Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Fox News says I'm an 'anti-Christian bigot'

Hey, at least they spelled my name right. Apparently I'm an anti-Christian bigot for having the temerity to criticize Tim Tebow, using Scripture no less. Which, fine. But what amuses me is that the commentator also paints Kurt Warner with the 'anti-Christian bigot' brush—yes, the same Kurt Warner who was previously the highest-profile evangelical Christian in the NFL. Purity is tough, man.

Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to Gene Marks

When I read this piece I was immediately called back, as I so often am, to my days at Howard and the courses I took looking at slavery. Whenever we discussed the back-breaking conditions, the labor, the sale of family members etc., there was always someone who asserted, roughly, "I couldn't been no slave. They'd a had to kill me!" I occasionally see a similar response here where someone will assert, with less ego, "Why didn't the slaves rebel?" More commonly you get people presiding from on high insisting that if they had lived in the antebellum South, they would have freed all of their slaves.

What all these responses have in common is a kind benevolent, and admittedly unintentional, self-aggrandizement. These are not bad people (much as I am sure Mr. Marks isn't a bad person), but they are people speaking from a gut feeling, a kind of revulsion at a situation which offends our modern morals. In the case of the observer of slavery, it is the chaining and marketing of human flesh. In the case of Mr. Marks, it's the astonishingly high levels of black poverty.

It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings--to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, if we were slave masters our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter, that were we poor and black our sense of Protestant industry would be a mighty power sending gang leaders, gang members, hunger, depression and sickle cell into flight. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct.

Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, but on the whole, mediocre. 

That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook--but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.

Read the whole thing.

Unemployment insurance helps, not hinders, Americans looking for work

Claims that unemployment insurance benefits dissuade the jobless from looking for work are untrue, as the accompanying chart shows. Research by Carl Van Horn and the Heldrich Center at Rutgers University shows that unemployed workers who receive unemployment compensation do more to find a job than those who never receive benefits. They do more online job searching, are more likely to look at newspaper classified ads, and are more likely to send email inquiries and applications to prospective employers.

The reason unemployed Americans can’t find jobs isn’t a failure to look. As EPI economist Heidi Shierholz points out, they can’t find jobs because there are 10.6 million more unemployed workers than there are available jobs.

And now: A moment of snark about Zbigniew Brezezinski

The former national security advisor writes this morning about how to confront and accomodate China's rise: By making allies with everybody else!
A successful U.S. effort to enlarge the West, making it the world's most stable and democratic zone, would seek to combine power with principle. A cooperative, larger West—extending from North America and Europe through Eurasia (by eventually embracing Russia and Turkey), all the way to Japan and South Korea—would enhance the appeal of the West's core principles for other cultures, thus encouraging the gradual emergence of a universal democratic political culture.
I could be wrong, but Brezezinski seems to want to enlarge the West to include ... everyplace but China and Africa. And I could be wrong, but that seems to be far too large a coalition to actually be effective. As we're seeing in Europe, it's tough to hold continental coalitions together—there are just so many competing interests. Growing the "West"—even informally—seems unlikely.

Soon, foreign nationals may have more ability to influence elections than you do

At least, that's what I take away from Paul Sherman's Wall Street Journal piece today. There's a case winding through the courts in which foreign nationals—both residents of New York—are suing to be allowed to make contributions to political campaigns, saying they have the right to do so under the First Amendment.

On Dec. 12, the Supreme Court passed up its first opportunity to announce whether it would take the case. Some observers take this as a hint that the court is going to let the D.C. panel's ruling stand. That would be a mistake, and a sharp reversal from the hard line the court has taken recently on speech-squelching campaign-finance laws. 
The panel's ruling stemmed from a conviction that "foreigners" are different and that foreign speech poses a unique threat to the American political system. As to the first point, foreigners surely are different—they can be prohibited from voting, holding elective office, or serving in certain roles of government authority. But none of this has any bearing on whether their speech is entitled to First Amendment protection. After all, corporations are not allowed to vote but, as the Supreme Court recognized in Citizens United, they are still permitted to speak out about candidates.
Sherman is a cheerleader for letting foreign citizens contribute to American campaigns, but man this seems like a bad idea. If the Supreme Court affirms his vision, it will—in recent years—have allowed both corporations and foreign nationals unlimited power to promote American political candidates of their choosing. You know who this crowds out of the game? Actual, flesh-and-blood voting American citizens—folks whose political cash contributions are necessarily small, for the most part, if they exist at all.

