A slightly mischievous piece by one Tim Brighouse makes a suggestion to members of the Browne commission which, I am sure, as members of the big society they will want to take up by making large donations, and to the government which, again, I’m sure they’ll be delighted to adopt as policy: a graduate tax on those of us who got our college education for free at a time when it produced a significant wage premium (oddly enough an age span that begins with my dad and ends with my sister). Here’s a taste:

When I first read the Browne report I was puzzled, as I am sure we all were, by the false logic. The cuts are governed by a general desire not to pass on our current debts to future generations, yet this report is apparently happy to load some of it on prospective young graduates. How can we explain that to our teenagers?

My second response when reading the report was to feel unusually guilty and ashamed. It should have the same effect on anybody aged between 45 and 70, for we are the “charmed generations”, as we often privately admit to one another.

We were showered with all manner of blessings: we missed the Second World War; we didn’t give up two years of our lives to national service; and we enjoyed the benefits of the newly created welfare state. If we own a house, for many years we enjoyed tax relief on mortgage interest payments. And to cap it all we either have or can expect reasonable, and in some cases generous, occupational pensions, which succeeding generations will not.

Most important of all – and this is where the Browne report comes in – the fortunate few in our charmed generations who attended college or university, unlike our successors, enjoyed free tuition and were given grants to live on as undergraduates.

In my case, in 1958 it was £300, which is equivalent to £12,000 today – more than half the starting salary of a teacher. In today’s money that is about £50,000 over the four years it took me to complete my degree and PGCE, and the state paid for the tuition at about the same cost, amounting to £100,000 in all. No wonder some of us felt we owed the state – and future generations – something in return.

Disclosure: in the traditional role of more tech-savvy offspring I found the online calculators that enabled him to do the inflation adjustment. (That I am more tech-savvy than him tells you a lot about how tech-unsavvy he is).

Eric McGhee has a “somewhat dispiriting post”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/11/did_controversial_roll_call_vo.html at _The Monkey Cage._

Running a model on voting this Tuesday, he finds that Democrats’ votes for health care, TARP, cap and trade and the stimulus hurt their support. In some cases it hurt them quite a lot.

bq. What does this model tell us about roll call votes on these four bills? Simple answer: they mattered. A lot. A Democratic incumbent in the average district represented by Democratic incumbents actually lost about 2/3 of a percentage point for every yes vote. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s for incumbents in districts that voted 63% for Obama.

bq. For Democrats in the least Democratic districts (Chet Edwards of TX or Gene Taylor of MS), the model suggests a loss of about 4% for every yes vote. Does that mean poor Chet lost 16 points on roll call votes alone? No, because he wasn’t a big supporter of Obama’s agenda. But he did vote for both TARP and the stimulus. In fact, virtually every Democratic incumbent on the ballot yesterday supported at least one of these four bills. That support was costly.

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The US Federal Reserve has announced its long-awaited renewal of quantitative easing (cutely labelled QE2). It’s $600 billion of new money to buy US Treasury notes with an average duration of five years, along with recycling of some money from the mortgage bailouts, also into T-note purchases. That sounds like a lot, but the reaction from Brad DeLong (endorsed by Paul Krugman) has been a big yawn. With the five-year bond rate at just over 1 per cent, the amount the private sector would demand to hold these bonds (that is, the annual interest payment) is about $7 billion, which is rounding error in the context of the current crisis.

I had been thinking that the Fed might take the much riskier (and politically trickier) step of buying corporate bonds. That would seem more likely to promote investment, but would obviously involve a good deal of winner-picking, with the associated potential for (real or perceived) corruption.

But what is really needed here is fiscal stimulus focused on job creation, combined with a long-term plan for fiscal consolidation (that is, higher taxes and/or lower expenditure). Instead, what the US appears likely to get is a permanent tax cut for the rich, partly offset by lots of job-destroying nickel-and-dime cuts in current expenditure. Many of these cuts will prove to be counterproductive or unsustainable in the long run.

Well, that was depressing. My fellow Wisconsinites managed to replace the best Senator in the US senate with a ninny — I’d have been happy to have the Dems lose control of the Senate in return for keeping Feingold, personally. By contrast, at least the voters in Racine had the sense to retain our best State Assemblyperson in the face of a massive Republican effort to defeat him.

