Half Changed World

Health care reform

I work on other programs affecting low-income families, not health care.  But if Congress passes a true health care reform year, and no improvements in the programs that I work on, I'll consider it a success.  And if we get everything on my organization's policy agenda for 2009 but health care reform crashes and burns, I'll be disappointed.

Ezra Klein is blogging for the Washington Post now, and he's got two really good pieces today, one from this morning on why the CBO cost estimates are putting health care reform in danger and one from tonight on the Finance committee's revised plan. Basically, the budget office has told Congress, no, you're not going to save enough money with comparative effectiveness research and improved health care IT to pay for the expansions in coverage you want to see.  If you want real health care reform, the choices are to come up with the money from some other source (e.g taxes of one sort or another) or to get serious about cost-controls (e.g. take a chunk out of insurers' hides, and possibly out of doctors' as well.)  The no-hard-choices fairy isn't going to save you.

It's looking like Congress isn't really going to tackle these hard choices until after the Fourth of July recess.  Which means that the next few weeks are a great time to weigh in with your Representative and Senators about the need for real health care reform -- including a public plan -- and the need to pay for it with comprehensive tax reform.  If you really want single payer, go ahead and tell them that, but then tell them about what you think is second best, because single payer isn't happening, not this time around, and it won't be more likely in 10 years if this round collapses.

Are you paying attention to the health care debate, or have all the different bills made your eyes cross?  Are you waiting until things sort out a bit to pay attention?  What burning questions would you like answered?  As I said, this isn't my area of expertise, but if I don't know the answer, I probably know where to find it.  If you want to get into the wonky details yourself, my favorite health policy sites are Families USA, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Milk

I finally got a chance to watch Milk on DVD, and thought it was terrific.  I knew that he was a gay politician and that he had been killed, and that was about it.  Having learned a little about him, I now want to know more -- after watching the movie, I added The Times of Harvey Milk (which is a documentary about him) to my queue.

If the movie is portraying him fairly, Harvey Milk was a natural-born politician, able to talk to almost anyone, able to bring people together, able to make people have hope in spite of themselves.  Watching the scenes of him leading crowds, knowing what was coming, was almost unbearable.

One of my favorite professors in college used to talk about "Dante's influence on Virgil" meaning that after the Inferno, no one ever looked at the Aeneid the same way.  In the same way, Milk's story resonates differently today, in the age of Obama, with half a dozen states recognizing same-sex marriages, than it could possibly have resonated in 1984, when the documentary was made.

In the movie, Milk insists that all of his friends have to start coming out to their families and straight friends, because once your image of "the gays" is replaced by the face of someone you know, it's hard to hate.  It made me wonder how the equality movement would be different if AIDS hadn't hit the gay community so hard during the 1980s.  HIV/AIDS forced people out of the closet who would have stayed quiet otherwise.  And it's certainly hard to imagine that the right to marry would have become such a central focus of the gay and lesbian movement if the bathhouse culture of the 1970s had continued on.

I highly recommend the movie if you haven't seen it yet.

holy freaking cow!

was my reaction when I heard the news that Arlen Specter is switching to the Democratic party.  I know, he was quite clear that he won't be an automatic 60th vote for cloture for the Democrats.  Oddly enough, he singled out the Employee Free Choice Act as an example of where he won't change his position, even though he used to be a co-sponsor of the bill in a previous Congress.  But I would say that the odds of a significant step on health care reform actually getting passed this year just went up by a good bit.

Some interesting coverage of the story, from:

• Talking Points Memo
• Firedoglake
• Campaign Diaries See also this post from a month ago, about Pennsylvania's sore loser law.

I know I promised a book review today, but I don't have the energy -- feeling a bit sick (upset tummy, not the flu, chill out).  Maybe tomorrow.  But I may also report on my jury duty experience.

universality and targeting

I ran across this LA Times article today, about (formerly) middle-class workers who have lost their jobs and are shocked to discover that their families don't qualify for most public benefit programs.  In many cases it's because with unemployment benefits, their incomes are still too high to qualify for food stamps or cash assistance; in other cases, they would qualify based on income, but have too much assets -- especially cars -- to qualify.

I don't know whether this makes those rejected for benefits more or less supportive of these programs.  I can imagine some people thinking "gee, if I can't live on this, how can people live on far less?" and supporting expansion and other people thinking "well, if these programs won't help me when I really need it, what good are they?" and supporting cuts.

Since the Recovery Act passed, I've been spending a lot of my time at work writing about the temporary assistance (TANF) provisions and trying to convince states to use that money to expand benefits for the neediest families.  It's been a tough sell.  Even though any increases would be 80 percent federally funded, state budgets are so tight that in many cases, they're saying they can't find the 20 percent.  And states are nervous about expanding programs with money that is designed to be temporary, because it's always hard politically to cut services back later.  I'm frustrated, but I get it -- I know how hard it is to sell any expansion of "welfare."

That said, I'm really shocked by how hard it is in some states, including Virginia, to get the unemployment insurance expansions passed.  For those who believe that welfare is bad, but contributory social insurance, like social security, is good, UI should fall on the "good" side of that divide -- it's based on wages and subject to a history of employment. The fact that it's still under fire makes me somewhat more skeptical about the claims that making programs universal will protect them from being attacked as "welfare."

Audacious

I keep saying that I know that Obama's going to disappoint me at some point and then he keeps exceeding my expectations.  As I read his budget document this morning, I kept on finding more and more things that blew me away.  Here's some of them:

• As Robert Reich said, this budget would substantially increase the progressivity of the federal income tax.  The very rich have gotten the lion's share of the gains in the US economy over the past few decades, while the tax system has gotten less progressive.  This would be a big step towards that.
• I nearly shouted out loud when I read the section on carbon permits, and saw the phrase "100 percent auction."  This means that, unlike the Senate bill from last year, none of the permits would be given away to  industry.  This is key because giving away permits rewards polluters, and dramatically decreases the funds that are available to provide targeted assistance to low-income consumers and displaced workers.  And Obama's proposal to use some of the money to extend the Making Work Pay tax cut is essentially a version of Cap and Dividend.
• I was also stunned at Obama's willingness to pick fights on things that aren't going to get headlines or win him any votes.  For example, he says that he will fully fund the Community Development Block Grant, but will seek to distribute the funds through a "more effective formula."  CDBG is one of the few federal programs that provides flexible funds to cities and other local governments, and the current formula is pretty poorly targeted -- it provides a little bit of money to almost every local government, regardless of need.  I assume it's obvious why it's politically hard to change that.  It would have been easy for Obama to decide to let this one slide, given the major pieces of legislation he's trying to get through.  But he didn't.

recovery package

I'm still waiting to find out the details of the conference agreement on the recovery package, but I'm cautiously optimistic.  I don't think it's going to be a magic wand, but it will be a big step forwards.  I won't really relax until it clears the Senate, but what I'm hearing sounds like they made some reasonable choices.

MomsRising sent out an alert to their members on the recovery package, and asked for reports "if you or a family member have lost a job, a house, healthcare, or sleep because of the recession."  Here are some of the responses they've gotten.  It kills me to read them.  It's scary out there.

a victory for kids

Obama signed the SCHIP reauthorization today.  About 4 million more kids will have health insurance as a result.  Yes, it matters who is in the White House.

taxes

I think Robert Reich got it dead on in describing the popular anger about Daschle's nonpayment of his taxes. 

In short, many Americans who have worked hard, saved as much as they can, bought a home, obeyed the law, and paid every cent of taxes that were due are beginning to feel like chumps. Their jobs are disappearing, their savings are disappearing, their homes are worth far less than they thought they were, their tax bills are as high as ever if not higher -- but people at the top seem to be living far different lives in a different universe....and, not the least, the Washington insiders who have served on the Hill or in an administration and then gone on to pocket millions as lobbyists for the same companies they once regulated or subsidized. To the American who's outside the power centers -- the places of entitlement and I'll-scratch-your-back-while-you-scratch-mine deal making -- the entire system seems rotten.

