Half Changed World

Dear Rep Connolly

I am writing to express my deep concern about news reports that suggest that you are considering supporting extensions of the Bush tax cuts for the richest 1 percent of Americans.

In the long term, we can not continue to run large budget deficits.  Therefore, a vote to extend these tax cuts is a vote to cut spending on education, on roads, on health care, on job training.  It is a vote to take away money from child care and from senior centers.  It is a vote to accept the increasing inequality of opportunity in our society and to surrender the hope that government can make things better.

I know, some of your constituents are fortunate to make more than $250,000 a year.  But they benefit from a healthy society, and can afford to contribute.  Our economy grew very well during the 1990s when tax rates were at the levels that they would return to.

Please give me a reason to vote for you next month.

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I sent the same letter (w/o the last sentence) to Warner and Webb.

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I am really f-ing depressed tonight.   And I don’t see it getting better soon.

Update:  I meant to link to this  Center for American Progress report on what a budget balanced through spending cuts alone would look like.

So, my mom is asking for suggestions for books for hanukah presents for the grandchildren — my sons, who will be 7 and 9 (with the 9 year old a very strong reader and the 7 year old just really starting to read on his own), and my nephews, ages 2 and 4.

I futzed around online and came up with the following recommendations, but I thought I’d see what my readers had to add:

For the 2 year old:

The Quiet Book, Deborah Underwood
Can’t Sleep without Sheep by Susanna Leonard Hill

(I don’t know anything about these other than what I found online, but they look pretty good.)

4 year old: City Dog, Country Frog, Mo Willems
Knuffle Bunny Free, Mo Willems

(I love Mo Willems)

7 year old:  The Dinosaur Museum: An Unforgettable, Interactive Virtual Tour Through Dinosaur History, National Geographic Society
Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs: The Definitive Pop-Up, Robert Sabuda
Knuffle Bunny Free, Mo Willems
Rocks and Minerals (Eye Wonder)., DK books

(He’s at an awkward stage, not really into reading himself, but getting old for picture books, although I’ll make an exception for Mo Willems.  We’ve been reading the Narnia books and Paddington out loud.  He says he wants to be an archeologist, and loves rocks.)

9 year old: City of Ice, Laurence Yep  (not yet released)
Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume, Jeff Smith
Warriors: Power of Three Box Set: Volumes 1 to 6 Erin Hunter OR
Warriors Box Set: Volumes 1 to 6 Erin Hunte

(He loved City of Fire, and City of Ice is due out soon.  I have no idea which of the Warriors books he’s read, but he doesn’t mind re-reading, so I think the box sets are a safe pick.  And he liked the volume of Bone that I got out from the library for him.  I’d put the new book by Richard Riordan set in the world of the Percy Jackson books on the list, except that I assume he’ll want to buy it as soon as it comes out.)

So, what should we add to the list?

I recently read 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam and was thinking about blogging about it.    Then I saw that she’s running a challenge this week to actually do a time use diary for a week and to share the results.  So I decided to bite the bullet and do it.

Vanderkam says that there’s no point in waiting for a “typical week” because there are no typical weeks.  But here are some of the reasons that this week is not typical:

• Big event tomorrow night for work.  I almost never have to attend evening events for work.
• No day this week when it makes sense to work from home, which I try to do once a week.
• I’m taking Friday off, and we’re heading up to NYC for Yom Kippur.

But, here goes anyway.

So, today’s report:

• 6:45 hours of sleep (since midnight)
• 15 minutes of yoga
• 1:30 hour of personal email and messages, online shopping, social games
• 1 hour shower/dress/breakfast/pack lunch/try to convince boys not to kill each other while I eat breakfast, or at least to go downstairs if they have to
• 2 hours of commuting (sigh; but that probably includes at least 30 minutes of walking on a nice day, and listening to a good chunk of NPR and some of this week’s This American Life Podcast)
• 1 hour of meetings
• 3:30 hours of responding to work emails and calls, reviewing documents, negotiating times for later meetings, etc.
• 2 hours of preparing for a couple of a webinars I’m doing — which I always underestimate how long it will take to prep
• 1 hour of working on a report that is hanging over my head — it really needs more focused attention, and I don’t know when I’m going to find it.
• 30 minutes of talking to coworkers
• 15 minutes of eating lunch
• 15 minutes of walking around the block for some fresh air
• 1 hour of setting up my new iPod and clearing my settings from my old one so D could buy it from me
• 20 minutes of walking/running after the boys while they rode their bikes
• 20 minutes of eating dinner (leftovers, so pretty much zero cook time)
• 20 minutes of reading to N (The Silver Chair; D is officially not listening, but somewhat managed to drift in while I was reading…)
• 15 minutes of blogging.

