The poor are making poor choices. Right?

I want to read more deeply into this new paper about how debt is swamping the middle class—which makes the suggestion that the leverage problem is holding back America's economy. But in a quick overview, I couldn't help but notice this:

• The debt is highest among the middle class. Middle-income families before the crisis had a debt-to-income ratio of 155.4 percent in 2007, the last year for which data are available, for families with incomes between $62,000 and $100,000, which constituted the fourth quintile of income in our nation in 2007. This ratio is higher than for any other income group. Families in the top 20 percent of income (with incomes above $100,000) had a ratio of debt to income of 123.6 percent, and families in the third quintile (with incomes between $39,100 and $62,000) owed 130.7 percent of their income. Households in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution (with incomes below $39,100 in 2007) owed well below 100 percent of their income.

In the Facebook thread on my payday loans post yesterday, there was some discussion—typical in these circumstances—that the poor are poor, and dragged down by the burdens of debt, because of the poor choices they make. And in some cases, I'm sure that's true. But honestly: It appears that the low-income folks of America might be the only ones not taking on far more debt than they can possibly afford.

Guilty as charged

Cooking is the easiest thing to do in the house. But what women are still expected to do, what my wife is still expected to do, is to remember when every sock in the house is about to get a hole in it, or when the kids are due for a dentist’s appointment or a play date – that whole recipe for family life, women still feel obliged to do it more than men. And so men do get a certain kind of cheap credit for being a family man just by cooking. Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

via theamericanconservative.com

Gonna have to examine my conscience on that one...

Today in inequality reading: Stagnant wages

A new report from the Resolution Foundation, a British research organization that focuses on workers with low income, has done just that. The report covers 10 rich countries, and looks at the growth rate of median pay versus economic growth per capita from 2000 to the start of the Great Recession.

Here’s the key chart showing that ratio:

A higher ratio means that the pace of growth for median pay was close to the pace of growth for output per capita. A low ratio means that median pay grew much more slowly than did the economy as a whole.

Of the 10 countries analyzed, Finland showed the closest relationship between the living standards of the typical worker and improvements in the overall economy. The United States was on the lower end. From 2000 to 2007, median pay increased at a quarter of the pace of output per capita. In other words, the typical American worker did not share much in the country’s growing wealth even when the economy was good.

via economix.blogs.nytimes.com

The unseen casualties of a decade of war, continued

The U.S. is inadvertently financing human trafficking and worker abuse because of the federal government’s poor oversight of contractors operating in war zones, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) told a congressional panel today.

Federal contracting regulations rely on self-policing and reporting to contracting officers, which has not been proven to be an effective way to monitor trafficking, POGO Director of Investigations Nick Schwellenbach told a subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Although the Department of Defense has made some improvements in combatting trafficking, there is still a notable lack of criminal enforcement. In the few investigations that have been conducted into alleged contractor involvement in human trafficking in war zones, some of the people making allegations were never even interviewed, Schwellenbach told the Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and Procurement Reform.

“The lack of oversight of federal contractors has led to taxpayer dollars funding these terrible crimes,” Schwellenbach said. “The U.S. has a moral and legal obligation to do everything it can to protect its contracted workforce in war zones.”

via pogo.org

If you haven't read Sarah Stillman's June article in the New Yorker about human trafficking in U.S. war zones, you should. It's a heartbreaker.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_stillman

We're still talking about Janet Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction?'

LOS ANGELES (November 2, 2011) – The Parents Television Council® condemned the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling claiming the Janet Jackson striptease during the 2004 Super Bowl was not indecent and does not merit a fine. The PTC and its 1.3 million members led the public outcry after the incident by calling on the Federal Communications Commission to levy a hefty fine against CBS and its affiliates for violating the federal broadcast indecency law.

via parentstv.org

You know what's really indecent? That any part of our government is still occupied with a two-second flash of flesh that occurred nearly eight years ago. CBS clearly didn't intend to air such a moment; it hasn't led to a parade of prime-time stripteases—because alienating family viewers clearly isn't in the broadcast network's best interest. End it already.

Big corporations pay a lower tax rate

You often hear people argue that the United States’ corporate tax rate of 35 percent is much higher than other nations, but don’t be fooled. Thanks to loopholes, the actual tax rate is much lower—about 18.5 percent according to a survey of the 280 largest publicly traded companies by the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice. About a quarter of the companies paid less than 10 percent in taxes over the past three years, while 30 companies—including Boeing, Wells Fargo, and GE—appeared to pay no taxes whatsoever.

via thedailybeast.com

I don't actually have a clean take on this, though I thought it was important to note. It could be an argument for tax reform—lowering the rate but removing the loopholes. On the other hand: The loopholes always seep back in, and the new lowered rate would probably be seen as the ceiling, meaning that eventually the government would be deprived of necessary revenue.

