Heather MacDonald argues that it wasn't, and I find her pretty convincing. My first inclination when I heard the bare facts of the case was that it sounded like an instance of police brutality, but now that we have a fuller picture of the incident I'm not so sure of that.
While his comments about Obama do border on racism ("clean and articulate"?), this kind of unbelievably blunt talk from a presidential candidate will make the debates that much better.
Yes, I agree, income inequality has indeed reached some gross proportions.
But at the same time, there are far better policy options than the tried-and-true axioms that you hear repeated almost endlessly on these blogs - fair trade, universal health care, college affordability.
(Originally, I pointed to Kwhite's latest post as an example of "pushing this orthodoxy", a reading which Kwhite disputes. Fair enough.)
I'll attempt to address the main points of each, and at the same time offer up some serious counter-solutions of my own.
So-called "fair trade", as a full system rather than an ad-hoc basis whereby a few farmers benefit when college kids want to feel good about themselves, too often ends up being simply far less trade, exacerbating and extending third world poverty. Low wages are not, in and of themselves, a form of exploitation.
As for universal health care - noble goal, but that depends completely how it's done. Specifically, if people have no incentive not to consume health care based on whether they really need it or not (i.e. preventative or not), it becomes financially unsustainable very quickly. Systems like France's benefit from elective procedures simply not being as popular over there -- and at the same time, I'd hardly call their system "sustainable".
A better approach is to aim for universal health insurance coverage - using market-based mechanisms to improve access while maintaining the system's efficiency.
Lastly, we have got to rein in consumer financing somehow. Middle-class America is getting itself into debt beyond all reason, with the savings rate actually going negative. People are just buying an unbelievable amount of crap they don't need these days -- everything from IPods to leased SUVs -- and not saving like they should.
That's one of the biggest stories I haven't seen the progressive community touch very much - the middle-class' shift away from personal fiscal responsibility over the past two decades or so.
The stock market rising should be benefiting the middle class. The reasons it isn't as much are largely due to people making stupid choices.
The return of the average investor is only comparable to a T-bill, significantly less than you'd get from just taking some safe mutual funds.
Why is that?
Because people suck at picking stocks. 98% of the people who pick their own stocks shouldn't be.
It's really no different than playing poker, but we stigmatize gambling in this country and then turn around and pretend that everyone picking stocks for themselves is being "responsible".
Most people who claim to know what they're doing in the stock market are little more than gamblers, and their returns, honestly accounted for, reflect that. We need to be getting more people into mutual funds.
As for college affordability: If we're really serious about increasing class mobility, why are we not talking about expanding the EITC and scholarships targeted at especially useful majors for low-income kids?
I'm all for making college more affordable, assuming it's truly an investment in kids from underprivileged backgrounds and their future. Let the kids from the ranks of the idle rich take the gender studies major or become the world's leading expert on Chaucer, I want Mr. First-In-My-Family-To-Go-To-College to outdo and outclass them, focusing on hard math and science, high-demand language skills, etcetera.
The proof is in the pudding. The group at the top of America's socio-economic ladder isn't whites -- it's Asian Americans, who have a higher average household income and lower out-of-wedlock birthrates. Disproportionately, Asian American parents tend to steer their kids towards "non-fluff" majors. This occasionally results in some very unhappy kids, but it works. Jewish Americans have (at least historically) done the same. For many of us, the whole "doctor or a lawyer" thing was just a running gag at synagogue, but enough parents genuinely think that way that it shifts the averages.
We should also seriously be incentivize trade schools. The simple fact is, a lot of people go to college not because it's best for them, but because we lionize it in our culture and pretend it's the gateway ticket to All Good Things.
The reality is somewhat different - in a global economy, a skilled tradesman may end up doing better financially, not to mention the benefits of being good with your hands and the stability of never having to worry about being outsourced.
To give you an example: I know a guy who's really, really bright. He aspired to a middle class standard of living, but rather than simply going with the herd, he cracked out a calculator and started to punch numbers.
At the end of the day, he took the path which makes the most financial sense -- he graduated early with his GED and started working at the post office at age 17.
The post office is not a hard job, you meet interesting people from time to time, and the benefits (as from most government jobs) are quite competitive. It's almost impossible to be fired and there's a fairly set schedule for when you get promoted.
Whenever anyone from some mid-rank college with a liberal arts degree questions his lack of a degree, he simply whips out the calculator and shows them how he'll almost certainly end up better off financially than they will.