Note that I left work probably 30 minutes earlier than usual, trying to follow Vanderkam’s notion of preserving evening hours for family time even if you have to get back to work after the kids are in bed.  And I did spend 15 minutes or so responding to messages tonight. But I’m too braindead at this point to work on the report, which is what I was hoping to do.  That said, I was pretty fried at 5.15 too, so I wouldn’t have been terribly productive even if I had stayed in the office.

I have to confess that when I picked up 168 Hours, I thought it was by the same person who had written this Washington Post magazine article about time use and how working mothers have more leisure than they admit. A lot boils down to your definition of leisure — I think I officially had almost 4 hours of leisure today.  But it’s broken down into tiny bits, and it doesn’t necessarily feel like leisure.

Geeky Mom is considering an e-reader, which inspired me to update my Kindle review now that I’ve been using it for 7 months.

• I’m still doing a lot of work reading on it, and I’ve mostly stopped converting pdfs to Kindle format.  My eyesight is good enough to read the tiny print, although with effort, and it’s worth it not to have the footnote showing up in the middle of a sentence and the tables totally scrambled.
• I love it for the metro and for traveling light.   The ability to be stuck on the tarmac and buy the next book on your to-do list is definitely worth it.  (As far as I see, this is the only downside of the wifi only version of the Kindle.  I wonder when someone will figure out a way to let you download books onto the kindle using a cell phone.)
• Most of the books I read are still print, because most of the books I read come from the library.
• Kindle editions of new hardcovers are a lot cheaper than list price, but typically only a few bucks more than Amazon sells them for.  I think I want to to take Tana French’s new book, Faithful Place, with me on vacation, but am leaning towards buying it in print so I can pass it on to my mother.
• As I read more fiction on the Kindle, I’m surprised at how annoying I find it not to be able to easily flip back to the previous chapter to remind myself of who a character is.  Ebooks are more like scrolls than books — and there’s a reason no one reads scrolls anymore.

I’ve spent much of this week at work banging my head against the wall that of all the offsets Congress could have found to use to pay for state fiscal relief (FMAP) and education jobs, the one they chose to use was a cut in Food Stamps (SNAP).  And then the Senate decided to cut Food Stamps some more to pay for child nutrition programs.

I get that inflation has been lower than predicted, and so the Food Stamp increase in the recovery act is lasting longer than expected. But, as Dave Obey said, that would have just meant that “some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.”  (And kudos to @AnnieLowrey for following the story from the start.)

At least with the FMAP/EduJobs bill, I can make the macroeconomic argument that it makes sense to spend more money today, prevent huge layoffs in the states and local governments, and cut spending in 2014.  (If the economy is this bad still 4 years from now, we’re going to have much bigger problems.)  But in the child nutrition bill, the increases would actually come AFTER the cuts.

Matthew Yglesias wrote about the child nutrition bill s today and noted that it really is robbing Peter to pay Paul — taking from dinners to pay for lunches, and from the summer to pay for the school year.  I wanted to highlight one of his commenter’s responses, since it’s rare to hear from people who are directly affected.  JRoth wrote:

I’ve been on SNAP benefits for over a year (family of 4, household income in ‘08 and ‘09 around $20k), and I can tell you that the margin between the old benefits ceiling (somewhere around $500) and the new (well over $600) makes a huge difference in my family’s grocery budget. With the former, I can just about squeeze the entire month’s food into the SNAP budget – a couple months we had to go the last 2-3 days on leftovers and cobbling together whatever was in the freezer. Under the new benefits, I can buy my kids fresh fruit without stressing over the difference between a $2 pint of blueberries and a $2.50 pint.

Point being, insofar as the public health goal of SNAP is enabling more healthful family eating, an extra $25/person/month goes a long way in obviating the (perceived) need to buy the high calorie/low nutrition food products that are implicated in low income obesity.