And on the other other hand: Maybe the loopholes aren't always bad. Boeing didn't pay taxes, for example, because it used tax credits for creating 9,000 jobs. Would those jobs exist without the tax credits? I don't know; I suspect they probably would. But the incentive probably doesn't hurt, either.

George Will wants freedom of association ... for conservatives

There's a lot to unpack in George Will's column today about Vanderbilt University's decision to withhold recognition from the Christian Legal Society, a campus group that (naturally, given its orientation) wants to ensure that only Christians can be in its leadership.

I think Will goes wrong by starting to compare apples to oranges. Will must be quoted at length:

In 1995, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the private group that organized Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade to bar participation by a group of Irish American gays, lesbians and bisexuals eager to express pride in their sexual orientations. The court said the parade was an expressive event, so the First Amendment protected it from being compelled by state anti-discrimination law to transmit an ideological message its organizers did not wish to express.

In 2000, the court overturned the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling that the state law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation required the Boy Scouts to accept a gay scoutmaster. The Scouts’ First Amendment right of “expressive association” trumped New Jersey’s law.

Unfortunately, in 2010 the court held, 5 to 4, that a public law school in California did not abridge First Amendment rights when it denied the privileges associated with official recognition to just one student group — the Christian Legal Society chapter, because it limited voting membership and leadership positions to Christians who disavow “sexual conduct outside of marriage between a man and a woman.”

It seems to me that these three cases, though, are entirely consistent. The first two uphold the rights of private organizations to choose their members and their message. The third doesn't change that! The Christian Legal Society still has a right to exist in the California case—it just doesn't have the right to use the college's funds and facilities if it's going to exclude some students from membership. As Justice Ginsburg said in writing for the majority on that case: "In requiring CLS—in com­mon with all other student organizations—to choose be­tween welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress
constitutional limitations. CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings’ policy."

If anything, Vanderbilt has a stronger defense of its policy to deny the CLS the use of its funds and facilities: Unlike Hastings, it's a private university! Surely it, like the parade organizers and the Boy Scounts, has the right to chose its own expressive associations as well! But Will smells the smoke of pernicious progressive plotting:

Although Vanderbilt is a private institution, its policy is congruent with “progressive” public policy, under which society shall be made to progress up from a multiplicity of viewpoints to a government-supervised harmony. Vanderbilt’s policy, formulated in the name of enlarging rights, is another skirmish in the progressives’ struggle to deny more and more social entities the right to deviate from government-promoted homogeneity of belief. Such compulsory conformity is, of course, enforced in the name of diversity.

Shorter Will: Freedom of association is important ... for conservatives. If a private entity wants to exclude gays, he will defend to the death its right to do so. If a private entity wants to exclude a club that excludes gays, though, it's the death of freedom. Such a one-way conception of liberty isn't really liberty at all, is it? The shape of Will's argument is—as Justice Ginsburg suggested—seeking a privileged position for social conservatives under the rubric of seeking parity. That's usually what conservative groups accuse gay rights activists of doing!

It's worth mentioning that Will's column appears the same week as news emerges about Shorter University, a Christian college in Georgia that is now requiring its employees to abstain from pre- and extra-marital sex, including homosexual sex. I don't agree with Shorter University's theology—but it is a private university which takes no state or federal money. So even though I won't be sending my son there, I will defend the college's right to choose its associations. George Will would too, I imagine. He just doesn't apply the same standards in the opposite direction. Which means he's less attached to the liberty he claims to espouse than he is to opposing gays and liberals.

Community colleges on the rise

Comparatively affluent students are picking community colleges over four-year schools in growing numbers, a sign of changing attitudes toward an institution long identified with poorer people.

A recent national survey by Sallie Mae, the student loan giant, has found that 22 percent of students from households earning $100,000 or more attended community colleges in the 2010-11 academic year, up from 12 percent in the previous year. It was the highest rate reported in four years of surveys.