I think this is right -- I'm just as horrified by the $5 million Daschle earned in two years as an "advisor" and "rainmaker," as by the tax issues.

I'm not quite sure why Geithner got away with it and Daschle didn't.  In the abstract, I'd be more worried about the Secretary of Treasury not paying all his taxes than I would about the Secretary of HHS.   Maybe because Congress was convinced that the stock market would collapse if they didn't approve Geithner right away.  Maybe because someone who does his own taxes with TurboTax gets more sympathy than someone whose accountant is fudging things.  (Daschle supposedly asked his accountant in JUNE if he should be reporting the car service as income -- it shouldn't have taken more than a week for the accountant to say of course -- unless the question he asked is "can you get away with this?" rather than "what is legal?")  Maybe because it's hard to be sympathetic for someone who owes more in unpaid taxes than most people make in a year.  Or maybe he just had bad timing.

Some different points of view from blogs I read:

• Becca at Not Quite Sure confesses her own tax sins.
• Martin Manley at Jam Side Down tells the story of his vetting and worries that we're disqualifying good candidates for "jaywalking."

I agree that Killefer's error was pretty minor, and shouldn't have disqualified her.  I have trouble swallowing Daschle's multiple errors as just as trivial.

welfare and the recession

The New York Times ran a front-page story today about the failure of the welfare rolls to increase even as the economy tanks.  It's by Jason DeParle, who covered welfare reform for the Times in the 1990s, and wrote the best book there is on the subject: American Dream, and I think he got it just about right. There are some states with significant percentage increases in their caseloads, to be sure, but the base is so low at this point that the absolute numbers of new cases is pretty small.  And the two states with the highest unemployment rates -- Michigan and Rhode Island -- have experienced large decreases in the number of families receiving welfare.  Frankly, it scares me.

The article is currently #9 on the Times list of most emailed articles, and it received 171 comments on their website before the Times cut it off.  (I didn't know that the Times cut off comments on their articles... I wonder if this is based on a time limit, a number of comments, or a subjective judgment of the quality of the discussion.  Actually, the comments are far more balanced and reasonable than I would have guessed.)

As the article notes, there are some provisions in the recovery bill that provide incentives to states to let more people receive assistance.  So far, they haven't received much attention, and that's probably a good thing politically.  They're pretty small dollars in the scheme of the bill (although I'd have said the same thing about the family planning provisions, and that didn't protect them).  I think it's really key that Ron Haskins, who was the lead Republican staffer for the Ways and Means Committee during welfare reform, was willing to be quoted in the article that he thinks caseloads ought to be rising:

Even some of the program’s staunchest defenders are alarmed.

“There is ample reason to be concerned here,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican Congressional aide who helped write the 1996 law overhauling the welfare system. “The overall structure is not working the way it was designed to work. We would expect, just on the face it, that when a deep recession happens, people could go back on welfare.”

“When we started this, Democratic and Republican governors alike said, ‘We know what’s best for our state; we’re not going to let people starve,’ ” said Mr. Haskins, who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “And now that the chips are down, and unemployment is going up, most states are not doing enough to help families get back on the rolls.”

That provides a LOT of political cover to Republicans who don't want to do anything that can be seen as undoing welfare reform.

That said, I don't think it helps things when progressives refer to the bailout as "corporate welfare."  I think the term inherently suggests that welfare is a bad thing.

Misc political notes

• Good bye Rod, and good riddance.

• I was pleased to hear Obama talking about the outrageousness of Wall Street bonuses.  I do think the bully pulpit can make a difference.

• Tuesday is a special election, to choose a new chair of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors, replacing Gerry Connolly who is now in Congress.  Special elections can be crazy, because turnout is generally low and so small groups can affect the results.  Fairfax county's budget is probably bigger than several states.  I strongly support Sharon Bulova, as does the Washington Post. Vote Tuesday, Feb 3, 6 am to 7 pm, at your regular polling place.

• I received a long phone survey tonight that led me to the definite conclusion that Kaye Kory (who represents this district in the Fairfax school board) is considering challenging Delegate Bob Hull in the primary.  A quick google search found that both Not Larry Sabato and the Falls Church News think she is running against him.  Then again, NLS thought she was running two years ago.  I told the pollster that I didn't know which one I'd support.  I have no idea what, if any, policy differences there are between them.

• Still don't know who I'm supporting for Governor.

lose your job, lose your health care

One of the joys of our system of employer-provided health insurance is that the odds are pretty good that if you lose your job, you'll also lose your health insurance. 

Well, you can continue your coverage with COBRA, but relatively few workers who have just lost their job can afford to pay 102 percent of their premiums for an extended period of time. The average COBRA payment eats up something like half of the average unemployment insurance benefit.

If you're young and healthy, you might be able to buy an individual plan for less than your COBRA payments, especially if you're willing to accept a high deductible and hope you don't get sick.  If you have children, they might qualify for public insurance, through SCHIP or Medicaid, but unless you were seriously living paycheck to paycheck and have no assets, you probably won't qualify.

The Economic Recovery bills moving through Congress attempt to deal with this problem in a couple of different ways:

• it would provide a federal subsidy for part of the cost of COBRA payments
• it would extend how long you could continue to participate in your former employer's plan if you were within 10 years of qualifying for Medicare, or had worked for your old employer for at least 10 years.
• At least on the House side (it may be in the Senate bill too, but I haven't found it), it would let states cover workers receiving unemployment benefits under Medicaid, without regard to income or assets.

I'm not an expert on health care policy, but this strikes me as a bit of a kludged together package.  For one thing, it leaves out the 60 percent of unemployed workers who don't qualify for unemployment insurance, most of whom probably didn't get employer-provided benefits in the first place, and so can't get COBRA either.  For another, COBRA is a pretty expensive way to cover people -- Medicaid is  lot cheaper. 

I'm not really objecting to the proposal -- it's better than doing nothing, and I recognize that health care reform isn't likely to happen in the next month.  But this really isn't a substitute for doing health care reform for real.

still buzzing

OK, I know you're all probably getting sick of my obsessing over the inauguration, but indulge me for one more post.  I'll get back to being my usual jaded wonky self soon enough, I promise.

I loved these pictures of Obama's first day on the job.  It still hardly seems real that he's actually the president.  So it's amazing to see him in the Oval Office, getting down to business.

At work, everyone was trading their inauguration stories.  It sounded like the people who just wandered down to the Mall and found spots near the Washington Monument generally had a better experience than many of the people who had tickets, who spent a lot of time on lines to get through security (and some of whom didn't make it in at all).

I really enjoyed reading about the experiences of these kids from Chicago who were selected for a trip to DC at Share My Inauguration.*  They clearly appreciated the historic moment, but also had a definite kids' perspective on the whole experience.

As I said yesterday, I had a better time at the inauguration for not being responsible for keeping D safe and happy.  I think he probably showed good judgment in turning down my invitation to come with me.  But I'm also a little sad that I don't think he appreciates quite how momentous a day it was.  He's learned about segregation and Martin Luther King, Jr. in school, but it's a pretty abstract concept to him.  And there's something lovely about that innocence too.  But I wonder if 8 years from now, he's going to be pissed that I didn't schlepp him down to the Mall so he could claim bragging rights.

One of the things that was interesting about the inauguration is that everyone there was consciously aware that it was a Historical Moment.  I wonder if the people who attended the March on Washington knew right away that it would be Important.  I'm pretty sure that most of the people who attended Woodstock (the other comparison I heard a lot) didn't know that it was an Event until after the fact.

* Full disclosure: I was asked to plug this site as part of MomCentral blog tour, but I'm happy to do so.  They seem to be great kids, and I'm glad that they got the opportunity to be here.

A day to remember

It really was a day to remember.

