Are you ready for some football! And mourning?

There's something that kind of weirds me out about how the national commemoration of 9/11 has been somewhat co-opted by the NFL:

NEW YORK -- The New York Giants will visit the Washington Redskins and the New York Jets will host the Dallas Cowboys on Sept. 11, marking the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The first Sunday features several high-profile games, including Indianapolis at Houston and Atlanta at Chicago. But much of the national focus will be on Washington and New York, the two cities most affected by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"That stadium is going to be full of emotion, not only the people from the area but in the entire country," said Jets coach Rex Ryan, who will be matching wits with his brother, Cowboys defensive coordinator Rob Ryan. "The fact that it's the 10th anniversary of 9/11, that's where the focus should be, not me playing against my brother."

"For nearly 10 years, we have felt an obligation to use our platform to make sure none of us ever forget the tragedy and heartbreak and courage and heroism of Sept. 11," Giants spokesman Pat Hanlon said. "That responsibility becomes even greater."

Because without football, we'd probably have forgotten 9/11 right now.

That's ridiculously unfair of me, of course. And I guess that sports are so tightly interwoven into our society that the major events of our collective lives are filtered through them. But it's been particularly noticeable in connection to 9/11. George W. Bush turned throwing out a World Series pitch in the attack aftermath into a legend of his courage and fortitude. (I can't find the video, but I recall the 2004 Republican National Convention featured a short video lauding the president's manliness for throwing that pitch so soon after the terrorists struck.) And some months later, the Super Bowl seemed to act as a national catharsis for all the pent-up emotion leftover from 9/11—including a Budweiser commercial with the clydesdales offering their condolences—that seemed all the more meaningful because the Patriots won. The Patriots. Get it?

It's possible I'm being incredibly churlish. But at some point the need to mourn a horrific terrorist attack through sports seems insanely trivial.

Today in inequality reading: What's your CEO making?

The AFL-CIO has launched a new website focused on CEO pay:

The site, 2011 Executive Paywatch, notes that total compensation for C.E.O.’s averaged $11.4 million in 2010, up 23 percent from the previous year, based on the most recent pay data for 299 major companies.

The Web site notes that the C.E.O.’s at those 299 companies received a combined total of $3.4 billion in pay in 2010, enough to support 102,325 jobs paying the median wage.

The Web site notes that chief executives’ compensation is 343 times the median pay — $33,190 — of American workers. It adds that the $11.4 million average for C.E.O.’s is 28 times the pay of President Obama, 213 time the median pay of police officers, 225 times teacher pay, 252 times firefighter pay, and 753 times the pay of the minimum-wage worker.

Did you do 23 percent better in 2010 than 2009? I sure didn't. Did your company add that much value to its bottom line? Maybe, maybe not.

I don't doubt that CEOs create value for their companies, and they're always going to make more money than rank-and-file workers. But they didn't used to outstrip the pay of their workers by quite so much, and it's hard for me to find a good economic reason why that's so now. My free-market friends will roll their eyes, but I think oligarchic brand of capitalism is--and probably should be--simply unsustainable.

Why? Because CEO pay continues to skyrocket when stuff like this is happening to regular American families:

7. Employer-provided health insurance benefits continue to disappear. The share of people with employer-provided health insurance dropped from 64.2 percent in 2000 to 55.8 percent in 2009. This is the lowest share since 1987 when the Census started to track these data.

8. Family incomes drop sharply in the recession. Median inflation-adjusted household income fell 3.6 percent in 2008 and by another 0.7 percent in 2009. It stood at $49,777 in 2009, its lowest level in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1997. White family income stood at $54,461, compared to African-American family income, which was $32,584, or 59.8 percent of white income. Hispanic family income was $38,039 in 2009, or 69.8 percent of white income.

9. Poverty continues to rise. The poverty rate stood at 14.3 percent in 2009—its highest rate since 1994.

You can't blame this on Barack Obama. The employer benefits were dropping in 2009--before ObamaCare passed. I guess we can argue about the stimulus in regards to the other numbers, but count me as somebody who suspects things would've been much worse without it.

That's not the point. The point is that a society chooses to organize itself along free-market lines because a free market helps the vast majority of citizens sustain themselves. For most of American history--and there have been exceptions--that has been the case. If the system only works at the top, if the rest of us have only bread and circuses to console us, then trouble is coming ... and all the Ayn Rand movies in the world won't change that. Defenders of the free market should concern themselves with inequality issues because that's probably how they can best defend free markets.