In the lengthening economic downturn, even relatively prosperous families have grown reluctant to borrow for college. Schools are finding that fewer students are willing to pay the full published price of attendance, which tops $55,000 at several private universities. More students are living at home.

via washingtonpost.com

My son's just 3 years old, but I've already spent a lot more time than I expected thinking about how best to provide his education. When he was born, I think I had a plan to get him into an Ivy League school. Now...not so much. It depends on his gifts and interests, of course, but I'm not interested in saddling either him or me with huge amounts of debt for his college experience. College will probably be important. An expensive college? Maybe not.

Solving the jobs crisis through despair

Some goodish news from the Fed...

The unemployment rate, it predicted, would still be at least 8.5 percent at the end of 2012, at least 7.8 percent at the end of 2013 and at least 6.8 percent at the end of 2014.

But at least that's a drop in unemployment, right?

Such reductions probably would come in part from people abandoning the search for work, rather than those finding new jobs.

 (Sigh.) Expect government officials to tout the falling unemployment rate even as other indicators—median wages, number of households in poverty—continue to stagnate or get worse.

The unseen casualties of a decade of war

Adolescent boys with at least one parent in the military are at elevated risk of engaging in school-based physical fighting, carrying a weapon and joining a gang, according to research presented today at the American Public Health Association’s 139^th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

 

The study by researchers at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health looked at the strain of military deployment on U.S. families, particularly its toll on adolescent boys and girls whose parents are on active duty. The research is based on data from the 2008 Washington State Healthy Youth Survey of more than 10,000 adolescents in the 8^th, 10^th and 12^th grades of public schools.

The study finds that military deployment is associated with a 1.77 higher odds of physical fighting and 2.14 higher odds of gang membership among adolescent boys in 8^th grade. Girls in 8^th grade with at least one parent in the military were at twice the risk of carrying a weapon.

via apha.org

Media Research Center on the Herman Cain scandal: Clinton! Clinton! Clinton!

The Media Research Center seems to think the media is proving its liberal bias by covering the Herman Cain scandal so closely, whereas it strained to ignore the Clinton sex scandals of the 1990s. Which is weird, because my memory of the late 1990s is that political coverage was dominated, for a time, by news of Clinton's sex scandals. There was even an impeachment or something.

Nonetheless, MRC concludes:

When one contrasts the sexual harassment scandals of Democrat Bill Clinton, which included on the record accusers, with the hazy allegations against Republican Herman Cain, it becomes clear that the networks have enthusiasm for one and ignored the other.

That's interesting framing, because the "hazy allegations" against Cain are actually confirmed cases that were settled with monetary payouts a decade ago. That makes them somewhat more tangible than the MRC suggests, it seems to me.

Thomas Sowell defends usury

At NRO today, Thomas Sowell gets cranky about a California newspaper's investigation into "payday loan" companies and their practices. He particularly objects to a line suggesting that customers of such institutions are charged what amounts to an annual interest rate of more than 400 percent:

The 460 percent figure comes from imagining that the borrower is not just going to borrow the money for a couple of weeks, but is going to keep on borrowing every couple of weeks all year long.

Using this kind of reasoning — or lack of reasoning — you could quote the price of salmon as $15,000 a ton or say a hotel room rents for $36,000 a year, when no consumer buys a ton of salmon and few people stay in a hotel room all year. It is clever propaganda, but do people buy newspapers to be propagandized?

Sowell, having raised such questions, might've attempted to answer them.

That might've detracted from his screed, though, because the evidence is that quite a few customers actually do get caught in a debt spiral with these companies. In 2007, Michael Stegman did an overview of the industry for the Journal of Economic Perspectives:

Sowell, in the end, decries the story as part of a lefty plot to keep payday lenders from defending themselves:

Instead, we get the story of how the payday-loan industry, like most other industries, has lobbyists contributing money to politicians to try to be spared more regulations. This the investigative reporter calls “protecting” the payday-loan industry.

Protecting it from what? From the politicians. Some would call their campaign donations “protection money,” in the same sense in which the mafia collects protection money.

Not exactly. In California, the payday loan industry has put its muscle behind a bill that would boost their profits by letting them lend greater amounts of money at higher rates of interest. That's not defensive, it's aggressive. If Sowell's mafia analogy is correct ... well, let's just say the payday industry would be the guy in the leather chair, stroking a cat.

I suspect the broader argument is that payday companies provide a valuable service, which workers are free to use or not use. But it certainly appears that the systemic incentive is to put the working poor on the hook and encourage them to stay there for as long as is profitable. Sowell's fellow conservatives like to talk a lot about liberty from government, but payday loan lenders offer plenty of evidence there are other institutions that offer oppression, which is no less pernicious.