But, in the light of Daniel’s post below, I’m very curious what the the opponents of his argument (and there are many) are thinking about Florida. Cheers to the Democrats and their voters for throwing the race to Rubio! Well done, chaps! Update: when I checked the numbers Rubio was still polling slightly under 50%, but now I see he got just over 50%, so maybe it wasn’t thrown.

The roots of the debacle that will be Election Day 2010, for US Democrats, lie right here:

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Nothing, I think, can encapsulate Obama’s arrogance, or his profound alienation from ordinary Americans, so well as this chanting-and-smirking festival from last fall — complete with teleprompter and foreign-languagestan “translation” for all you “world citizens” out there.  The White House, realizing its colossal error in judgment (and noting with alarm that overnight, 16 percent of Americans suddenly came to believe that Obama is Hindu), tried desperately to cover its tracks by moving Diwali 2010 to just <i>after</i>  the midterm elections, to November 5.  But to no avail.  The damage has been done.

May our new Senators — especially Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Pat Toomey, and Rand Paul — deliver us from Diwali and all it implies.

<b>Broder Version:</b>  He came in here and he chanted in the place — <i>and it’s not his place</i>.

As the US goes to the polls, there is not exactly a shortage of commentary telling people how important it is that they vote, and so it’s been almost traditional (by which I mean, I did it at least once) for me to provide a small voice for the forces of apathy. This year, though, I want to address a particular and in my view rather pernicious species of electoral wowserism – the belief on the part of the Democratic Party that it has something approaching property rights over the vote of anyone to the left of, say, the New York Times opinion page.

The argument I want to establish here is that the decision about whether or not to vote Demcrat (versus the alternative of abstaining or voting for a minor party) is a serious one, which is up to the conscience of the individual voter to make, and which deserves respect from other people whether they agree with it or not. Obviously in making that argument, I’m going to have to venture into a number of unpalatable home truths about the Democrats as they are currently organised (abstract: ineffectual, cowardly, surprisingly warlike, soft-right, generally an obstacle to the development of social democratic politics), but let’s get this clear right up front – voting Democrat might often be the right thing to do in any given case, depending on local conditions; it might even usually be the right thing to do. What I’m not going to accept, however, is that it is always or definitionally the right thing to do.
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Windsor and Maidenhead Council (UK) “is planning a reward scheme”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/31/council-plans-big-society-reward (supermarket tokens and the like) for volunteers to help implement David Cameron’s “Big Society”:

bq. it is likely residents would get a loyalty card similar to those available in shops. Points would be added by organisers when cardholders had completed good works such as litter-picking or holding tea parties for isolated pensioners. The council says the idea is based on “nudge theory” – the thought that people don’t automatically do the right thing but will respond if the best option is highlighted. Points would be awarded according to the value given to each activity. Users could then trade in their points for vouchers giving discounts on the internet or high street.

Maybe the Council should have read more widely, since according to another body of literature (Bruno Frey, “Sam Bowles”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5883/1605 ), they risk sending out a signal that only a mug performs good works for no reward. An interesting natural experiment, to be sure, but not one that I’d wish on the residents of Windsor and Maidenhead.

It’s just a minor chest wound.

“Gideon Rachman”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2010/10/a-night-at-the-oxford-union/

bq. The viscount is an interesting character. He once worked in the policy unit at Number Ten under Lady Thatcher and is now deputy leader of the anti-European UK Independence Party. More recently he has become famous as a vociferous climate-change sceptic and for fighting a Quixotic campaign to gain entrance into the House of Lords. I was seated opposite him at the pre-debate dinner, and initially I found his conversation rather unsettling: a blizzard of statistics and anecdotes on everything from climate to Europe, all delivered with supreme confidence and a slight gleam in the eye. I began to think that Viscount Monckton might be a formidable opponent during the debate. Then he told me that he has discovered a new drug that is a complete cure for two-thirds of known diseases – and that he expects it to go into clinical trials soon. I asked him whether his miracle cure was chiefly effective against viruses or bacterial diseases? “Both”, he said, “and prions”. At this point I felt a little more relaxed about the forthcoming debate.