Thomas Sowell doesn't know what he's talking about in Philly schools

Thomas Sowell says the key to stopping bullying is empowering educators to dispense with the bullies without due process or fear of lawsuits. As proof of educational namby-pambyness, he throws in this aside:

For years, there have been stories in New York and Philadelphia newspapers about black kids beating up Asian classmates. But do not expect anybody to do anything that is likely to put a stop to it.

If these were white kids beating up Hispanic kids, cries of outrage would ring out across the land from the media, the politicians, the churches, and civic groups. But it is not politically correct to make a fuss when black kids beat up Asian kids.

But there was a huge fuss in Philadelphia. It was on the cover of Philadelphia Weekly, and when a mini-riot happened at South High, it resulted in weeks of media coverage—I covered a couple of the protests myself—and a change in the school's administration. That led to the Philadelphia Inquirer's huge week of stories this spring about violence in Philly schools more broadly. If Sowell wants to suggest that Arlene Ackerman's administration hasn't done enough to solve the problem, I'll join him. But he suggests that "the media, the politicians, the churches, and civic groups" are ignoring it—and ignoring it because we're afraid of saying bad thing about black kids. But he's wrong.

So what happened at South High, anyway? It looks like things are getting better, but it's taking real effort.

And for what it's worth, that effort doesn't involve booting the bullies post haste. Instead, it involves taking steps to keep students safe in the moment and creating a better atmosphere at the school:

The doors of student bathrooms are kept propped open - a screen blocks direct sight inside - but staff can hear if trouble starts.

Hackney also changed how Southern handles complaints of harassment and assault, which Asian students say were often not taken seriously. Now, students can write incident reports in their first language, crucial for those learning English.

Something else is different too: There's no trash on the floor. Staffers still bend over to pick up the occasional wrapper, but last year the litter seemed ankle-deep.

As the story indicates, the new principal is willing to get rid of students who make problems—but he's also more focused on stopping violence before it starts. A carrot-and-stick approach seems to be more effective—and proven—than Sowell's stick-first approach.

I'm happy to criticize the district for what it has failed to do. Honesty compels acknowledgement of where things are going right. But Sowell doesn't even bother to check the facts. He's got his headlines and his assumptions, and nothing else seems to matter.

Prop 8 and Judge Vaughn Walker: Gay judges are automatically unqualified

Ed Whelan makes the case in National Review that Judge Vaughn Walker's decision overturning Prop 8 in California be set aside because Walker has recently come out of the closet and thus can't be considered impartial:

Two weeks ago, former federal district judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled last summer in Perry v. Schwarzenegger that California’s Proposition 8 is unconstitutional, publicly disclosed for the first time that he has been in a same-sex relationship for the past ten years. A straightforward application of the judicial ethics rules compels the conclusion that Walker should have recused himself from taking part in the Perry case. Further, under well-established Supreme Court precedent, the remedy of vacating Walker’s judgment is timely and necessary.

As a practical matter, I'm unsure if Whelan's thinking will carry the day. As a broader matter, I find it discomfitting: Would we ask an African-American judge to step aside in a race discrimination case? A female judge to step aside in a sex discrimination case? Not automatically, no. There is a suggestion in Whelan's argument—a spirit that pervades Prop 8 itself—that gay Americans cannot be full citizens with the full rights and duties of citizenship. The only impartial, qualified judge is, well, a heterosexual judge.

But is that really the case? Remember that one of the key arguments made by Prop 8 supporters was that gay marriages threaten straight marriages. Judge Walker cited such arguments in his ruling last year, quoting from the California voter education guide:

And:

The foundation of Prop 8, in other words, is not that gay marriage should be prohibited for any old reason—but because it threatens to undermine female-male marriages.

Seems to me then, that any judge who is married or has been married or who might want to be married someday—be they gay or straight—thus finds him- or herself possibly compromised in this matter. Who is to say a straight judge wouldn't be acting to protect his or her marriage from the destabilizing influence of gay unions? The only person capable of passing a good judgement would be a demonstrably asexual judge—and while that's not impossible to imagine, let's just concede it's unlikely. There's nobody who can escape the appearance of a conflict of interest here if Whelan's logic is being applied to everybody. Otherwise, "straight white male" is the default standard of impartiality; everybody else is just an interest group, compromised by their biases.

The anti-immigration movement: Brought to you by eugenicist John Tanton

One recurring theme in the anti-abortion movement is that organizations like Planned Parenthood are the fruits of bad seeds—irrevocably tainted by events that happened decades ago. And so you see frequent invocations of "eugenicist Margaret Sanger" in these debates. By that standard, then, I guess it's fair to accompany every single mention of the modern anti-immigration movement with a reference to eugenicist John Tanton—who helped create Numbers USA, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the Center for Immigration Studies.