It happens enough that he knows the numbers for their average salaries after graduation (and their average debt load) by heart -- and the look on their face when they realize they could have done better by working at the post office than going to college is priceless.
He has no debt, guaranteed job stability and nearly-guaranteed promotions, great benefits, and he's literally five years ahead in his career and earnings. More like six years ahead if you count the fact that a plurality of American college students take five years to graduate.
Given the lifestyle of a postman, he even has more time to pursue his intellectual passions than the average college student.
It's come to my attention, reading ashwini's blog, that some people actually take that thing seriously. I've met few policymakers who think it's worth the paper it's printed on, and I'm inclined to agree - it's an unworkable, unrealistic, unenforceable document that's ultimately meaningless.
Does anyone here who supports it care to offer arguments in favor if its usefulness and its relevance?
...the best argument against it is reading the court's statute itself, something that I'm willing to bet only a small percentage of its supporters have ever actually done.
This article makes a far better case for not launching missile strikes against Iran than the bug-eyed pronouncements that Bush is secretly planning to invade or what have you -- it'll just hand them a PR victory and won't do much.
Of course, by the same token, all serious attempts at recent diplomacy with Iran -- including a herculean effort under the Clinton administration -- have failed. In order to apply broad multilateral pressure to Iran we'd have to get the Europeans to see that same failure of diplomacy. That's not likely, IMHO, because in reality the European insistence on "diplomacy" is more realpolitik than anyone actually believing it will accomplish anything.
That leaves us with few good options. There is no "grand bargain" to strike with Iran that would leave us better off than our current sabre rattling (Which at least has been partly responsible for Ahmadinejad's party's loss in the polls), a military attack would be counterproductive, and in the end we're stuck in reactive mode.
This mood is reflected by most of the Iranians I know - "Iran's run by a bunch of assholes, but America can't invade and there's nothing to gain by talking to them either."
The review is probably a hell of a lot better than the book, so please do check it out.
Hitchens is one of the sharpest writers of our age, and I can't help but feeling a pang of gratitude that he still calls himself a liberal after all that the Left has put him through over the years -- he's a credit to the term.
Riedl's critique makes good sense to me - if the goal was really to help make college more affordable, it seems like they'd be more likely to target something else.
What about expanding these SMART grants? Sounds like the perfect way for the government to get involved to me - I want the government to be helping to make college more affordable, but not if the kids are going to become Comparative Literature majors. Incentivizing the hard sciences and critical language skills makes good sense, and that's what our government should be focusing on.
Same with raising the minimum wage, an inane and meaningless gesture - if congress really wants to help people, they should be boosting the Earned Income Tax Credit instead.
As best I can currently tell, the new federal minimum wage is going to get extended to American Samoa, where it will double and/or triple most people's wages overnight if they continue to be paid in the same fashion they have been.
Given that people in American Samoa were previously poor but subsisting, and given the low price levels in Samoa, the new federal minimum wage is the closest we'll get for a long time to seeing a living wage implemented top-down on an entire economy.
Anyone want to make some bets on how this is going to turn out for the Samoans? Are they hopping on the fast track to the Good Life?
Update: The US representative for Samoa, Democrat Eni F.H. Faleomavaega, owns a tuna cannery operated by Del Monte Foods. Heh.
Edit: Looks like for whatever reason you want to believe - correcting an accidental lapse, response to increased scrutiny in the press, or a little of both - this inconsistency is going to be patched up. I'm not a big fan of the principle at work behind this law, but consistency is always good.
So that new minimum wage bill they're passing in Congress? They decided to make it truly national by including all US territories, including the Nothern Marianas Islands, which Abramoff had gotten a lot of flack for using for their incredibly low minimum wage.
...Oops, wait - turns out not every territory is included. They seem to have forgotten one...
...American Samoa.
Why would they include all American territories except American Samoa, you ask?
75% of American Samoa's workers are employed by StarKist, the tuna company whose parent company is Del Monte.
Del Monte just so happens to have its corporate headquarters in...
...(you guessed this already, didn't you?) San Francisco, in Nancy Pelosi's district.
Very cute.
I'm sure all the Democrats who were lining up to criticize Abramoff about offshoring to the low-wage Northern Marianas Islands will be issuing press releases against Nancy Pelosi, right?
Because with Democrats in power, things work differently, right?
Nobody ever lost money underestimating the ethics of a Congressman.
Arnold's new proposal has its problems, but it's a monumental first step in the right direction - addressing the real incentive problems that Western European style universal health care systems have created and attempting to surmount them.
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