see a safety-net program doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: help more people in a time of widespread economic distress.
The recent growth of SNAP has indeed been unusual, but then so have the times, in the worst possible way. The Great Recession of 2007-9 was the worst slump since the Great Depression, and the recovery that followed has been very weak. Multiple careful economic studies have shown that the economic downturn explains the great bulk of the increase in food stamp use. And while the economic news has been generally bad, one piece of good news is that food stamps have at least mitigated the hardship, keeping millions of Americans out of poverty.
Nor is that the program’s only benefit. The evidence is now overwhelming that spending cuts in a depressed economy deepen the slump, yet government spending has been falling anyway. SNAP, however, is one program that has been expanding, and as such it has indirectly helped save hundreds of thousands of jobs.
But, say the usual suspects, the recession ended in 2009. Why hasn’t recovery brought the SNAP rolls down? The answer is, while the recession did indeed officially end in 2009, what we’ve had since then is a recovery of, by and for a small number of people at the top of the income distribution, with none of the gains trickling down to the less fortunate. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the top 1 percent rose 31 percent from 2009 to 2012, but the real income of the bottom 40 percent actually fell 6 percent. Why should food stamp usage have gone down?
Still, is SNAP in general a good idea? Or is it, as Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, puts it, an example of turning the safety net into “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”
One answer is, some hammock: last year, average food stamp benefits were $4.45 a day. Also, about those “able-bodied people”: almost two-thirds of SNAP beneficiaries are children, the elderly or the disabled, and most of the rest are adults with children.
Beyond that, however, you might think that ensuring adequate nutrition for children, which is a large part of what SNAP does, actually makes it less, not more likely that those children will be poor and need public assistance when they grow up. And that’s what the evidence shows. The economists Hilary Hoynes and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach have studied the impact of the food stamp program in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was gradually rolled out across the country. They found that children who received early assistance grew up, on average, to be healthier and more productive adults than those who didn’t — and they were also, it turns out, less likely to turn to the safety net for help.
SNAP, in short, is public policy at its best. It not only helps those in need; it helps them help themselves. And it has done yeoman work in the economic crisis, mitigating suffering and protecting jobs at a time when all too many policy makers seem determined to do the opposite. So it tells you something that conservatives have singled out this of all programs for special ire.
Even some conservative pundits worry that the war on food stamps, especially combined with the vote to increase farm subsidies, is bad for the G.O.P., because it makes Republicans look like meanspirited class warriors. Indeed it does. And that’s because they are.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 22, 2013
“Celebrating Misery”: House Republicans’ Ghoulish Defunding Rally
There was something ghoulish about the rally that House Republicans held today in the Rayburn Room after they voted to defund health care reform. The party atmosphere was so boisterous, the cheers and laughter so loud, that it was easy to forget everyone in the room had just voted to keep tens of millions of people from getting health insurance.
By keeping spending at its current levels through mid-December, they had also voted to continue the sequester, which is preventing millions of people from getting public housing subsidies, Head Start seats, and unemployment benefits. The sequester is also taking a serious toll on scientific research and investment in infrastructure, not to mention its infuriating drag on employment and the economic recovery. How about another round of applause?
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, of course, from a House that had voted the previous day to cut food stamps for 3.8 million low-income people, including many very young and very old recipients. But at least they didn’t have a party to celebrate that vote.
Today, though, everyone was in a great mood.
“When we acted, it wasn’t just a group of Republicans, but it was a bipartisan vote,” said Kevin McCarthy, the Majority Whip. (O.K., fine. Two Democrats voted for it, and 188 voted against.) “Let me state that again because I want to make sure you write it correctly. [Huge laughter.] It was a bipartisan vote because we’re Americans first! [Cheers, applause.]”
But some Americans are last, like the millions who would have to get all their medical care from an emergency room if the House had its way. That didn’t seem to bother Eric Cantor, the Republican leader, who pushed through the food-stamp bill and today claimed the health law was turning the country into a part-time economy. (Actually, the recession had started that trend long before President Obama’s health law took effect.)
Mr. Cantor called on Senate Democrats to pass the House bill, which isn’t going to happen, and even named a few from conservative states, like Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Kay Hagan of North Carolina, who Republicans hope to defeat for re-election by linking them to the health law.
