Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Michael Connelly - The Gods of Guilt
One of my reading larks is crime fiction. I read Connelly's Mickey Haller stories; I do not read the Harry Bosch ones. This is new one but is probably the worst of the 5 Lincoln Lawyer novels so far. The plot is too complicated. The thing though is not the plot but the character of defense lawyer Mickey Haller: divorced with a teenage daughter who has disowned him because he defends low-lifes and the way he works out of the backseat of a rented Lincoln. Does the plot really matter? Not so much.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
The Untelling by Tayari Jones
This was a simple, quick book about grief, regret, and the secrets we refuse to tell and how all that shapes us. Aria Jackson is forever impacted by a car accident when she is nine that kills her father and sister. Years later, she learns that is unable to have children, but decides not to tell her fiance. Meanwhile, her mother holds onto the guilt that she accidentally smothered her daughter during the car crash years before, never telling anybody in her family this truth. Overall, the story was entertaining.
A Good Analysis of the Blue State-Red State Divide
by Dan Balz
Red, blue states move in opposite directions in a new era of single-party control
California, Texas and America’s red-blue divide: Three-quarters of state governments — more than at any time in recent memory — are fully controlled by either Republicans or Democrats. The values that underpin these governing strategies reflect contrasting political visions, and their differences can be seen in stark terms in when comparing Democratic-controlled California with Republican-controlled Texas.
Political polarization has ushered in a new era in state government, where single-party control of the levers of power has produced competing Americas. One is grounded in principles of lean and limited government and on traditional values; the other is built on a belief in the essential role of government and on tenets of cultural liberalism.
These opposing visions have been a staple of national elections, and in a divided Washington, this polarization has resulted in gridlock and dysfunction. But today, three-quarters of the states — more than at any time in recent memory — are controlled by either Republicans or Democrats. Elected officials in these states are moving unencumbered to enact their party’s agenda.
Graphic
Today, three-quarters of the states are controlled by either Republicans or Democrats, more than at any time in recent memory.
Texas, California embody the red-blue divide
Dan Balz DEC 28
In the debate over Republican vs. Democratic state governance, two huge states stand at opposite poles.
.Republican states have pursued economic and fiscal strategies built around lower taxes, deeper spending cuts and less regulation. They have declined to set up state health-insurance exchanges to implement President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. They have clashed with labor unions. On social issues, they have moved to restrict abortion rights or to enact voter-identification laws, in the name of ballot integrity, that critics say hamper access to voting for the poor and minorities.
Blue states have also been forced to cut spending, given the budgetary pressures caused by the recession. But rather than cutting more deeply, a number of them also have raised taxes to pay for education or infrastructure. They have backed the president on the main elements of his health-care law. The social-issue agenda in blue states includes legalizing same-sex marriages, providing easier access to voting and, in a handful of cases, imposing more restrictions on guns.
The values that underpin these governing strategies reflect contrasting political visions, and the differences can be seen in stark terms in the states. In a red state such as Texas, government exists mostly to get out of the way of the private sector while holding to traditional social values. In blue states such as California and Maryland, government takes more from taxpayers, particularly the wealthy, to spend on domestic priorities while advancing a cultural agenda that reflects the country’s growing diversity.
The alternative models on display in the states have triggered a competition for bragging rights about which would be better for the nation as a whole — a debate that is likely to intensify nationally in forthcoming elections.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), coming off a year as chairman of the Republican Governors Association, has been a tireless proselytizer for his party’s conservative approach. Red states, he said, are “doing better economically, they’re doing better with credit ratings, they’re doing better with people moving into their states. . . . I’ll sit here all day and talk to you about how Republican policies and Republican-led states are doing better.”
Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D), who has moved Illinois in a progressive direction, countered that the Republican model threatens to leave too many people behind. “We’re not Pottersville, and we don’t intend to be Pottersville,” he said in a reference to the mean-spirited and miserly villain in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” “There is a choice between a Bedford Falls that cares about your neighbor and the scorched-earth, don’t-care-about-your-neighbor policy of Mr. Potter.”
Single-party control
Today, 37 of the 50 states are under unified party control. Republicans hold the governorship and majorities in both chambers of the legislature in 23 states; Democrats have full control in 14 states. In 12 states, power is divided between Republicans and Democrats. (The other state, Nebraska, has a nonpartisan, unicameral legislature, although the governor is a Republican and the legislature is conservative.)
Justin Phillips, a political scientist at Columbia University who has written extensively about state government, said the degree of unified party control in the states is greater than at any time in more than half a century.
“This allows governors to behave very differently than they do under divided control,” Phillips said. Acknowledging that the parties long have had different philosophies about how to govern, he added: “The difference between what Democrats want and what Republicans want is growing. With unified party control, they don’t have to compromise.”
The National Governors Association once was an arena where governors of both parties came together to find consensus. But Ray Scheppach, who spent three decades as the organization’s executive director, said the governors’ partisan organizations — the Republican Governors Association and the Democratic Governors Association — now dominate, producing a sea change in the way states are being governed.
“They used to be governors first and Democrats or Republicans second,” Scheppach said. “Now they’re Democrats and Republicans first and governors second. In my mind, that’s a huge change.”
Widespread unified control in the states represents a significant shift over a period of three decades. After the 1980 elections, 24 states were under unified control. A decade later it was 20, and after the 2000 election it was only 21. Since then the states have been moving toward more unified control, with the biggest changes taking place in the past half-dozen years as partisan lines have hardened and split-ticket voting has declined across the country.
Control in the states today is more closely aligned with voting patterns in presidential elections than in the days when conservative Democrats dominated state and local elections in the South and moderate Republicans held greater sway in the North.
Karl Kurtz, a political scientist at the National Conference of State Legislatures, noted in an article published this year that Republicans control both houses of the legislatures in 22 of the 24 states carried by Mitt Romney in 2012 and that Democrats hold majorities in 18 of the 26 states won by Obama.
The eight Obama states that have full or partial Republican control are or recently have been presidential battlegrounds. These are Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Two decades ago, when politics were not as polarized, governors were more inclined to work cooperatively with legislators of the other party, in part as an acknowledgment of the disparate views of the entire citizenry of their states.
“This picture of Republican-controlled states doing exactly the opposite of what Democratic-controlled states do on these issues is relatively recent,” Kurtz said. “Even in past generations, even when they had the hammer, when they had unified government, when they might have had a supermajority or veto-proof majority control, I think there was more of a tendency to negotiate with the minority than there is today.”
The risk is that with unified control, governors and their like-minded legislators push beyond the views of their citizenry, particularly in states where public opinion is more evenly divided.
Phillips and Columbia colleague Jeffrey R. Lax argued in a paper published in the American Journal of Political Science that elected officials in states with unified control can overshoot public opinion. “The net result is that state policy is far more polarized than public preferences,” they wrote.
The most obvious example of this is Wisconsin, a state Democrats have carried in every presidential election since 1988 (although several of those outcomes were among the closest in the nation). After his election as governor in 2010, Republican Scott Walker, with the backing of a GOP-controlled legislature, moved swiftly to implement a conservative agenda that included significant restrictions on collective-bargaining rights for most state workers.
The policies sparked widespread protests and ultimately a recall election in 2012 that Walker survived. The state remains deeply polarized, and Walker, a prospective 2016 presidential candidate, remains firm in his convictions, with a new book titled “Unintimidated.”
In Ohio, which Obama carried in 2008 and 2012, Republican Gov. John Kasich and his legislature triggered a similar backlash over changes in public employees’ collective bargaining and over voting laws. Ohio voters repealed restrictions on collective bargaining for public employee unions a year after Kasich’s election. Later, faced with another threat of a citizen veto, the legislature rolled back some voting-law restrictions.
Going separate ways
In many more states, however, citizens are being governed by a philosophy and a set of policies that conform more closely to public opinion within their borders. That has accelerated the trend toward more-partisan governing, and as Ronald Brownstein and Stephanie Czekalinski wrote this year in National Journal, it is sometimes “straining the boundaries of federalism.”
Over the past three years, Obama’s Affordable Care Act has been the most ideologically divisive issue across the country. The law envisioned that the states would establish marketplaces, or exchanges, to facilitate the purchase of health insurance.
But 27 states opted not to do so in any way, throwing responsibility on the federal government. All have Republican governors, Republican legislatures or both. Of the states that took full responsibility for an exchange, two-thirds are under unified Democratic control and almost all the rest have divided government. (There are seven states in partnership with the federal government.)
The law also expanded access to Medicaid, with the federal government providing the states with more than 90 percent of the funding over the first nine years. Democratic-led states leaped at the opportunity, but 23 states have declined — three-quarters of them under unified Republican control when the decisions were made.
Some Republican governors have bucked that trend. Eight states with Republican governors or unified Republican control have decided to enter into the expanded Medicaid program.
The latest to join was Iowa, where Republican Gov. Terry Branstad worked with leaders in both parties in a divided legislature. Earlier, in Ohio, Kasich had to overcome resistance from Republican legislators. He found a route around the legislature that put his state in the program, arguing that it was good for the state and its low-income residents.
Governors of both parties often cite the same priorities when they talk about their agendas: job creation, education, transportation and health care. But policies have differed, particularly as they have addressed budgetary pressures during the slow recovery after the 2008 recession.
Tax policy is one area that often has divided Republicans and Democrats. The American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that has offered legislative models for lawmakers, cites 18 states as having cut taxes this year. All but two have Republican governors, and those two — Arkansas and Montana — have Republican legislatures.
Democratic governors have gone in the other direction. Maryland, under Gov. Martin O’Malley, raised taxes on the wealthy. California Gov. Jerry Brown won voter approval last year for a major tax increase on the rich.
On education, Republican-led states have pushed for charter schools and more choice for parents in lieu of ever-greater spending. They say their blue-state colleagues are too constrained by the power of teachers unions to be as bold in their efforts. Democrats say Republicans have been too willing to squeeze funding for schools.
The minimum wage is another point of divergence. California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island have increases pending. In New Jersey, where Democrats control the legislature, voters in November approved a constitutional amendment increasing the state minimum wage. Republican Gov. Chris Christie opposed the amendment.
Red and blue states also have gone in different directions with labor relations, with red-state governors and legislatures moving to restrict collective-bargaining rights for public employee unions and others approving right-to-work legislation.
Michigan is a state synonymous with union power and one that has consistently voted for Democratic presidential nominees since 1988. But the GOP-controlled legislature last year approved a right-to-work law. When Republican Gov. Rick Snyder signed it, he said: “I don’t view this as anti-union at all. I believe this is pro-worker.”
Pensions have strained the budgets of most governors. Red-state governors have trumpeted their efforts to revamp public employee pension and benefit packages, but blue-state governors have been forced to act as well, despite ties to organized labor.
According to analysts at both Morningstar and Moody’s, there is no clear red-blue pattern to the problems states face on the pension front or to actions taken to solve those problems.
Illinois had perhaps the most severe pension problem in the country and seemed politically incapable of dealing with it. But Quinn and the legislature reached agreement recently on what Moody’s called “the largest reform package” in the country. If fully implemented, the analysis said, the deal would substantially reduce a problem that had resulted in five credit downgrades for the state.
Culture wars continue
Social issues have produced an even starker dividing line between red and blue states.
Abortion wars in Texas drew national attention this summer when state Sen. Wendy Davis (D) filibustered against a bill to restrict abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The filibuster helped launch Davis to a candidacy for governor in 2014. But in conservative Texas, she and her allies ultimately failed to block enactment of the bill, which was championed by Gov. Rick Perry (R) and the GOP-controlled legislature.
Texas was hardly alone among red states in moving to restrict abortion rights. Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion issues across the country, said that in 2013 there were 64 restrictions approved in the states. Of those, 53 were in states where Republicans control both the legislature and the governor’s office. Ten came in states where the Republicans have partial control of the government.
“In general, if there is Republican control, then abortion restrictions are on the table and able to be enacted,” she wrote in an e-mail. “When Democrats are in charge then abortion restrictions are not very likely.” Nash noted that California was the only state to approve expanded access to abortion services.
The Supreme Court gave same-sex marriage a boost this summer in a pair of rulings but stopped short of legalizing such unions across the country. That has left the issue to the states, where action follows a distinct red-blue pattern.
Same-sex marriage is now legal in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Where it has become legal by popular vote or action by a state legislature, Democrats control the levers of government.
In some other states, the courts have moved to sanction such unions. In recent weeks, same-sex marriages became legal in two more states — New Mexico, where control of government is divided, and Utah, long a Republican stronghold. In both cases, the change came from court rulings.
There have been political repercussions in two other states with divided control of government after courts stepped in to legalize such unions.