I'm assuming that anyone reading this has already read news coverage, so I'm only going to post about my personal experience:

The transportation logistics were convoluted, but not terrible given the huge number of people they were transporting.  The 16S bus we had been promised didn't exist, but that didn't really matter.  Bypassing L'Enfant Plaza and getting dumped at Judiciary Square instead probably cost us an hour of walking around, but gained us the experience of getting to walk through the 3rd street tunnel.  On the way home, we didn't even try to get on the metro near the Mall, but walked across the 14th street bridge to the Pentagon.  We passed a woman who suggested that it would be grand to have no cars and pedestrians walking down the middle of Independence Ave all the time.

The lines for the ticketed areas were a total mess.  The silver line literally looped back onto itself at one point.  We lucked into being right nearby when they opened up a new gate, but I'm not at all surprised that some ticket holders never got in.  There was no one managing the lines or providing information that I could find.

The Mall was a madhouse (we were jam packed so tightly that I literally couldn't move my arms for most of the time, and I could only see small pieces of the Jumbotron, let alone the actual events) but it was still a glorious day.  Everyone was just so happy and excited and buzzing.  I've never been in that tightly packed a crowd other than for short periods on the subway, but it was ok.

I really wasn't that cold, except on the way home.  I guess we were packed in so tightly we kept each other warm, like penguins.

That said, I'm glad that D turned down my offer to come.  He would have been tired and uncomfortable and unable to see, and I would have had him on my shoulders for hours, and we both would have been cranky.  It was a day for going with the flow, and I'm particularly bad at going with the flow when I feel responsible for other people's happiness.

The crowd was more integrated than any event I've attended that I can think of.  The woman in front of me (white) was 6 months pregnant and part of a group that was 4 adults and 16 children. She's a lot braver than I am.  The woman next to her (black) said she was only there because her 91 year old mother wanted to be there.

I'm not generally a fan of Rick Warren, but it was moving to hear so many people around me saying the Lord's Prayer under their breath around me.  

The crowd was a lot more rowdy than you could tell from the TV broadcasts -- there was lots of cheering for Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter as well as Bill Clinton and all of the Obamas, and there were pretty loud boos for Bush, Lieberman, and Clarence Thomas.  (Some for McCain, but not as many as for the other three.)   And there was lots of singing of hey nah, good bye.  Chants of Yes We Can and Obama while the dignitaries were arriving.

I don't think the people around us knew that Aretha was going to sing, so there were whooops when she was announced. 

I couldn't really hear most of the speeches -- the audio wasn't very loud, and there was also an echo effect from the multiple jumbotrons -- so I watched the whole thing over again once we finally made it home.

Here's a photo I took during Obama's speech -- by holding my camera over my head and snapping in the general direction of the screen.  The view from my eye level was much worse.

Forgot to mention: Everyone in my section was amused by a squirrel who was clearly freaked out that there were so many people under ITS TREE.  At one point it got up the nerve to jump from one tree to another, and there was an audible cheer in our area. 

wow

I spent much of the day immersed in the details of the recovery legislation that's being introduced in the House.  And all I can say is, wow, we're really in a whole new world.

I know, there's still a long way to go between this preliminary bill being introduced and something being signed into law.  (I watched my schoolhouse rock, you know.)  But, for someone who has spent much of my life fighting for incredibly modest incremental improvements, it's just mindboggling to read a bill that in one stroke would do so much.

Just to give one example: you might remember that last fall, I was excited that the Senate tax bill would lower the threshold at which families begin to qualify for the child tax credit to $8,500.  Well, this bill would lower the threshold all the way to $0.  If a family with a child earns $1, they would get a $0.15 tax credit.

This is just totally outside of my zone of experience.  The only time in my life when Democrats have controlled both the Presidency and both houses of Congress was 1993-1994.  And Clinton was so convinced that he needed to bring the budget deficit under control that he famously complained that they had become "Eisenhower Republicans." 

So, wow.

Which Side Are You On?

I was thrilled to read earlier this week that Tom Geoghegan is running for Congress, for the seat that Rahm Emmanuel is vacating.  It's a special election, which usually means really low turnout, and there's about 10 people running for it, so goodness knows whether he's got a shot, but I'm excited enough about him that I squeezed out a contribution for him.  Thomas Frank called him an "unrepentant New Dealer" and that's probably fair enough.  He's a lifelong labor lawyer, a supporter of single payer health insurance.

But the main reason that I'm supporting him is that he wrote a book that changed my life.  It's called Which Side Are You On?  Trying To Be For Labor When It's Flat on Its Back.  It begins:

   "Organized labor." Say those words, and your heart sinks. I am a labor lawyer, and my heart sinks. Dumb, stupid organized labor: this is my cause. But too old, too arthritic, to be a cause.

    It was a cause, back in the thirties. Now it is a dumb, stupid mastodon of a thing, crawling off to Bal Harbour to die. How did it outlive George Meany? Sometimes, as a mental exercise, I try to think of the AFL-CIO in the year 2001. But I cannot do it. The whole idea is too perverse.

    U.S. manufactunng has gone down the drain, and with it, it seems, the entire labor movement.

The book is sad, funny, and poetic.  And it convinced me that tilting at windmills is a perfectly reasonable way to spend your life.  The next thing I knew, I was taking  David Montgomery's classes and a few years later I was in public policy grad school. 

My copy of the book is still on my shelf, and I just picked it up.  I had forgotten that Geoghegan had signed it for me.  It's dated November 1994, a few weeks after the election that brought us Newt Gingrich and the Contract with (or on) America, and I must have been pretty discouraged when I talked to him, because what he wrote is "For some good it may do -- Read Coles!  Then just put it all aside, and do it all with as much style as you can."

Anyway, I'm not the only person who Geoghegan has impressed.  Here's Kathy G writing about canvassing for him, and Katha Pollitt and David Sirota and James Fallows and Rick Perlstein (author of Nixonland) even Mickey Kaus

Oh, and if you're having trouble spelling his name, you can also find his website at www.tom09.com

Inauguration

It still takes my breath away to think that in just over a week, this man is going to be sworn is as President of the United States.  I'm sure he'll piss me off sometimes, but I really can't think of anyone else I'd rather have as President right now, even if there are people whose list of policies look closer to mine.

I think I've decided against taking the boys downtown, although it kills me a little to be so close and not to be there.  But we wouldn't be able to see a thing, and it's going to be cold, and they just don't have that much patience.  I took them to see him at the town meeting in Alexandria during the primaries, so they can tell their kids someday that they saw him.  (I'm told that my great-great grandmother Betsy Segal saw Mr. Lincoln when he came to New York to give his speech at Cooper Union and she was a little girl.)  One of my friends is having a kid-friendly party, so I think we'll go there, and watch on TV and wave flags, and read stories from Our White House.

I'm not going to any of the inaugural balls, but there are a couple of parties that I'm considering.  My boss is having a get together on the evening of the 20th, if I can figure out how to get to her house in Maryland from Virginia.

What are you doing?

he meant it

I'm not a fan of Rick Warren, and I'm not thrilled with Obama's choice to invite him to give the invocation at his inauguration.  But, you want to know what my main response is? 

Obama really meant it when he said he wasn't going to be president of the red states, or blue states, but of the United States of America.

recounts and runoffs

These images from Minnesota Public Radio make me grateful that I'm not an election judge.  There are some examples -- on both sides where the campaigns are grabbing at straws.  But there are also some where it's really hard to tell what the voter had in mind.  And there's also the issue of having someone who can't decide whether they're voting for Al Franken or the Lizard People determine the control of the U.S. Senate.

I have to say, these ballots make the Georgia idea of having a runoff when neither candidate gets 50 percent seem more reasonable.  Although I have a sneaking suspicion that the policy just might may have been instituted to make sure that a black candidate couldn't win if two white candidates split the vote.  Does anyone know which actually costs the state more (per capita), holding a runoff or manually reviewing all the ballots?