I'm not sure how to write this without sounding like a paranoid crank. I really don't believe that free speech is a zero-sum affair. I'm not a nativist. I do believe that the best answer to bad speech is more speech.

But yeah, I'm concerned that a group of wealthy citizens of China or Israel or Russia could get together and bundle their contributions to tip the balance of an American presidential election. I'm concerned that if money equals speech, then it's often impossible to answer bad speech with more speech in any meaningful way. And I'm concerned that—again—actual flesh-and-blood regular American citizens are going to wind up the least influential players in the political process.

On the last count, it's possible that's already happened. But it should be resisted at each and every turn.

Nobody gets married anymore

Barely half of all adults in the United States -- a record low -- are currently married, and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides (26.5 years) and grooms (28.7), according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data.

In 1960, 72% of all adults ages 18 and older were married; today just 51% are. If current trends continue, the share of adults who are currently married will drop to below half within a few years. Other adult living arrangements-including cohabitation, single-person households and single parenthood-have all grown more prevalent in recent decades.

The Pew Research analysis also finds that the number of new marriages in the U.S. declined by 5% between 2009 and 2010, a sharp one-year drop that may or may not be related to the sour economy.

That last paragraph reminds me of a favorite conservative trope—espoused by National Review's Rick Lowry, among others—that poor people can not be poor if they get married, because married people tend not to be poor. But correlation isn't causation, of course, and I wonder if the declining marriage rates/rising poverty rates don't tell a different story: That there are a lot of people who simply don't feel like they have the economic resources to formally form a household and start a family.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Gene Marks is apparently not a poor black child in West Philadelphia

PhillyGrrl and Dan Denvir have already hopped on Gene Marks for his "if I were a poor black child" piece for Forbes, but it really is breathtaking in its awfulness. Marks writes about what he would do, as a poor black child in West Philadelphia, to stop being so poor.

Shorter Marks: "If I were a poor black kid, I'd use all the advantages I have from not being a poor black kid."

Sound too harsh? Check out these two, entirely representative paragraphs: 
If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study. I’d become expert at Google Scholar. I’d visit study sites like SparkNotes andCliffsNotes to help me understand books. I’d watch relevant teachings onAcademic Earth, TED and the Khan Academy. (I say relevant because some of these lectures may not be related to my work or too advanced for my age. But there are plenty of videos on these sites that are suitable to my studies and would help me stand out.) I would also, when possible, get my books for free at Project Gutenberg and learn how to do research at the CIA World Factbookand Wikipedia to help me with my studies. 
I would use homework tools like Backpack, and Diigo to help me store and share my work with other classmates. I would use Skype to study with other students who also want to do well in my school. I would take advantage of study websites like Evernote, Study Rails, Flashcard Machine, Quizlet, and free online calculators.
All you have to do to not be a poor black child is hop on your computer and go online!

Here's the problem: That's not actually an option for lots and lots and lots of poor kids in this town. At one North Philadelphia school, it's estimated that only 25 percent of the students have access to a computer and the Internet at home. A year ago, the Knight Foundation estimated that 40 percent of Philadelphia residents do not have home Internet service. 

And the Public Health Management Corporation not-so-long-ago released this survey of Philadelphia Internet habits. Among the findings:
• Philadelphia residents are more likely to be non-Internet users than are their suburban counterparts. More than a quarter (27.3%) of Philadelphia adults do not use the Internet. 
• For those who do not use the Internet, the most common reason cited was lack of access. More than one-third of adults who do not use the Internet (36.5%) indicated they did not have access or did not have a computer.

• Poverty was also a factor. Adults living in poverty are much more likely to be non-Internet users than are non-poor adults: 42.5% of adults living below the federal poverty line do not use the Internet, versus 16.0% of adults living above the federal poverty line.2 Latino adults (34.7%) and black adults (28.1%) are more likely to be non-Internet users than white adults (15.6%).
There aren't really numbers here to indicate the level of access that Philadelphia's "poor black kids" have to online resources like the ones described by Marks, but it's not hard to draw a conclusion from all the other numbers: That access is most likely insufficient.