As for school lunches, the current budget is laughably small (under $2/child/lunch, iirc), and so any improvement in that number will represent an improvement. But school lunches remain a nutritional wasteland, even in places where there’s an awareness (my kid’s school offers whole grain in most meals and healthful-seeming dishes, but the reality is A. they still taste gross and B. the backup options are unconscionable things like Uncrustables.

That sounds right to me.  I was shocked and slightly horrified to read last month that Fairfax schools were selected best in the country for nutritious school lunches.  My kids eat the school lunch about once a week (N thinks it’s a huge treat, and would have it every day if we let him; D only wants to do it on the days that they have grilled cheese or breakfast for lunch.)  If that’s the best, I can’t begin to imagine what the worst looks like.

In today’s NY Times, there were a bunch of letters in response to a story from last week about how many interns at City Hall have connections to the rich and powerful.   I’m not shocked or even particularly surprised by the article.   New York is a city where people use their pull to get kids into preschool, after all, and once upon a time my mom was able to use her mid-level city job to get my brother a summer job with the Buildings Department.   But I was bemused by the letter from the former high school teacher of some of the young adults in the article, who defends the practice by noting what “excellent, hard-working and conscientious students” the kids were.

I don’t have any data on this (not sure how you’d go about trying to find it), but my sense is that it’s less and less common for nepotism to be a matter of getting stupid and lazy people into jobs. There are exceptions, of course, but I think business is really more competitive these days, such that it’s harder to hide your dumb nephew for very long.  Nepotism is what lets one excellent, hard-working and conscientious student get ahead of all the excellent, hard-working and conscientious students who don’t have someone opening doors for them.  (Or, as another letter-writer notes, can’t afford to take an unpaid internship.)

The other thing that’s changed, I think, is that it’s harder for blue collar workers and lower level managers to use nepotism.  Kids used to be able to count on following their fathers into factory jobs, and that’s pretty much unheard of now.  Earlier this month, the Times ran a long profile of a young man, a recent college graduate, who was looking for work, but had turned down one job because it wasn’t at the level he was hoping for.  One of the points Uchitelle makes is that his father and grandfather both got their starts through connections:

They said it was connections more than perseverance that got them started — the father in 1976 when a friend who had just opened a factory hired him, and the grandfather in 1946 through an Army buddy whose father-in-law owned a brokerage firm in nearby Worcester and needed another stock broker.

What do you think?  Am I being naive in thinking that there are fewer total incompetents getting jobs because of nepotism now?  And is it any less pernicious if it’s used to decide between two competent people rather than to promote incompetence?

I finally had a chance to listen to the Planet Money podcast from last month about payday loans.  Overall, it mostly covered familiar territory, but I was intrigued by the research suggesting that rate ceilings tend to act as “anchors” for interest rates, and wind up as floors.

I was also struck by one element of the story of the man who kept on coming back to take out high-interest loan after high-interest loan, in order to support his gambling habit.  In passing, they noted that he owned his house free and clear.  I think the implication was that he was making a mistake taking out payday loans, when he could have taken out a much cheaper mortgage.  Alternatively, I could tell a story that he had figured out a mental accounting scheme that let him keep gambling relatively small amounts, without risking losing his house.  The payday loans may not have been as irrational a choice as all that.

In perhaps related news, Jim McDermott and Barney Frank have introduced bills that would legalize — and tax — internet gambling.   In general, I’m vaguely supportive, mostly because I think it’s pretty much impossible to stop people from gambling on the internet anyway.  I like some of the causes that the money is supposed to support — although I’m also very aware that in most of the states where lottery sales are supposed to support education, they just supplant money the state would have spent from general revenues otherwise, with no net increase in spending.

If you listen to the US Congress, unemployment insurance is becoming the new welfare.

Orrin Hatch today dropped an amendment that would require states to test applicants for cash assistance (TANF) and unemployment insurance for illegal drugs before they could be approved for benefits.  We’re used to dealing with this sort of stupidity in the TANF program, but I have to admit that I was surprised to see this applied to unemployment insurance as well.  At least Hatch is honest enough to admit that testing all these people would cost far more than the value of any benefits it might save — when this comes up at the state level, legislators are constantly surprised to learn that it doesn’t save money.