Of course, the efficient way to deal with multiple candidates is the preferential or instant runoff ballot where voters rank the candidates and then when someone is eliminated, his or her votes are redistributed to the voter's second choice.  It means that you can vote for a "minor party" candidate without feeling like your vote is wasted -- and when my 5th grade class used it for our presidential vote in 1980, John Anderson did in fact win.

Australia actually uses this system in their parliamentary elections, and it seems to work for them.  Cambridge MA uses a version of it for city council elections where first they reallocate the "extra" ballots  of candidates who got more votes than needed.  That link indicates that they have moved to using scan cards for these elections -- when I lived nearby, they did it all on paper, and you could hang out and watch them move the ballots from one pile to another.  I wonder what fraction of ballots are spoiled there -- it's pretty confusing if you're not used to it.

rocket science

It appears that the $700 billion bailout fund isn't going to be used to buy "toxic assets" from the banks after all.  I'm not sure how I feel about that. 

On the one hand, the folks at Planet Money have been telling me since before the bailout bill passed that most economists think a stock injection plan makes more sense than buying assets of unknown value.  On the other hand, Congress certainly thought they were giving Treasury authority to buy lousy assets, not all this other stuff.   Neel Kashkari, who is running the bailout office, may be doing the right things.  But no one elected him anything, and no one confirmed his appointment.  And I'm enough of a believer in checks and balances to think that maybe the Treasury ought to be going to back to Congress and saying "this is what we want to do and why."

I also think the fact that Kashkari is literally a rocket scientist* (well, technically an aerospace engineer) is a symptom of what's been wrong with the American economy.  There's just been so much money sloshing around the financial sector that it's been sucking smart people away from jobs where they actually do something productive.  Being an engineer is on average a good-paying job, but it's not a winner take all job -- very few engineers make more than $200,000 a year. 

*For what it's worth, David Kestenbaum at Planet Money has a PhD in Physics.  I haven't been able to find anyone working in finance who is literally a brain surgeon by training.

tears of joy

I don't usually cry with happiness, but I've been tearing up all day.  Because for 22 months, Obama has been telling us that the United States can live up to its highest aspirations, can make real the story that this is a place of unparalleled opportunity, and last night we did it.  So many people feel like they own a piece of this victory, because they volunteered or gave money to the campaign, and that's something wondrous too.  I keep looking at the pictures of people dancing in the street, or the tears running down Jesse Jackson's face, and then I well up again.  By 9am today, you couldn't buy a copy of the Washington Post anywhere downtown because people wanted them as souvenirs.

All day long I've been humming Ella's Song to myself -- it's the Sweet Honey in the Rock song that begins "We who believe in freedom shall not rest until it's come...." 

Obama's got a tough job ahead of him, and yes, there's no way he's going to make everyone happy who supported him.  But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be celebrating today.  As Marge Piercy writes:

This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let's not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melach haolem, sheheckianu, v'kiemanu, v'higianu lazman hazeh.

Blessed are you, Adonai our God, Ruler of the Universe, who gave us life, who sustained us, and who enabled us to reach this day.

Results

via MSNBC

That's a neat widget, but so far, I've been mostly checking out the results at the New York Times, which lets you drill down by county. Not much to say yet.

Update: 10:16 pm.  It sure looks like Obama's won, but the reality of it hasn't really hit me.  Both boys are asleep on the living room couch.

Virginia's Presidential race is still too close to call.  It looks like this may be the state where the polls are going to be furthest off.  I'll be really interested to hear what they think happened.

Wolf appears to be beating Feder by large margins.  Connally appears to be beating Fimian.  Chris Shays has lost, so there are no longer any Republican Representatives from New England.

Do some community organizing

I should be going to bed, but I found this via Brad DeLong and couldn't resist.

By the way, DeLong is a wonky economist, and I've never seen him post a video before.

one day more

24 hours from now, the polls will be closed in several states and we'll be starting to have a sense of how the election played out.

Tomorrow morning I'll be getting up early to volunteer at the polls, helping people find parking spots in the dark and helping with the lines.  Then I'll take a break for a few hours to run the bake sale for the PTA (since the school is a polling site) and to vote myself.  And then I'll head out to the local organizing site to do whatever they need me to do until the last voters on line get their chance to vote.  I'll bring folding chairs for those who need a place to sit, and magazines for parents to read to their children.

I'm feeling tired and drained and elated all at once, and I've only been on the margins of the campaign.  One of the things that's special about this campaign is how many people feel like they own a piece of it.  I can't imagine how the folks who have been working 24/7 on this feel, let alone Obama himself, what with his grandmother dying this morning.

I don't know if I'll have a chance to report in, but I'd love to hear from the rest of you.  What are you doing?  Have you voted already?  What sort of lines are you seeing?

And don't forget, if you see any voting problems, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Write to Marry

This post is part of the Write to Marry blog carnival, organized by Dana at Mombian and Mike at PageOneQ.

I've been listening to the podcast of the Writer's Almanac on my way to and from work and today I heard that last Thursday was the 7th anniversary of the iPod.  It made me gape, because they've become such a ubiquitous part of our lives that it seems unimaginable that they didn't exist that recently.

Five years ago, the idea that same-sex marriages would be be legally recognized in the United States would have seemed unimaginable to me, such a far off possibility that it didn't seem like a fight that was worth taking on.  And then Massachusetts opened the doors, and San Francisco followed and I couldn't stop looking at the pictures of all the happy couples.  And the world shifted.

There's been some bumps in the road since then.  Four years ago, I was worrying about the referenda against same sex marriage and their impacts on the presidential election, and trying to remember that February warmth.  Two years ago, I was knocking on doors trying (unsuccessfully) to stop a hateful amendment to Virginia's constitution.  This blog carnival is focused on stopping California's Proposition 8 which would take away same-sex couples right to marry.

But I truly think the world has changed.  People have seen the couples lining up to marry in California and Massachusetts.  And they've seen that the sky hasn't fallen down.

I've posted this poem before, but it seems appropriate again:

Why marry at all?

By Marge Piercy, from My Mother's Body

Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magneta blossoms in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?

Why register with the state?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.

Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth's curve
but whose destination we can now alter.

This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.

TBR: Paul Robeson

I usually don't do book reviews of books that I read a long time ago, but since we've been talking about Paul Robeson, I though I'd make a plug for Martin Duberman's wonderful biography of Robeson.  It's a long book, but it illuminates a fascinating and complicated man, as well as what it meant to be a successful black man in pre-civil rights America  (he was born in 1898 and was the third African-American man ever to attend Rutgers), and the Red scare.

The anti-communist hysteria of the 50s certainly caught up many people who weren't really communists, but Robeson wasn't in that category.  He may or may not have ever been a formal member of the Community Party USA (he always denied it; Gus Hall claimed he was), but there's no doubt that he was a communist sympathizer.  To his credit, he truly believed in the universal brotherhood of man; to his shame, as Dave noted, he continued to insist that Stalinist Russia was an exemplar of that ideal, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary.  Duberman doesn't shy away from that failing in Robeson, but he makes a convincing argument for how a proud and idealistic man could avoid confronting a truth that would give aid and comfort to those who had persecuted him for years, and embarrass the people who had stood up for him.

If you didn't listen to the song I posted last week, go back and listen.  His voice is awesome.  This is the CD of Robeson singing that I have.  It's an eclectic album that doesn't quite hold together, but shows off the range of his repertoire.  It has his version of Ol' Man River, as well as the House I Live In, and Joe Hill.  It also has him singing Motherless Child, Ode to Joy (in German), a Yiddish folksong, a song from The Magic Flute, discussing how "hello" sounds the same in many languages, and reciting the final speech from Othello. 

That's America to me

Because I felt needed to wash my ears out (and maybe my brain) after listening to Michelle Bachmanns ranting about "anti-Americans" in Congress, let me offer another vision of America, Paul Robeson singing "The House I Live In."

(Also available at Remix America, which has some other interesting stuff.)

Here's a link to donate to El Tinklenberg, who is running against Bachmann.

