The Difference...

More on Charles Murray's "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010" from the New York Times review by Nicholas Confessore:

A Libation Gap?

One of its overriding themes is that economic insecurity doesn’t have much to do with eroding civic values, so we shouldn’t bother using government to tackle inequality. You will learn about working-class laziness, but you will find little discussion of the decline of trade unions or the rise of a service economy built on part-time work without benefits.

Murray dismisses research by scholars who have found that people in bankruptcy court usually end up there because they lost a job, got divorced or faced catastrophic medical bills, pointing to a contrary study of a single year’s worth of bankruptcy filings in Delaware, home to many of America’s credit card companies but very few of its citizens.

Though a self-described libertarian, Murray is not immune to the rage of the 99 percent. He lashes into bloated C.E.O. pay, but chiefly as a symptom of collapsing codes of behavior and propriety. And he is also skeptical that working-class whites are employed less because they can’t find decent jobs. How can the economy have anything to do with it, he asks, when the decades in question have included periods of rapid economic growth? 

Perhaps because not everyone has shared in that growth. While Murray’s new upper class was taking home an ever greater share of national wealth, incomes for almost everyone else were stagnating. During the decade preceding the 2008 bust, according to the Census Bureau, median family income in the United States dropped from $61,000 a year to $60,500. 

Indeed, in comparison with the early 1960s, American workers today are less likely to have pensions, less likely to be able to support a family on a single income and, until the much-reviled ObamaCare law kicks in, less likely to be able to afford health insurance if their employer doesn’t provide it. 

Working-class whites are different from the cognitive elite in at least one way: They have less money.

Quote of the Day

Paul Krugman, at the New York Times, on the state of contemporary conservatism: "tinfoil hats have become a common, if not mandatory, G.O.P. fashion accessory."  Read the rest HERE.

Income Inequality & The Education Gap

Sabrina Tavernise at The New York Times:

Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.

It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race. 

Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period. 

“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites. 

In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s. 

White America Coming Apart?

Murray, center, is worried about "White America"

Charles Murray, the right-wing think-tanker most notorious for the "Bell Curve" thesis asserting racial differences in intelligence, has come out with a new book focused on the apparent decline of white people in the US: “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010."

Murray - true to form - blames liberal "elites" for what he interprets as moral disarray among the white working class. Most of this concern relates to declining labor force participation and declining rates of marriage among lower income white people.

Paul Krugman, reviewing Murray's case, suggests the real causes of increasing stress on working class individuals and families:

Most of the numbers you see about income trends in America focus on households rather than individuals, which makes sense for some purposes. But when you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all — yes, all — of this rise comes from the women, both because more women are in the paid labor force and because women’s wages aren’t as much below male wages as they used to be.

"Those were the days..."

For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals...

The Catholic Contraception "Controversy"

98% of Catholics use birth control proscribed by the hierarchy

The current heat over requirements that employers such as universities and hospitals that are affiliated with churches provide full health insurance coverage, including access to contraception is based on some misinformation regarding who supports the Affordable Care Act regulations and who is raising a ruckus claiming the Obama administration is engaged in a "war on religion" as some sort of secularist plot. While the Catholic hierarchy set off this controversy, the shock troops against the administration are mostly coming from elsewhere.

The graph below shows current polling on public support, broken down into denominational factions ("white evangelicals" is an unfortunate-but-necessary separate race-based category, because the right-wing white populism that has infected many self-defined evangelicals among the GOP's largely lily-white base is a more defining characteristic than their asserted Christian values - values which are interpreted quite differently among very traditionalist or fundamentalist Christians who are also informed by the real-world experiences of African-Americans.)

Note that support for the contraception coverage is even higher among Catholics than the general population, while "white evangelicals" - i.e. demographic terrain for a major "usual suspects" segment of the hard-core GOP base among resentment-driven white cultural populists - are the predictable locus of dissent  :

 Via Wonkblog.