According to this Nielsen study, American teens between 13-17 years old are sending or receiving, on average, 3,339 texts per month, and teen girls send or receive 4,050 per month. (Obviously, this is among teens with cell phones.) It’s hard to believe that the average is distorted by a minority of massive users – that’s already a text every 7 to 9 minutes across the whole waking day. Of course, I could be wrong about how much they sleep. On the other hand, the study was conducted between April and June, 2010, so at least some of them were presumably in school – not that this necessarily eliminates all opportunities to text, I know, but it must cut down on them somewhat, right? I mean, we’re talking about high school, not college, here.

Thanks to some FB comments by Marc Mulholland, I see that there’s an interesting bit of rhetorical back-and-forth going on in British politics today. Labour claims that ConDem plans to cap housing (and other) benefit payments will have the effect of forcing poor people out of London and therefore amount to “social cleansing”. Useful idiot Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg “pretends to be outraged”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_9125000/9125499.stm :

bq. To refer to cleansing would be deeply offensive to people who have witnessed ethnic cleansing in other parts of the world.

Unfortunately, for him, in a flanking manoeuvre from the right, London mayor Boris Johnson (Tory) then “repeats the charge”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/28/boris-johnson-kosovo-style-cleansing-housing-benefit , making it more explicit and destroying its metaphorical character:

bq. What we will not see, and will not accept, is any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London.

None of this, including the faux-outrage from Clegg, would surprise anyone who has hung around the blogosphere since 2001, since charges of “moral relativism”, “moral equivalence” and “you are implicitly comparing X to Y how dare you!” are the common currency of wingnuts and “decents” alike. This one is mildly interesting, though, because it is a complaint about the adaptation of what was originally a piece of “unspeak”: a euphemism. The complaint depends for its force entirely on the euphemism being understood non-euphemistically, if you see what I mean. I see from some discussion at the Unspeak site, that Steven Pinker has a name for this: the “euphemism treadmill”.

bq. People invent new words for emotionally charged referents, but soon the euphemism becomes tainted by association, and a new word must be found, which soon acquires its own connotations. ( _Blank Slate_ p.212).

I’m pleased that the NLRB looks to be “reversing its position on graduate student unionization”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/28/nlrb

bq. The National Labor Relations Board, in a 2-to-1 decision, has edged away from its recent history of rejecting unionization rights for graduate teaching assistants at private universities.

In the decision, the NLRB found that the graduate students at New York University who are currently trying to unionize with the United Auto Workers deserve a full hearing on the merits of their organizing drive. In so doing, the majority of the NLRB reversed a regional director’s decision that the UAW could not organize graduate students at NYU because of a 2004 NLRB ruling in a case involving Brown University graduate students.

The decision is particularly piquant because it cites to NYU’s own policies as evidence supporting the grad students’ position.

bq. In its new ruling, the NLRB cites differences in NYU’s relationship with its graduate students now as compared with the past and with other universities today to suggest that they may be entitled to a union. For instance, the NLRB ruling notes that NYU has said that its graduate students who teach do so voluntarily and are free to join the adjunct union at the university for representation in their role as instructors. The NLRB ruling says that this is significant because it means that graduate students are being paid as employees, not simply as graduate students.

Public health warning: much much more McArdle-blogging beneath the fold. But take heart – this may possibly be my last and most definitive statement on the topic. I certainly can’t imagine that I will want to write at length about this any more.

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More on McGarble later – Lemuel Pitkin and norbizness are hereby _strongly advised_ to avert their eyes from my next post. But in the meantime, I wanted to point to “Scott’s great column”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee311 today (which is quite apropos in any event).

bq. The Stewart-Colbert rally is bound to draw young people filled with unhappiness about how the world is going, and I’m not about to begrudge them the right to an interesting weekend. But the anti-ideological spirit of the event is a dead end. The attitude that it’s better to stay cool and amused than to risk making arguments or expressing too much ardor — this is not civility. It’s timidity.

bq. “Here we are now, entertain us” was a great lyric for a song. As a political slogan, it is decidedly wanting. If someone onstage wants to make Saturday’s rally meaningful, perhaps it would be worth quoting the old Wobbly humorist T-Bone Slim: “Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack.”