“Robert J. Samuelson”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/14/AR2008121401811_pf.html turns the stupid up to 11.
A second myth is that lobbying favors the wealthy, including corporations, because only they can afford the cost. As a result, government favors the rich and ignores the poor and middle class. Actually, the facts contradict that. Sure, the wealthy extract privileges from government, but mainly they’re its servants. The richest 1 percent of Americans pay 28 percent of federal taxes, says the Congressional Budget Office. About 60 percent of the $3 trillion federal budget goes for payments to individuals — mostly the poor and middle class. You can argue that those burdens and benefits should be greater, but if the rich were all powerful, their taxes would be much lower. Similarly, the poor and middle class do have powerful advocates. To name three: AARP for retirees; the AFL-CIO for unionized workers; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for the poor.
Should people pretend to take this sort of horseshit seriously? One, could, for example, point out to serious academic research that completely contradicts Samuelson’s claims, such as Larry Bartels’ finding that “[US] senators are consistently responsive to the views of affluent constituents but entirely unresponsive to those with low incomes.” (p.275, Bartels 2008; Bartels also finds that Republicans are roughly twice as responsive to the views of high income constituents as Democrats)? Or should people just point at the silly man, and laugh (Samuelson’s claims are so pig-ignorantly ridiculous that they’re _not even competent hackery_ )? I’m genuinely of two minds.
Update: Bartels speaks further to this at “Ezra Klein’s blog”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=12&year=2008&base_name=the_weak_and_the_rich.
I know of two systematic attempts to measure the relative influence of affluent, middle-class, and poor people on government policy. One is in the next-to-last chapter of Unequal Democracy, where senators’ roll call votes are moderately strongly affected by the preferences of high-income constituents, less strongly affected by the preferences of middle-income constituents, and totally unaffected by the preferences of low-income constituents. That’s the more optimistic view. My Princeton colleague Marty Gilens (in a 2005 article in Public Opinion Quarterly and a book-in-progress) has a parallel analysis focusing on aggregate poilcy shifts over two decades. He also finds no discernible impact of low-income preferences, but argues that middle-class people also get ignored when they happen to disagree with rich people.
As Ezra says:
Bartels explains his research in further detail “here”:http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/05/16/a_political_system_utterly_unr/. Marty Gilens’ work is “here”:http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/research.html. I’d be interested to hear Samuelson respond to their findings, or describe which aspects of their analysis he finds insufficiently rigorous.
I link to Top Shelf Comics whenever they have one of their $3 sales. Because their stuff is great. Because you should support your independent small publishers. (Well, that is what I have always assumed, and I see no reason to change my mind.)
They have another sale, until tomorrow – December 14 – offering you free shipping on new release orders over $40, plus on orders from that $3 bin that is still pretty full.
You know. Think about how this goes.
Stockings always get stuffed with care with cheap stuff that seems sort of funny for a moment but isn’t actually that interesting. Think how much more baffled your family members will be by mysteriously Santa-provided copies of “Magic Boy and Robot Elf”, not to mention two of my favorite comics that would fit into a stocking: Dan James’ “The Octopi and the Ocean” and “Mosquito”. It makes me sad that these two titles continue to languish in the remainder bin. (Go ahead. Check out the previews.)
New stuff that looks good: Veeps, a comic book people’s history of the all those who were a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Kids will love Owly and the Korgi books. Alex Robinson’s new one is supposed to be good. (I like his old stuff. Haven’t tried the new yet.) There’s a new volume of Jeff Lemire’s Essex County series. (Possibly these names mean very little to you. Perhaps you should amend that situation.)
The Labor Beat video group is putting together a documentary about the victorious occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago. The filmmakers were — unless I’m mistaken — the only media group given constant access to the inside of the factory during this action. They’ve put up a ten minute selection of footage on YouTube:
on an otherwise dismal day. The UFCW has “finally succeeded”:http://www.fayobserver.com/article?id=312956 in unionizing the Smithfield meatpacking plant.
Workers at Smithfield Packing Co. voted in favor of unionizing, a stunning victory for labor organizers who have waited 16 years to gain a presence in the world’s largest hog processing plant. … Tonight’s victory marks a major inroad for organized labor in North Carolina. … After the union was defeated in the 1990s, the voting results were challenged with allegations that management harassed and intimidated workers. In May 2006, a federal court ruled that Smithfield must stop anti-union tactics and allow a vote.
