Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 329
March 18, 2014
The Whiteness Of Poverty
Yesterday, a reader took Paul Ryan to task for ignoring rural poverty. Waldman makes related points:
Everyone knows that minority populations in America, particularly blacks and Hispanics, suffer from disproportionate levels of poverty. For the moment, we don’t have to go into why that is and what can be done about it. I just want to note something that seldom gets mentioned: the actual racial makeup of America’s poor. In fact, when I tried to find a chart laying it out to paste into this post, I couldn’t find one. So I took poverty data and population data and made one myself (this is as of 2012) … The point of this chart is that even though blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately poor, the largest group of poor people in America is … white people.
Despite that fact, when you say “the poor,” what pops into most people’s heads is an image of a black person, probably due in no small part to the fact that poverty in America is represented in the media as a largely black phenomenon (I’m not just saying that; there’s research backing that up).
Bad Ideas We’ve Seen Before
On Sunday, Robert Costa floated a new Republican GOP health care plan. Kevin Drum points out that the proposal is nothing the GOP hasn’t proposed a thousand times. Jonathan Cohn focuses on the interstate insurance sales component:
Bob Laszewski piles on:
A new carrier could conceivably come into the market with much lower rates––because it is offering fewer benefits––attracting the healthy people out of the old more regulated pool leaving the legacy carrier with a sicker pool. Stripping down a health plan is a great time tested way for a predatory insurance company to attract the healthiest consumers at the expense of the legacy carrier who is left with the sickest.
He suggests that “supporters of this idea first ask the leaders of the insurance industry if they would even do this under the best of circumstances.”
Busting The For-Profit College Racket
The Department of Education on Friday proposed new regulations (pdf) intended to address the high rate of student loan defaults among graduates of for-profit colleges. Ashlee Kieler outlines the proposal:
Programs would be deemed failing if loan payments of typical graduates exceed 30% of discretionary income or 12% of total annual income. Programs would be given a warning if a student’s loan payments amount to 20 to 30% of discretionary income, or 8 to 12% of total annual income. Discretionary income is defined as above 150% of the poverty line and applies to what can be put towards non-necessities.
Passing along the eyebrow-raising chart above, Danny Vinik praises the crackdown on for-profit colleges:
Students at for-profit colleges drop out at an alarming rate and those that do graduate have much higher levels of debt than students in public and private non-profit colleges. For-profits also receive a substantial share of their revenue—more than 80 percent to be exact—from loans and grants from the federal government. In 2012, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, led by Senator Tom Harkin, completed a two-year report into for-profit universities to investigate whether this taxpayer money was being well spent. Across the board, degrees and certificates from for-profit colleges cost significantly more than those from non-profits[.]
Those extra costs are not leading to high graduation rates though. Fifty four percent of students who enrolled during the 2008-2009 school year had withdrawn from the institution by 2010. Only 18 percent had earned their degree or certificate.
America’s Foreign Policy Is Bankrupt
If America and Europe have failed to adequately defend Ukraine, it’s not for lack of guns. It’s for lack of money. Over the last year, the real contest between Russia and the West hasn’t been a military one (after all, even McCain knows that risking war over Ukraine is insane). It’s been economic. In part because of two wars that have drained America’s coffers, and in part because of a financial crisis that has weakened the West economically, the United States and Europe have been dramatically outbid. …
Whenever the United States debates using its money to buttress democracy and Western influence in a strategically important part of the world, commentators offer comparisons with the Marshall Plan that America offered Europe after World War II. But in today’s dollars, according to one estimate, the Marshall Plan would total roughly $740 billion. That kind of money would certainly enable far-reaching economic reforms in Ukraine, and likely anchor the country in the West for years to come. But, of course, the suggestion is absurd. Today’s Senate can barely pass an aid package 740 times as small.
March 17, 2014
America’s Religious Exceptionalism
Waldman notes the America’s unusual religiosity for a wealthy country:
The relationship is pretty clear: countries with higher levels of development are less religious and more accepting of those who don’t believe in a deity, with two outliers. China is obviously where it is because of communism, and the United States? Well, we’ve always been the most religious of the wealthy countries, which is the product of multiple factors but can largely be explained by the fact that unlike in European countries, where a sclerotic state church lost more and more adherents over time, we’ve always had a dynamic, competitive religious marketplace. Like just about everything when it comes to religion, on this question we’re the exception among similar countries.