What he didn’t mention, though, is that the House’s real beef is with Senate Republicans, not Democrats, many of whom have denounced the extremist tactic of threatening a government shutdown if health reform isn’t defunded. The defeat of the House demand in the Senate is pre-ordained, and when the measure comes back to the House next week without any mention of the health law, and with little time left to avoid a shutdown, the laughter and applause will be long gone.
By: David Firestone, Editors Blog, The New York Times, September 20, 2013
“Up To His Eyeballs In Alligators:” Mitch McConnell Flirts With The Tea Party Crazies On The Debt Ceiling
Sen. Mitch McConnell is so up to his eyeballs in alligators, he’s long since forgot about cleaning the swamp.
No question the senator hears the steady, galloping horses from the tea party extremists closing fast. To be sure, he faces a tough general election against Kentycky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes – some polls even show him behind. But before he gets to next November he faces the threat of a challenge from within his own party. Wealthy tea party candidate Matt Bevin is definitely nipping at his heals.
Maybe that is why McConnell is showing signs of joining the “crazy caucus” – that large band of Republicans who are ready to see a default on the debt, a shutdown of the government, a continuation of the sequester and the defunding of Obamacare – and by virtue of such insane policies, an economic meltdown.
They profess to be worried about the deficit and spending yet their policies so far, and their future plans, would see drastic reductions in tax revenue as they stall the recovery, put more people out of work and send us back into a recession.
Bad politics, bad economics and bad for America’s middle class.
Yesterday, McConnell expressed the need to use the debt for “leverage” against Obama. “It’s a hostage worth ransoming,” McConnell has said. He embraced the tea party call for not raising the debt limit and watching America default. Sorry – been there, done that, didn’t work.
Maybe the Republicans should follow the example of their hero, President Reagan.
Here is what Ronald Reagan wrote to Congress when it came to raising the debt ceiling in 1983:
The full consequences of a default – or even the serious prospect of default – by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar in exchange markets. The Nation can ill afford to allow such a result. The risks, the costs, the disruptions, and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusion: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.
Reagan, after all, raised the debt ceiling 18 times.
So, let’s play this out. If McConnell is so intent on joining the tea party in their efforts what is he risking if Obama calls the bluff of the “crazy caucus”? The full weight of responsible economists, editorial writers, business leaders, reasonable elected officials would come crashing down on him. As the minority leader in the Senate he would not be the engineer of a compromise but rather the creator of chaos.
The crazy caucus would become the chaos caucus, led by Mitch McConnell.
In short, he would have drunk the Kool-Aid and end up paying for it at the ballot box. He would be loudly criticized as the man who allowed what Reagan warned against to become a reality. Some legacy.
My guess is that President Obama has had about enough from the threats, the in-your-face tactics of the tea party. He’ll put his foot down, not be intimidated and let the chips fall.
And if I were betting, the Republican “crazy caucus” would morph rather quickly into the “suicide caucus.” And Mitch McConnell would be part of the carnage.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, September 18, 2013
“The Great Divide”: The Stagnation Of American Education
For most of American history, parents could expect that their children would, on average, be much better educated than they were. But that is no longer true. This development has serious consequences for the economy.
The epochal achievements of American economic growth have gone hand in hand with rising educational attainment, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have shown. From 1891 to 2007, real economic output per person grew at an average rate of 2 percent per year — enough to double every 35 years. The average American was twice as well off in 2007 as in 1972, four times as well off as in 1937, and eight times as well off as in 1902. It’s no coincidence that for eight decades, from 1890 to 1970, educational attainment grew swiftly. But since 1990, that improvement has slowed to a crawl.
Companies pay better-educated people higher wages because they are more productive. The premium that employers pay to a college graduate compared with that to a high school graduate has soared since 1970, because of higher demand for technical and communication skills at the top of the scale and a collapse in demand for unskilled and semiskilled workers at the bottom.
As the current recovery continues at a snail’s pace, concerns about America’s future growth potential are warranted. Growth in annual average economic output per capita has slowed from the century-long average of 2 percent, to 1.3 percent over the past 25 years, to a mere 0.7 percent over the past decade. As of this summer, per-person output was still lower than it was in late 2007. The gains in income since the 2007-9 Great Recession have flowed overwhelmingly to those at the top, as has been widely noted. Real median family income was lower last year than in 1998.
There are numerous causes of the less-than-satisfying economic growth in America: the retirement of the baby boomers, the withdrawal of working-age men from the labor force, the relentless rise in the inequality of the income distribution and, as I have written about elsewhere, a slowdown in technological innovation.