(Longtime CT readers may remember a “disgracefully dishonest”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/16/ducking-under/#more-4799 _Economist_ story on how great the Smithfield plant was for immigrants from a couple of years back and a series of “increasingly”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/17/asymmetrical-information/ “ludicrous”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/21/up-to-a-point-lord-copper/#more-4820 posts from Megan McArdle, then writing at said journal, defending same)
Chris Hayes has a “nice piece”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081229/hayes/single in _The Nation_ about how the term ‘pragmatism’ is used in US public debate. [click to continue…]
Via “The Online Photographer”:http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html , Laurie Hill’s film about the things people request from the Hulton Archive:
From “an otherwise serious article”:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/its-official-men-really-are-the-weaker-sex-1055688.html about the effects of pollution on males of all species:
bq. … a study at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys.
Samuel Freeman’s _Rawls_ has received considerable praise on this blog. Indeed Harry “described it”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/10/rawls-by-samuel-freeman/#more-6491 exactly a year ago as “A brilliantly careful, utterly transparent, account of Rawls’s thought and an admirable presentation of the state of the debates around Rawls’s work.” Well Harry may well be right about the book as a whole, but I’m afraid I found the pages where Freeman states his and Rawls’s objections to “liberal cosmopolitanism” somewhat objectionably arresting. Details are below the fold, but I was taken aback by the linked claims that “language itself” would not be possible without “social co-operation” which, in turn, would not be possible without the enforcement of social rules by a coercive power. From which it follows, of course, that language itself is not possible in the absence of such a coercive power. That just seems rather obviously historically and ethnographically false unless Freeman intends by “social cooperation” and “coercive power” rather looser arrangements for coooperation and constraint than he needs for the conclusion he wants to reach, namely, that there is a qualitative difference between the domestic order and the international one, such as would justify restricting strong distributive justice duties to co-members of societies. Given that he has to reject, then, a looser conception of those terms, it looks like he’s committed to the claim that “language itself” would not be possible without the state. Which is nuts. [click to continue…]
I’m at the Berkman Center in Harvard, for a conference on the Internet and Politics in 2008 (Eszter is here too). Participants have written a number of interesting short pieces on this this topic for the “conference website”:http://publius.cc/category/internet-and-politics-2008/ (there are more promised); I’ve also done a piece, which I enclose beneath the fold on how Internet participation and partisanship are linked together. [click to continue…]
Guardian Obit here. Picture gallery here. Dragon’s Friendly Society here. The Clangers, Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine here.
When my eldest was 5 there was just one thing on her Christmas list. A Clanger. And Father Christmas brought her a little cuddly clanger and a soup dragon. Boy was she happy. For several years there was a promise that Noggin the Nog would come out on DVD, but there was delay after delay, during which I feared that by the time it came out my kids would be too old for it. It was too late for my eldest, but just in time for the middle one, and we had a third so that a second one would get to enjoy them.
During the great debate over my son’s name the way my wife and the girls got me to accede to their preference was by pointing out that if we named him as we did he would share his first name with Oliver Postgate. Clever.
A taste of Noggin the Nog, the best thing ever on television, here.
I’m going to go out on a limb: Joni Mitchell is a great singer/songwriter/pianist/guitarist.
Pursuant of this theme, a pair of YouTube videos – really just song tracks. The first, a sweet and mournful heavy-orchestration-makes-it-good track, “Down To You”, from Court and Spark (1973). Especially the French horn bits. That was the album that gave us “Free Man In Paris”, “Help Me”, and the (slightly annoying) “Raised On Robbery”; but if you ask me: “Down To You” is the drop-dead achingly beautiful one. Right. That’s settled.
Next, “The Jungle Line”, from The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975). She’s getting into all the fusion-y jazz stuff which, for me, is mostly hit but sometimes miss. But “Jungle Line” has this crazy thumpy blatt-y bass-y bassoon-y oboe-y, synth-y stuff over the sampled African drums. Is it the long lost Brian Eno-produced Björk album from 1975? I think a few bars from this one would be great for baffling your friends/incorporating into some oddly unplaceable mash-up. What do you think?
Speaking of dubious mash-up projects, I have a very bad idea: a mash-up of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” with Randy Newman’s “Little Criminals“. Obviously you would have to call it “Smooth Little Criminals”. Can you sort of hear it? (Perhaps not. But I think you will agree that the original Jackson video is a stronger effort than the middle-school action figure Newman offering.)
As it has become evident that the financial crisis is comparable, in important ways, to the early stages of the Great Depression, there has been a lot of debate about the lessons to be learned from the responses to the Depression in the US, most notably the various policies that made up the New Deal. There’s a lot to be learned there, but it’s also important to remember that the Depression, in the US and elsewhere, continued throughout the 1930s before being brought to an abrupt end by the outbreak of World War II.[1]
Not only did the slump end when the war began, it did not return when the war ended – a huge difference from previous major wars. Instead the three decades beginning in 1940 were a period of unparalleled prosperity for developed countries, with economic growth higher and unemployment lower than at any time before or since.
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