After the Iowa Supreme Court acted in 2009, its ruling triggered a major political reaction. Voters subsequently removed three judges who had supported the ruling. A fourth survived his election in 2012.
In New Jersey, the issue produced a different reaction. Same-sex marriages became legal there in October by court action. Christie opposed the change, but with Election Day only a few weeks off, he chose not to buck public opinion and withdrew the state’s appeal to the court action.
Public opinion has shifted dramatically on this issue, but some red states are still moving to put prohibitions in their constitutions. North Carolina, which has been a presidential battleground in the past two elections but where a Republican governor and legislature have moved decidedly to the right, approved such an amendment in the spring.
Many other states have such prohibitions written into their constitutions, and they are likely to become the next front in the culture war over same-sex marriage.
The mass shooting last December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., sparked calls for new gun-
control legislation, nationally and in the states. Obama’s gun initiative died in the Senate early this year, but new restrictions were enacted in eight states, seven where Democrats have unified control.
“I’ve been involved with state legislation for 18 years now,” said Brian Malte, senior national policy director at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “2013 was by far the most successful year in terms of us passing proactive gun legislation.”
Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs at the National Rifle Association, said the pattern is fairly clear on gun legislation. Where control is divided or where Republicans hold power, “we were able to advance our agenda,” he said. Even in some blue states, the NRA was successful in defeating proposed restrictions.
Colorado passed new gun restrictions after the Sandy Hook killings and an earlier mass shooting in a suburban Denver movie theater. But the legislature’s action produced a backlash from pro-gun groups and citizens, resulting in the recall of two Democratic state senators, including state Senate President John Morse. A third who faced a possible recall resigned.
Voting laws have become another red-blue battleground. There are two trends visible in the states. Red states have moved to enact a series of restrictive laws, including those requiring ID cards to vote as well as laws that cut back on early voting.
“That trend has been almost exclusively in states that are red, where the legislature and the governorship are Republican,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
A countertrend has developed in blue and some red states, with legislators moving to make access to voting easier, through things such as online registration.
The red-blue hard sell
The debate over which approach works better is being fought with claims and counter claims, all buttressed with batteries of statistics: the number of jobs created, the rate of job creation, changes in median income, poverty rates or the percentage of the population without health insurance.
Some analysts who have studied the contrasting performances of states say government policy is only one factor and perhaps not as significant as a state’s history and culture. Michigan’s long economic decline came during periods of both Democratic and Republican governorships, for example. California rose under Democrats and Republicans before it hit budgetary and economic turbulence.
“It has almost nothing to do with any individual administration,” said Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University. “I think of history as the number one factor. State government is significant but secondary.”
Still, Republicans have been more vocal about what they see as the superiority of their philosophy.
Louisiana’s Jindal says that, on average, unemployment is about a point lower in Republican-led states than in Democratic-led states. Of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates in November, five have unified Republican control, three are controlled by Democrats, one is divided and one, Nebraska, has a unicameral legislature. Of the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, four are in unified Republican hands, two are under the control of Democrats and four are divided.
Among the 17 states that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says had statistically significant declines in unemployment over the past year, eight are controlled by Republicans, seven are controlled by Democrats and two have divided government. Two of the top three performers — North Carolina and Florida — are under GOP control while the other — New Jersey — has a Republican governor. In these 17 improving states, California’s unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent,was the highest.
Presented with some of those realities, Jindal said there are fairer measures of success than the unemployment rates. He cited overall job growth and, crucially, how businesses rank the states. He and other Republican governors point to Texas as the nation’s leader in job creation since the 2008 recession, and they credit low-tax, low-regulatory policies for the successes.
Jerry Nickelsburg, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, said Texas’s success is clear. But he questioned whether the same model is successful in other states. “Texas does really well with GDP growth,” he said. “But then go to other low-tax, low-wage, weak-union states and you really don’t find them doing quite so well.”
Maryland’s O’Malley drew a different contrast between how Democrats and Republicans are governing, arguing that his state’s record holds up well when measured against red states. “The fundamental difference between most Democratic governors and most Republican governors has to do with ideology versus a more entrepreneurial approach,” he said. “Democratic governors exist in a reality-based world. We are not chained to ideology.”
Wisconsin’s Walker said the GOP’s small-government model is the surest way to economic dynamism. “You create a government that’s . . . mainly about helping government get out of the way,” he said. But he added a caveat. “I think government’s too big, too expensive, too involved in your lives,” he said. “But for the government that’s necessary, it should work. . . . That’s the challenge for Republicans.”
Perry, who is exploring a second presidential candidacy, has taken this fight into his opponents’ back yards. He has sponsored radio ads in or made forays to some Democratic-led states to encourage businesses to consider moving or expanding operations to Texas. asserting that the limited-government approach of Republicans has clear advantages over the Democrats’ model.
Illinois’s Quinn dismissed Perry as a “big talker.”
“I have read the entire book of Amos in the Old Testament,” Quinn said. “Amos was a working guy who took care of sycamore trees. One of his famous pieces of advice is, don’t afflict the poor. I think some of the policies of the governors on the other side are afflicting the poor.”
The coming national debate
California’s Brown ultimately finds all the gamesmanship tiring. “I think it’s hard to make these generalizations,” he said. “A lot of it is just boosterism when governors go around. They’re more like promoting their state to puff up their images. We [in California] have problems, and we’re solving them.”
One analyst who works closely with governors and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to take sides in the debate, said, “I don’t know that anyone has a definitive measure to show your economic policy is better than mine.”
Perry argued that the red-blue contrasts are just what the Founding Fathers envisioned by giving states constitutional authority to chart their own destinies with economic and social policies that are tailored to their populations. “People in this very mobile society can go live where they’re most comfortable,” he said.
The next presidential campaign probably will revive the national debate about whether the country should move decisively in one direction or the other, particularly if a Republican governor becomes the party’s nominee.
But Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, offered this caution to would-be contenders. “When a governor is running for president,” he said, “they push an ideological agenda that is tailored much more to the national primary voters in their party than it is to the average voter in the state. And they often crash and burn for that reason.”
Columbia’s Phillips said it is questionable whether there is an ideal model for the nation. “If the country had to live under one [red or blue] model, I think national politics would be as hostile, or worse, than it is today,” he said. Having divergent approaches in the states, he said, “defuses” some of the conflict at the national level. “It is what the framers of the Constitution envisioned.”
But Brown focused on one value of single-party dominance in an era of partisan divisions. “The main thing is to get stuff done,” he said. “You need a governing consensus. . . . You can’t govern as a constant bickering, debating society. Somebody must prevail over time to sustain any kind of momentum.”
That question could be at the heart of the debate in 2016. After years of gridlock, will people be prepared to move as decisively in one direction or the other in Washington as they have been in the states?
Red, blue states move in opposite directions in a new era of single-party control
California, Texas and America’s red-blue divide: Three-quarters of state governments — more than at any time in recent memory — are fully controlled by either Republicans or Democrats. The values that underpin these governing strategies reflect contrasting political visions, and their differences can be seen in stark terms in when comparing Democratic-controlled California with Republican-controlled Texas.
Political polarization has ushered in a new era in state government, where single-party control of the levers of power has produced competing Americas. One is grounded in principles of lean and limited government and on traditional values; the other is built on a belief in the essential role of government and on tenets of cultural liberalism.
These opposing visions have been a staple of national elections, and in a divided Washington, this polarization has resulted in gridlock and dysfunction. But today, three-quarters of the states — more than at any time in recent memory — are controlled by either Republicans or Democrats. Elected officials in these states are moving unencumbered to enact their party’s agenda.
Graphic
Today, three-quarters of the states are controlled by either Republicans or Democrats, more than at any time in recent memory.
Texas, California embody the red-blue divide
Dan Balz DEC 28
In the debate over Republican vs. Democratic state governance, two huge states stand at opposite poles.
.Republican states have pursued economic and fiscal strategies built around lower taxes, deeper spending cuts and less regulation. They have declined to set up state health-insurance exchanges to implement President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. They have clashed with labor unions. On social issues, they have moved to restrict abortion rights or to enact voter-identification laws, in the name of ballot integrity, that critics say hamper access to voting for the poor and minorities.
Blue states have also been forced to cut spending, given the budgetary pressures caused by the recession. But rather than cutting more deeply, a number of them also have raised taxes to pay for education or infrastructure. They have backed the president on the main elements of his health-care law. The social-issue agenda in blue states includes legalizing same-sex marriages, providing easier access to voting and, in a handful of cases, imposing more restrictions on guns.
The values that underpin these governing strategies reflect contrasting political visions, and the differences can be seen in stark terms in the states. In a red state such as Texas, government exists mostly to get out of the way of the private sector while holding to traditional social values. In blue states such as California and Maryland, government takes more from taxpayers, particularly the wealthy, to spend on domestic priorities while advancing a cultural agenda that reflects the country’s growing diversity.
The alternative models on display in the states have triggered a competition for bragging rights about which would be better for the nation as a whole — a debate that is likely to intensify nationally in forthcoming elections.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), coming off a year as chairman of the Republican Governors Association, has been a tireless proselytizer for his party’s conservative approach. Red states, he said, are “doing better economically, they’re doing better with credit ratings, they’re doing better with people moving into their states. . . . I’ll sit here all day and talk to you about how Republican policies and Republican-led states are doing better.”
Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D), who has moved Illinois in a progressive direction, countered that the Republican model threatens to leave too many people behind. “We’re not Pottersville, and we don’t intend to be Pottersville,” he said in a reference to the mean-spirited and miserly villain in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” “There is a choice between a Bedford Falls that cares about your neighbor and the scorched-earth, don’t-care-about-your-neighbor policy of Mr. Potter.”
Single-party control
Today, 37 of the 50 states are under unified party control. Republicans hold the governorship and majorities in both chambers of the legislature in 23 states; Democrats have full control in 14 states. In 12 states, power is divided between Republicans and Democrats. (The other state, Nebraska, has a nonpartisan, unicameral legislature, although the governor is a Republican and the legislature is conservative.)
Justin Phillips, a political scientist at Columbia University who has written extensively about state government, said the degree of unified party control in the states is greater than at any time in more than half a century.
“This allows governors to behave very differently than they do under divided control,” Phillips said. Acknowledging that the parties long have had different philosophies about how to govern, he added: “The difference between what Democrats want and what Republicans want is growing. With unified party control, they don’t have to compromise.”
The National Governors Association once was an arena where governors of both parties came together to find consensus. But Ray Scheppach, who spent three decades as the organization’s executive director, said the governors’ partisan organizations — the Republican Governors Association and the Democratic Governors Association — now dominate, producing a sea change in the way states are being governed.
“They used to be governors first and Democrats or Republicans second,” Scheppach said. “Now they’re Democrats and Republicans first and governors second. In my mind, that’s a huge change.”
Widespread unified control in the states represents a significant shift over a period of three decades. After the 1980 elections, 24 states were under unified control. A decade later it was 20, and after the 2000 election it was only 21. Since then the states have been moving toward more unified control, with the biggest changes taking place in the past half-dozen years as partisan lines have hardened and split-ticket voting has declined across the country.
Control in the states today is more closely aligned with voting patterns in presidential elections than in the days when conservative Democrats dominated state and local elections in the South and moderate Republicans held greater sway in the North.
Karl Kurtz, a political scientist at the National Conference of State Legislatures, noted in an article published this year that Republicans control both houses of the legislatures in 22 of the 24 states carried by Mitt Romney in 2012 and that Democrats hold majorities in 18 of the 26 states won by Obama.
The eight Obama states that have full or partial Republican control are or recently have been presidential battlegrounds. These are Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Two decades ago, when politics were not as polarized, governors were more inclined to work cooperatively with legislators of the other party, in part as an acknowledgment of the disparate views of the entire citizenry of their states.
“This picture of Republican-controlled states doing exactly the opposite of what Democratic-controlled states do on these issues is relatively recent,” Kurtz said. “Even in past generations, even when they had the hammer, when they had unified government, when they might have had a supermajority or veto-proof majority control, I think there was more of a tendency to negotiate with the minority than there is today.”
The risk is that with unified control, governors and their like-minded legislators push beyond the views of their citizenry, particularly in states where public opinion is more evenly divided.
Phillips and Columbia colleague Jeffrey R. Lax argued in a paper published in the American Journal of Political Science that elected officials in states with unified control can overshoot public opinion. “The net result is that state policy is far more polarized than public preferences,” they wrote.
The most obvious example of this is Wisconsin, a state Democrats have carried in every presidential election since 1988 (although several of those outcomes were among the closest in the nation). After his election as governor in 2010, Republican Scott Walker, with the backing of a GOP-controlled legislature, moved swiftly to implement a conservative agenda that included significant restrictions on collective-bargaining rights for most state workers.