And I join with Cecily in saying: "Do you hear me? I am a pro-choice East Coast liberal elitist and I am PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN. Stop saying I'm not. "

update:  My mother asked me whether my readers know who Paul Robeson was.  I said I'd ask.  Do you?

more on voter registration

Picking up on Thursday's discussion...

Our voter registration system is inherently messy.  In general, without some sort of a national voter registry, it's almost impossible to come up with a system that:

a) doesn't impose massive burdens on people who move a lot*;
b) doesn't penalize people who don't vote every year; AND
c) ensures that no one can be registered to vote in more than one place.**

I know that for years and years after I moved away from New York (and registered to vote elsewhere), I remained on the voter rolls in my old precinct.  (My parents still voted there, so could see my name on the list.)  Not sure if my changing my name when I married confused them, or if they just never processed the form that Virginia sent them when I registered here.

I understand the appeal of matching voter registration records against other databases, but the problem is that it's really easy for perfectly valid registrations to get bumped because people use different variants of their names, or someone can't read their handwriting, or just plain computer errors.  This is a bigger issue this year than in the past, precisely because in the wake of the 2000 debacle, states were required to clean up their lists.  (As bj said, the issues in 2004 were mostly about the reliability of electronic voting machines, and ballot and machine shortages that led to huge delays in heavily minority areas.)

And the fact is, there are no modern US examples of election fraud happening as the result of widespread false registrations.***  It would be a pretty inefficient way to steal an election, compared to getting election officials to stuff the ballot box (either literally or with electronic tampering), as happened in the 1948 Senate victory by LBJ, which pretty much everyone agrees involved election fraud on both sides.  I'm actually far more worried about the increasing use of mail-in ballots, as that makes it a lot easier for people to either impose social pressure on their friends/family, or to downright buy votes.

So, yeah, when McCain and his surrogates say that improper voter registrations are threatening American democracy, I just don't buy it. 

* I assume it's obvious to everyone who reads this why poor people and young people are more likely to move a lot, but if you want me to explain, let me know.  They're also less likely to have government issued ID.

** Although my friend who is a dual US-Canadian citizen, living in Montreal, assures me that it's legal for her to vote in both US and Canadian federal elections, although she can't vote in a US state or local election.

*** Of course there are specific cases of people voting in districts they didn't live in, or in multiple districts.  And it's a testimony to most people's honesty that there aren't a ton more, given how easy it is to get on the rolls in more than one state.

faith in the system

I sometimes work in legislative coalitions with the folks at ACORN, and I can tell you they're feeling pretty shell-shocked right now.  For decade they've been quietly going about their work, organizing low-income people to fight for things like job training, affordable housing, and child care.  It's not glamorous work, and the wins come in small increments.  And now they're suddenly Republicans' public enemy number one.

I really do think the concerns about voter registration are overblown.  Enough registration forms get lost in the system that there's a real incentive to submit multiple times until you're sure one took.  And they're legally required to submit any form they're given, because there have been in the past cases of people doing voter registration drives and then tossing all the forms in the trash.  I wonder if, after the election, we could get a bipartisan agreement that allowed for election day registration but required a government issued ID.  Or maybe we could borrow the purple ink from the Iraqis.

But, what's really bothering me is that the rhetoric that McCain and his supporters are using undermines people's faith in the system.  I raised the same concern four years ago, when Democrats were worrying about Diebold voting systems.  It's good and fine to fight hard in elections, but it's not ok to undermine the legitimacy of the winner.  I'm hoping that Obama wins by big enough margins, in both electoral votes, and in the individual states, that there's no possibility that anyone could believe that fraud changed the results.

Continuing the conversation:

• ACORN and housing

• more on voter registration

Other election issues

I don't want to jinx it, but unless all the polls are totally wrong, or something horrendous happens in the next few weeks, the uncertainty on November 4th is not going to be about who is the next President, but about the rest of the elections.*  Do the Dems really have a chance at 60 votes in the Senate?  Is Massachusetts going to commit budget suicide? What's going to happen to marriage equality in California?

Sam Wang makes a convincing case that if you have money left to spend on political contributions this cycle, you should spend it on the Senate races in Oregon, Georgia and Minnesota.  Of those, the one that jumps out at me is Georgia, because I haven't forgiven Chambliss for his utterly sleazy ads about Max Cleland.  (And Jim Martin's making sure the voters don't forget either.) 

Increasing the margin in the House is probably less of a priority, but I'm still trying to find some money to toss towards a couple of races:

• Judy Feder's contest to beat Frank Wolf in Virginia -- she's awesome, and is one of the half dozen or so people in the US who I actually think understand health care reform.  That said, he's a popular incumbent and he trounced her two years ago.  Virginia polls close early -- 7pm Eastern time** -- so that's a good race to keep your eye on -- if she wins, it's a sign that the Dems are really riding a wave.
• Dennis Shulman in New Jersey.  He's a blind rabbi, a psychologist, running against someone who is incredibly conservative for his district.  And I know his daughter.

I'm finding it hard to get too excited about my own Congressional race, but Anonymous is a Woman has some good posts about it here and here.  I haven't seen any polling, but I think Connolly should win easily -- the district has moved to the left, and the seat has only stayed Republican as long as it has because of people's respect for Tom Davis and appreciation of what he's done for federal workers.  I got a very annoying push poll from Fimian last week (although even the poor sap they had doing the poll couldn't pronounce his name.)

As far as I can tell, we don't have any wacky policy referenda on our ballot here in Virginia.  Here in Fairfax, there's a parks bonds referendum, which I'm probably going to vote against.  Given the huge budget deficit the county is running (due to the collapse of property tax revenue), I just don't think that it makes sense to borrow for things that are nice, but not essential.

* Not that I'm complaining about this.  After the last two Presidential elections,I'd really like one where I'm not sure it's worth staying up to watch the California returns come in.  My dad and I were talking about this and we decided that the question we wanted to ask is: what's your prediction for what time you go to bed on election night?

In 2000, I was 6 months pregnant, had a brutal cold, and had to catch a flight to go to a work meeting in Cleveland at 5.30 the next morning.  At about 2 am, I finally gave up and went to bed.  In 2004, I gave up when they moved Florida back from Kerry to too close to call.

** If you're likely to be stuck at work and racing home to vote, you might consider going ahead and voting absentee early.  If you're at work *or commuting* for at least 11 hours that day, it's an approved reason to vote absentee.  That sounds like a lot, but a 9 hour day and a one hour commute each way qualifies you.

obsessing over the maps

I keep checking the electoral map projections at RealClearPolitics.  They're far more encouraging than they've been until now -- McCain would have to win pretty much all of the "toss-up" states in order to win.  And a friend pointed me to this post at FiveThirtyEight, which suggests that RCP's averages are biased toward McCain, including polls in or out based on how favorable they are towards him.  I don't know if that's true, but if even a supposedly pro-McCain site is coming up with numbers like this, that's a good sign.

Martin Manley correctly warns us that a month is an eternity in politics, so I'm not counting my chickens.  No jogging through the finish line.  But I'm feeling hopeful.

(yes, I've got the debate on, but no, I'm not going to blog it unless something crazy happens.)

idle speculation

So, if McCain doesn't show up for the debate tomorrow night, will they let Obama answer questions on his own for an hour and a half?  That would be awesome.

Is Christopher Cox the new Michael Brown?

Until today, I had never head of Christopher Cox.  He's the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and he seems to be becoming the poster boy for the total failure of the regulatory agencies to do anything to try to prevent the Wall Street meltdown.

Well, that's not quite fair.  As I learned this afternoon by listening to This American Life, he acted to ban naked short sales (e.g. the practice of selling stocks that you don't actually own and haven't borrowed from anyone) but only for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman, and 18 other financial institutions, and only for a limited period this summer. 

I'm not defending the idea that you should be able to sell things that you don't own (and it's apparently illegal in any case), but what this says to me is that he wanted to shoot the messenger.  Short sellers aren't what's bringing these institutions down.  Bad lending standards, massive leverage, and generally really bad judgment are.