Ross Douthat argues that, “relative to many other countries and cultures, we’ve managed to reap the benefits of religious idealism – through our many religiously-motivated reform movements, from the abolitionists to the populists to the civil rights movement to (or so I would say) the pro-life movement, and then also through the social, civic benefits of a thriving religious marketplace– without enabling the worst forms of religious intolerance.” He fears that America’s political relationship to religion is changing:
My general anxiety, underlying the specific religious-liberty issues that we’re debating these days, is that this achievement may be slipping away from us – that as the country has become somewhat less religious overall, and as the two parties have become not only ideologically but religiously polarized, a sort of Europeanization of American church-state issues has become visible in our politics. You can see this on the religious right, in the appeal of an ahistorical nostalgia for a Christian America that never really was, and then you can see it on the irreligious left, in the appeal of an ahistorical view that the Constitution somehow bars religious people from bringing their theological convictions into politics. And I think the latter impulse is pushing liberalism in an increasingly anti-clerical direction, toward a narrowed view of religious freedom in which that freedom stops when the Sunday (or Saturday) service ends, and a narrow view of religious pluralism that sees religious schools and charities and hospitals mostly as potential threats to individual liberty, rather than important non-state servants of the common good. How far this impulse will take liberalism I don’t know – you should ask a liberal! But I don’t think current trends are good news for what Robert Putnam calls the “grace” that religious freedom has offered our society these last few hundred years.
But Katherine Franke believes that the new religious liberty cases are pushing the envelope:
In many respects, the people or companies who claim these religious exemptions are asking that they be entitled to travel through life—both their private life and their public life—surrounded by a bubble that defines their faith. What does it mean to be a citizen if you can say, “My bubble basically inoculates me from having to answer to your law”? But in the United States, we say everyone is governed by the same law. To say “my religious law trumps your secular law” is a radical idea.
Emily Bazelon makes related points:
[R]ooting against Hobby Lobby or anti-gay bills doesn’t have to mean rooting against religious liberty. When Congress passed [Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993], liberals helped take the lead. The law was a disapproving response to a 1990 Supreme Court ruling in the case Employment Division v. Smith, a suit brought by two drug counselors who were fired after taking peyote in a Native American religious ceremony and couldn’t get unemployment benefits because their use of the drug violated state law. Could the state do this, or did their constitutional right to religious freedom mean they should be allowed to use peyote in a religious ceremony without penalty?
The Supreme Court said the answer to that question was no: The employees didn’t have the rights here. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that since peyote is illegal, and since that law is “neutral” in applying to everyone, the state could impose it. At the time, the ruling read as insensitive to the lack of power religious minorities have relative to the majority. “In law school, I saw Smith as a conservative decision,” Brooklyn law professor Nelson Tebbe remembered when I called him this week. “And when Congress passed RFRA in response, it was about protecting potentially persecuted minorities. But now, in an amazing shift, it’s the most powerful religious organizations in the country that are invoking this law—the Catholic Church and Protestant evangelicals.”
When GIs Can’t Find Joe
In an excerpt from his new book Caffeinated, Murray Carpenter reveals how military researchers are developing various alternatives to coffee:
One of the buildings at Natick has a brightly lit room called the Warfighter Cafe. That’s where Betty Davis, who leads the Performance Optimization Research Team, showed me a small table covered with snack foods – applesauce, beef jerky, energy bars, and nutritious “tube foods,” which taste like pudding but come in a package that looks like a large tube of Crest. The products have two things in common. They are formulated for soldiers (“warfighters” in the current Department of Defense lexicon). And they all contain added caffeine.