This proposal isn’t likely to go anywhere, but meanwhile the Senate is dropping the COBRA subsidy for health insurance for the unemployed as well as the $25 a week additional federal benefits from the UI extension bill.  And almost no one is talking about continuing benefits for the “99-ers” those who have exhausted 99 weeks of unemployment insurance.

My theory is that people are terrified by the notion that you could do nothing wrong, be  a good worker, lose your job, search hard for another one, and still be unemployed after two years.  They don’t want to believe that they live in a country where it could happen, and they don’t want to believe that it could happen to them, or to their friends or family.  And we’ve got this really weird dynamic of unemployment right now, where unemployment is really high but no longer climbing,  nearly half of the unemployed have been out of work  for more than 27 weeks, but at this point if you’ve got a job, your odds of being laid off are pretty low.

So people are  convincing themselves that the long-term unemployed  must have done something wrong.    They must not really be looking, or they’re too picky, or they’re not willing to move to where the jobs are, or something.  And so it’s ok to cut them off, because they deserve it.

Update: Nancy Folbre just said almost the exact same thing in the New York Times today, except she’s an economist, so she used bigger words.

Via Laura at Apt 11d, I read Henry Farrell’s post on why he’s leaving Facebook.  Of the various things I’ve read lately about Facebook, it comes the closest to capturing my reasons for being unhappy with FB.  I’m not a privacy purist –for one thing, I’m well aware that the corporate databases have far more info about me than I’ve ever posted online.  I’m willing to give up some privacy about my shopping for a few bucks off of groceries (e.g. store loyalty cards), and the ability to stay in loose connection with friends and relatives is worth more to me than a few dollars.  I don’t post anything that I’d be horrified to read repeated in a public forum.  And I’ve never been unhappy with the ads that google shows alongside my gmail account (although I’m not sure I’ve ever clicked through either).

But a couple of weeks ago, a colleague reported to me that Xobni is showing her my facebook profile picture when she gets a work email from me.  Even though 1) my privacy settings on Facebook say it should only be available to friends of friends; 2) I haven’t friended any of my colleagues (I’m happy to connect on LinkedIn); and 3) I don’t have my work email connected to my Facebook account.

So, this pisses me off on general principles (because it appears that Xobni is not honoring the FB privacy settings and each company seems to think it’s the other’s fault).  And also because even though my profile pic is totally innocuous, it’s not “professional” — I’m in casual clothes, and laughing.   If I wanted to associate a picture with my work email (and I don’t), it would be the boring one of me in a suit that’s on my organization’s website.  I reject Zuckerberg’s idea that having different images for work and for personal life is out of date.  I like reading Penelope Trunk, but dear god, I don’t want to be her.

I just idly googled the name of one of my first bosses and learned that she died more than a year ago.  I’m so pissed at myself for not having stayed in better touch with her.

I worked for Shelley when I was an intern with the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union one summer in college.  (The “look for the union label” folks.  They merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union a few years later to form UNITE, which then merged with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union.) I didn’t know much about unions, but they were offering a stipend for the summer, and I wanted a job that was interesting, but didn’t want to work for free.)

Shelley was with the legislative department (and yes, I did get to meet Evy Dubrow), but there wasn’t that much going on that summer , so she marched me all over the office introducing me to people and asking what they needed done.   I did all sorts of things that summer –  sorted postcards opposing NAFTA and supporting single payer health care by Congressional district, wrote a memo on union policies regarding sexual harassment, cataloged their lending library of VHS tapes, dug through the archives for old photos and made up a display on the history of the union.   Shelley called me “Little Girl” but treated me like a grown-up,  talked me through it when I got caught in some stupid office politics, and convinced me to take David Montgomery’s classes.  The next year she moved to Washington State, but we stayed in touch.  I visited her once — couldn’t believe that she trusted me to borrow her car to go off on my own — and met the dog that I had heard so much about.   Somewhere in there she had a kidney transplant, but she always talked about how well “Nancy Kidney” was doing.

Over the year we lost touch, although we wrote or emailed a few times.  A while back she moved to the Norfolk area, and I meant to go down and visit her some time but I never did.  And now she’s dead, and the obituary says it’s from complications of diabetes.  I guess Nancy wasn’t working any more. Damn.

The obituary says that she was 58 when she died last year.    So she would have more or less my age now when I worked for her.  I can’t decide if that seems older or younger than I’d have guessed.