Education deserves particular focus because its effects are so long-lasting. Every high school dropout becomes a worker who likely won’t earn much more than minimum wage, at best, for the rest of his or her life. And the problems in our educational system pervade all levels.
The surge in high school graduation rates — from less than 10 percent of youth in 1900 to 80 percent by 1970 — was a central driver of 20th-century economic growth. But the percentage of 18-year-olds receiving bona fide high school diplomas fell to 74 percent in 2000, according to the University of Chicago economist James J. Heckman. He found that the holders of G.E.D.’s performed no better economically than high school dropouts and that the rising share of young people who are in prison rather than in school plays a small but important role in the drop in graduation rates.
Then there is the poor quality of our schools. The Program for International Student Assessment tests have consistently rated American high schoolers as middling at best in reading, math and science skills, compared with their peers in other advanced economies.
At the college level, longstanding problems of quality are joined with the issues of affordability. For most of the postwar period, the G.I. Bill, public and land-grant universities and junior colleges made a low-cost education more accessible in the United States than anywhere in the world. But after leading the world in college completion, America has dropped to 16th. The percentage of 25- to 29-year-olds who hold a four-year bachelor’s degree has inched up in the past 15 years, to 33.5 percent, but that is still lower than in many other nations.
The cost of a university education has risen faster than the rate of inflation for decades. Between 2008 and 2012 state financing for higher education declined by 28 percent. Presidents of Ivy League and other elite schools point to the lavish subsidies they give low- and middle-income students, but this leaves behind the vast majority of American college students who are not lucky or smart enough to attend them.
While a four-year college degree still pays off, about one-quarter of recent college graduates are currently unemployed or underemployed. Meanwhile, total student debt now exceeds $1 trillion.
Heavily indebted students face two kinds of risks. One is that they fall short of their income potential, through some combination of unemployment and inability to find a job in their chosen fields. Research has shown that on average a college student taking on $100,000 in student debt will still come out ahead by age 34. But that break-even age goes up if future income falls short of the average.
There is also completion risk. A student who takes out half as much debt but drops out after two years never breaks even because wages of college dropouts are little better than those of high school graduates. These risks are acute for high-achieving students from low-income families: Caroline M. Hoxby, a Stanford economist, found that they often don’t apply to elite colleges and wind up at subpar ones, deeply in debt.
Two-year community colleges enroll 42 percent of American undergraduates. The Center on International Education Benchmarking reports that only 13 percent of students in two-year colleges graduate in two years; that figure rises to a still-dismal 28 percent after four years. These students are often working while taking classes and are often poorly prepared for college and required to take remedial courses.
Federal programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have gone too far in using test scores to evaluate teachers. Many children are culturally disadvantaged, even if one or both parents have jobs, have no books at home, do not read to them, and park them in front of a TV set or a video game in lieu of active in-home learning. Compared with other nations where students learn several languages and have math homework in elementary school, the American system expects too little. Parental expectations also matter: homework should be emphasized more, and sports less.
Poor academic achievement has long been a problem for African-Americans and Hispanics, but now the achievement divide has extended further. Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, has argued that “family breakdown is now biracial.” Among lower-income whites, the proportion of children living with both parents has plummeted over the past half-century, as Charles Murray has noted.
Are there solutions? The appeal of American education as a destination for the world’s best and brightest suggests the most obvious policy solution. Shortly before his death, Steve Jobs told President Obama that a green card conferring permanent residency status should be automatically granted to any foreign student with a degree in engineering, a field in which skills are in short supply..
Richard J. Murnane, an educational economist at Harvard, has found evidence that high school and college completion rates have begun to rise again, although part of this may be a result of weak labor markets that induce students to stay in school rather than face unemployment. Other research has shown that high-discipline, “no-excuses” charter schools, like those run by the Knowledge Is Power Program and the Harlem Children’s Zone, have erased racial achievement gaps. This model suggests that a complete departure from the traditional public school model, rather than pouring in more money per se, is needed.
Early childhood education is needed to counteract the negative consequences of growing up in disadvantaged households, especially for children who grow up with only one parent. Only one in four American 4-year-olds participate in preschool education programs, but that’s already too late. In a remarkable program, Reach Out and Read, 12,000 doctors, nurses and other providers have volunteered to include instruction on the importance of in-home reading to low-income mothers during pediatric checkups.