Davis showed me a plastic-wrapped ration, about the size of a small hardcover book. It’s called a First Strike ration, a concentrated package of nutrition designed for soldiers moving quickly with minimal gear. The First Strike rations include plenty of caffeine. For starters, there is Stay Alert gum, with five pieces per pack, each piece containing 100 milligrams. This was originally developed by a subsidiary of Wrigley, working with researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. And there is Zapplesauce, caffeinated applesauce. It comes in a plastic pouch and packs 110 milligrams of caffeine. There is a mocha-flavored First Strike Nutritious Energy Bar, also packing 110 milligrams of caffeine. Some of the rations also include instant coffee (which soldiers sometimes put between their cheek and gum, like a dip of Skoal, a sort of do-it-yourself version of the Grinds Coffee Pouches) or caffeinated mints.
Grading Bikeshares
Steven Miller ponders the success of NYC’s Citi Bike:
Even when adjusted for its size, Citi Bike’s ridership numbers have quickly surpassed comparable systems. While there are many factors shaping Citi Bike’s success, a new report from NYU argues that the program’s connections to transit could be a key to its strikingly high ridership. … One in 10 Citi Bike stations is within 100 feet of a subway stop, more than half are within 750 feet and nearly three-quarters are within a quarter-mile. In the other two cities, both rail transit and bike-share stations are spaced farther apart, and their ridership numbers have lagged behind Citi Bike’s.
Meanwhile, J. Green finds that DC’s busiest bikeshares aren’t necessarily giving their neighbors an economic boost:
Some 66 percent of bikeshare users traveled to a destination where they expected to spend money. Of those, 63 percent planned to spend $10-$49 and 30 percent planned to spend more than $50. The researchers found that most users would spend money at businesses near CaBi stations, with 39 percent reporting spending would occur within 2 blocks of the station and an additional 40 percent indicating spending would occur within 4 blocks. According to the research, about 16 percent said they wouldn’t have made the trip had a CaBi station not been nearby. (While interesting, these figures would have been made more useful had they been compared to the amounts pedestrians, regular bicyclists, and car users expected to spend near the same stores).
As for the 140 businesses surveyed, the vast majority didn’t know whether CaBi had any effect on customer traffic levels, just 10 percent perceived an increase. About 20 percent thought that CaBi had directly and positively impacted sales, while the rest were unsure or neutral. The good news may be none thought CaBi hurt their sales. The vast majority of businesses (70 percent) also thought CaBi had a positive effect on the neighborhood. The rest weren’t sure or neutral. Again, no negative perceptions.
Previous Dish on bikeshare programs here and here.
The Moral Case For Open Borders
Marking Open Borders Day yesterday, Ilya Somin argues for liberalizing immigration policy:
Hundreds of millions of people live in countries where their probable fate is a life of poverty and oppression. Many of them could escape that terrible fate if only First World governments would allow them to immigrate. Economist Michael Clemens estimates that the economic gains from worldwide open borders are large enough to double world GDP. Enormous numbers of people currently live in poverty not because they are unable to be productive workers, but merely because they are forcibly prevented from working for First World employers who would be willing to hire them. In addition to harming potential migrants, these restrictions also inflict losses on First world employers, landlords, and consumers who would like to hire immigrants, rent to them, or purchase goods and services they produce.
But the benefits of open borders go far beyond purely material gains, great as they are.
Many potential migrants are also trapped in societies where they are denied basic human rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and private property. Many of the women among them reside in societies with severe gender-based oppression and discrimination. For hundreds of millions of people living in undemocratic societies, emigration is their only realistically feasible way to exercise political freedom – the right to choose what kind of government they wish to live under.
Bryan Caplan takes a critical look at the arguments against immigration:
Most arguments for immigration restriction are equally good arguments for government regulation of natives’ fertility. But I see that almost everyone favors immigration restrictions, and almost no one favors fertility restrictions.
I see that almost everything immigrants do makes their critics angry. The critics are angry when immigrants work, and angry when they’re on welfare. The critics are angry if immigrants are visible, and angry if immigrants keep to themselves. The critics are angry if immigrants increase housing prices and angry if immigrants reduce housing prices.