Here's a key excerpt from Sunday's profile in the New York Times:

But if anything, Dr. Tanton grew more emboldened to challenge taboos. He increasingly made his case against immigration in racial terms.

“One of my prime concerns,” he wrote to a large donor, “is about the decline of folks who look like you and me.” He warned a friend that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”

Dr. Tanton acknowledged the shift from his earlier, colorblind arguments, but the “uncomfortable truth,” he wrote, was that those arguments had failed. With a million or more immigrants coming each year — perhaps a third illegally — he warned, “The end may be nearer than we think.”

He corresponded with Sam G. Dickson, a Georgia lawyer for the Ku Klux Klan, who sits on the board of The Barnes Review, a magazine that, among other things, questions “the so-called Holocaust.” Dr. Tanton promoted the work of Jared Taylor, whose magazine, American Renaissance, warned: “America is an increasingly dangerous and disagreeable place because of growing numbers of blacks and Hispanics.” (To Mr. Taylor, Dr. Tanton wrote, “You are saying a lot of things that need to be said.”)

Beyond immigration, he revived an old interest in eugenics, another field trailed by a history of racial and class prejudice.

“Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids?” he wrote. “And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less. Who is going to break the bad news to them?”

I don't believe that everybody who favors tight restrictions on immigration and the forever treatment of immigrant children as outlaws is a racist or a secret eugenicist. (I do think they're wrong.) But by the standards of our modern discourse, though, none of that really matters. John Tanton's ties to modern-day anti-immigration organizations are deeper than Margaret Sanger's to modern Planned Parenthood—he's still alive, and sitting on the board of FAIR. As the Times piece noted, his colleagues in those organizations have been mostly reluctant to distance themselves from him and his views. (Probably out of politeness, like how you tolerate a racist relative at Thanksgiving, but still.) If the fruit of a bad seed is forever tainted, then today's anti-immigration organizations can't remove John Tanton's outrageous racism from their DNA.

Billy Eger returns

I was worried he'd stopped paying attention. Billy Eger's latest:

Your definitely not an accounted,your definitely a communist liberal loser,you have 2 braincells an 1s out looking for the other one.Joel you really can't be this stupid ,but ,then again you think your a journalists,far, far,far from it.its ok,cause soon thier won't be print media an your stupidity will NOT grace the paper anymore unless sum1 goes online too read your immature beliefs,wich I doubt they will do.have a crappy day Asshole .oh all those loser government workers who enslave themselves to the sleeper cell in the whitehouse,fuck them,those people need to get a life ,its all corrupt DEMS an Republicans,don't need to be in public schools or tell me what too eat,drive or breath,this was created by banks that didn't even need to be bailed out. It's the next ponzi scheme,they ran out of tax dollars because of layoffs an jobs leaving country they have to devise way to tax u so they can have their martini in Belize.I feel sorry for stupid people like you,even more for your kids if you have any,they'll probably even laugh at how stupid you are an how they can pull the wool over your eyes an closed mind.later loser,1 more thing ,all you media assholes play with peoples emotions instead of just printing facts.your ALLLLLLLLLLLLLL losers. Fuck off an .........
billy from wickliffe

Today in inequality reading: Barlett and Steele return

In short, corporate America does not come close to paying its fair share of government's cost. Nor, obviously, is it called upon to make any human sacrifice. As for all those hundreds of billions, they simply were and are added to the national debt, a tab that will be borne disproportionately by working Americans.

What kind of corporation escapes responsibility for any of these bills? Carnival Cruise Lines for one, a Miami company whose glitzy megaships have names like Carnival Fantasy, Ecstasy, Elation, and Paradise. From 2005 to 2010, Carnival - the world's largest cruise carrier - racked up $13 billion in profits. The company's tax bill for those years? Chump change of $191 million. That's million. And that included U.S. income tax, foreign income, and local income tax. The overall tax rate came in at 1.4 percent. This even though the ships sail out of Miami and are inspected by the Coast Guard.

Middle America has not fared nearly so well, thanks to a Congress that likes to sock it to ordinary people, the same people who are and will be hammered even more as lawmakers target them to be a scapegoat for the ballooning deficits. Though corporate profits have continued to climb, the wages of working people remain frozen in time. In 2008, according to IRS data, 10 million working individuals and families filed tax returns reporting incomes of between $30,000 and $40,000. Their effective tax rate: 6.8 percent - nearly five times the Carnival rate.

via philly.com

Songs on my iPod with 'America' in the title

• "America" by Neil Diamond.