Rand Paul is really angry about the Herman Cain scandal story

Paul adds that fear of sexual harassment suits damages workplace relations.

“There are people now who hesitate to tell a joke to a woman in the workplace, any kind of joke, because it could be interpreted incorrectly,” he says. “I don’t. I’m very cautious.” 

via nationalreview.com

You know what else damages workplace relations? *Sexual harassment.* It's ok, I think, to be cautious about telling that dirty joke.

We know how to help the economy: Aid distressed homeowners

I found this recent magazine article very interesting. Here are a couple of key paragraphs from it:

Underwater homeowners can’t refinance at today’s rock-bottom interest rates, because they’re considered bad credit risks. They can’t move to where jobs are more plentiful or the pay is better, because if they sell their home, they end up owing the banks a bundle. But if they lose their job, their wages drop. If they have a medical emergency, they may fall behind on their mortgage payments and be foreclosed upon. If that happens, they and their family can lose both their home and their credit rating.

We don’t need another stimulus to fix what ails the economy. We need to fix the housing market. And the way to do that is to allow a mortgage cramdown in the context of a personal bankruptcy. Put simply, someone who owes $450,000 on a house worth $300,000 isn’t going to be helped that much by a lower interest rate. He would be helped​—​as would the housing market and the larger economy​—​if the lender could be compelled in a bankruptcy proceeding to write down the loan amount to $300,000, which is all the lender would recover in any case were it to foreclose on and then auction off the property.

Oops! That's actually two different magazine articles—the first paragraph comes from Robert Reich's piece in November's American Prospect, a liberal magazine. The second—and this is kind of shocking—is from Ike Brannon, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard.

Reich and Brannon have slightly different approaches to the issue, but their bottom line is roughly the same: Distressed homeowners should have their mortgages written down to reflect the post-bubble value of their homes—so that those owners don't owe more than what the house is worth. Banks make no less money than they would if they were forced to foreclose, but owners gain back some of their money and freedom to move to a new job.

Free those underwater homeowners, and they might start buying stuff again. When people start buying stuff again, demand will rise and the people who make and sell stuff will likely start hiring more people to make and sell that stuff. The economy would get new life.

Smart people on the left and right can see this. Yet a serious effort to help these homeowners doesn't seem to be in the offing, either from the president, his GOP rivals for the office, or Congress. Why not?

Blog news

First of all, a thank you to everybody who reads this blog regularly: October was the best traffic month I've had since returning to this Blogspot site after leaving Philadelphia Weekly. It's more gratifying to write this stuff when people are actually reading it.

Second of all: I'm certain I won't break that record in November. I have my (knock on wood) final diverticulitis surgery on Nov. 8, and preparations are already consuming my time and mental energy. I won't be here quite as much this month. I'm sorry about that. My hope is that being restored to full health allows me to write and opine more vigorously than before.

I had thought, for a little while after the first of my three surgeries, that I might abandon political blogging entirely. What I've discovered in recent months is that I have a passion for understanding and making sense of how the country is run, and how it might be run better. I want the blog to reflect my other interests, too: Parenting, cooking, reading, movies. But the core of it will continue to be learning and thinking about policy and politics. My hope is not to hew to orthodoxy, but to be an independent thinker. Maybe even "original thinker" on occasion, but I'll settle for independent at the least.

So I hope you're still here when I come back. Thanks again for reading.

Even Paul Krugman thinks Max Boot sounds like Paul Krugman

I've poked fun at conservative defense writer Max Boot lately because of Boot's recent assertions that cutting defense spending would end up cutting American jobs in a soft economy. I noted that Boot sounded like liberal columnist Paul Krugman, and suggested that "mainstream conservative Republicans—whatever their fiscal rhetoric—have long favored the soft socialism of big defense spending."

Krugman sounds the same theme this morning, not mentioning Boot specifically, but otherwise making the same point. He calls this crowd "weaponized Keynesians," a term borrowed from Barney Frank.

First things first: Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this conclusion, but economics isn’t a morality play: spending on things you don’t like is still spending, and more spending would create more jobs.

Beyond that, there’s a point made long ago by the Polish economist Michael Kalecki: to admit that the government can create jobs is to reduce the perceived importance of business confidence.

Appeals to confidence have always been a key debating point for opponents of taxes and regulation; Wall Street’s whining about President Obama is part of a long tradition in which wealthy businessmen and their flacks argue that any hint of populism on the part of politicians will upset people like them, and that this is bad for the economy. Once you concede that the government can act directly to create jobs, however, that whining loses much of its persuasive power — so Keynesian economics must be rejected, except in those cases where it’s being used to defend lucrative contracts.