There are other problems with his essay: He urges kids—the one, ahem, reading Forbes—to aim at getting in a magnet school. Which sounds great, but isn't easy: They have restricted-size enrollments, and getting in can be a bit of a crapshoot.

Overall, the tone of Marks' essay reminds me of an old Sam Kinison bit about hunger in Africa. The answer to the problem, Kinison would scream, is to go "LIVE WHERE THE FOOD IS!" Which is both obvious and dumb. It's nice, I guess, that Marks is thinking about the plight of poor black kids in Philadelphia. It's just too bad there's little evidence he's tried to understand the challenges that are actually involved.
 

Doesn't economic growth cause income inequality?

A commenter asks: "Can liberals and conservatives politely agree that the only time an economy can grow is when 'income inequality' is widening?"

Sure. Absolutely. In a hypothetical case where everybody's income was growing 10 percent a year, that 10 percent would add up to a lot more dollars for the rich guy than the poor guy. But a chart depicting their incomes would show more or less the same rate of growth rising in concert with each other, even as the gaps between the lines grew wider. That might eventually produce a problem—but then again, it might not.

That's not really the situation in the United States, though. Here's a chart from the CBO's October report about income inequality.


The 21st through 80th percentiles—essentially, the middle class—barely see their income edge up between 1979 and 2007. The Top 1 Percent? With a brief break for the post-9/11 recession, their income curves sharply, sharply up, diverging from the other lines pretty dramatically. It's true the economy was generally growing during these periods. But it's also true the gains from that growth went almost entirely to the top of the distribution curve. To me, that suggests something is out of whack.

Four job-seekers for every opening

Today’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the number of job openings decreased by 110,000 in October to 3.3 million. The total number of unemployed workers in October was 13.9 million (unemployment is from the Current Population Survey). Therefore the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings was 4.3-to-1 in October, a deterioration from the revised September ratio of 4.1-to-1.

A recession is a crappy way to reduce income inequality

Since I harp on income inequality a bit around here, it's important to take note of this New York Times story today:
The share of income received by the top 1 percent — that potent symbol of inequality — dropped to 17 percent in 2009 from 23 percent in 2007, according to federal tax data. Within the group, average income fell to $957,000 in 2009 from $1.4 million in 2007.
If the Top 1 Percent saw its share of income reduced, that means other groups saw their share of income rise. Good news, right? Well, not really. The same recession that kicked the Top 1 Percent in the teeth did the same thing to everybody else. The median household income has actually dropped in recent years, thanks also in large part to the recession.

The problem with growing income inequality isn't merely that the rich are getting richer. That happens. The problem has been that the rich have gotten richer while everybody else has seen stagnating incomes to go along with increased productivity, and often needed to add a second person in the household working just to keep up.

There are some people who will probably be plenty happy to see the rich become less rich, but not me. I want to see working- and middle-class folks be able to get ahead. A recession-fueled flattening of the economic bell curve isn't really cause for celebration. And as the Times notes, it's probably short-lived anyway—history shows the Top 1 Percent will likely start to pull away again. It probably won't be because a rising tide is lifting all boats. The problem still exists.

Gingrich, sharia, and the fundamentalist mindset

Michael Gerson has a terrific column today about Newt Gingrich's crazy alarmism over sharia law. It needs to be quoted at length:
The Republican front-runner set out his argument about Islamic law in a speech last year to the American Enterprise Institute. The United States’ problem, Gingrich argued, is not primarily terrorism; it is sharia — “the heart of the enemy movement from which the terrorists spring forth.” Sharia law, in his view, is inherently brutal — defined by oppression, stonings and beheadings. Its triumph is pursued not only by violent jihadists but by stealthy ones attending the mosque down the street. “The victory of sharia,” he concludes, “would clearly mean the end of the government Lincoln was describing.”

Who else shares this interpretation of sharia law? Well, totalitarians naturally do. Gingrich joins Iranian clerics, Taliban leaders and Salafists of various stripes in believing that the most authentic expression of sharia law is fundamentalism and despotism.

Other Muslims — many other Muslims — dispute this. The varied traditions of Islamic jurisprudence assign different weights to scripture, tradition, reason and consensus in the interpretation of Islamic law. Some assert it is identical to the cultural and legal practices of 7th-century Arabia, creating a real global danger. But others believe it is a set of transcendent principles of justice separable from its initial cultural expression and binding mainly on the individual. Most Muslims respect Islamic law. But the interpretation of sharia varies greatly from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia to Tanzania to Detroit.