The policies sparked widespread protests and ultimately a recall election in 2012 that Walker survived. The state remains deeply polarized, and Walker, a prospective 2016 presidential candidate, remains firm in his convictions, with a new book titled “Unintimidated.”
In Ohio, which Obama carried in 2008 and 2012, Republican Gov. John Kasich and his legislature triggered a similar backlash over changes in public employees’ collective bargaining and over voting laws. Ohio voters repealed restrictions on collective bargaining for public employee unions a year after Kasich’s election. Later, faced with another threat of a citizen veto, the legislature rolled back some voting-law restrictions.
Going separate ways
In many more states, however, citizens are being governed by a philosophy and a set of policies that conform more closely to public opinion within their borders. That has accelerated the trend toward more-partisan governing, and as Ronald Brownstein and Stephanie Czekalinski wrote this year in National Journal, it is sometimes “straining the boundaries of federalism.”
Over the past three years, Obama’s Affordable Care Act has been the most ideologically divisive issue across the country. The law envisioned that the states would establish marketplaces, or exchanges, to facilitate the purchase of health insurance.
But 27 states opted not to do so in any way, throwing responsibility on the federal government. All have Republican governors, Republican legislatures or both. Of the states that took full responsibility for an exchange, two-thirds are under unified Democratic control and almost all the rest have divided government. (There are seven states in partnership with the federal government.)
The law also expanded access to Medicaid, with the federal government providing the states with more than 90 percent of the funding over the first nine years. Democratic-led states leaped at the opportunity, but 23 states have declined — three-quarters of them under unified Republican control when the decisions were made.
Some Republican governors have bucked that trend. Eight states with Republican governors or unified Republican control have decided to enter into the expanded Medicaid program.
The latest to join was Iowa, where Republican Gov. Terry Branstad worked with leaders in both parties in a divided legislature. Earlier, in Ohio, Kasich had to overcome resistance from Republican legislators. He found a route around the legislature that put his state in the program, arguing that it was good for the state and its low-income residents.
Governors of both parties often cite the same priorities when they talk about their agendas: job creation, education, transportation and health care. But policies have differed, particularly as they have addressed budgetary pressures during the slow recovery after the 2008 recession.
Tax policy is one area that often has divided Republicans and Democrats. The American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that has offered legislative models for lawmakers, cites 18 states as having cut taxes this year. All but two have Republican governors, and those two — Arkansas and Montana — have Republican legislatures.
Democratic governors have gone in the other direction. Maryland, under Gov. Martin O’Malley, raised taxes on the wealthy. California Gov. Jerry Brown won voter approval last year for a major tax increase on the rich.
On education, Republican-led states have pushed for charter schools and more choice for parents in lieu of ever-greater spending. They say their blue-state colleagues are too constrained by the power of teachers unions to be as bold in their efforts. Democrats say Republicans have been too willing to squeeze funding for schools.
The minimum wage is another point of divergence. California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island have increases pending. In New Jersey, where Democrats control the legislature, voters in November approved a constitutional amendment increasing the state minimum wage. Republican Gov. Chris Christie opposed the amendment.
Red and blue states also have gone in different directions with labor relations, with red-state governors and legislatures moving to restrict collective-bargaining rights for public employee unions and others approving right-to-work legislation.
Michigan is a state synonymous with union power and one that has consistently voted for Democratic presidential nominees since 1988. But the GOP-controlled legislature last year approved a right-to-work law. When Republican Gov. Rick Snyder signed it, he said: “I don’t view this as anti-union at all. I believe this is pro-worker.”
Pensions have strained the budgets of most governors. Red-state governors have trumpeted their efforts to revamp public employee pension and benefit packages, but blue-state governors have been forced to act as well, despite ties to organized labor.
According to analysts at both Morningstar and Moody’s, there is no clear red-blue pattern to the problems states face on the pension front or to actions taken to solve those problems.
Illinois had perhaps the most severe pension problem in the country and seemed politically incapable of dealing with it. But Quinn and the legislature reached agreement recently on what Moody’s called “the largest reform package” in the country. If fully implemented, the analysis said, the deal would substantially reduce a problem that had resulted in five credit downgrades for the state.
Culture wars continue
Social issues have produced an even starker dividing line between red and blue states.
Abortion wars in Texas drew national attention this summer when state Sen. Wendy Davis (D) filibustered against a bill to restrict abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The filibuster helped launch Davis to a candidacy for governor in 2014. But in conservative Texas, she and her allies ultimately failed to block enactment of the bill, which was championed by Gov. Rick Perry (R) and the GOP-controlled legislature.
Texas was hardly alone among red states in moving to restrict abortion rights. Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion issues across the country, said that in 2013 there were 64 restrictions approved in the states. Of those, 53 were in states where Republicans control both the legislature and the governor’s office. Ten came in states where the Republicans have partial control of the government.
“In general, if there is Republican control, then abortion restrictions are on the table and able to be enacted,” she wrote in an e-mail. “When Democrats are in charge then abortion restrictions are not very likely.” Nash noted that California was the only state to approve expanded access to abortion services.
The Supreme Court gave same-sex marriage a boost this summer in a pair of rulings but stopped short of legalizing such unions across the country. That has left the issue to the states, where action follows a distinct red-blue pattern.
Same-sex marriage is now legal in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Where it has become legal by popular vote or action by a state legislature, Democrats control the levers of government.
In some other states, the courts have moved to sanction such unions. In recent weeks, same-sex marriages became legal in two more states — New Mexico, where control of government is divided, and Utah, long a Republican stronghold. In both cases, the change came from court rulings.
There have been political repercussions in two other states with divided control of government after courts stepped in to legalize such unions.
After the Iowa Supreme Court acted in 2009, its ruling triggered a major political reaction. Voters subsequently removed three judges who had supported the ruling. A fourth survived his election in 2012.
In New Jersey, the issue produced a different reaction. Same-sex marriages became legal there in October by court action. Christie opposed the change, but with Election Day only a few weeks off, he chose not to buck public opinion and withdrew the state’s appeal to the court action.
Public opinion has shifted dramatically on this issue, but some red states are still moving to put prohibitions in their constitutions. North Carolina, which has been a presidential battleground in the past two elections but where a Republican governor and legislature have moved decidedly to the right, approved such an amendment in the spring.
Many other states have such prohibitions written into their constitutions, and they are likely to become the next front in the culture war over same-sex marriage.
The mass shooting last December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., sparked calls for new gun-
control legislation, nationally and in the states. Obama’s gun initiative died in the Senate early this year, but new restrictions were enacted in eight states, seven where Democrats have unified control.
“I’ve been involved with state legislation for 18 years now,” said Brian Malte, senior national policy director at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “2013 was by far the most successful year in terms of us passing proactive gun legislation.”
Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs at the National Rifle Association, said the pattern is fairly clear on gun legislation. Where control is divided or where Republicans hold power, “we were able to advance our agenda,” he said. Even in some blue states, the NRA was successful in defeating proposed restrictions.
Colorado passed new gun restrictions after the Sandy Hook killings and an earlier mass shooting in a suburban Denver movie theater. But the legislature’s action produced a backlash from pro-gun groups and citizens, resulting in the recall of two Democratic state senators, including state Senate President John Morse. A third who faced a possible recall resigned.
Voting laws have become another red-blue battleground. There are two trends visible in the states. Red states have moved to enact a series of restrictive laws, including those requiring ID cards to vote as well as laws that cut back on early voting.
“That trend has been almost exclusively in states that are red, where the legislature and the governorship are Republican,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
A countertrend has developed in blue and some red states, with legislators moving to make access to voting easier, through things such as online registration.
The red-blue hard sell
The debate over which approach works better is being fought with claims and counter claims, all buttressed with batteries of statistics: the number of jobs created, the rate of job creation, changes in median income, poverty rates or the percentage of the population without health insurance.
Some analysts who have studied the contrasting performances of states say government policy is only one factor and perhaps not as significant as a state’s history and culture. Michigan’s long economic decline came during periods of both Democratic and Republican governorships, for example. California rose under Democrats and Republicans before it hit budgetary and economic turbulence.
“It has almost nothing to do with any individual administration,” said Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University. “I think of history as the number one factor. State government is significant but secondary.”
Still, Republicans have been more vocal about what they see as the superiority of their philosophy.
Louisiana’s Jindal says that, on average, unemployment is about a point lower in Republican-led states than in Democratic-led states. Of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates in November, five have unified Republican control, three are controlled by Democrats, one is divided and one, Nebraska, has a unicameral legislature. Of the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, four are in unified Republican hands, two are under the control of Democrats and four are divided.
Among the 17 states that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says had statistically significant declines in unemployment over the past year, eight are controlled by Republicans, seven are controlled by Democrats and two have divided government. Two of the top three performers — North Carolina and Florida — are under GOP control while the other — New Jersey — has a Republican governor. In these 17 improving states, California’s unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent,was the highest.
Presented with some of those realities, Jindal said there are fairer measures of success than the unemployment rates. He cited overall job growth and, crucially, how businesses rank the states. He and other Republican governors point to Texas as the nation’s leader in job creation since the 2008 recession, and they credit low-tax, low-regulatory policies for the successes.
Jerry Nickelsburg, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, said Texas’s success is clear. But he questioned whether the same model is successful in other states. “Texas does really well with GDP growth,” he said. “But then go to other low-tax, low-wage, weak-union states and you really don’t find them doing quite so well.”
Maryland’s O’Malley drew a different contrast between how Democrats and Republicans are governing, arguing that his state’s record holds up well when measured against red states. “The fundamental difference between most Democratic governors and most Republican governors has to do with ideology versus a more entrepreneurial approach,” he said. “Democratic governors exist in a reality-based world. We are not chained to ideology.”
Wisconsin’s Walker said the GOP’s small-government model is the surest way to economic dynamism. “You create a government that’s . . . mainly about helping government get out of the way,” he said. But he added a caveat. “I think government’s too big, too expensive, too involved in your lives,” he said. “But for the government that’s necessary, it should work. . . . That’s the challenge for Republicans.”
Perry, who is exploring a second presidential candidacy, has taken this fight into his opponents’ back yards. He has sponsored radio ads in or made forays to some Democratic-led states to encourage businesses to consider moving or expanding operations to Texas. asserting that the limited-government approach of Republicans has clear advantages over the Democrats’ model.
Illinois’s Quinn dismissed Perry as a “big talker.”
“I have read the entire book of Amos in the Old Testament,” Quinn said. “Amos was a working guy who took care of sycamore trees. One of his famous pieces of advice is, don’t afflict the poor. I think some of the policies of the governors on the other side are afflicting the poor.”
The coming national debate
California’s Brown ultimately finds all the gamesmanship tiring. “I think it’s hard to make these generalizations,” he said. “A lot of it is just boosterism when governors go around. They’re more like promoting their state to puff up their images. We [in California] have problems, and we’re solving them.”
One analyst who works closely with governors and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to take sides in the debate, said, “I don’t know that anyone has a definitive measure to show your economic policy is better than mine.”
Perry argued that the red-blue contrasts are just what the Founding Fathers envisioned by giving states constitutional authority to chart their own destinies with economic and social policies that are tailored to their populations. “People in this very mobile society can go live where they’re most comfortable,” he said.
The next presidential campaign probably will revive the national debate about whether the country should move decisively in one direction or the other, particularly if a Republican governor becomes the party’s nominee.
But Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, offered this caution to would-be contenders. “When a governor is running for president,” he said, “they push an ideological agenda that is tailored much more to the national primary voters in their party than it is to the average voter in the state. And they often crash and burn for that reason.”
Columbia’s Phillips said it is questionable whether there is an ideal model for the nation. “If the country had to live under one [red or blue] model, I think national politics would be as hostile, or worse, than it is today,” he said. Having divergent approaches in the states, he said, “defuses” some of the conflict at the national level. “It is what the framers of the Constitution envisioned.”
But Brown focused on one value of single-party dominance in an era of partisan divisions. “The main thing is to get stuff done,” he said. “You need a governing consensus. . . . You can’t govern as a constant bickering, debating society. Somebody must prevail over time to sustain any kind of momentum.”
That question could be at the heart of the debate in 2016. After years of gridlock, will people be prepared to move as decisively in one direction or the other in Washington as they have been in the states?
Friday, December 27, 2013
Match Point
As chance had it, I rewatched Match Point from Woody Allen. When I first saw this movie, years ago when it was released in 2005, I was more apathetic and indifferent. However, upon this second viewing, I am thoroughly entertained. This may be my favorite Woody Allen film.