When specifically asked by Senator Shelby (who is not exactly known for being an advocate for government intervention) if he wanted more regulatory authority, he said no.

John McCain says that Cox should be fired.  Bush says that he's doing a great job, Brownie.  (And as in FEMA, I think the problems go much further than the top leadership...)

graphing the tax plans

Via Bitch PhD and Yglesias, this terrific graph showing the Obama and McCain tax plans and how much they'll affect different income brackets' taxes, with the bands scaled to reflect the number of people affected:

This is from a site called chartjunk, which attempts to use Edward Tufte's principles in designing charts.  Definitely lots to learn from.

The Freakonomics blog at the NY Times picked up on this too.

While we're on the topic of taxes and distribution, I'll point out that the big tax cut bill coming out of the Senate, which includes both the Alternative Minimum Tax patch and a bunch of business tax extensions, does include one provision that is really important for low-income families: allowing families to start to receive the child tax credit starting at an income of $8,500, down from the $12,050 under current law.  This would help 13 million low-income children.  It's not at all guaranteed that the House bill will also include this provision, so it's worth dropping a line or calling your representative.

I'm going to use the blogger's prerogative to add this to the post, rather than risking having it get buried in the comments with all the back and forth about child support.

Maria commented on the stat that's shown in the third chart on the Freakonomics post -- that the top .1 percent of the country pays 20 percent of the income tax.  I haven't seen that elsewhere, but it seems plausible.  There are great statistics on US income and wealth inequality here.

It's worth noting that for all conservatives in the US mutter about European socialism, the tax system in almost all European countries is far less progressive than the US system, because they collect a large portion of their government funding through a Value Added Tax (VAT) which is if anything, somewhat regressive.

I

If I didn't laugh, I'd have to cry

Via Becca at Not Quite Sure, Jon Stewart nailing people with their own words.

And Roger Simon on Why The Media Should Apologize.

I remember that around 9/11, people were saying that irony was going out of style.  But I don't know how else we're supposed to deal with this craziness.

Update:  Oh.  My.  God. I think I have to cry anyway.

Denting the glass ceiling

For all that I think Sarah Palin would be a terrible president, I do think her nomination puts another dent in the glass ceiling.  Specifically, while there are a few hardliners still arguing that women shouldn't be in positions of authority, there's no doubt that the world has changed when Phyllis Schlafly is going around saying that Palin's experience as a mother will make her a better vice president.  I really do think that the next woman who runs will find it a little bit easier as a result.

Martin Manley comments on the historical nature of this election:

"On the other hand, Clinton, together with Obama and McCain, may have just killed the white male ticket. As a country, we are having our 56th presidential election, meaning that about 200 people in American history have had the honor of running for President or Vice President at the head of a major party ticket (some have run more than once, some years there have been more than two major parties). So far as I know, all but one of these candidates has been a white man (the exception is Geraldine Ferraro in 1984). With the nomination of Palin, neither party has fielded a white male ticket. Indeed, thanks to the contestants in this year's election and the odd way the US selects Vice Presidents, a white male ticket may now be politically untenable.

"Fine."

judgment

In response to my initial post about Palin, Beth posted a comment questioning her judgment as the mother of a child with Down syndrome choosing to take on the responsibilities of being VP.  I wasn't particularly swayed by that argument -- for one thing, I suspect that the day-to-day responsibilites of being VP are probably less than those of being Governor of Alaska.  Not to mention that with the employment opportunities for oil field workers being somewhat limited in the greater DC area, her husband would probably wind being available for parenting duties more or less full time.  (I've heard some people say he's already doing the SAHD thing now, on leave from his other jobs, but haven't read anything authoritative.)  I did wonder a little about the time/travel involved with campaigning, but was planning on ending with a somewhat smug comment about basically trusting people to make good decisions about their families.

I'm feeling less smug and more judgmental today.  Not because Palin's teenage daughter is pregnant, but because, knowing that her daughter was pregnant, she accepted the VP nomination, and the media frenzy that goes with it.  And that seems like a pretty crappy thing to do to a teenager who is already in a stressful situation.

Does that change my vote?  Not in the least -- I was never going to vote for McCain.  But it does make me think somewhat less of Palin as a person.  And it makes me eat a little crow about my claim not to judge other people's parenting.

Palin

Some reactions to Sarah Palin for VP.

First, I have to say that my dad suggested that McCain would pick Palin over a month ago.  I thought he was nuts.

Second, this choice clearly succeeded in changing the political conversation from being about Obama's speech.

Third, I don't know if it will make any difference to the election.  In general, very few people vote based on the VP choice.  It will make the Christian right more eager to get up on a wet November morning, but might scare some folks on the fence who worry that McCain's VP might actually wind up in the Oval Office in the next four years.  It might win some Hillary voters, but will piss off others who see it as meaning that McCain thinks they're stupid (or that she's a younger and less qualified woman getting what they fought for).

Fourth, I don't think she's qualified to be President.  But I'm not sure she's that much less qualified than, say, Mitt Romney.  He was Governor of Massachusetts for 4 years; she's been Governor of Alaska for 2 years.  He's got more business experience; she's got more local government experience.  And even the people who like Romney's politics think he's plastic, while by all accounts she's quite real and is very popular in her state.

tough questions

I was working in the kitchen and listening to the convention coverage on the radio, but when it  was time for Clinton's speech, I went to watch it on TV.  D popped out of his room (I had put him to bed an hour earlier) and asked if he could watch it with me.  I had already promised he could stay up tomorrow to watch Obama's speech, and he doesn't need to be up early tomorrow morning, so I said ok.

So we sat down to watch and after a few minutes the questions start:

• Where are the soldiers again?
• Why did you say that "we're in Iraq"? (I meant the U.S.; he interpreted it as him and me.)
• Is Iraq in America?
• Why are American soldiers in Iraq? [I try to answer in a way that gives my opinion, but acknowledges that there's disagreement about this.]
• Why can't we just leave?
• Someone said that the reason we can't leave is that they might follow us.  Daddy said that our army is too strong and they can't do that.  Is that right? [I say yes, our army is the strongest in the world.  But then I try to explain about terrorism, and September 11...  He's seen The Sphere and knew that buildings fell down, but I believe this is the first time he's understood that it was intentional.]
• Did the people who flew the airplanes die as well?
• Good.  I think they deserved to die.  Do you think so?
• [Looking at the cat...]  How do they move their tails?
• But where do the tails come from?
• What's "evolve"?
• Do you know about the birds that sit on top of sand iguanas?
• [I unpause the TiVo and try to watch some more of the speech.]
• Why do the parents have to die so their children can be ok?  [I explain that "starve" doesn't really mean that the parents died.]
• Why do needs have to depend on money?

watching the convention

I'm watching the convention with half an ear.  For some reason, I can't get my local PBS station at the moment, and the CNN coverage is driving me nuts -- I'd rather listen to the speakers than to James Carville.  They're saying that there's not much happening that's of interest to the television audience, but there's no way to tell from their coverage, since they're not actually letting anyone hear the speakers.

I'm enjoying reading the twitters from Bitch PhD, but am not sure they're really adding to my understanding of the convention.

Ted Kennedy looks damn good under the circumstances.  He's far less jowly than my image of him -- don't know if he's lost weight or what.

I read the draft Democratic Party platform earlier today. In some ways platforms are always fairly meaningless documents -- they're written by committee, and include something for everyone, so they don't tell you anything about what the real priorities will be when the rubber hits the road.  But, as laundry lists go, it's a fine one.

I don't have much to say about the choice of Biden as VP.  I don't think he changes the dynamics of the race much.  He's got good foreign policy credentials.  NPR this evening had a long piece about whether his support for the awful bankruptcy bill was because the credit card companies are major constituents or because they're major donors.  I'm not sure the distinction is meaningful.  It's the same problem as Schumer's support of tax loopholes for hedge funds.  Fred at Stone Court says that Biden was particularly disrespectful to Elizabeth Warren during the debate.