Right. I don't mind that Boot and his fellow hawks are making an economic argument for defense spending. I just wish they'd apply that same logic to the rest of government.

Shut up and be happy, you ungrateful Occupy Wall Street protesters!

A conservative friend posted this to Facebook a couple of days ago, and it's been gnawing at me a bit:

The suggestion here being that the Occupy Wall Street crowd is selfish and ridiculous to be protesting.

This is both right and wrong. We should all be grateful in a cosmic sense for what we do have, of course. But "being a starving baby with ribs showing" shouldn't be the only grounds for complaint. (If it is, the Tea Party might want to pipe down as well.)

If you believe that your betters are tilting the playing field not through luck, not through accident, not merely through hard work, but through the greasing of palms and the escaping of the same rules that apply to you—then I think it's fine and appropriate to speak up.

This is a similar logic to those who suggest (say) American women shouldn't complain about disparities in the United States because, hey, Afghanistan! Burkhas! It's a logic that allows the people at the top to deflect the complaints (merited or not) of people in the middle and even people near the bottom—in in deflecting, serves those people at the top quite well.

It's also a logic at odds with the American Founding that conservatives like to claim as their unique heritage: The Founders might've been taxed without representation, but they were doing pretty well under the British, by and large. My conservative friend replies to this point that the Founders were concerned with "representation and consent of the governed. It wasn't simple materialism."

Well, exactly.

There are many Occupy Wall Street critics who have convinced themselves that the protests are, at foundation, envy by the poor of the rich. Perhaps there's some of that at work. But the most common complaint, as I understand it, is about governance. The fact that government is supposed to be accountable to people, but seems to be more responsive to moneyed interests—in ways that disadvantage many of us.

No: Things don't suck as much here as they might in other parts of the world. They might not suck as much as they did 100 or 200 years ago for many people. But it's not irrational to look at one's own time and place and ask if we could or should be doing better—and it's not selfish to push for that improvement if you can identify it.

The flat tax is bad

So says I in this week's Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk:

The flat tax is Republican-led class warfare. It makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, for no better purpose than making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

We have progressive taxation -- in which people with higher incomes pay a higher tax rate than those at the lower end of the scale -- for a reason: People on the low end are less able to pay. Flat taxes invert that logic, giving the rich a huge tax break and often burdening the poor.

The Tax Policy Center says a low-income family making $31,000 a year would lose its $5,147 tax return under Perry's plan, for example.

(Herman Cain's plan is worse. Nearly everybody making under $50,000 would see a huge tax increase.)

Perry's plan was unveiled the same day as a new Congressional Budget Office report showing economic inequality is widening in this country.

From 1979 to 2007, people in the richest 1 percent grew their after-tax income by 275 percent. The three-fifths of people in the middle class saw less than 40 percent income growth during the same period -- and the bottom fifth grew incomes just 18 percent.

The gap is getting bigger. Even before the recession, the middle class was being left behind. Perry's plan would exacerbate the problem -- and likely balloon the deficit even further.

"But I don't care about that," Perry says. He should.

In the new book "The Darwin Economy," economist Robert H. Frank points to research that high levels of income inequality are correlated to slow economic growth. "Larger shares (of income) for poor and middle-income groups were associated with higher growth rates," Frank writes.

Flat taxes burden the poor, make income inequality worse, and in so doing put a stranglehold on an already-strangled economy. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

Ben, in his portion of the column, points out that Perry's plan would let people opt to stay under the current tax structure. Fair point. The likely result of that is top earners would choose the flat tax and lower earners would stick with the current tax structure—meaning the Perry plan is to make the rich richer, and let the poor spin their wheels. That's not quite as awful as the picture I paint, but it seems kind of pointless—particularly in an era of ballooning deficits. Nobody's made a serious suggestion that I'm aware of that the problem with the economy is that rich people don't have enough money; I'm skeptical that such a plan would actually deliver good results for the rest of us.

Rich Lowry: The poor have only themselves to blame

I wondered where National Review editor Rich Lowry was going with this. He spends the bulk of his column conceding that, yes, the American Dream is "raggedy around the edges," that if you're born poor in America, you're all too likely to stay poor, that "picking the right parents" seems to make more of a difference here than it does in (say) Finland for your future economic prospects.

So, God bless Lowry for providing some conservative reality-based pushback to Paul Ryan's fantasy of an economically mobile society.