The movie is drama, comedy, and thriller woven together. What is most striking is the obvious theme of what role luck plays in life. This premise is clearly served to us in the opening scene, when the former professional tennis player protagonist tells us how significant luck is, while we see a tennis ball hit a net and pop in the air, ultimately not knowing which side of the court it will land.
Early on, this character is seen reading Crime and Punishment. I have never read Dostoevsky, but I understand that in his book someone commits murder but is later redeemed by love, God, and punishment for the crime. Similarly, our tennis player in Match Point commits murder and, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, tries to hide his crime by faking a robbery. However, our tennis player is never redeemed. Luckily for him, the police believe another culprit responsible. Allen is suggesting, unlike Dostoevsky, that life can be shaped by luck and that love and God do not always offer the promise of salvation.
I am now compelled to watch more Woody Allen movies. I have always liked Annie Hall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Midnight in Paris, Mighty Aphrodite, and Sweet and Lowdown. I did not care for You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger or Melinda and Melinda. I want to watch his latest, Blue Jasmine, next. I may also watch Crimes and Misdemeanors, which I read has a similar story to Match Point.
The movie is drama, comedy, and thriller woven together. What is most striking is the obvious theme of what role luck plays in life. This premise is clearly served to us in the opening scene, when the former professional tennis player protagonist tells us how significant luck is, while we see a tennis ball hit a net and pop in the air, ultimately not knowing which side of the court it will land.
Early on, this character is seen reading Crime and Punishment. I have never read Dostoevsky, but I understand that in his book someone commits murder but is later redeemed by love, God, and punishment for the crime. Similarly, our tennis player in Match Point commits murder and, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, tries to hide his crime by faking a robbery. However, our tennis player is never redeemed. Luckily for him, the police believe another culprit responsible. Allen is suggesting, unlike Dostoevsky, that life can be shaped by luck and that love and God do not always offer the promise of salvation.
I am now compelled to watch more Woody Allen movies. I have always liked Annie Hall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Midnight in Paris, Mighty Aphrodite, and Sweet and Lowdown. I did not care for You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger or Melinda and Melinda. I want to watch his latest, Blue Jasmine, next. I may also watch Crimes and Misdemeanors, which I read has a similar story to Match Point.
Krugman Makes a Good Point
December 27, 2013, 11:55 am 14 Comments
The Big Screwup
You know how it went. They made big promises: just go to the website, provide the information, and all will be well. What actually happened was nothing like that. It’s true that many, perhaps most people did in the end manage to get what they sought; but millions found themselves frustrated and angry. Was it a disaster? That depends on which anecdotes you choose to emphasize. Will it have long-run consequences? Too soon to tell.
Yes, the great online-shopping screwup of 2013 was an object lesson. Oh, wait — did you think I was talking about healthcare.gov?
So, in case you didn’t know, online shopping had a number of glitches this holiday season, with Amazon, for example, failing to make good on many supposedly guaranteed delivery dates — and as a result, quite a few Christmas presents weren’t there when the reindeer took off. The biggest bottleneck seems to have been UPS, which just didn’t provide enough capacity, but it wasn’t the only one. Can’t the private sector do anything right?
OK, we all understand that things happen, and that sometimes they go wrong — especially when you’re dealing with something new, like the rapid growth of online shopping. But as Alec MacGillis says, many pundits were quick to declare healthcare.gov’s problems evidence of the fundamental, irretrievable incompetence of government, and as an omen of Obamacare’s inevitable collapse. Strange to say, none of these people are making similar claims about UPS or Amazon.
I wonder why.
.
The Big Screwup
You know how it went. They made big promises: just go to the website, provide the information, and all will be well. What actually happened was nothing like that. It’s true that many, perhaps most people did in the end manage to get what they sought; but millions found themselves frustrated and angry. Was it a disaster? That depends on which anecdotes you choose to emphasize. Will it have long-run consequences? Too soon to tell.
Yes, the great online-shopping screwup of 2013 was an object lesson. Oh, wait — did you think I was talking about healthcare.gov?
So, in case you didn’t know, online shopping had a number of glitches this holiday season, with Amazon, for example, failing to make good on many supposedly guaranteed delivery dates — and as a result, quite a few Christmas presents weren’t there when the reindeer took off. The biggest bottleneck seems to have been UPS, which just didn’t provide enough capacity, but it wasn’t the only one. Can’t the private sector do anything right?
OK, we all understand that things happen, and that sometimes they go wrong — especially when you’re dealing with something new, like the rapid growth of online shopping. But as Alec MacGillis says, many pundits were quick to declare healthcare.gov’s problems evidence of the fundamental, irretrievable incompetence of government, and as an omen of Obamacare’s inevitable collapse. Strange to say, none of these people are making similar claims about UPS or Amazon.
I wonder why.
.
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Critic James Wood's Favorite Books of 2013
Favorite Books of 2013
Posted by James Wood
I was excited, this year, to read the work of Elena Ferrante. This reclusive Italian novelist (she writes pseudonymously, and does not make public appearances) is a savage talent. Her formidable novel “Days of Abandonment” tells the story of an Italian academic and writer whose husband suddenly leaves her for another woman. You might expect something along the lines of an Iris Murdoch book, or what used to be called. in England, “a Hampstead novel” (middle-class lives, book-lined sitting rooms, and the spice of adultery). But Ferrante’s novel is closer to Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel” poems: a desperate, brutally honest, at times slightly repellent, powerfully self-analytic cry of pain. Unlike many novels that treat similar material, this book doesn’t request your sympathy so much as your gasping assent. I’ve read little else like it; the pages are on fire.
Europa also recently published the first and second volumes of Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy, “My Brilliant Friend” and “The Story of a New Name.” These wonderful novels are less claustrophobic than “Days of Abandonment,” and they bring to life an entire Neapolitan working-class community, from the nineteen-fifties to the nineteen-seventies. What they share with Ferrante’s earlier work is a tender bleakness—an extraordinary honesty, an absolute commitment to the avoidance of sentimentality, and beautifully spare, lucid prose. Reading these books, which are so full of struggle, ambition, and the desire to escape a rich but stifling community, I was reminded of the work of the Sicilian master Giovanni Verga, and of mid-twentieth-century neorealist filmmakers, like Rossellini and De Sica.
Two American writers thrilled me this year, Rachel Kushner and Jamie Quatro. Many of the stories in Quatro’s first book, “I Want to Show You More,” like Ferrante’s earlier work, deal with marriage and adultery. And Quatro is as original in her way as the Italian writer. She writes very short stories (some only three of four pages long), and her work is less about full-fledged adultery than blocked, impossible relationships—long-distance affairs, barely sustained by text and Skype, kept alive erotically with raw and rude selfies, texted snapshots, phone sex. Quatro is interesting because she plays this world of adventure and appetite against a context of theological prohibition: her female narrators and characters tend to have discernible Christian backgrounds, and their references are Bible-saturated. They hover on the edge of transgressions that are made both more sinful and more exciting by inherited religious traditions.
Rachel Kushner’s “The Flamethrowers” has rightly received much praise. Her story, of a young woman from Reno, Nevada, who is making her way in the Greenwich Village art scene of nineteen-seventies New York, has elements of the traditional bildungsroman, and also usefully deploys the Flaubertian flâneur. (As in Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education,” the protagonist roams the city, noticing and listening.) I was entranced by Kushner’s cool intelligence, by the passionate exactitude of her language, and by her seemingly inexhaustible supply of stories.
The second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume memoir-novel, “My Struggle,” was published this year, and it’s as good as the first one. The Norwegian writer ranges prosaically, across all sorts of subjects: being a husband, a father, and a writer; the Norwegian postwar social compact; masculinity; mental health; religious belief in a secular age; Dostoyevsky; nineteenth-century Romanticism; literary theory.… There’s a bit more Thomas Bernhard in the second book than in the first, and that misanthropic edge makes it funnier and more mordant than its predecessor. (Knausgaard on the idiocy of children’s parties—or, rather, the idiocy of parents at children’s parties, and the ensuing glacial boredom—is cherishable.)
Two books of literary criticism are worth mentioning: Thomas Pavel’s “The Lives of the Novel: A History,” and Gary Saul Morson’s “Prosaics and Other Provocations.” Pavel has written the most interesting and subtle one-volume history of the novel currently available. He is especially intelligent on the way in which of narration and belief (both formal religious belief and the particular quality of belief needed to make a stake in an imaginative fictional world) interact with each other. Morson, in a tremendous collection of pieces, extends his ongoing interest in what he calls “prosaics”—basically, a way of attending to fictional prose that makes room for the messiness, the loose ends, and the improvised form that one finds in the great realist writers (for Morson, especially Dostoyevsky).
John Sutherland - A Little History of Literature
This is a good book for the perpetual undergraduate like me for it's a brief survey of the history of English literature. As Emerson would say, take what you need and disregard the rest. On the other hand, the book freshly reveals my many deficiencies in the world of English literature.
There is a chapter on magical realism. This is a genre I have never understood.
I am weak on Shakespeare. I am weak on epic poetry. I am weak on "Beouwolf." I am weak on so many literary areas.
I had an English professsor at Auburn who loved John Donne. The metaphysical poets are not my favorites.
I need to read more Dickens. I need to read more Woolf.
There is a chapter on magical realism. This is a genre I have never understood.
I am weak on Shakespeare. I am weak on epic poetry. I am weak on "Beouwolf." I am weak on so many literary areas.
I had an English professsor at Auburn who loved John Donne. The metaphysical poets are not my favorites.
I need to read more Dickens. I need to read more Woolf.
What Santa Says
Santa did visit the Hudson house last night. He left a short note saying, "Be blessed with what you have---the best wife and son a man could ever want. You need no more." Thanks, Santa, for the reminder. I need no more.
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Lucy Horsley Lewis, L Vicky Bartholomew Griffin, Kelley Sanford Sharit and 5 others like this..Lorna Wood Merry Christmas, Fred!about an hour ago · Like..Fred Hudson Happy Holidays, Lorna! :)
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Lucy Horsley Lewis, L Vicky Bartholomew Griffin, Kelley Sanford Sharit and 5 others like this..Lorna Wood Merry Christmas, Fred!about an hour ago · Like..Fred Hudson Happy Holidays, Lorna! :)
The Dylan Library V
This morning I hear "Duquesne Whistle" from the "Tempest" album for the first time while driving to Starbucks. It's a nice, bouncy tune.
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Inequality
Inequality for DummiesBy BILL KELLER
Published: December 22, 2013 644 Comments
Inequality is in. The president, you have probably heard, has declared income inequality to be “the defining challenge of our time.” (Except he didn’t quite, but we’ll get to that.) Politicians, pundits and activists on the left have seized on the president’s words, along with the rising fortunes of progressive idols Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio, to refute the apostles of austerity (mostly Republicans these days) and lay down early populist markers for the 2016 elections. Liberals of a more centrist bent — notably the former Clintonites at the Third Way think tank — have refused to join the chorus and been lashed by fellow Democrats for their blasphemy. Senator Warren has suggested that liberals who disagree with her are in the pocket of Wall Street. Third Way executives took to the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal to accuse the populists of indulging a “ ‘we can have it all’ fantasy.”
If you traffic in opinions, as a pro or an amateur, you’d better have opinions about inequality. And so I set off into the intramural battlefield to see what’s up.
For starters, economic inequality is manifestly real, growing and dangerous. The gulf between the penthouse and the projects is obscenely wide. Obama cited some of the startling numbers: The top 10 percent of Americans used to take in a third of the national income. Now they gobble up half. The typical corporate C.E.O. used to make 30 times as much as the average worker. Now the boss makes 270 times as much as the minion. Many factors have led to this trend, including the offshoring of work to low-paid foreign labor, the automation of everything from manufacturing to meter-reading, a tax code that allows the accumulation of riches at the top, the slow growth of educational attainment, the demise of strong unions, a collapse of the social contract.
The alarming thing is not inequality per se, but immobility. It’s not just that we have too many poor people, but that they are stranded in poverty with long odds against getting out. The rich (and their children) stay rich, the poor (and their children) stay poor. President Obama’s speech on Dec. 4, widely characterized as his inequality speech, was actually billed by the White House as a speech on economic mobility. The equality he urged us to strive for was not equality of wealth but equality of opportunity.
A stratified society in which the bottom and top are mostly locked in place is not just morally offensive; it is unstable. Recessions are more frequent in such countries. A widely praised 2012 book, “Why Nations Fail,” argues that historically when the ruling elites have pulled up the ladder and kept newcomers from getting a foothold, their economies have suffocated and died. “The most pernicious fact of inequality is when it translates into political inequality,” said Daron Acemoglu, a co-author of the book and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist. “That means our democracy ceases to function because some people have so much money they command greater power.” The rich spend heavily on lobbyists and campaign donations to secure tax breaks and tariff advantages and bailouts that perpetuate their status. Not only does a dynamic economy stagnate, but the left-out citizenry becomes disillusioned and cynical. Sound familiar?
