Matt Miller on Paul Ryan's really awful budget

For the life of me I don’t understand why the press doesn’t shove this fact in front of every Republican who says the debt limit cannot be raised unless serious new spending cuts are put in place. The supposedly “courageous,” “visionary” Paul Ryan plan — which already contains everything Republicans can think of in terms of these spending cuts — would add more debt than we’ve ever seen over a 10-year period in American history. Yet Ryan and other House GOP leaders continue to make outrageous statements to the contrary.

Without blushing. And without anyone calling them on it.

“The spending spree is over,” Ryan said the other day, after the House passed his blueprint. “We cannot keep spending money we don’t have.” Except that by his own reckoning Ryan is planning to spend $6 trillion we don’t have in the next decade alone.

“We have too many people worried about the next election and not worried about the next generation,” Ryan added. So Ryan is expressing his concern by adding at least $14 trillion to the debt between now and when his plan finally balances the budget sometime in the 2030s (and only then if a number of the plan’s dubious assumptions come to pass).

“We cannot afford to ignore this coming fiscal train wreck any longer,” Eric Cantor says. “Complacency is not an option.” Well, if $14 trillion in fresh debt and unbalanced budgets until the 2030s do not amount to “complacency,” I’d hate to hear what the GOP definition of “profligacy” is.

via washingtonpost.com

I've said it before: Paul Ryan's budget is a "path to prosperity" for the already-prosperous. It doesn't fix the debt but it does weaken the safety net while giving a tax break to the rich. It's just not good.

Grover Norquist's latest very bad idea

My preference would be to keep the administration on a short leash and extend the debt limit by only a small amount and for a short period of time. This debt-limit increase is one of the few pieces of legislation that Obama must sign. Why not have such an extension every month and attach to each of them something small, reasonable, and related to debt or spending?

via nationalreview.com

That's Grover Norquist, in an NRO symposium about whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling. His proposal, of course, would tie Washington down in never-ending debates about the debt ceiling and the budget, leaving the government with no energy or capacity to focus on anything else. Which might be Norquist's aim. But that doesn't mean the rest of us should sign on.

What Col. Qaddafi learned from Iraq

Sending advisers to Libya is the latest in a series of signs of trouble for the NATO campaign, which began in earnest with a stinging, American-led attack but has seemed to fizzle since operational command was transferred to NATO on March 31. After that, a rebel offensive was smashed by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces, which sent the rebels reeling toward the eastern city of Ajdabiya.

New tactics used by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces — mixing with civilian populations, camouflaging weapons and driving pickup trucks instead of military vehicles — have made it hard for NATO pilots to find targets. At the same time, loyalist artillery and tanks have hammered the rebel-held city of Misurata with cluster bombs, which have been banned by much of the world, making a mockery of NATO’s central mission of protecting civilians.

via nytimes.com

I don't know if Col. Qaddafi learned these tactics by watching the war in Iraq. But I do know they're pretty classic insurgent tactics. If you've got a weaker force than your opponent--and at this point, Qaddafi's opponent is NATO--then you don't confront your opponent strength to strength. You hide out in the population and rely on subterfuge instead of overt force. Unsporting? Sure. But Qaddafi wants to hold onto power; there's no reason for him to play by the rules of the West. Becoming an insurgent is the best way for him to hold onto power.

LZ Granderson: The favorite openly gay dad of social conservatives everywhere

Interesting phenomenon the last couple of days: A few of my socially conservative Facebook friends have posted a link to this LZ Granderson essay about the oversexualization of young girls. An excerpt:

And then I realize as creepy as it is to think a store like Abercrombie is offering something like the "Ashley", the fact remains that sex only sells because people are buying it. No successful retailer would consider introducing an item like a padded bikini top for kindergartners if they didn't think people would buy it.

If they didn't think parents would buy it, which raises the question: What in the hell is wrong with us?

Sensible stuff, hitting that sweet spot where social conservatives and feminist liberals can find common ground. And I don't think my socially conservative friends know each other, which indicates the essay is going viral. But I wouldn't mention it except for one thing: LZ Granderson is gay. Openly gay. With a teen son. He's a gay dad.

A conservative friend responds to this observation with one of his own: "If he's right, he's right." And my friend is right!

But here's the thing: So much of the modern argument against gay marriage is actually against gay parenthood. Maggie Gallagher of the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage re-made the argument in explicit terms this week in testimony before Congress:

“Marriage is the union of husband and wife for a reason: these are the only unions that create new life and connect those children in love to their mother and father,” Gallagher said. “This is not necessarily the reason why individuals marry; this is the great reason, the public reason why government gets involved in the first place.”

Gallagher said the need to raise children by married parents of opposite genders affirms the rationale for having in place DOMA, the 1996 law that prohibits recognition of same-sex marriage, and criticized the Justice Department for dropping defense of the law.

“This is the rationale for the national definition of marriage proposed by Congress in passing DOMA: ‘civil society has an interest in maintaining and protecting the institution of heterosexual marriage because it has a deep and abiding interest in encouraging responsible procreation and child-rearing,’” Gallagher said. “If we accept, as DOMA explicitly does, that this is a core public purpose of marriage, then treating same-sex unions as marriage makes little sense.”

Implicit in all of this is the idea that gay parents can't be good—or maybe even adequate—parents. And because of this, government shouldn't recognize the unions of gay men and women regardless of whether or not child-rearing comes into play.

But when a gay dad like Granderson describes himself as a "Tiger Dad" whose approach to parenting is to be his son's parent, not his friend—and when that gay dad happens not to mention his gayness—he becomes a hero of social conservatives.

And that's fine. It's good! I don't expect it will convince my socially conservative friends that a mother-and-father parenting relationship isn't the best way to raise kids. But I guess I can hope that admiring Granderson's parenting philosophy can open their minds (just a little bit) to the idea that other types of families deserve government support and recognition.

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.