The Republican candidate for Congress in this district just ran an ad that says he's the one to support for "real change" in Washington.  Choke.

Michelle did a good job.    T. walked in during the "ice cream" part of the speech and we both went "awww..."  If you've already read Dreams from my Father, there's not that much new in her description of Barack, though.

Gaak.  CNN has been going on about Carville's complaints that there wasn't enough "red meat" in the evening, but they just admitted that they didn't cover Pelosi's speech which did get people in the convention hall rared up.  Why?  Because they were talking with Carville!!

Define "rich"

From the interviews with Rick Warren last weekend:

Obama:

Q. Okay. Taxes. This is a real simple question. Define rich. I mean, give me a number. Is it 50,000, 100,000, 200,000? Everybody keeps talking about well, here we're going to tax. How do you define that?

A. You know, if you've got book sales of 25 million and you qualify --

Q. Okay. All right. I'm not asking about me.

A. Look, here is how I think of it. Here is how I think of it and this is reflected in my tax plan. If you are making $150,000 a year or less as a family, then are you middle class or you may be poor. But $150[000] down, you are basically middle class. Obviously it depends on region where you are living.

McCain:

Q Define rich. Everybody talks about, you know, taxing the rich and -- but not the poor, the middle class. At what point -- give me a number, give me a specific number, where do you move from middle class to rich? Is it 100,000, is it 50,000, 200,000? How does anybody know if we don't know what the standards are?

A Some of the richest people I've ever known in my life are the most unhappy. I think that rich is -- should be defined by a home, a good job and education and the ability to hand to our children a more prosperous and safer world than the one that we inherited. I don't want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich. I don't believe in class warfare or redistribution of the wealth. But I can tell you for example there are small businessmen and women who are working 16 hours a day, seven days a week that some people would classify as, quote, rich, my friends, who want to raise their taxes and raise their payroll taxes…

So I think if you're just talking about income, how about five million. So -- but seriously, I don't think you can -- I don't think, seriously that -- the point is that I'm trying to make here seriously -- and I'm sure that comment will be distorted, but the point is -- the point is -- the point is that we want to keep people's taxes low and increase revenues.

From a recent Pew survey:

2 percent described themselves as "upper class"
19 percent described themselves as "upper-middle class"
53 percent described themselves as "middle class"
19 percent described themselves as "lower-middle class"
6 percent described themselves as "lower class"
1 percent didn't know or refused to answer.

How low can you go?

When I worked at HHS, I occasionally found myself in the odd position of defending this administration to my friends.  Some of it (as my husband pointed out) was cognitive dissonance -- if I had believed that they were as evil as some of my friends said, I couldn't have survived working there as long as I did.  But it's also true that, after listening to the political appointees, I often found myself in a position where I disagreed with them, but was convinced that they genuinely believed that their policies (stricter work requirements, marriage promotion activities) were the best ways to help poor children and families.

This spring, OMB issued a directive that said that agencies wouldn't be allowed to rush through regs at the last minute.  I said at the time that I assumed this only applied to regulations they didn't want to issue, not to ones they did.  Sure enough, the Post reported today that DOL is trying to sneak through a regulation that would make it harder to regulate workplace toxins.  So I thought I was maybe getting cynical enough.

Nope.  Apparently the Bush Administration doesn't really believe that companies are supposed to pay their employees for the work they do.

Paid sick days

"Achoo!"
"Bless you."
"Achoo!"
"Gezundheit!"
"Achoo!"
"Damn it, you better not be getting sick."

Tomorrow evening, I'm attending a fundraiser in support of the Ohio Healthy Families Act, which would guarantee full-time workers 7 paid sick days a year (with part-timers eligible on a pro-rata basis).   The ability to take a paid sick day is something that professionals take for granted, but only about half of American workers have any paid sick days, and many of those that do, can only use them if they're personally sick, not to care for a sick family member.

Paid sick days are good for workers, good for families, and good for public health.  Trust me, you don't want restaurant workers coming to work sick, and you don't want other families sending their kids to school sick because they can't afford to keep them home.

I support federal legislation for paid sick days, but I also think it's great that folks in Ohio are using the ballot initiative process to try to move the idea.  For one thing, it might well get passed before anything happens at the federal level.  For another, it helps mobilize low-income workers to vote in November.

Live, from Virginia....

I had heard earlier in the day that McCain was having some sort of telephone town hall today, but I was still somewhat taken aback when the phone rang after dinner and I was connected to it.   I'd love to know how I got on their list of "independents and moderates" -- Virginia doesn't have party registration.  Is it because I voted in the Republican presidential primary in 2000?  If so, their data systems did a good job of matching me to my voting history at my old address.

When I was connected to the call, it was already under way -- I assume they had some fixed number of lines available, and when someone hung up on them, they went down their list of numbers until they reached someone else.  When I came on, he was in the middle of a response to question about farm subsidies and sugar tarifs -- I thought he gave the right answer (that they're undefensible).  He did a poor job on one about how to respond to people who say that he'd just be Bush 2.0 -- going into his differences with Obama, before seeming to remember what the question was. I only listened for about 10 minutes because the boys were needing my attention.

I've never lived in a state that was really in play during a Presidential election.  It should be interesting.  According to Real Clear Politics' poll averaging, McCain has a slight lead in Virginia so far. Given that Virginia hasn't gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since Kennedy, Obama's doing well even to keep it in play.  Four years ago, I let myself be caught up in the election-day frenzy enough to believe that Kerry had a chance.  I think Obama's got more than a chance, but we've got four long months to go.

The Maternal is Political

Today's book review is part of a MotherTalk tour.  That means I got a free copy of the book and an Amazon gift certificate to review the book.  But, given the topic, I'm confident that I would have reviewed the book in any case.

The Maternal is Political, edited by Shari MacDonald Strong, is a collection of essays by women writers about "the intersection of motherhood and social change."  Some of the authors are famous, either as politicians (Nancy Pelosi, Benazir Bhutto), activists (Cindy Sheehan), or writers (Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Lamott, Anna Quindlen), but most of them are by women you've never heard of, talking about how their motherhood has affected their political activity.  In most cases, the essays are about how mothering has inspired them to take action, but some of them are about the struggles to balance the demands on their time from their families and their activism (the essay by Valerie Weaver-Zercher about "Peace March Sans Children" made me grin in recognition).

One of the things I liked about the book was the wide range of issues covered,  Several of the essays are about opposing war as a mother's issue, but others touch on abortion, homeschooling, public schooling, religious freedom, disability, environmentalism, sexual harassment, adoption and more. Of course, I have some quibbles about the topics that are missing... I find it hard to believe that there's not one about health care (Flea could have done a great job with that one) and in general, I think economic justice issues were under-represented.  (And yes, I should have submitted an essay... I can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure I posted the call for submissions here when it came out.)

In spite of that long list of issues, the voices were different enough that the book never felt like a litany of complaints.  Anna Quindlen's piece on being pregnant in New York made me laugh, and two essays made me cry -- Cindy Sheehan's anguished farewell to activism to "try to regain some of what I have lost... before it [the system] totally consumes me or any more people that I love" and Kathy Briccetti's joyful account of her family's second-parent adoption.

I also liked the recognition that there are many ways to be political.  A few of the writers were elected officials, and some engaged in politics by writing letters to the editor, going on protest marches, or submitting testimony to their state legislators.  But many of them were political in everyday ways -- raising feminist sons and daughters, choosing to reduce use of hazardous chemicals and natural resources, speaking up about equality in personal encounters, standing up to a man harassing another woman (who is someone else's daughter), helping out another mother by taking care of her kids when she's in a crunch.  I think those examples may really help people who feel like they don't have time to be politically active -- or that nothing they do will make a difference -- to think of ways to incorporate activism into their lives.