The left-left sees economic inequality as mainly a problem of distribution — the accumulation of vast wealth that never really trickles down from on high. Their prescription is to tax the 1 percent and close corporate loopholes, using the new revenues to subsidize the needs of the poor and middle class. They would string the safety net higher: expand Social Security, hold Medicare inviolate, extend unemployment insurance, protect food stamps, create more low-income housing. They would raise the minimum wage.
The center-left — and that includes President Obama, most of the time — sees the problem and the solutions as more complicated. Yes, you want to provide greater security for those without independent means (see Obamacare), but you also need to create opportunity, which means, first and foremost, jobs. Yes, you can raise taxes on the rich, but you don’t want to punish success. “You want to increase social mobility by providing an opportunity for the bottom to become rich, not forcing the rich to become poor,” said Acemoglu, who aligns more with the center than with the populists.
The center-left (I’m somewhat oversimplifying these categories) agrees on the menace of inequality, but places equal or greater emphasis on the fact that the economy is not growing the way it did for most of the last century. The sluggish growth means that not only are the poorest stuck at the bottom, but the broad middle is in economic decline. “The central economic problem is that a middle-class wage does not make a middle-class life anymore,” said Jon Cowan, president of Third Way. This diagnosis leads to somewhat different priorities. Of the arguments that pit Democrat against Democrat, three strike me as most important:
The first is how to restart the engine of growth. The populists favor putting more money in the hands of the bottom and middle, who will then spend us back to economic vigor. This is classic Keynesian thinking, largely vindicated by history. But the center-left points out that our economy is already 70 percent dependent on domestic consumers, way more than other developed countries. Liberals of all shades favor greater government investments in education, infrastructure, clean energy and other research. But they divide over policies that might unleash the energy of the private sector. In a line from his speech that was not widely quoted, President Obama said, “The fact is if you’re a progressive and you want to help the middle class and the working poor, you’ve still got to be concerned about competitiveness and productivity and business confidence that spurs private-sector investment.” While closing loopholes, Obama would also lower corporate tax rates; he would do trade deals to expand our diminishing share of foreign markets; he would shrink long-term deficits and streamline regulations.
The second argument is over entitlements. The left-left seems to believe that government investments — roads and bridges, clean energy, education, etc. — and more-generous safety-net benefits can all be had by milking the rich and cutting military spending. Most centrists would raise taxes some and cut defense spending some, but they say that unless we also curb the growth of entitlements, the stampede of baby boomers into Social Security and Medicare will crowd out everything else. Between now and 2030, the working-age population that pays into Social Security grows by 15 percent; the over-65 population that withdraws from Social Security grows by 65 percent. No one on the left favors entrusting Social Security and Medicare to the mercies of the private marketplace, as some Republicans do. But while the left tends to treat entitlements as sacred (Senator Warren and others would increase benefits for everyone, even the rich), centrists favor measures to slow the growth of entitlements: using a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) formula that more accurately reflects how people spend, cutting benefits for those who don’t really need them, possibly extending the retirement age a couple of years, and using the government’s leverage to drive down the costs of medical care. The tension between entitlements and investment is a Third Way obsession. In a column and two blog posts last year (here, and here, and here) I sympathized with the case for imposing some restraint on entitlements. I still do.
And a third difference between the near left and the far left is the question of making government more efficient. This is not so much a policy dispute as a mind-set. In education, health care, Social Security and other areas, the center seems more receptive to reforms intended to get decent results at lower costs. Further left, reform is seen as a euphemism for taking stuff away, and often resisted. The left responds to rising costs with rising subsidies; the center looks for ways to change incentives. Thus centrists put into the Affordable Care Act a so-called Cadillac tax, which aims to assure the government is not subsidizing plans that encourage a lot of unnecessary treatment. The idea encountered resistance from the left, led by unions that had negotiated hard to get more lavish coverage.
There is more common ground than you would know from watching the op-eds fly. Almost everyone to the left of John Boehner agrees, for example, that we are overdue for a raise in the minimum wage. The public overwhelmingly supports it. It won’t help those with no jobs at all, but the best evidence is that it won’t kill jobs either, and it does help inequality by boosting the incomes of the working poor. Even the free-market editorial writers at The Economist have begun to come around in favor of a higher minimum wage.
Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank that hosted Obama’s speech, has quarreled with the centrists at Third Way, but defines the basic problem — immobility and declining middle-class wages — in the same way. Her group has advocated Social Security reforms similar to Third Way’s — including the contentious COLA fix. Significantly, many centrist Democrats who used to side with the budget hawks have mostly conceded that the federal deficit is not a near-term problem for the economy.
Liberals from Elizabeth Warren to Third Way have one other thing in common: a Republican-controlled House that hews to a discredited gospel of gutting government, cutting taxes and letting the market sort it out. Barring a purge of Congress, most of the ideas put forth by the liberals, center-left or left-left, are going nowhere in the partisan sludge pit that is Washington. If you want to see good intentions turned into actual success stories, innovation pressed into service against inequality, you should turn your attention elsewhere — to cities. In the new year, I plan to do that.
No Movies to See
During the holiday season I always like to get out and see a movie. Alas, there is nothing worth seeing that I can see. How sad.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
The Dylan Library IV
"Blonde on Blonde" is possibly Dylan's greatest alburm. Once again I thrill to "Just Like a Woman" and "Visions of Johanna." It's hard to beat driving to Trussville to get a haircut listening to Bob Dylan.
Friday, December 20, 2013
Bill Bryson - One Summer
For sheer reading pleasure it's hard to beat this popular history of the summer of 1927. Bryson has written a number of books on various subjects. This one represents a great accomplishment of research and enjoyable writing.
Alot was going in the summer of 1927. Babe Ruth was on his way to 60 home runs, a baseball record that stood until 1961. Bill Tilden ruled the tennis world and Jack Dempsey and GeneTunney fought an epic and highly discussed boxing match at Soldier Field in Chicago before 150,000 people. Al Capone ruled Chicago before his abrupt downfall shortly thereafter. Prohibition was disrupting the country. The invention that lead to television came in 1927. The dog Rin Tin Tin goes back to the 20's. Who knew? President Coolidge spent most of the summer of '27 in South Dakota. Work began on Mount Rushmore. The racist Herbert Hoover became the odds on favorite for the Republican presidential nomination when Coolidge announced that he would not run in 1928. Then there was Charles Lindberg, the main subject of this book.
I have never quite undertood the popularity of Lindberg. After reading this book, I still don't understand. My conclusion is that you would had to have been there to understand.
So many interesting people race across the pages of this enthralling book. The Roaring Twenties certainly roar in this book.
Alot was going in the summer of 1927. Babe Ruth was on his way to 60 home runs, a baseball record that stood until 1961. Bill Tilden ruled the tennis world and Jack Dempsey and GeneTunney fought an epic and highly discussed boxing match at Soldier Field in Chicago before 150,000 people. Al Capone ruled Chicago before his abrupt downfall shortly thereafter. Prohibition was disrupting the country. The invention that lead to television came in 1927. The dog Rin Tin Tin goes back to the 20's. Who knew? President Coolidge spent most of the summer of '27 in South Dakota. Work began on Mount Rushmore. The racist Herbert Hoover became the odds on favorite for the Republican presidential nomination when Coolidge announced that he would not run in 1928. Then there was Charles Lindberg, the main subject of this book.
I have never quite undertood the popularity of Lindberg. After reading this book, I still don't understand. My conclusion is that you would had to have been there to understand.
So many interesting people race across the pages of this enthralling book. The Roaring Twenties certainly roar in this book.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
What Kind of Country Do We Want?
by Robert Reich
Robert Reich.Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; Author, Beyond Outrage
The Meaning of a Decent Society
It's the season to show concern for the less fortunate among us. We should also be concerned about the widening gap between the most fortunate and everyone else.
Although it's still possible to win the lottery (your chance of winning $636 million in the recent Mega Millions sweepstakes was one in 259 million), the biggest lottery of all is what family we're born into. Our life chances are now determined to an unprecedented degree by the wealth of our parents.
That's not always been the case. The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches -- with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone -- was once at the core of the American Dream.
And equal opportunity was the heart of the American creed. Although imperfectly achieved, that ideal eventually propelled us to overcome legalized segregation by race, and to guarantee civil rights. It fueled efforts to improve all our schools and widen access to higher education. It pushed the nation to help the unemployed, raise the minimum wage, and provide pathways to good jobs. Much of this was financed by taxes on the most fortunate.
But for more than three decades we've been going backwards. It's far more difficult today for a child from a poor family to become a middle-class or wealthy adult. Or even for a middle-class child to become wealthy.
The major reason is widening inequality. The longer the ladder, the harder the climb. America is now more unequal that it's been for eighty or more years, with the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of all developed nations. Equal opportunity has become a pipe dream.
Rather than respond with policies to reverse the trend and get us back on the road to equal opportunity and widely-shared prosperity, we've spent much of the last three decades doing the opposite.
Taxes have been cut on the rich, public schools have deteriorated, higher education has become unaffordable for many, safety nets have been shredded, and the minimum wage has been allowed to drop 30 percent below where it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.
Congress has just passed a tiny bipartisan budget agreement, and the Federal Reserve has decided to wean the economy off artificially low interest rates. Both decisions reflect Washington's (and Wall Street's) assumption that the economy is almost back on track.
But it's not at all back on the track it was on more than three decades ago.
It's certainly not on track for the record 4 million Americans now unemployed for more than six months, or for the unprecedented 20 million American children in poverty (we now have the highest rate of child poverty of all developed nations other than Romania), or for the third of all working Americans whose jobs are now part-time or temporary, or for the majority of Americans whose real wages continue to drop.
How can the economy be back on track when 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the richest 1 percent?
The underlying issue is a moral one: What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
Conservatives answer that question by saying it's a matter of personal choice -- of charitable works, philanthropy, and individual acts of kindness joined in "a thousand points of light."
But that leaves out what we could and should seek to accomplish together as a society. It neglects the organization of our economy, and its social consequences. It minimizes the potential role of democracy in determining the rules of the game, as well as the corruption of democracy by big money. It overlooks our strivings for social justice.
In short, it ducks the meaning of a decent society.
Last month Pope Francis wondered aloud whether "trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness," Rush Limbaugh accused the pope of being a Marxist for merely raising the issue.
But the question of how to bring about greater justice and inclusiveness is as American as apple pie. It has animated our efforts for more than a century -- during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and beyond -- to make capitalism work for the betterment of all rather merely than the enrichment of a few.
The supply-side, trickle-down, market-fundamentalist views that took root in America in the early 1980s got us fundamentally off track.
To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.
The Result of Alabama's Harsh Immigration Law
Connecting the Dots
How the Harshest Immigration Law in the US Ended in Disaster
December 19, 2013
by Joshua Holland
39MSNBC reporter Benjy Sarlin traveled down to Alabama to see the impact of the most punitive law against unauthorized immigrants in the US firsthand.
Diane Martell, 17, right, leans on her parents Maurcio and Guadalupe on the porch of their home in Bessemer, Ala. The Martells are illegal immigrants, as are most of the residents of this trailer park, and they live in fear of Alabama's harsh immigration laws. "We are human beings," Martell says. "We are not criminals, and we are not aliens and we cannot just stay silent." (AP Photo/Dave Martin, File)
When it was enacted, the Alabama law was supposed to be a model for what advocates of “enforcement-only” immigration policies call “self-deportation.” The idea is to make everyday life so difficult for the undocumented that they choose to leave of their own accord.
What Sarlin found was a disaster – a policy whose unintended consequences were far-reaching and extremely costly to the native-born as well as the immigrant population.
Sarlin writes:
“Illegal is illegal.” With that rallying cry, Alabama passed HB 56 in 2011, the harshest state immigration law in the country.
The lead sponsor of the bill boasted to state representatives that the law “attacks every aspect of an illegal alien’s life.” Among its key provisions: landlords were banned from renting homes to undocumented immigrants, schools had to check students’ legal status, and police were required to arrest suspected immigration violators. Even giving unauthorized immigrants a ride became a crime.
The vast scope of the law turned Alabama into an unprecedented test for the anti-immigration movement. If self-deportation didn’t work there, it’s hard to imagine where it could. Early reports suggested success: undocumented immigrants appeared to flee Alabama en masse. But two years later, HB 56 is in ruins. Its most far-reaching elements have proved unconstitutional, unworkable, or politically unsustainable. Elected officials, social workers, clergy, activists, and residents say an initial immigrant evacuation that roiled their communities ended long ago. Many who fled have returned to their old homes.
