Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2302

Endgame

They're stepping lightly:

— White House screwing up financial regulation appointments.

— Tax hikes can't .

— But millionaire sure can be asked to pay more.

— Employment shifts away from unionized firms.

— Extraordinary hypocrisy.

— Everybody loves Medicare.

Blondie, "Rapture". It just feels right.

Newt Gingrich Reiterates Support For Poll Tests and Repealing The Voting Rights Act

When I first wrote about Newt Gingrich's plan to violate the Voting Rights Act and impose a poll test that would disenfranchise poor people, blacks, and Latinos I thought maybe this was just his mouth running. But Travis Waldron reports from Iowa that Gingrich is reiterating his support:

GINGRICH: [Immigrants] need to pass a test of American history. And candidly, it wouldn't be bad to have a test like that for young Americans before they start voting.

I wonder if a question about the historic use of such tests as a key pillar of white supremacy could make it onto Gingrich's proposed test?

Demand Matters: Unemployment Is Concentrated In Highly Cyclical Sectors Of The Economy

I can't turn this Washington Post chart (pdf) into anything that would be readable on the blog, but the key point is that unemployment hasn't hit all sectors evenly. Construction employment has declined 28.1 percent since the peak, down to 5.5 million jobs. Manufacturing has declined by a smaller percent than that—16.4 percent—down to 11.7 million jobs. Those two sectors are the biggest decliners. By contrast, employment in health care and education services is up 10.4 percent to 19.9 million.

Something that I think is hard to avoid noticing is that these two big loser sectors are the most cyclical parts of the economy. People go to school because they're the right age. People go to the doctor because they're sick. When people become income- or credit-constrained they cut back on buying durable goods or decide not to get the kitchen redone after all.

Alexander Hamilton vs The Bill Of Rights

The Bill of Rights wasn't a part of the original draft of the constitution and proponents of its ratification faced criticism on this grounds. Alexander Hamilton shot back in Federalist 84 that a Bill of Rights would be a terrible idea:

I go further, and affirm, that Bills of Rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretence for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the Constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority, which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it was intended to be vested in the National Government. This may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for Bills of Rights.

Then of course a few years later a Bill of Rights was adopted. The Federalist is often used for its insights into what the Founders had in mind with their constitution, so what is one to make of this?

— Perhaps since Hamilton specifically warned that a Bill of Rights would imply that everything not forbidden is permitted, and then such a bill was adopted, we ought to infer that everything not forbidden is now prohibited.

— Or perhaps since Hamilton specifically warned against this we should flag this as a particularly wrongheaded form of inference.

— Or perhaps since Hamilton was a practical politician trying to get people to vote his way on a particular issue, we should regard him as just making the best case possible for a deeply flawed Bill Of Rights-less constitution and ignore his rhetorical flourishes.

To me it all seems like a good argument that relying on history and exegesis of centuries-old documents (as opposed to more recent precedents) as the basis of our legal system is a deeply problematic concept.

If I'm Getting Left Behind, At Least I've Seen The Movie

By Alyssa Rosenberg

It's entirely beside the point to say that the Left Behind movies are not very good, but on a Friday afternoon before the theoretical Rapture, there is room for movies that are so bad they're kind of delightful. I must say, if the goal is getting the message out, it's not very strategic to have only Tribulation Force on Netflix Instant, since it means I had to pick up with the story already started, though I guess it makes sense to try to lock in at least some of your DVD sales up until the last minute at the end of days?

All that said, Left Behind: Tribulation Force is not actually the worst movie I've watched this year—that would be Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood. It's got its plot holes, for sure. If the Antichrist is going to pull together a united world government, starting at the United Nations is going to be a bad bet, especially since taking over the assets of American financiers doesn't buy you control the way it used to. The folks behind the Tribulation Force could probably use some training in how to run a counterinsurgency. And I need to check in with my generous host here and the other rising young journodudes to make sure they're prepared to run a large global news network should Buck Williams not be available for any reason. The revolution will apparently be lead by a young, fast-rising writer who turns 30 right around the Rapture, works for a big media conglomorate, and then jumps to an independent outlet to bring the truth to the people. You do the math.

But really, what strikes me most about the movie is that everyone, no matter their perspective on religion, deserves better movies than this about faith, depictions that go beyond scratchy fake beards on prophets and badly-written professions of belief. One of the things that's great about Kings is that it has an actual artistic sense of the majesty of the divine, the terror of what it would be like to live without deity you believed in profoundly. If you want to use art to debunk organized religions or faith in general? Well, there are creative stories to tell about the damages and disappointments of religion, or about the power of human experience unmediated by a higher power. This isn't it.