• "America" by Simon & Garfunkel.

• "America (Reprise)" by Neil Diamond.

• "An American in Paris" conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

• "American Music" by Violent Femmes.

• "The American Patrol" by The Glenn Miller Orchestra.

• "American Wedding" by Gogol Bordello.

Heh.

"When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he's just being America's accountant ... This is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill -- but wasn't paid for," Mr. Obama told his supporters. "So it's not on the level."

via cbsnews.com

We don't have a spending problem. We have a paying problem.

via krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

I don't think we need to bring tax revenues up to Norway levels. But ... this is why I don't trust deficit-reduction plans that involve huge tax cuts. (I could see rate cuts as part of a tax reform package that eliminated loopholes, but Paul Ryan's plan seems aimed more at cutting revenues to government.)

Raise the debt ceiling

Ben and I tackle the debt ceiling vote in our newest Scripps column

When you're out driving with your family and see a stop sign ahead, how do you usually handle the situation? Do you wait until the very last second, then slam on the breaks -- hurtling your passengers forward against their seat belts and causing bruised ribs and bloody noses, along with no small amount of unnecessary alarm? Do you ignore the stop sign altogether and drive right on through, oblivious to crossing traffic?

If you're a halfway decent driver, you do neither of these things. You try to slow down gently and calmly before coming to a full stop -- knowing that the panic-driven way of halting might be just as injurious as plunging through the intersection. This, roughly, is the situation we face with the debt ceiling.

Simply put, if the feds try to completely slam the breaks on federal spending now, we'll end up in a fair amount of pain. Under one scenario, America would simply stop making interest payments to China and its other creditors -- destroying our country's worldwide economic leadership, most likely never to be regained. In the other scenario, interest payments would continue and all other programs would be hollowed out immediately.

That might sound good in some Tea Party scenarios, but the sudden loss of funding and thousands of federal jobs would upend the recovery.

To throw another metaphor on the pile: This wouldn't be ripping off a Band-Aid quickly -- it would be re-opening the wound. We don't need that.

We also don't need to pile up ever-more exorbitant amounts of debt endlessly into the future -- neither Democrats nor Republicans believe that. Big changes are coming to the federal budget. They should happen in an orderly fashion. Refusing to raise the debt ceiling at this point wouldn't be orderly, but it would be incredibly destructive.

Ben, on the other hand, advocates "holding the line." Read the full column for his take.

Raise the debt ceiling

Ben and I tackle the debt ceiling vote in our newest Scripps column

When you're out driving with your family and see a stop sign ahead, how do you usually handle the situation? Do you wait until the very last second, then slam on the breaks -- hurtling your passengers forward against their seat belts and causing bruised ribs and bloody noses, along with no small amount of unnecessary alarm? Do you ignore the stop sign altogether and drive right on through, oblivious to crossing traffic?

If you're a halfway decent driver, you do neither of these things. You try to slow down gently and calmly before coming to a full stop -- knowing that the panic-driven way of halting might be just as injurious as plunging through the intersection. This, roughly, is the situation we face with the debt ceiling.

Simply put, if the feds try to completely slam the breaks on federal spending now, we'll end up in a fair amount of pain. Under one scenario, America would simply stop making interest payments to China and its other creditors -- destroying our country's worldwide economic leadership, most likely never to be regained. In the other scenario, interest payments would continue and all other programs would be hollowed out immediately.

That might sound good in some Tea Party scenarios, but the sudden loss of funding and thousands of federal jobs would upend the recovery.

To throw another metaphor on the pile: This wouldn't be ripping off a Band-Aid quickly -- it would be re-opening the wound. We don't need that.

We also don't need to pile up ever-more exorbitant amounts of debt endlessly into the future -- neither Democrats nor Republicans believe that. Big changes are coming to the federal budget. They should happen in an orderly fashion. Refusing to raise the debt ceiling at this point wouldn't be orderly, but it would be incredibly destructive.

Ben, on the other hand, advocates "holding the line." Read the full column for his take.

The wealthy aren't unduly burdened by taxes

With Tax Day fast approaching and deficit reduction all the rage, one fact deserves significant attention: the wealthy are enjoying the some of the lowest taxes in generations. The Figure shows the average tax rate in 1979, 1992, and 2007, as well as the tax rate for the top 1% of households, and the top 400 households (who have an average annual income of nearly $350 million).  Since 1979, the country’s overall average tax rate—the share of income paid in taxes—has fallen slightly, but for those at the top of the earnings ladder this share has fallen dramatically.

via epi.org

It may not be the case that we can solve all our problems by increasing taxes on the wealthy. But it's also not the case that the wealthy are stumbling under the weight of an overbearing tax burden in the United States, either.