The governing implications of Gingrich’s views are uncharted. Would President Gingrich reaffirm his belief that the most radical form of Islamic law is the most authentic?
That last sentence, to me, is key. Gingrich, as a converted Catholic, can't really be said to be a "fundamentalist" in the sense that many Americans use the term. But he's clearly tied into America's fundamentalist mindset. And it seems to me that the people most alarmed about the imposition of a radical form of sharia law in America are, like Gingrich, tied into that fundamentalist mindset. They mock and hold contempt for Christian religious moderates and believe that a more austere form of the religion is true—and they transfer that worldview onto Islam, scaring themselves half to death in the process.

The problem is that, while threats do exist, it doesn't actually paint a realistic view of the world we live in, or Islam as it's practiced by many Americans. Gingrich's alarmism isn't just offensive as a matter of demagoguery—it's also scary because it reveals an apocalyptic worldview that seems dangerous in the hands of a national leader.

Millionaires and food stamps, revisited

Back in October, I issued a challenge:
But how many millionaires are gaming the system to get food stamps? I'm guessing maybe ... this guy. Maybe there are a few others out there. But I'll pull a number out of my posterior and guess that 99.99 percent of all food stamp recipients are not millionaires. And I defy anyone to prove otherwise.
The New York Times tries to get an answer today, and doesn't really come up with a number:
Department of Agriculture officials dismissed the notion of millionaire food stamp recipients. “Federal law is clear,” said Aaron Lavallee, a spokesman for the department. “The program is intended for households with income not exceeding 130 percent of poverty.”

Among the 46 million Americans who receive the assistance — roughly one in seven Americans — few seem to be millionaires.
That's not entirely satisfying, because we don't know how few are millionaires—even if we can surmise, as the Times does, that precious few are. But maybe we can extrapolate from the unemployment insurance numbers:
From 2005 to 2009, millionaires collected over $74 million in unemployment benefits, according to an estimate by Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who has paired with Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, to push to end the practice.

According to Mr. Coburn’s office, the Internal Revenue Service reported that 2,362 millionaires collected a total of $20,799,000 in unemployment benefits in 2009; 18 people with an adjusted gross income of $10,000,000 or more received an average of $12,333 in jobless benefits for a total of $222,000.
Now, we know that more than 20 million Americans collected unemployment insurance in 2009. If I'm doing the math correctly—never my strong suit—that means that roughly 1 percent of 1 percent of unemployment insurance beneficiaries were millionaires.

Now, unemployment insurance is linked to one's employment status—no matter how much you make, you're eligible if you lose your job. Food stamps are linked to your income: Which means it's probably very much harder to get such benefits if you're a millionaire. Republicans can produce the occasional anecdote, but I feel comfortable sticking with my assertion that 99.99 percent of all food stamp recipients are not millionaires.

None of which would be worth mentioning, except that Republicans are using the specter of millionaires receiving poor-people entitlements as justification to start to trim the safety net. It's "welfare queens" all over again, and it's dishonest.

Monday, December 12, 2011

National Review's disingenuous editorial on gay rights

National Review's editors aren't happy with the Obama Administration's new efforts to protect gay rights abroad:
Support for human rights has a place in foreign policy, albeit a subordinate one. Among those rights, certainly, is the right of homosexuals to be free from violent attacks and other draconian punishments. As Clinton rightly notes, if there are fundamental rights at all (and the foundational premise of this republic is that there are) then they “are not conferred by the government,” but ours “because we are human.” The secretary then goes on to claim that human rights and gay rights are “one and the same,” which we suppose is true insofar as the latter collapses into the former. What we don’t understand is how Clinton’s view — that being human vests us with certain rights — entails or even is compatible with a second set of rights that one enjoys by virtue of being homosexual. When Clinton says, “It is a violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation,” no recourse is required to a gay right. The words “because of their sexual orientation” are superfluous. When she says that the horrors of “corrective” rape against women who are suspected of being homosexual are violations of a right, to what right could she be referring besides the right not to be raped, simpliciter?
Which makes a certain amount of sense on its own. It doesn't make sense in light of National Review's longtime efforts to call attention to Christian persecution abroad. Here's a typical example from earlier this year:
The Arab Spring has not been kind to Egypt’s Christian minority. Over the weekend, Muslims apparently incited by Islamist hardliners again terrorized Coptic Christians, in what is now a pattern of attacks against them and their churches. Possibly the Islamists are jockeying for political power in this transitional period, or even trying to immediately effect a religious cleansing similar to the one that has happened in Iraq.