Even in today’s lackluster labor market, employers still complain that they cannot find workers with the needed skills to operate complex modern computer-driven machinery. Lacking in the American system is a well-organized funnel between community colleges and potential blue-collar employers, as in the renowned apprenticeship system in Germany.
How we pay for education shows, in the end, how much we value it. In Canada, each province manages and finances education at the elementary, secondary and college levels, thus avoiding the inequality inherent in America’s system of local property-tax financing for public schools. Tuition at the University of Toronto was a mere $5,695 for Canadian arts and science undergraduates last year, compared with $37,576 at Harvard. It should not be surprising that the Canadian college completion rate is about 15 percentage points above the American rate. As daunting as the problems are, we can overcome them. Our economic growth is at stake.
By: Robert J. Gordon, The New York Times, September 7, 2013
“A Tragic Waste Of Time”: In The Budget Fight, The GOP Doesn’t Act In The National Interest
Are we really going to do this? Are we going to wade into a struggle we don’t really want to fight? Are we going to mire ourselves in a senseless, grinding conflict whose possible outcomes range from bad to worse?
I’m talking about the upcoming budget battles in Washington, of course. (What, you thought I meant something else?)
Incredibly, Congress seems determined to spend much of the fall demonstrating its boundless talent for dysfunction. House Republicans say they will threaten once again to send the nation into default — and the economy over a cliff — by refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling, now set at $16.7 trillion. This means that by mid-October, the government would exhaust its borrowing authority and be left without enough money to pay its bills.
“The president doesn’t think this is fair, thinks I’m being difficult to deal with,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said last week at an Idaho fundraiser. “But I’ll say this: It may be unfair, but what I’m trying to do here is to leverage the political process to produce more change than what it would produce if left to its own devices. We’re going to have a whale of a fight.”
In other words, Boehner is looking forward to the opportunity to threaten the nation with grievous harm. Nice little economic recovery you’re working on. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.
President Obama, who has seen this movie before, says there will be no fight because he categorically refuses to negotiate over the debt ceiling. He demands that Congress do its job — which amounts to a routine bit of bookkeeping — without all the needless drama.
Investors around the world still consider U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds to be the ultimate safe haven, especially in times of economic uncertainty. It is unthinkable that our elected officials, supposedly working in the nation’s best interests, would threaten this exalted and immensely beneficial status by intentionally triggering a default.
So who’s going to blink?
Obama certainly has the stronger political position. His approval numbers may be stuck in the 40s, but ratings for Congress are down in the teens — and sinking.
Boehner has almost no room to maneuver. House Republicans are still fuming at having been forced to swallow a modest tax increase for the wealthy as part of the “fiscal cliff” deal earlier this year. The responsible thing would be for Boehner to bring a simple bill raising the debt ceiling to the floor, where it would pass with the votes of Democrats and non-crazy Republicans. But that would probably cost Boehner his job.
You’re depressed already? I’m just getting started.
Before we even get to the debt-ceiling fight, the government will run out of authority to spend money on Sept. 30 — which means no ability to function — unless Congress approves a continuing resolution. Doing so should be another no-brainer, but some Republicans are itching for a government shutdown. Because, you know, that worked so well for Newt Gingrich in the ’90s.
Boehner wants none of that. But in an attempt to get House Republicans to avert a shutdown by passing a short-term funding bill, he promises them a “whale of a fight” later over the debt ceiling. (He treats his caucus as if it were a cage full of rabid wolverines.)
Oh, and there’s another whole dimension to the pointless political snarling and bickering we will have to endure over the next few months: Obamacare.
Some Republicans believe, or say they believe, that they can use the continuing-resolution fight or the debt-ceiling fight, or maybe both, to force Obama to sign legislation nullifying all or part of his health-care reforms. One idea is to take away Obamacare’s funding. Another is to delay the individual health insurance mandate, due to take effect next year.
Do they really believe the president is willing to forsake his most important legislative accomplishment? Before it even comes fully into effect?
This is a tragic waste of time and effort, and the House Republicans are to blame. Remember when Democrats captured the House in 2006? They worked with George W. Bush even though they disagreed with his policies. Most Democrats adamantly opposed the Iraq War, but then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi made sure that Bush got the funding he required for the troops.
Boehner and his crew need to act like grown ups. If they don’t, voters need to send them home.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 2, 2013
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