My one real complaint about the book is that there are two essays about personal relationships with people who are (gasp!) Republicans, but no actual Republicans -- or even conservatives -- in it.  I would have liked to read an essay by someone whose experiences as a mother made them an anti-abortion activist.  I would have loved to read an essay by Cathy McMorris Rodgers on the challenges and insights of serving in Congress as the mother of an infant with Down's syndrome.  I don't know if Strong made a deliberate choice to only include liberal voices, or if it's a function of the way the call for essays was marketed, but I think it limits the audience for the book unnecessarily.

More politics

We've been receiving a torrent of mailings and autodialed calls about tomorrow's primary for the open 11th Congressional district seat.  I'm going to vote for Byrne.  I think the mailings (from Women Vote, not Byrne) calling him a war profiteer were pretty over top, but I do find it a little queasy-making that he works for a defense contractor in "community relations" while chairing the Fairfax Board of Supervisors.  And fundamentally, the only criticisms I've heard about Byrd are that she's "divisive" (e.g. has opinions) and is "shrill" (e.g. has opinions and is female).

There's been lots of talk about Jim Webb as a possible running mate for Obama.  I'm not nearly as opposed to him as Kathy G.  While he's said some incredibly stupid things about women in the past, from listening to him during both his Senate race and as Senator I believe that he's truly learned since then (and not just gotten PC drummed into him).  And he's been consistently out there on the economic justice issues I care about.  But he's a dreadful campaigner -- he won in 2006 because it was a tidal Democratic year and because George Allen couldn't keep his foot out of his mouth, not because of his own campaigning.  And I'm not at all confident that the Dems could keep his seat if he vacated it.  (Well, unless the Republicans keep nominating the likes of Jim Gilmore.)

I can't say I'm particularly enthusiastic about Tim Kaine as a running mate either.  He's a nice guy and a solid governor, but I don't really think he brings the evangelical vote with him, and he's not someone I particularly associate with changing the way Washington works.

Here's my wild and crazy VP suggestion:  Coleen Rowley.

Who's your VP suggestion?

Farm Bill

It appears that Congress overrode the President's veto on (most of) the Farm Bill today.  (Due to a clerical error, the bill that was sent to Bush omitted an entire title -- earlier today, it looked like they might have to pass the whole bill over again, but apparently they've decided that they can override the veto on what was sent to him today, and deal with the last title after the Memorial Day recess.)

The bad news is that the bill continues huge subsidies for agribusiness, at a time when commodity prices are at record highs.  The good news is that it contains some real improvements for the Food Stamp program (now to be called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) -- increasing the average benefit by increasing the amount of income that is assumed to be needed for purposes other than food, allowing more  child care expenses to be deducted, allowing the employment and training program to help people buy the equipment and uniforms they need to start a job, adjusting the asset limit for inflation over time.  There's also more money for WIC (which is *not* an entitlement, and can run out of money when lots of people apply.)

So, how do you weigh these issues?  People I generally trust don't all come down on the same side of this. Parke Wilde at the US Food Policy blog is pretty disappointed.  He's astonished to find himself agreeing with the President's criticisms of the bill.  The Food Research and Action Center is thrilled to finally pass the nutrition title improvements.

I'm more on the FRAC side of this argument.  While this is definitely a bill I need to hold my nose to support, I don't see any other way that we could have gotten the nutrition title improvements.  While the White House may not have actively opposed these improvements, they sure weren't going to put pressure on wavering Republicans to support them in a freestanding bill.

Paid parental leave for feds

Just wanted to give a heads up that HR 5781, which would provide federal employees with 4 weeks of paid parental leave, is headed to the House floor for a vote next week.   (If you read the bill text at that link, it will say it's 8 weeks of paid leave, but it was cut to 4 weeks in committee.)  Outside of the DC area, this probably hasn't gotten much attention, so it's worth dropping your Representative a line to encourage support.

I used to be a fed, and lots of people were shocked when I told them that I didn't get any paid maternity leave.  The feds generally provide good benefits, so everyone assumes that they provide parental leave.  They don't -- and they don't have any sort of short-term disability program, either -- although you can use any annual leave (vacation) or sick leave that you've accrued.  The problem is that while long-term federal employees often have months and months of sick leave accrued up, most of the people who have babies aren't long-term employees (since the federal government hires very few 12 year olds).  By hoarding my leave days carefully, and working up to the day I went into labor, I was able to take 12 weeks off with pay when I had D.  When I had N, less than 3 years later, there was no way I could have saved up enough leave -- and I was better off than most second-time parents, as T was staying home with D, so I didn't have to use up sick days when he was sick.

So, this bill both makes parenting significantly more manageable for federal employees, and also puts the federal government on record that parental leave is important.  And it even has a chance of being passed in both Houses.

tomorrow

I've got a delightful little book that I want to blog about, but tonight's not the night.  I keep hitting refresh on CNN, but the percent counted doesn't seem to have gone up in the past hour...

Stupidest policies ever

In his quasi-blog* at The Atlantic, James Fallows asked whether anyone can name a more stupid policy that passed with bipartisan support during the last 50 years than the McCain-Clinton proposal for a gas-tax holiday.  His pick from the many submissions he received is the mandates and subsidies for corn-based ethanol.  The full list of popular submissions is worth reading -- Fallows notes that while some of them had worse effects than ethanol subsidies, in order to make the short list, a policy had to be obviously bad even without the benefits of hindsight.

The policy that I was surprised not to see on the list is the mortgage interest deduction, the one policy that everyone from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to the American Enterprise Institute agrees is terrible policy.  It's expensive, regressive, and most people agree that it makes homeownership MORE expensive for the people likely to be on the margin between owning and renting.  I don't know if it misses the 50 year cut off, or if Fallows' readers are likely to be in the group that benefits from it, and so are blind to its faults.

What else would you put on the list?

*It's a quasi-blog because it doesn't allow comments.  This is clearly Fallows' choice rather than The Atlantic's because Yglesias has a real blog on their site.

Tax Day Alert

From my friends at the Coalition for Human Needs:

On Tax Day, we ought to feel that we're paying for a government that helps when a recession hits.

Now we're in a recession.  The President opposes help to the unemployed and others facing hardships.  Some in Congress want to do the right thing - and some are mostly hearing from corporate lobbyists.  Who will prevail?

Call on Monday and Tuesday, April 14-15:  1-800-473-6711*
Tell your Representative and Senators to do more to reverse the recession - by helping those in need.

You can make the difference! Here's how:

Call 1-800-473-6711* toll-free, and ask for each of your U.S. Senators and your Representative; tell them: 

I am a constituent of Rep/Sen ___ and I am calling to urge him/her to do more to reverse the recession.  Economists agree that the best way to boost the economy is to help those in need.  That's why he/she should support extending unemployment insurance, more nutrition and home energy assistance, and aid to states to prevent harmful cuts in health care and other services.   

Economists of all stripes agree that the best way to boost the economy is to put money into the hands of those who will spend it quickly:  low- and moderate-income people.  But if Congress only hears from corporate lobbyists, there will be more deals that ignore the 80,000 who lost jobs and 20,000 who lost their homes last month alone - as well as the millions who are going without because of skyrocketing food and energy prices.

 (For more information: see Towards Shared Recovery, http://www.chn.org/pdf/2008/stimulus4142008.pdf)

At tax time, it's worth remembering that for 2007 millionaires each average more than $114,000 for the tax cuts enacted since 2001. They're doing okay.  But the bottom half of U.S. families have seen their income shrink during the same period, and the recession will make things far worse for those whose incomes are low to middling.  Helping them helps all of us.

Need Help finding your Member's name?

• Find your Rep. at: www.house.gov.
• For your Senators' names go to www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

*This toll-free number is provided courtesy of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization which works for peace and social justice. AFSC welcomes groups to circulate and use the number in support of non-partisan work for budget priorities that fund human needs, not war and without linking the alert to a website that solicits donations or is coordinated and/or publicized with actions used to support or oppose any party or candidate for public office.

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And here's the paper my organization put out.