But Lowry arrives at the end of his column—just two paragraphs to go!—and concludes that despite all this, one shouldn't blame America's economic structure—really, the poor have only themselves to blame:

This stagnation is less a statement about the structure of America’s economy than about its culture. As Ronald Haskins, also of the Brookings Institution, wrote in an essay for National Affairs, “economic mobility is constrained above all by personal choices and behaviors.” He argues that society’s leaders “should herald the ‘success sequence’: finish schooling, get a job, get married, have babies.” If Americans finished high school, worked full-time at a job that matched their skills, and married at the rate they did in the 1970s, the poverty rate would be cut by 70 percent.

These old-fashioned bourgeois virtues, and particularly marriage, rarely figure in the public debate. Everyone is more comfortable talking about taxes or the banks, as the America Dream frays.

Let's unpack this a bit, using Finland—Lowry's comparison—as our guide a bit.

First of all, marriage, since that's the item that got my attention. While it's true that the marriage rate in the United States had declined in recent decades, it's also vastly truer that the marriage rate in the United States is much higher than in Finland: 7.5 marriages for every 1,000 people in the population in 2005, compared to Finland's rate of around 5 marriages per 1,000 people in the same year. The decline in marriage rates has happened in just about every developed country around the world (except Sweden, where the rate wasn't that high to begin with) but the United States remains one of the most marrying countries of them all. To a great extent, "old-fashioned bourgeois virtues" have held on tightly here—only it doesn't seem to make much of a difference in our economic mobility rates.

Maybe it's just the poor who aren't married? Nope. A 2004 study from the MDRC suggests that "through their early 30s, economically disadvantaged adults actually are more likely to marry than advantaged adults." The poor are attempting, at least, to embrace old-fashioned bourgeois virtues—but it's also true that those marriages more often end in divorce. That does give rise to a chicken-and-egg question, I suppose: Are the poor economically disadvantaged because they can't build stable marriages? Or can they not build stable marriages because they're economically disadvantaged? I don't know the answer to that question, but I have a hunch. But the overall point is this: The United States is a marrying country, and our poor are a marrying people. The evidence seems weighted against Lowry's point.

I'm going to skip the baby-making part, except to note that having a kid hasn't done anything to improve my economic prospects. Kids eat!

Let's focus on education, instead: It's true that the high school graduation rate in the United States is shamefully low—72 percent, compared to Finland's 92 percent. (It's worth noting that Finland also has a much higher rate of college graduates: 48.5 percent compared to America's 36.5 percent.) I'm skeptical Lowry and his fellow conservatives would recommend adopting the Finnish education system—it's European!—but I could be wrong.

For those who do graduate high school, how easy is it to find a "full-time job that matches their skills?" It's much more difficult these days than it was in the 1970s to find such a job that will pull you out of poverty. We already know that between the 1970s and now, the American economy shifted pretty radically, shedding manufacturing jobs and pushing more people to the service industry. Generally speaking, that's meant a shift to not-as-well-paying jobs: In September, a manufacturing-sector job in the United States paid $980.98 per week; a private-sector service job paid $756.96—provided you weren't in retail, which paid $496.12 per week. These are average wages, not median wages—which would provide a better picture of what a typical worker in those sectors make. Generally speaking, though, the type of full-time job that matches the skills of a high school graduate has shifted away from well-paying to not-as-well paying. That's assuming the jobs exist; the high unemployment rate suggests that's not always the case.

Making babies won't change that dynamic.

Maybe it doesn't make sense to blame taxes and bankers for that shift, but the issue is definitely one of economics—not just or even mostly, as Lowry tries to suggest, about poor people having bad habits. The numbers indicate that the poor are trying; the opportunities aren't there. Whose fault is that?

Surprise me

Forgive me a brief, personal interlude, but something I've noticed about myself: I enjoy reading conservative writers like David Frum, Conor Friedersdorf, Rod Dreher, and Nicole Gelinas because, frequently, they stray off the reservation. I thought I just appreciated un-orthodoxy, but now I suspect that I enjoy reading them (too) because they sometimes agree with and confirm my own personal biases.

I'm trying to think of any writers I enjoy who might be described as A) liberal and B) unorthodox. No names come to mind. And that worries me about my own writing here, to be frank: I try to be on guard against hackery and tribalism, but it's damned hard to avoid those temptations when writing about politics.

Contrarianism for its own sake is just as lazy as any other unthinking ideological conformity, of course. But who can I read who will surprise me? How can I train myself to surprise myself on occasion?