Terry Bradshaw's concussions

Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw says he’s feeling the effects of numerous concussions sustained during his NFL career.

Bradshaw, a 62-year-old Shreveport, La., native, says he has been having short-term memory loss as well as the loss of hand-eye coordination. He also said he is undergoing rehabilitation for those ailments.

“I forgot the numbers. It’s pretty staggering,” Bradshaw said. “If you play in the NFL and start for 10 years, it’s not good. It is not good.”

via kansascity.com

There is part of me here that says: "So what?" Coal miners, for example, see their lives shortened pretty regularly by the work they do, but I'm not going without electricity. So if Terry Bradshaw finds himself harmed by the same work that made him rich and famous, who am I to complain?

The difference here, of course, is that electricity is a vital and necessary component of modern life. We can't really live without it. Terry Bradshaw scrambled his brain ... so we could be entertained. Me? I can easily find something else to do on Sunday afternoons that doesn't involve watching men sacrifice their mental capacities and good health for my amusement.

Big Gubmint for its own sake

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said in a speech on the floor Tuesday that “too often, it seems, Democrats in Washington claim to be interested in helping those in need, when what they really seek is to protect big government.”

via nytimes.com

I hear this a lot from my conservative friends, and I guess my question is: To what end? Why would we love big government if not as an ends to helping those in need?

Conservatives value small government for its own sake--they believe smaller government produces more liberty. I think that's an insight worth considering, frankly. But some of my conservative friends (like Mitch McConnell above) seem to then assume the inverse is true: Liberals want Big Government because, well, we really love Big Government.

It doesn't really make sense. The truth is that lots of liberals really do want to help the less-fortunate, and see government programs and regulation as the best way to do so. There's nothing tricky about it, no love of government for government's sake.

Priorities

They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs.  That’s not right.  And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.

Barack Obama, via whitehouse.gov

If you don't believe government should be in the business of defraying health costs for the elderly, this probably doesn't move you. I've got to think there are more than a few independent voters out there who would agree with the president.

Barack Obama didn't make the deficit by himself. Neither did Social Security.

But as far back as the 1980s, America started amassing debt at more alarming levels, and our leaders began to realize that a larger challenge was on the horizon.  They knew that eventually, the Baby Boom generation would retire, which meant a much bigger portion of our citizens would be relying on programs like Medicare, Social Security, and possibly Medicaid.  Like parents with young children who know they have to start saving for the college years, America had to start borrowing less and saving more to prepare for the retirement of an entire generation. 

via whitehouse.gov

Still reading my way through Obama's speech, but it's worth noting that the long-term deficit problem we have today didn't start with Social Security back in the Roosevelt era or Medicaid back in the LBJ years. It started in the 1980s...roughly the same time we started getting a generation of politicians who told us we shouldn't have to pay for the government we get. As I said in the Scripps column last week, the deficit isn't just a spending problem—it's a paying problem.

Somebody tell Tom Corbett

The total number of job openings in February was 3.1 million, and the total number of unemployed workers was 13.7 million (unemployment is from the Current Population Survey).  The ratio of unemployed workers to job openings was 4.4-to-1 in February, a substantial improvement from the revised January ratio of 5.1-to-1.  However, February marks 26 months that the “job-seeker’s ratio” has been substantially above the 4-to-1 ratio.  A job seeker’s ratio of 4-to-1 means that for 3 out of 4 unemployed workers, there simply are no jobs.

via epi.org

A fantasy budget for liberals that will never, ever happen

The People’s Budget would finance $1.7 trillion worth of public investment over the next decade, most of which is front-loaded over the next five years. The budget would strengthen Social Security by lifting the cap on taxable earnings. The budget also would accrue health savings of $308 billion over the next decade, primarily by creating a public option for health insurance and negotiating prescription drug prices for Medicare Part D.

The budget would reduce conventional and strategic military forces, for savings of $692 billion and end all emergency war supplemental appropriations for savings of $1.6 trillion. Finally, individual and corporate tax reform would ensure sufficient revenue to cover federal outlays by the end of the decade.

via epi.org

Quotes that don't actually elicit sympathy from me

We have an au pair from France, and she recently filled up our minivan and gave me a bill for $70,” said Melanie Janin, a mother of three from Bethesda. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ 

via washingtonpost.com