Coptic Christians in the Imbaba district of Cairo report that on Saturday night they were assaulted by Muslims who looted and burned St. Mina’s Church and the Church of the Virgin Mary and attempted to burn St. Mary and St. Abanob Church. The press has reported that, according to the Copts, twelve people were killed. According to the Egyptian interior ministry, which habitually downplays or ignores attacks against Christians, possibly six victims were Christian and six were Muslim. More than a hundred people were injured, as Copts fought back with sticks and stones.
By National Review's logic today, we shouldn't really care so much that Christians were the victims of those attacks in Egypt; isn't it bad enough and criminal enough that anybody was beaten or attacked? Who cares what the motivating factors were?

I don't excuse the religious persecution, by the way. I find it repugnant and contemptible, just as I find it repugnant that gays are targeted for beatings and rapes and murder. But National Review isn't really in a position to suggest, with a straight face, that we should focus on behaviors to the exclusion of motivations.

Mitt Romney is rich? So is Obama

Over at The Philly Post, my column this morning is about how I don't really care about Mitt Romney's attempted $10,000 bet with Rick Perry:
The fact that our presidential candidates are rich isn’t a big deal. The fact that Mitt Romney wants to make a $10,000 bet isn’t a big deal. The fact that Romney and Newt and Perry all the rest of them want to govern the country on behalf of the rich—that’s the big deal. The fact that they want to do so at a time of skyrocketing income inequality is a big deal.

Instead of having a forthright discussion about those issues, though, we’re forced to sit through a kind of minstrel show where rich candidate after rich candidate after rich candidate pretends to be a “regular guy” with the “common touch.” And it has nothing to do with whether or not that candidate would be a good president.
Obama is among the rich candidates, incidentally, and Republicans are just as interested in tarnishing him with a silver spoon. To wit, take Andrew Malcom's column in today's Investor's Business Daily, which takes the Obamas to task for all their ... Christmas decorating:
The extravagance of 2011's decorations, however, are striking given the widespread joblessness, pale economic growth, home foreclosures and grim outlook for 2012, not to mention the incumbent president's historically low approval rating heading into his reelection bid.

How simple, politically astute, symbolically helpful and cost-effective it would have been for the Obamas this year to say that in sympathy with so many struggling countrymen, they were curtailing holiday decorations to match the sacrifices of others.
How tedious. I could get into all the ways that White House Christmas decorating isn't just about the family occupying the White House, but serves as part of the national celebration, but ... meh. How tedious.

Obama is comfortable. Romney is comfortable. There is no likely candidate for president who isn't far and away richer than the rest of us. So who cares? The question is: Who do you trust to govern on behalf of your interests? Net worth makes little difference in answering that question.

Friday, December 9, 2011

On writing about religion

Some people like writing. Others like having written. Me? I like having written without giving offense to people I love and respect.

By that standard, my musings in "Tim Tebow's ostentatious faith" and "Tebow, revisited" have been flaming disasters, with responses from my Christian friends generally ranging from stern disagreement to angry chastisement. The common theme in those responses: That (perhaps) I'd let antipathy to Christianity cloud my judgment.

The estimable William Voegelli weighed in with the least-angry but still-pointed variation on this theme: "If your point is that we would be better off rediscovering the value and satisfactions of reticence, I'm on board. If you're singling out Tebow because fundamentalist Christianity gives you the heebie-jeebies, I'm not." Privately, a close friend suggested (in not-so-many words) that I'd made a shtick out of being a big-city agnostic who was once a small-town Christian.

I didn't sleep much, or well, last night. It's quite a thing to have produced as intense a reaction as that.

But having examined my conscience, let me say this, unreservedly: Christianity doesn't give me the heebie-jeebies.