Now Alabama is back where it started, waiting for a solution from Washington that may never come.
Things started to go wrong just weeks after the law went into effect, when a German driver was detained after being pulled over in a routine traffic stop. Under the law, police were compelled to arrest the man, process him and hold him in jail until federal immigration officials could verify his legal status. But it turned out that the driver was an executive with Mercedes. As Sarlin notes, “The European car giant was one of several foreign auto companies in the state whose plants provide thousands of much-needed jobs.” Another incident with a Japanese Honda worker also made headlines.
That provision, which was central to the Alabama law, created major problems for law enforcement. Small towns with limited police forces simply didn’t have the resources to hold everyone they stopped who didn’t have proof of citizenship. Another provision of the law gave ordinary citizens standing to sue police departments they believed weren’t enforcing the law rigorously enough.
But those weren’t the only problems. Sarlin continues:
More unintended consequences emerged, this time from the religious community. Churches complained the law’s ban on providing aid to undocumented immigrants could criminalize everything from soup kitchens to Spanish-language Sunday services.
“They were going to change Bible school into border patrol,” Scott Douglas, executive director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, told MSNBC. “We had fewer Spanish-speaking congregants coming to our organization for help.”
At courthouses, simple tasks like renewing one’s vehicle tags now required proof of legal status, which generated long lines for citizens and non-citizens alike. Utilities were unsure whether they needed to cut off service to residents who couldn’t prove citizenship.
“People couldn’t get power or water, it was crazy,” Jeremy Love, an immigration attorney in Birmingham, recalled. “It got resolved, but it took pressure. I’d call managers and tell them it was a civil rights violation.”
County attorneys even questioned whether residents needed papers to use their public swimming pool – an uncomfortable prospect in a state still haunted by the legacy of segregation.
The law’s passage also led to a severe shortage in agricultural workers, as immigrants – both those who were authorized to work in the US and those who were not – fled Alabama in droves.
Just seven months after the law went into effect, lawmakers were busy watering down most of its key provisions. Or at least those provisions which hadn’t already been ruled unconstitutional by the courts. Sarlin writes, “Alabama settled its various lawsuits in October 2013 and coughed up $350,000 to cover their opponents’ legal bills.” (Under the Civil Rights Act, when judges rule that a government infringed on its citizens’ rights, they can order it to cover the costs of bringing the suit.)
Ultimately, most of those who left Alabama in response to the passage of HB 56 have returned. It cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars and took a toll on the state’s image, but did little to address the issue of unauthorized immigration in the final analysis.
Alabama’s experience isn’t unique. In 2006, the town of Riverside, NJ, passed a strict immigration ordinance that sent thousands of immigrants out in search of more accommodating communities. But a year later, The New York Times reported:
With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.
The town was also hit with serious legal bills defending against several lawsuits. According to the Times, “The legal battle forced the town to delay road paving projects, the purchase of a dump truck and repairs to town hall.” The law was repealed a little more than a year after it went into effect.
Hazelton, PA’s tough-on-immigrants ordinance was blocked before it went into effect, but the town still incurred over $2 million in legal fees.
And in Arizona, where the infamous SB 1070 was supposed to serve as a model for the theory of “self-deportation” – for the criminalization of the undocumented – lawmakers ended up having a very similar experience as their counterparts in Alabama. It caused fear among immigrant communities, resulted in serious economic harm, cost the state a fortune to defend and was ultimately gutted by the courts.
There are two primary reasons why these enforcement-only efforts continue to end in disaster. First, we live in a relatively free country and don’t accept being asked to show our papers during routine transactions with the government or being arrested for not having them with us. There are constitutional limits on law enforcement that make these laws impractical in the real world.
Second, they come with a high economic cost because immigrants don’t just add to the supply of labor — they also increase the demand for labor by consuming goods and services within the economy. They’re participants in their local economies.
Still Alienated
When I was growing up in the 60's and early 70's it was standard rhetoric to say that we were alienated. If you weren't alienated you were a dork. At least we thought so in our callow minds. We were rebelling against the values of our middle class existence. Far out, man. We would "rap" and we had it all figured out. Now in our 60's rather than growing up in the 60's we are alienated once again watching the shrinking middle class in this country. History plays its dirty tricks. Yes, I'm still alienated but in a different way. My callow mind is still functional. You can't touch me cruel world.
The Dylan Library III
"Blood on the Tracks" caused quite a sensation when it was released in late 1974. People said, "We've got Dylan back." He sounded once again like he did in the 60's It's great listening to this classic album once again in the privacy of my car. "A Simple Twist of Fate" is my favorite selection off this album.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Defining Dylan
Bookends
Bob Dylan: Musician or Poet? Published December 17, 2013
By Dana Stevens
Dylan’s songs are primal and modern, poetic and cinematic. Many consciously aspire to the condition of literature.
Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson
Dana Stevens
Like the handful of artists in whose company he belongs, Bob Dylan takes the notion of genre and cheerfully chucks it into the wood chipper. Is Shakespeare a poet or a dramatist — or, to descend into the smaller subcategories into which genre can never seem to stop fracturing, a comedian, a tragedian or a historian? Did Buster Keaton leave his mark primarily as an actor, a director, a stuntman or a clown? When Michael Jackson performed the moonwalk on television for the first time, did the crowd go into rapture because of his dancing, singing, songwriting or choreography?
Creative activity at a certain level renders genre categorization moot. Or rather, it pushes “genre” back toward its origin in an Indo-European root denoting procreation, “engendering” in the most literal sense. Dylan’s songs at their best seem to originate from some primal foundry of creation, a Devil’s crossroads where Delta blues, British folk ballads, French Symbolism and Beat poetry (to name only a few of his early influences) converge and fuse.
But his music reaches forward in time, toward more modern art forms, as well. There’s something distinctly cinematic, for example, in the crosscutting and temporal leaps of a narrative ballad like “Tangled Up in Blue,” which compresses a feature film’s worth of images, locations and encounters into four and a half minutes of bravura storytelling. If it’s a kind of sung movie, “Tangled Up in Blue” is one that, like so many Dylan compositions, consciously aspires to the condition of literature. In one verse, an erudite topless-bar waitress hands the first-person narrator — or in some versions of the song, a third-person stand-in — a life-changing volume of verse by “an Italian poet / From the 13th century.”
“I wasn’t yet the poet musician that I would become,” Dylan writes of his early folk-singing days in his memoir “Chronicles: Volume 1” (a vivid, surprisingly chatty book that nonetheless manages to disclose almost nothing about its strategically elliptical author, and that points to yet another potential career path: Dylan as prose writer). But elsewhere he has repudiated both those roles, most famously in a 1965 press conference in which — asked the same question that appears above this column — he laughed and replied, “Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know.”
That modesty, false or not, hasn’t kept us from trying to understand for the past five decades just what, exactly, Bob Dylan is, or from throwing ever-heavier symbolic mantles over his bony shoulders: prophet, shaman, enigma, bard. The more he evades definition, the more grandiose the titles we devise, all the while romanticizing his ability to keep us at a permanent distance. His very undecidability as a cultural figure — the sense that we, and he, haven’t quite grasped what he’s up to — is a mark of how much Dylan has given us as a — well, as whatever kind of artist he is. It’s too early to perceive the full scope of his contribution, and he’s not done changing yet.
The title of his fourth album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” seems funny 50 years and countless recordings later: How could we have known then that the man would turn out to have more sides than a mirrored disco ball? But it’s Dylan’s vision of his role as primarily that of an entertainer, a “song and dance man,” that perhaps drives the nonstop touring that’s dominated his life for the past two and a half decades. (Since 1988, he’s averaged more than 100 shows a year, with the longest stretch off the road only three consecutive months during a health scare in 1997.) For at least a decade, Dylan’s stage manager has introduced nearly every show with a florid, possibly ironic short speech identifying the singer as “the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The voice of the promise of ‘60s counterculture.” Then the poet comes out and does his song and dance.
Dana Stevens is the film critic at Slate and a co-host of the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast. She has also written for The Atlantic and Bookforum, among other publications.
◆ ◆ ◆
By Francine Prose
Dylan is the unlikely offspring of Rimbaud and Whitman. But he’s neither Rimbaud nor Whitman.
Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson
Francine Prose
If I had to choose my favorite Bob Dylan song, it would probably be “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” That’s the one that begins, “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez / And it’s Eastertime too.” It conjures up a “Touch of Evil,” Roberto Bolaño sort of situation, with a dark tourist urban legend embedded in one verse: “Sweet Melinda / The peasants call her the goddess of gloom / She speaks good English / And she invites you up into her room / And you’re so kind / And careful not to go to her too soon / And she takes your voice / And leaves you howling at the moon.”
I don’t know why I love the tune so much. Possibly because I’ve traveled to places that, in retrospect, I feel lucky to have gotten out of alive. But the song is more than a cautionary ballad about a corrupt, social-disease-ridden border town. It describes a state of mind. I never once taught at a summer writers’ conference without becoming obsessed with a line from that song, about someone named Angel, just arrived from the coast, “Who looked so fine at first / But left looking just like a ghost.” I’d hear it the way Dylan sang it, with a full stop after each word: Just. Like. A. Ghost! And then I’d look at my pale face in the mirror.
I started listening to Dylan when I was in high school, when he was a folk singer and not yet famous. It was fine with me when he “went electric.” I’d advise anyone who wants to see the gifted, angry kid with whom my generation fell in love to watch “Don’t Look Back,” D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film about Dylan’s 1965 British tour.
I’ve always been partial to “Blood on the Tracks,” from 1975: to “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Shelter From the Storm” and especially “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” — so much compressed narrative, such a profusion of catchy rhymes. Dylan has written many of our most beautiful love songs. And for the ironist there’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” a rocker’s take on an E. M. Forster or Edith Wharton novel, with that funny line, “Got to hurry on back to my hotel room / Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece.” Once a friend told me that “I’ll Keep It With Mine” is a spiritual song, a sort of hymn. At the time I thought he was being pretentious, but now I’m inclined to agree.
The Dylan songs I keep returning to are the ones that spin out images like a surrealist or expressionist film, like Buñuel’s “Andalusian Dog” crossed with “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones? “Visions of Johanna” may be our most accurate, haunting evocation of the semi-hallucinatory insomnia that can be an unfortunate side effect of love. Perhaps I have a weakness for songs about the apocalypse (another favorite is Exuma’s “22nd Century,” performed by Nina Simone), but I’ve always admired “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” Dylan’s images cascading in the cadence of a children’s rhyming game: a partridge in a pear tree in a post-nuclear hell. Dylan is a master not only at translating rage into song (“Positively 4th Street” and “Idiot Wind” come to mind), but also at convincing us we’ve felt exactly the same kind of anger he’s describing.
He’s the heir, the unlikely offspring of Arthur Rimbaud and Walt Whitman. But he’s neither Rimbaud nor Whitman. He’s Bob Dylan. Is he a poet or a songwriter? The same answer applies: He’s Bob Dylan. I find myself falling back (again!) on Emily Dickinson’s remark: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Dylan’s songs can make us feel that pleasurable shock of being partially decapitated by beauty.
Bob Dylan: Musician or Poet? Published December 17, 2013
By Dana Stevens
Dylan’s songs are primal and modern, poetic and cinematic. Many consciously aspire to the condition of literature.
Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson
Dana Stevens
Like the handful of artists in whose company he belongs, Bob Dylan takes the notion of genre and cheerfully chucks it into the wood chipper. Is Shakespeare a poet or a dramatist — or, to descend into the smaller subcategories into which genre can never seem to stop fracturing, a comedian, a tragedian or a historian? Did Buster Keaton leave his mark primarily as an actor, a director, a stuntman or a clown? When Michael Jackson performed the moonwalk on television for the first time, did the crowd go into rapture because of his dancing, singing, songwriting or choreography?
Creative activity at a certain level renders genre categorization moot. Or rather, it pushes “genre” back toward its origin in an Indo-European root denoting procreation, “engendering” in the most literal sense. Dylan’s songs at their best seem to originate from some primal foundry of creation, a Devil’s crossroads where Delta blues, British folk ballads, French Symbolism and Beat poetry (to name only a few of his early influences) converge and fuse.
But his music reaches forward in time, toward more modern art forms, as well. There’s something distinctly cinematic, for example, in the crosscutting and temporal leaps of a narrative ballad like “Tangled Up in Blue,” which compresses a feature film’s worth of images, locations and encounters into four and a half minutes of bravura storytelling. If it’s a kind of sung movie, “Tangled Up in Blue” is one that, like so many Dylan compositions, consciously aspires to the condition of literature. In one verse, an erudite topless-bar waitress hands the first-person narrator — or in some versions of the song, a third-person stand-in — a life-changing volume of verse by “an Italian poet / From the 13th century.”