Bus Drivers Should Be Paid What It Costs To Hire Competent Bus Drivers

I understand where Duncan Black is coming from in voicing frustration at the idea that bus drivers are the real lucky duckies of the American economy, but I ultimately think this is a deeply wrongheaded way of looking at an issue:

Given all the austerity that's floating around I get that it's perhaps not the right moment, but whenever I hear about how good municipal workers have it I want to tell people to go apply for those goddamn jobs. When my local transit authority went on strike all the local yahoos were bitching about the fact that bus drivers, after some seniority, were paid FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. As I pointed out at the time, there were lovely bus driver job listings on the web page and if anybody thinks they have an awesome deal they can go apply for the jobs. Now apparently THIRTY EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS is too much.

But that's just the point. If $50,000 is too little to pay to hire a bus driver, then nobody will apply for the jobs and you'll have to raise pay. And the same goes for $38,000. Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour which at 40 hours a week and 50 weeks a year comes to I believe $14,500 and there are people doing minimum wage jobs. Maybe they'd like to drive a bus for $30,000 a year and maybe a transit agency near you would like to give them a shot. If it turns out that they can hire cheaper bus drivers, that means some combination of three things. It could mean plowing the money into better bus service, which is good for the bus system's primarily poor clients. It could mean using the money to reduce fares, which is good for the bus system's primarily poor clients. Or it could mean lower taxes, which at the state and local level are generally quite regressive.

Now personally I'm not a fan of that last option. I believe in public services, and I certainly believe in mass transit, and I want my city's transit to be excellent. But it's extremely difficult to have excellent public services if the debate is polarized between people who want to reduce spending in order to cut taxes, and people who want to view the bus system as a jobs program for bus drivers. When a city is having trouble attracting qualified applicants for bus driver jobs, that's a sign that the wage is too damn low.

The U.S.-U.K. Rivalry on Science Fiction

By Alyssa Rosenberg

I've been meaning to dive into this GeekDad post arguing that British science fiction is superior to its American counterpart for a bit, but it wasn't until after starting Torchwood this week that I figured out exactly what I meant to say. I want to separate out sci-fi and fantasy, which Donahoo conflates here, because I think there's actually a difference between British sci-fi and British fantasy, and some of the things Donahoo singles out as strengths, like a tendency towards localism, are much more present in the fantasy shows he names than the science fiction ones. Being Human is phenomenal, but it's not science fiction. And fantasy and science fiction do similar, but different work.

British science-fiction is very good at using the tropes of the genre to take on issues ranging from the rise of the security state in response to crisis, national control of nuclear weapons, torture, the impact of reality television on society, nuclear power, and cloned organs. It's an issue-of-the-week approach to procedurals instead of a body-of-the-week one. But I wonder if the reason shows like Doctor Who and Torchwood, even Red Dwarf, are able to do this is because they're less committed to consistent world-building. That's not to say that there aren't long-running and well-developed concepts behind all these series, but the point of Doctor Who isn't to get to be fully absorbed into Galifrey, but to jump around and explore different worlds and times, just as the institutional culture of Torchwood establishes the parameters for alien investigations. And there's no real effort to integrate all the phenomena and aliens and technology into a set of coherent rules about how science works, however nebulous.

There are a lot of American shows that operate on these terms, of course, Star Trek chief among them. But a crop of American shows like Battlestar Galactica, the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Fringe explore smaller numbers of issues through longer arcs. Even The X-Files is centered around one main question, though it's more procedural. The rules may be loose, but the real work is in figuring out the parameters of the universe you're watching, how science works, and how humanity and human institutions change in response.

I think it's more a matter of preference than anything else. I love world-building (particularly if there's a good juicy fictional religion for me to think about), so I like some of the work American shows do, and I get irritated by things like the lack of clarity about Torchwood's relationship with the British security agencies and the metropolitan police. But I love the rhythms of procedural as well. And with shows like Doctor Who starting to air simultaneously in the U.S., there's more opportunity for trans-Atlantic cross-pollination.

The Hidden Fault Lines Of Class And Geography In The Education Reform Debate

Something I liked about E.D. Kain's post on two recent education policy movies, the broadly anti-"reform" Race To Nowhere and the pro-"reform" The Lottery is that it draws out the class fault lines are too often submerged in a debate that's unduly focused on labor unions. As Kain observes, in the film about how too much emphasis on testing and accountability is driving our children insane "nearly all the students and families in the film were from upper-middle-class families." By contrast, in the film about how crusading charter school operators are saving American education from bloodsucking teachers unions "focused exclusively on these poor neighborhoods and the bad situation so many of the parents in these neighborhoods faced."

As a childless city-dweller, I'm not exactly kept up nights worrying about the plight of Vicki Abeles and other middle class suburban parents across America. Like the bulk of the center-left "reform" wing of the Democratic Party, I'm very concerned about the plight of low-income black and Latino students in large urban school districts. But it's important to recall that most American children aren't poor, most American schools aren't in large urban districts, and that in a very large country we actually have all kinds of different school systems.