Here's my dirty little secret: You can take the man out of the church, but you can't really take the church out of the man. I know that 30 years of immersion in Christian circles—particularly among Mennonites—still shapes both me and my worldview. And though I've been frank about my own fall from faith, I've also felt a deep desire that (in the words of Paul writing to the Romans) I "not cause my brother to stumble." I've never wanted to undermine anybody else's faith: They have their journeys and I have mine. The idea of evangelical agnosticism is kind of silly if you think about it, anyway, and I've not had much use for the fundamentalist atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

There's a "but" coming, however.

I also don't believe that religion or Christianity are necessarily unmitigated forces for good, nor above critique. Just this week, Rick Perry released an ad that I believe to be a shining example of Christian chauvinism. It's not his faith that offends me; it's the political and societal implications of how he wields that faith that I find frightening and objectionable. I think it's possible to criticize that without being anti-Christian. But I also understand that if you're a conservative Christian, such criticism might look anti-Christian to you. To some extent, then, I have to offer my critiques in (er) good faith and let the chips fall where they may.

So what does any of this have to do with Tim Tebow, you may be asking. He's just a guy who is public about his faith, right? It's not like he's running for president or anything. Fair point. Why does an athlete deserve my critique?

Well, for one thing: Tebow's big news. His faith is big news, and controversial. Seems worthy of discussing in an op-ed column, then.

But let me tell a personal story. A number of years back, I was walking down Massachusetts Street in Lawrence, Kan. A church had gathered at one corner—as it often did weekly during early summer evenings—and one man stood atop a planter, shouting a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon at traffic and passerby. This was when I was still immersed in faith and church, but I stopped and chatted with one of the leaders. And what I told him was this: If the church was trying to win converts to Christ—it was—then the planter sermons were a bad idea. They were alienating far more people than they were attracting; the result being that by the church's own lights it was pushing more people away from Christ (and thus possibly condemning them to hell) than it was saving. This seemed alarming to me. It didn't seem to bother the street preachers.

In other words: What I say now is pretty much precisely the thing I was saying when I was a Christian.

Obviously, I'm not a man of faith anymore, so maybe I'm not the best person to counsel Tim Tebow about the effectiveness of his ministry. But if you look not-terribly-closely at what I wrote, some of the main thrusts were A) the Christ that Tebow worships seems to urge modesty in one's public displays of faith and B) evangelizing the way Tebow does might be counterproductive. I didn't tell Christians to shut up; in fact, I proclaimed that idea "undesirable." Given that I'm not a Christian, it seems likely that I was perceived as using Scripture to try to stifle Christians. I can see how it would look that way. From my perspective? I was evaluating Tebow by the standards of the Scripture he claims to adhere to. When you are so very public about your faith, that is going to happen. And it's often going to be people with a real antipathy to the faith doing the evaluating.

It legitimately grieves me that my Christian friends would perceive me as attacking their faith. I'm not sure what to do about that without forfeiting my option to write about issues involving Christianity—a bad idea in a still-quite-religious nation.

But I wrote in a provocative tone. And I provoked. I accept that some of my friends found that hurtful. I can't say I won't do it again. I will, however, be mindful.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

How much money makes you rich?

Americans say they would need to earn a median of $150,000 a year to consider themselves rich. However, 30% say less than $100,000 would be enough, including 18% who would consider themselves rich if they made less than $60,000 a year. On the other hand, 15% say they would need to earn at least $1 million per year before thinking of themselves as rich.

This should actually vary from region to region—the amount of money I'd need to be comfortable in my Kansas hometown is probably a lot less than what I'd use here in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, $150,000 isn't a crazy number: It's three times the median household income in America. That's not not rich, at the very least.

Tebowing, revisited

I revise and expand my comments about Tim Tebow for this week's Scripps Howard column:
You know who would love to see Tim Tebow take it down a notch? Jesus.

At least, that's what the Bible seems to suggest in the sixth chapter of Matthew. That's where Jesus talks to his followers about prayer, and warns them against ostentatious displays: "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

Tim Tebow is, by all accounts, a man of great and genuine faith so perhaps he knows better than Jesus how to properly worship Jesus.

That seems unlikely, however.

Taken to its logical end, though, we would ask Christians to shut up about their faith entirely and stick it in a deep, dark hole. That's both unlikely and undesirable. Faith cannot, ultimately, be silenced.

But most of us have learned to live with boundaries -- to avoid thrusting our religion into arenas where it is unexpected or unwelcome. If you make a big sale at work, for example, you're unlikely to bend on knee in front of co-workers and customers to start giving thanks to God.