#WithSyria, Without A Solution
The Syrian conflict turned three on Saturday. Marc Lynch wishes the #WithSyria activists had clearer goals:
The premise of the “With Syria” campaigns is that the United States hasn’t acted to resolve the conflict in Syria because people aren’t aware of its horrors. But that’s probably wrong. To get a sense of how Americans think about Syria, I looked at every Syria question in the public opinion surveys collected in the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research database since January 2011 – 281 questions in all. Those surveys paint a pretty clear picture of an American public that knew perfectly well what was happening in Syria and whom to blame, and generally wanted to help, but absolutely rejected anything that smelled like military intervention. The activist campaigns might have more success translating a stand “with Syria” into meaningful action if they proposed specific ways for concerned individuals to make a difference without supporting war.
Borzou Daragahi expects the war to continue for the foreseeable future:
As the Syria war enters its fourth year, no question is perhaps more pertinent to the calculations of combatants inside the country and policy makers abroad than who is winning. Ominously for the prospects of ending the conflict that has left up to 140,000 people dead and displaced more than 9m in what the UN describes as the worst humanitarian catastrophe since the second world war, both sides claim they are.
“The fact that we’re in this intermediate situation where both sides can hope to win, but it’s not clear that they will, is the worst of all worlds,” says Jean-Marie Guehenno, former UN and Arab League deputy envoy to Syria. “Because all sides have an interest in continuing the fight rather than going for a political solution, all sides believe they can win.”
Vice is embedded with Syria’s rebels. Their first video dispatch is here.
Where Do RT Reporters Come From?
Often straight out of J-school:
RT America, by the accounts of the former and current employees with whom BuzzFeed spoke, has a strategy of hiring very young reporters who are eager to break out of small markets and want to cover international news. And the channel pays relatively well, more than most 22- or 23-year-olds expect to make in journalism. One former employee said a correspondent starting out could make as much as $50,000 or $60,000. “They’ll hire really young people and you almost feel like you’re working in a mini-CNN-type situation,” the former reporter said. “You’re not covering snowstorms or the puppy parade. You’re doing stories that are a lot bigger and meatier.”
And in Rosie Gray’s telling, it doesn’t take long for disillusionment to set in:
Soon after joining the network, the current and former employees said, they realized they were not covering news, but producing Russian propaganda. Some employees go in clear-eyed, looking for the experience above all else. Others don’t realize what RT really wants until they’re already there. Still others are chosen for already having displayed views amenable to the Kremlin. Anti-American language is injected into TV scripts by editors, and stories that don’t toe the editorial line regularly get killed.
Chait cringes:
A tragically large number of left-wing Westerners in the 20th century deluded themselves about the horrors of Soviet communism. As awful and unforgivable as it was, the process by which they made themselves into dupes was at least explicable:
They loved socialism, and one country in the world was implementing socialism, so they persuaded themselves, and for a while, it was working.
Today’s Russia dupes are a smaller, more pathetic lot. Above all they are just plain weirder, because they lack a clear ideological motive for their stoogery. Soviet Russia not only commanded a vast propaganda network, but embodied a doctrine with international appeal (and which had originated outside of Russia). Vladimir Putin’s Russia follows no model except Russian nationalism. To the extent it employs a non-nationalist philosophy, its main idea is that gays have weakened Europe. And yet the dupes still come.
Meanwhile, Weigel wonders how the network will find guests:
After [Alyona] Minkovski left the network, I saw fewer credible pundits make the walk to RT studios. I know of at least one magazine that warned its staffers not to go on anymore. Without sitting and auditing all of RT’s coverage, it seems like the network’s American opinion took more cues from the fringe.
This is where Abby Martin, a 9/11 truth activist and artist came in. In 2010 RT was getting exclusives with Rand Paul; in 2012 Martin was ambushing Paul to challenge his endorsement of Mitt Romney – a “Goldman Sachs, Bilderberg puppet.” It was Martin’s on-air denunciation of the Ukraine incursion [seen above] that woke up the media, again, to the strangeness of RT. It was anchor Liz Wahl’s on-air resignation and Martin’s quick back-peddling that deepened the strangeness, and brought new media attention, and will probably make it even harder for RT to book top guests. No secret here: D.C. (and New York) are in ready supply of pundits who want to go on TV shows and collect clips of themselves to show bookers for other TV shows. RT was a possible stop along the way, but some tanks in Crimea might have ended that.
Dish coverage of Wahl’s resignation here.
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