If you think about a town like Brooklin, Maine which has about 100 children in it (some of whom are too young to go to school) the idea that you need highly formalized assessment systems to tell if the school is working well or not seems absurd. People can engage in direct inspection, and the teachers and school administrators are probably people the parents know socially. All the kids in the town go to the same school, so the children from low-SES families can free ride to an extent on the monitoring abilities and political clout of the high-SES families. And instead of "school choice" people might just move to Sedgwick or Brooksville if they perceive some persistent gap in school quality.

I was looking at some basic data on Wisconsin the other day, and you see that there are actually only three districts that score worse than 60 on a simple "state achievement index." By contrast, 15 districts score over than 90. But those 15 range in size from 3,808 students (of whom 5% are low income) to 407 students (of whom 18% are low income). The lowest performing three, however, include Racine (22,552 students of whom 49 percent are low income) and Milwaukee (86,192 students of whom 77 percent are low-income). So this relatively tiny number of low-performance districts is a really big deal, especially if you're interested in the opportunities available to low-income Wisconsinites. And of course the high concentration of poor people in the Milwaukee school system is part of the reason why it performs so poorly. But by the same token, the poor performance of the schools is part of why there's such concentrated poverty—prosperous people who work in Milwaukee are going to tend to move to the suburbs rather than send their kids to these schools.

At any rate, this is basically just a long post of throat clearing, but the point is that it would behoove all of us at times to be a bit more specific about what exactly it is we're talking about when we talk about "schools" or "education." Different schools and school systems in America are very differently situated.

$250,000 A Year In Fargo Doesn't Buy You An Apartment In Manhattan

Allison Schrager offers what is I think my least-favorite economic argument, the regional variant of the old people who buy expensive houses aren't rich because their houses cost so much switcheroo:

Perhaps fairness also requires that the tax code account for the higher cost of living in some areas. The income cut-off for tax increases floated by President Obama is $250,000. That sum buys you a lot more in Fargo than it does in Manhattan. Most high earners live in expensive areas. They command such high salaries, in part, to offset their high cost of living.

I think this is a big mistake. In the age of global production lines, internet shopping, and cheap shipping $250,000 buys you the exact same thing in Fargo and Manhattan in the vast majority of cases. Go online, find what you want, see the price, click, enter your credit card information, and it's done.

Now of course it's true that you can't buy everything on the Internet. And these goods and services generally cost more in Manhattan than Fargo. But part of the essence of this non-shippable economy is that different stuff is for sale in Fargo and Manhattan. Most notably, a square foot of housing costs much more in Manhattan than it does in Fargo. But that's not to say that $250,000 buys "more housing" in Fargo than it does in Manhattan, it's to say that it buys worse housing. The people in those expensive Manhattan apartments are paying for the positive amenity value. They could move to the Bronx, but they don't want to. Similarly, Manhattan is full of restaurants that don't exist in Fargo. There are law firms in Manhattan and law firms in Fargo, but the Manhattan law firms are better. Service professionals move to New York to peddle their services because the city features a critical mass of well-heeled clients who can pay top dollar for the best hairstylists or dentists or architects in the world. Fargo's not like that.

Obviously most people don't live in Manhattan. Most people would prefer to spend their incomes on the cheaper goods and services available in lower-cost areas. And a minority of people insist on spending their incomes on the more expensive goods and services available exclusively in high-cost areas. And one of the great things about the USA being a large country is that we can all be accommodated. But we shouldn't let rich people living in expensive cities get away with the claim that they're somehow secretly not rich.

What Is Barack Obama's Policy On The US-Israel Relationship?

A couple of items I liked on Barack Obama's speech yesterday and Bibi Netanyahu's reaction to it. First, Jeffrey Goldberg slams Netanyahu:

And so I was similarly taken aback when I read a statement from Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday that he "expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004, which were overwhelmingly supported by both House of Congress."

So Netanyahu "expects" to hear this from the President of the United States? And if President Obama doesn't walk back the speech, what will Netanyahu do? Will he cut off Israeli military aid to the U.S.? Will he cease to fight for the U.S. in the United Nations, and in the many international forums that treat Israel as a pariah?

Second, Matt Duss makes the case that while Obama didn't break much new policy ground in the speech, the context and duration of what he said is important since it correctly identifies the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a central issue for US policy in the broader region. But I think Goldberg's ironic points about Netanyahu also apply to Obama. We know what Obama wants Israeli policy to be. And we know that the Prime Minister of Israel disagrees. And Netanyahu, unlike Obama, is accountable to the Israeli electorate and is actually the proper person to decide on Israeli policy. Obama's role is to decide on American policy. And per Duss's take on Obama, America's policy isn't an inconsequential matter for a United States of America which is deeply involved in the region. Is our policy really going to be to act as a backseat driver to a right-wing Israeli government that disagrees with our take, while offering Israel unconditional aid money and diplomatic support? Who does that please? Wouldn't it be better to equip Israeli opposition politicians with some kind of concrete argument that Netanyahu's approach has costs?