That would make them uncomfortable, and would be kind of rude as a result. Rudeness, in turn, makes few converts and conversions seem to be the point of Tebow's enterprise. Why be counterproductive? Tim Tebow, then, is the NFL equivalent of the telemarketer calling at dinner. He's free to make the call, but no one should be surprised if many of us are turned off by the salesman and his pitch.
Ben suggests that "Tebowing should be more emulated than scorned" in his take. You'll have to click the link to read the whole thing.

GOP rhetoric doesn't even have to make sense anymore

So the GOP, as expected, is blocking President Obama's nominee to lead the new consumer protection bureau. Republicans want changes to the structure of the bureau, basically to make it toothless. That doesn't sound great, though, so here's how they're playing it:
“We’re not going to let the president put another unelected czar in place, unaccountable to the American people,”said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).
But the whole point of Senate confirmation is that the appointee is anything but an "unelected czar" operating without accountability: They're accountable to the Senate. McConnell's rhetoric suggests that every cabinet member and every judicial nominee is somehow illegitimate. If that's the case, then McConnell and the Republicans believe we should tear down our form of government and raise something new in its place.

But I don't think that's the case. I think they're just cynical.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Federalist 58: Filibusters suck

It's true that when America adopted its Constitution, the Founders who wrote the Federalist Papers didn't put much—any—effort into defending the filibuster tactic that is so widely used in today's Senate. Why? Well, the Constitution itself didn't mention the filibuster: That's something the Senate decided, on its own, to allow in the rules.

Still, while reading Federalist 58, it's pretty easy to see what the Founders would've thought about the filibuster: They wouldn't have liked it. We can surmise as much when James Madison grapples with whether the Constitution should've required much more than a quorum for the House of Representatives to vote on weighty matters. Madison didn't like the burden that would create. Why? It would enable a minority of Congressmen to block legislation simply by not showing up:
It has been said that more than a majority ought to have been required for a quorum; and in particular cases, if not in all, more than a majority of a quorum for a decision. That some advantages might have resulted from such a precaution, cannot be denied. It might have been an additional shield to some particular interests, and another obstacle generally to hasty and partial measures. But these considerations are outweighed by the inconveniences in the opposite scale. In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority. Were the defensive privilege limited to particular cases, an interested minority might take advantage of it to screen themselves from equitable sacrifices to the general weal, or, in particular emergencies, to extort unreasonable indulgences.
Some of my conservative friends defend the filibuster as a minority legislative defense against the tyranny of the majority. But it's pretty clear the Founders—or at least Madison—weren't interested in giving the minority the power to block legislation, seeing it as a reversal of "the fundamental principle of free government."

Combine this with Federalist 22, in which Alexander Hamilton railed against the idea that two-thirds of Americans would "submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third"—roughly the ratio needed for the Senate to sustain a filibuster—and it's sure seems clear the practice is both undemocratic and a betrayal of the Founders' vision.

A conservative friend says I may modify my position on this when I read further into the Federalists. Right now, though, the filibuster isn't really faring well.

What caused Pearl Harbor? Flappers and jazz.

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review's "classical historian" in residence, idly speculates why Admiral Yammamoto planned the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor:
But it may be just as likely that Yamamoto’s earlier years in the United States, at Harvard in particular, rather than convincing him of the futility of attacking such an industrial colossus had encouraged his prejudices that Western society, especially in its Roaring Twenties excesses, was decadent and lacked the martial steel for an eventual war with the Japanese.
Now, there's no reason to actually produce any evidence in support of this theory, but it's fun to play with. "Of course we can beat the Americans! With General Jay Gatsby misguidedly leading the troops, there's no way we can't win! Twenty-three skidoo indeed! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Of course, it might just be that Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because the Japanese wanted to expand their control over Pacific island resources, and the American fleet stood in the way. You don't have to have contempt for your rival's character to want what he's keeping from you. It helps, but it's not a requirement. Without offering any evidence to support his argument, it sure appears that Hanson is engaging in an age-old "blame America" argument.

I know: I'm the one who wrote earlier today that we need to let Pearl Harbor not be such an urgent memory. But we're obviously going to remember it still. It would be nice if we didn't mis-remember it in order to make political arguments about our present-day policy.