“I wasn’t yet the poet musician that I would become,” Dylan writes of his early folk-singing days in his memoir “Chronicles: Volume 1” (a vivid, surprisingly chatty book that nonetheless manages to disclose almost nothing about its strategically elliptical author, and that points to yet another potential career path: Dylan as prose writer). But elsewhere he has repudiated both those roles, most famously in a 1965 press conference in which — asked the same question that appears above this column — he laughed and replied, “Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know.”
That modesty, false or not, hasn’t kept us from trying to understand for the past five decades just what, exactly, Bob Dylan is, or from throwing ever-heavier symbolic mantles over his bony shoulders: prophet, shaman, enigma, bard. The more he evades definition, the more grandiose the titles we devise, all the while romanticizing his ability to keep us at a permanent distance. His very undecidability as a cultural figure — the sense that we, and he, haven’t quite grasped what he’s up to — is a mark of how much Dylan has given us as a — well, as whatever kind of artist he is. It’s too early to perceive the full scope of his contribution, and he’s not done changing yet.
The title of his fourth album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” seems funny 50 years and countless recordings later: How could we have known then that the man would turn out to have more sides than a mirrored disco ball? But it’s Dylan’s vision of his role as primarily that of an entertainer, a “song and dance man,” that perhaps drives the nonstop touring that’s dominated his life for the past two and a half decades. (Since 1988, he’s averaged more than 100 shows a year, with the longest stretch off the road only three consecutive months during a health scare in 1997.) For at least a decade, Dylan’s stage manager has introduced nearly every show with a florid, possibly ironic short speech identifying the singer as “the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The voice of the promise of ‘60s counterculture.” Then the poet comes out and does his song and dance.
Dana Stevens is the film critic at Slate and a co-host of the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast. She has also written for The Atlantic and Bookforum, among other publications.
◆ ◆ ◆
By Francine Prose
Dylan is the unlikely offspring of Rimbaud and Whitman. But he’s neither Rimbaud nor Whitman.
Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson
Francine Prose
If I had to choose my favorite Bob Dylan song, it would probably be “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” That’s the one that begins, “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez / And it’s Eastertime too.” It conjures up a “Touch of Evil,” Roberto Bolaño sort of situation, with a dark tourist urban legend embedded in one verse: “Sweet Melinda / The peasants call her the goddess of gloom / She speaks good English / And she invites you up into her room / And you’re so kind / And careful not to go to her too soon / And she takes your voice / And leaves you howling at the moon.”
I don’t know why I love the tune so much. Possibly because I’ve traveled to places that, in retrospect, I feel lucky to have gotten out of alive. But the song is more than a cautionary ballad about a corrupt, social-disease-ridden border town. It describes a state of mind. I never once taught at a summer writers’ conference without becoming obsessed with a line from that song, about someone named Angel, just arrived from the coast, “Who looked so fine at first / But left looking just like a ghost.” I’d hear it the way Dylan sang it, with a full stop after each word: Just. Like. A. Ghost! And then I’d look at my pale face in the mirror.
I started listening to Dylan when I was in high school, when he was a folk singer and not yet famous. It was fine with me when he “went electric.” I’d advise anyone who wants to see the gifted, angry kid with whom my generation fell in love to watch “Don’t Look Back,” D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film about Dylan’s 1965 British tour.
I’ve always been partial to “Blood on the Tracks,” from 1975: to “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Shelter From the Storm” and especially “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” — so much compressed narrative, such a profusion of catchy rhymes. Dylan has written many of our most beautiful love songs. And for the ironist there’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” a rocker’s take on an E. M. Forster or Edith Wharton novel, with that funny line, “Got to hurry on back to my hotel room / Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece.” Once a friend told me that “I’ll Keep It With Mine” is a spiritual song, a sort of hymn. At the time I thought he was being pretentious, but now I’m inclined to agree.
The Dylan songs I keep returning to are the ones that spin out images like a surrealist or expressionist film, like Buñuel’s “Andalusian Dog” crossed with “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones? “Visions of Johanna” may be our most accurate, haunting evocation of the semi-hallucinatory insomnia that can be an unfortunate side effect of love. Perhaps I have a weakness for songs about the apocalypse (another favorite is Exuma’s “22nd Century,” performed by Nina Simone), but I’ve always admired “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” Dylan’s images cascading in the cadence of a children’s rhyming game: a partridge in a pear tree in a post-nuclear hell. Dylan is a master not only at translating rage into song (“Positively 4th Street” and “Idiot Wind” come to mind), but also at convincing us we’ve felt exactly the same kind of anger he’s describing.
He’s the heir, the unlikely offspring of Arthur Rimbaud and Walt Whitman. But he’s neither Rimbaud nor Whitman. He’s Bob Dylan. Is he a poet or a songwriter? The same answer applies: He’s Bob Dylan. I find myself falling back (again!) on Emily Dickinson’s remark: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Dylan’s songs can make us feel that pleasurable shock of being partially decapitated by beauty.
The Dylan Library II
So far I've listened to the first one, John Wesley Harding, and Self-Portrait. I am amazed at how good Dylan sounds coming from 1961. It's good to hear his song tribute to Woody Gurthrie, and the first song on the disc, You're No Good, are especially great. The talking New York song is still entertaining and funny. JWH sounds so good from 1968. I had forgotten that "All Along the Watchtower" is from this album. The Self-Portrait album did not receive great critical acclaim, but I remember it from the summer of 1970. The Dylan voice sounds strong from so long ago.
Monday, December 16, 2013
The Dylan Library
Thanks to Freddy's generous and fantastic Christmas present I am enjoying the Dylan library with the complete 47 disc collection. I will be updating as I go along.
Sunday, December 15, 2013
The Myth of Race
“Dreadful Deceit”: Race is a myth
A historian argues that one of the defining elements of American culture is merely a "social fiction"
by Laura Miller
Jacqueline Jones’ provocative new history, “Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama’s America,” contains a startling sentence on its 265th page. It comes after Jones quotes Simon Owens, the last of five African-Americans whose life stories she describes in the book. Owens — an auto worker, labor activist and writer who died in 1983 — stated, “I understood as a Negro first, in the South, the North, in the union, in the NAACP, in the C.P. [Communist Party] and in the S.W.P [Socialist Workers Party].” Jones adds, “Because generations of white people had defined him and all other blacks first and foremost as ‘Negroes,’ he had no alternative but to acknowledge — or, rather, react to — that spurious identity.”
That racial identities are “spurious” is the foundational argument of this fascinating book. Race is a cultural invention, rather than a biological fact (on this scientists widely agree), and Jones, a history professor at the University of Texas and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, wants to show how pernicious and persistent this falsity is. In the book’s epilogue, she points to an article from the 2012 edition of the New York Times titled “How Well You Sleep May Hinge on Race,” based on a study showing that living in high-crime neighborhood or having chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension can cause insomnia. But, as Jones observes, these are problems deriving from poverty, not race, and so the article “blatantly conflated socioeconomic status with the idea of race.”
Of the five people whose life stories are told in “Dreadful Deceit,” the first is essentially voiceless: an enslaved man named Antonio, abducted from his homeland in Africa and murdered while being “corrected” by a colonial landowner in 17th-century Chesapeake. As Jones relates, Antonio’s race “had no practical meaning” to the man who purported to own him, Symon Overzee. Describing in well-researched detail the economic and political milieu of the time, she argues that what created Antonio’s vulnerability to Overzee was not his skin color or any other physical trait but his uprootedness, “without a tribe or a nation-state to protect and defend him in the Atlantic world.”
In the revolutionary era, Jones singles out Boston King, born into bondage but able to escape the many designs on his freedom laid by opportunistic American and British whites during and after the revolution. He emigrated to Nova Scotia and ultimately to Sierre Leone. King was part of a group of black men and women who supported the Crown during the Revolutionary War in exchange for their liberty, although holding onto it could be tricky. But Jones is perhaps most interested in conveying the rationales that the wealthy South Carolinians of King’s day offered for holding onto their slaves. They “felt no need to justify human bondage by invoking race-based differences; they framed the issue of slavery as a matter of their own self-interest, one they could defend by force without bothering to explain themselves.”
It was only when whites felt real pressure to repudiate slavery on moral grounds that they began to concoct theories about how the “nature” of blacks rendered them suitable only for menial labor under the total control of white elites. Sometimes the challenge came from within, as was the case with Thomas Jefferson, whose desire to maintain his luxurious lifestyle forced him to reconcile “Enlightenment theories of liberty with self-interested theories of the limits of liberty.” Most propaganda about “race,” however (Jones frequently puts the word between quotation marks to emphasize its artificiality), came from the slave-owning classes trying to fend off abolitionists. The consistent refrain in “Dreadful Deceit” is just this: that the very idea of distinct races is a fabrication designed to provide the rich and powerful with a cheap, docile labor force.
None of the life stories in the book supports this argument more forcefully than that of Richard W. White, a Civil War veteran elected to the office of clerk of the Chatham County Superior Court in Georgia. One of his opponents in the election filed suit against White, charging that he was ineligible to hold office in Georgia because he was “colored.” White, who was relatively new in town and “from unknown parts and of unknown lineage,” appeared to be “white.” The evidence marshaled to prove that White was not white consisted, as the judge freely admitted, of “the reputation of the person in his community, that is what he says of himself — what others say of him — his associates and his general reputation.” In other words, Jones underlines, a man’s race in this community “would be a matter not of ethnicity or heritage or appearance or biology. It would be, purely and simply, a social fiction — one without any appreciable basis in physical reality.”
The other individuals Jones profiles include a woman who managed to amass enough real estate in antebellum Providence, R.I., to become the the town’s wealthiest black woman and William H. Holtzclaw, who founded a school, modeled after Booker T. Washington’s Tuskeegee University, in rural Mississippi in 1908. At times, her thesis gets lost in the particulars of their stories, but this isn’t a flaw. The strength of “Dreadful Deceit” lies in its wealth of detail and the precise picture it offers of specific places and times, towns where white workers embraced the ideology of race because it gave them an edge or, conversely, white shopkeepers turned out to be perfectly willing to countenance a black school in their area if good money could be made from doing business with it.
Jones’ central argument on the fictitious nature of “race” proves slippery, in no small part because many of the people she writes about don’t seem to have examined their own beliefs very closely. Many of them, for example, lacked a concept of the “scientific” and therefore couldn’t have made scientific claims about race even if they were so inclined. She clearly admires Owens for his belief that the shared interests of the working class and poor ought not to be divided by the fiction of race. (Owens rejected black separatists and nationalists as well as labor unions that failed to challenge their white members’ racism.) According to Jones, he thought of race as “simply a smokescreen — one that clouded the efforts of all people to secure justice and equality for themselves and their fellow sufferers.”
Jones is right, of course, that too much investment in racial division does disempower groups who need all the power they can get. Yet human beings amount to more than just their economic and political interests, and often a person’s cultural identification is what feels closest to his or her heart. At the same time, cultural divisions can be as bitter as racial ones.
Jones doesn’t address the rise of culture-based identity politics over the past several decades — a large gap in her account — but some critique is implied in her embrace of Owens’ idea that class identification should take precedence. Race may be a biological myth, but it has become a cultural reality, and it’s hard to regard the glories of African-American culture as merely the side effects of deplorable smokescreen. I doubt Jones would argue that they are, but just at the point where you expect her to tackle this knotty issue, “Dreadful Deceit” ends. Fortunately, the reader is left with the stories Jones has told, and they are more than enough.
Strategy
‘Strategy: A History’ by Lawrence Freedman
My strategy for this book was to read 150 pages a day over four days. On the fifth day I’d draft the review, on the sixth I’d polish it, and on the seventh I’d rest. The first day went perfectly to plan. Then the cat got sick, and a morning disappeared. Then my son needed help with an essay — an afternoon gone. Obstacle piled on obstacle. I eventually needed seven days just for reading. There’s a lesson here.
That lesson runs like a river through “Strategy.” Lawrence Freedman, once a foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair, is Britain’s foremost strategic analyst. His books manage to delight the experts yet are still comprehensible to the general reader, a rare skill in this genre. On this occasion, he has produced what is arguably the best book ever written on strategy (in its widest sense), but the overriding theme after more than 600 densely packed pages of text is virtually the same as what Robert Burns said in a few words:
.But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane [you aren’t alone]
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley [often go awry],
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promised joy.
Strategies promise joy but seldom deliver. The plans we make are attempts to impose order on our world, but the most careful arrangements often run aground on the shoals of circumstance. As Mike Tyson once philosophized, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”
The inclination to strategize is hardwired into our genes. Freedman begins this fascinating study by showing how chimpanzees form quite complex plans, whether finding food, defending themselves or ensuring group harmony. Violence is common but seldom indiscriminate; chimps apply their cost-benefit analysis when using force. As with Burns’s mousie, however, capricious chance can render naught the best-laid schemes of Mr. Chimp.
After looking at apes, the author moves to the human tendency to strategize. He deconstructs familiar stories (David and Goliath, the Trojan horse, etc.) to tease out their underlying strategies. His analysis of the 10 plagues in Exodus is a thing of beauty — perceptive, articulate, sophisticated but wonderfully clear. Each plague, he shows, constituted a gradual turning of the screw in a program of strategic coercion. That reminded me of Lyndon Johnson’s limited-war strategy in Vietnam, except that God succeeded and Johnson failed.
Strategy, Raymond Aron once argued, “draws its inspiration each century, or rather at each moment of history, from the problems which events themselves pose.” In other words, human beings adapt. But adaptation is usually reactive; strategy responds to the past more than it anticipates the future. Or, as the old adage goes: Commanders prepare for the last war. As a result, they find themselves struggling to keep up with change. A brilliant few have been able to guess correctly what lies ahead, but even a genius depends on luck. And, as Napoleon found in Russia, good luck can suddenly turn into bad.
“Actuality in the end proves unmanageable,” Thucydides observed. “It breaks in upon men’s conceptions, changes them, and finally destroys them.” Try as we might, we cannot make the world bend to our will. That is what commanders discovered in 1915. Before World War I, generals on both sides assumed that Napoleon had written the gospel on war in the age of nationalism. “Nobody,” Freedman admits, “could think of better ways of using great armies to win great wars.” Napoleon, however, did not have to contend with machine guns.
Nineteenth-century technological progress obliterated Napoleonic notions of mobile war, forcing men into trenches. Yet it is difficult to unlearn a gospel. Commanders in World War I are often condemned for fighting an unimaginative war of attrition, when in fact they should be criticized for trying to turn the war into something else — something Napoleonic.
Carl von Clausewitz famously remarked: “Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. . . . Countless minor incidents — the kind you can never really foresee — combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.” Strategies often depend upon a cooperative enemy; failure can result when the adversary refuses to act as predicted. Thus, in Vietnam, the United States followed a logical strategy but faced an enemy wedded to a different logic. Ditto in Iraq.
“Strategy” is a book about war but also much more than that. Less than half of it is devoted to military history. A later section deals with politics, looking at the plans made by those with power and by those who seek it. Here, the same limitations apply; the best-laid plans are foiled by the unpredictable and the accidental. Freedman ends by looking at how the obsession with strategy has infiltrated everyday life. We are all strategists now. Starbucks has a strategy for selling coffee, McDonalds for selling burgers and my sister for losing weight. CEOs see themselves as commanders of commerce; they even read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” But where does all this planning lead? Freedman concludes that “the hype that accompanied the promotion of successive strategic fashions exaggerated the importance of the enlightened manager and played down the importance of chance and circumstances in explaining success.”
All this strategizing is, in truth, an attempt to impose individual will upon a recalcitrant world. When armies fail, strategists are blamed. When a product goes unsold, the marketing strategist is fired. We conclude from failure that, if only a Napoleon had been in charge, success would have been assured. In this way, we convince ourselves that we are, in fact, architects of our own fate. That is much more palatable than having to admit that we might be mere flotsam in a turbulent sea of circumstance. We pretend that we are big and powerful, when in fact we are small and weak. Strategy is often simply a charade — ersatz order imposed upon a stubbornly disordered world.
Gerard DeGroot is a professor of history at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His “Back in Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War” will be published in early 2014.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
On Republican Health Care Talk
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December 14, 2013, 11:19 am 14 Comments
The Neo-paleo-Keynesian Counter-counter-counterrevolution (Wonkish)
OK, I can’t resist this one — and I think it’s actually important.
Brad DeLong reacts to Binyamin Appelbaum’s piece on Young Frankenstein Stan Fischer by quoting from his own 2000 piece on New Keynesian ideas in macroeconomics, a piece in which he argued that New Keynesian thought was, in important respects, a descendant of old-fashioned monetarism. There’s a lot to that view.
But I’m surprised that Brad stopped there, for two reasons. One is that it’s worth remembering that Fischer staked out that position at a time when freshwater macro was turning sharply to the right, abandoning all that was pragmatic in Milton Friedman’s ideas. The other is that the world of macroeconomics now looks quite different from the world in 2000.
Specifically, when Brad lists five key propositions of New Keynesian macro and declares that prominent Keynesians in the 60s and early 70s by and large didn’t agree with these propositions, he should now note that prominent Keynesians — by which I mean people like Oliver Blanchard, Larry Summers, and Janet Yellen — in late 2013 don’t agree with these propositions either. In important ways our understanding of macro has altered in ways that amount to a counter-counter-counterrevolution (I think I have the right number of counters), giving new legitimacy to what we might call Paleo-Keynesian concerns.
Or to put it another way, James Tobin is looking pretty good right now. (Incidentally, this was the point made by Bloomberg almost five years ago, inducing John Cochrane to demonstrate his ignorance of what had been going on macroeconomics outside his circle.)
Consider Brad’s five points:
1. Price stickiness causes business cycle fluctuations: You clearly need price stickiness to make sense of the data. However, there is now widespread acceptance of the point that making prices more flexible can actually worsen a slump, a favorite point of Tobin’s.
2. Monetary policy > fiscal policy: Not when you face the zero lower bound — and that’s no longer an abstract or remote consideration, it’s the world we’ve been living in for five years. And Tobin, who defended the relevance of fiscal policy, is vindicated.
3. Business cycles are fluctuations around a trend, not declines below some level of potential output: This view comes out of the natural rate hypothesis, and the notion of a vertical long-run Phillips curve. At this point, however, there is wide acceptance of the idea that for a variety of reasons, but especially downward nominal wage rigidity, the Phillips curve is not vertical at low inflation. Again, a very Tobinesque notion, as Daly and Hobijn explain.
4. Policy rules: Not so easy when once in a while you face Great Depression-sized shocks.
5. “Low multipliers associated with fiscal policy”: Ahem. Not when you’re in a liquidity trap.
I do think this is important. Among economists who are actually looking at recent events, not doing a see-no-Keynes, hear-no-Keynes, speak-no-Keynes act, there has been a strong revival of some old ideas in macroeconomics. It’s not just new classical macroeconomics that’s in retreat; we’re also seeing, within the Keynesian camp, a distinct if polite rise of neopaleo-Keynesianism.
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December 14, 2013, 10:38 am 46 Comments
Inequality and Incomes, Continued
Some further numerical thoughts on the right of inequality to be considered a “defining challenge.”
Many of the participants in our economic discourse start with the working presumption that inequality is a second-order issue, that the effects of rising inequality — to the extent that these effects are considered worth mentioning at all — are minor compared with the effects of economic growth or the lack thereof. This presumption is so ingrained in the discourse that hardly anyone looks at the numbers. But when you do look at those numbers, you get a shock.
In my previous post I looked at income changes since 2000, and argued that for the bottom 90 percent rising inequality has actually cost more than the economic slump. Obviously that calculation depends on the starting date — and you might also wonder whether the period since 2000 is exceptional.
But look, first, at the long-term trend in inequality. Piketty-Saez have the income share of the bottom 90 percent falling from two-thirds in 1979 to one-half now; that’s roughly 0.9 percent lopped off their income growth per year, for more than three decades. CBO’s numbers aren’t exactly comparable, but they show the income share of the bottom 80 percent declining from 57 to 47 percent over 1979-2007, which means income growth 0.7 percentage point per year slower than in the constant-inequality case.
Those are big numbers. They’re big enough that even if we restrict ourselves to the period 2007-13 — that is, to the Great Recession and the Not-So-Great Recovery — they suggest that the decline in middle-class incomes owes as much to rising inequality as it does to the depressed state of the economy. And this is true even though we’ve suffered the worst economic crisis since the 1930s!
You might be tempted to say that the depressed economy still deserves priority, because recovery is in everyone’s interests, so we should be able to achieve consensus on good short-run macro policies even as we debate inequality. That is, you might be tempted to say this if you’ve been living in a cave these past five years. In practice, debates over macroeconomic policy are just as polarized as debates over inequality — and along pretty much the same lines. That is, the same people who screech “Class warfare!” if you bring up the rising share of the 1 percent also shriek “Greece! Zimbabwe!” if you advocate expansionary fiscal and monetary policies.
So once again, the focus on inequality isn’t a diversion. It’s the right way to move this discussion.
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December 14, 2013, 8:48 am 18 Comments
TPP and IP, A Brief Note
Dean Baker takes me to task over the Trans Pacific trade deal, arguing that it’s not really about trade — that the important (and harmful) stuff involves regulation and intellectual property rights.
I’m sympathetic to this argument; this was true, for example, of DR-CAFTA, the free trade agreement with Central America, which ended up being largely about pharma patents. Is TPP equally bad? I’ll do some homework and get back to you.
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December 14, 2013, 8:36 am 83 Comments
Inequality As A Defining Challenge
It has taken an amazingly long time, but inequality is finally surfacing as a significant unifying issue for progressives — including the president. And there is, inevitably, a backlash, or actually a couple of backlashes.
Read more…
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December 13, 2013, 7:55 pm 17 Comments
Friday Night Music: 2000 Miles
Tis the season for bah humbug — the Christmas muzak is almost unavoidable. And I suppose I should be presenting an antidote. Instead, though, I find myself hearing Chrissie Hynde in my head, which is OK:
By the way, for those who missed it, the finale to last weekend’s Lucius concert:
And while it’s not on their album, they did play “Genevieve” — awesomely. I wish I had a video of that!
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December 13, 2013, 10:36 am 185 Comments
A Health Care Mystery Explained
Ezra Klein is puzzled (or at least says he is; I suspect he understands it perfectly) by Republican hypocrisy on health care. For many years the GOP has advocated things that are supposed to bring the magic of the marketplace and individual incentives to health care: higher deductibles to give people “skin in the game”, competition among private insurers via exchanges — competition that would include reducing costs by limiting networks — and, of course, for cuts in Medicare. Now the GOP complains bitterly that some Obamacare policies have high deductibles, that it relies on the horror of exchanges, that some networks are limited, and that there are cuts in Medicare.
Klein suggests that Republicans are really upset by other aspects of Obamacare, but are going after the easy targets even though they’re attacking their own ideas. In a sense he’s right, but as I said, I suspect that he knows that the issue is both bigger and simpler than he says.
What underlies what Jonathan Chait calls the Heritage uncertainty principle? He describes it thus:
Conservative health-care-policy ideas reside in an uncertain state of quasi-existence. You can describe the policies in the abstract, sometimes even in detail, but any attempt to reproduce them in physical form will cause such proposals to disappear instantly. It’s not so much an issue of “hypocrisy,” as Klein frames it, as a deeper metaphysical question of whether conservative health-care policies actually exist.
The question should be posed to better-trained philosophical minds than my own. I would posit that conservative health-care policies do not exist in any real form. Call it the “Heritage Uncertainty Principle.”
Well, actually it’s pretty simple. The purpose of most health care reform is to help the unfortunate — people with pre-existing conditions, people who don’t get insurance through their jobs, people who just don’t earn enough to afford insurance. Cost control is also part of the picture, but not the dominant part. And what we’re seeing right now, in any case, seems to confirm a point some of us have been making for a long time: controlling costs and expanding access are complementary targets, because you can’t sell things like cost-saving measures for Medicaid and limits on deductibility of premiums unless they’re part of a larger scheme to make the system fairer and more comprehensive.
And here’s the thing: Republicans don’t want to help the unfortunate. They’ll propound health-care ideas that will, they claim, help those with preexisting conditions and so on — but those aren’t really proposals, they’re diversionary tactics designed to stall real health reform. Chait finds Newt Gingrich more or less explicitly admitting this.
Hence the rage of the right. Here they were, with a whole raft of ideas they could throw out, like chaff thrown out to confuse enemy radar, to divert and confuse any attempt to actually provide insurance to the uninsured. And those dastardly Democrats have gone ahead and actually incorporated those ideas into real reform.
Once you realize this, you also realize that people who warn that by opposing Obamacare Republicans are undermining their own proposals are missing the point. Yes, the Ryan plan to privatize Medicare looks a lot like Obamacare — but Ryan comes to Medicare not to save it, but to bury it, so the question of whether his plan could work is irrelevant.
There’s no mystery here; it’s just top-down class warfare as usual.
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