The fallout of this episode - wherein the President is supported not only by most citizens but by most Catholics - is that in service of the GOP's desperate last-ditch partisan wars of cultural and racial resentment, we get nutty stuff like this coming from the mouth of Rick Santorum:   "This is a very hostile president to people of faith. He’s a hostile president, not just to people of faith, but to all freedoms." 

Santorum, true to form, is some combination of irresponsible and perverse in his mendacious mudslinging.  In fact, Santorum himself is hostile to freedom in that he has expressed opposition not just to a woman's right to choose as regards abortion, but to all forms of birth control. He is on the extreme wing of the anti-gay equality crusades. Santorum is shouting from the gutter. That he cloaks his hate and lies in high-volume religiosity makes them just that much more disgusting.

"How Romney would tax us"

Tax expert, David Cay Johnston, has it:

President George W. Bush cut taxes for almost everyone who paid income taxes. Romney would make the Bush tax cuts permanent. But that’s only a first step.

He would also raise taxes on poor families with children at home and those going to college. Romney does this by reducing benefits from the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit and by ending the American Opportunity tax credit for college education.

Without these tax breaks, the poorest fifth of taxpayers would pay $157 more in taxes in 2015 than under current policy, the Tax Policy Center says in its analysis of Romney’s plan. The second poorest group would pay $82 more, according to the center, whose past work has been praised by Republicans and Democrats alike.


TAX CUTS
While Romney would make these two groups — the poorest 125 million Americans — pay higher taxes, the top 60 percent all would get tax cuts. The top tenth of one percent would save, on average, $464,000 a year, the Tax Policy Center’s analysis says.

His plan gives one third of his tax cuts to the top tenth of one percent of taxpayers. By comparison, Bush gave this group only one eighth of his cuts.

Romney would also eliminate estate and gift taxes, a policy that I believe would damage the spirit of striving that has served us so well until now, replacing it with a new era of dynastic wealth.
Romney’s campaign did not answer specific questions about his tax proposals, referring me instead to the plan itself.

Tax Fairness - eliminate lower rates for capital gains

Mark Schmitt at "New Deal 2.0":

The special rate for capital gains and dividend income is the first problem to fix in tax reform, and not just for millionaires or those over $250,000. It creates enormous distortions in economic activity — all the complicated-sounding loopholes you hear about, like the “carried-interest loophole” or the “founders’ stock loophole,” are really just scams to redefine ordinary income as capital gains to get the preferred tax rate. Eliminate the special rate and the loopholes disappear.

Nor do lower rates for capital gains, in the long-term, promote growth or encourage investment that wouldn’t otherwise occur. Economist Alan Blinder pointed out in 2007 that after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 eliminated the special rate for capital gains, the economy continued to boom. The better “Buffett Rule” should be simply, “All income should be taxed in the same way, regardless of whether it comes from work or investment.”

Note: It's useful to remind ourselves of who was President when the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was passed, eliminating special lower rates for capital gains income.  Ronald Reagan championed this reform, which raised taxes on capital gains by thirty percent with no apparent impact on investment or GDP growth. The rates were eventually lowered under both Bushes.

Who benefits from this tax loophole?  According to Forbes editor Robert Lenzer (via Eric Alterman), "The top 0.1 percent—about 315,000 individuals out of 315 million—are making about half of all capital gains on the sale of shares or property after one year; and these capital gains make up 60 percent of the income made by the Forbes 400."

SuperBowl Surprise: Clint Eastwood endorses Obama... I mean, uh... the US auto industry

The hard Right will hate Clint for becoming a spokesman on behalf of Detroit's revival driven by President Obama's reaching out to an industry in distress, but I'm certain that he could care less. He's Clint Eastwood...and they're not.

A tale of two Romneys

Michael Tomasky at the New York Review of Books:

Gov. signing collective bargaining bill for public employees

George Wilcken Romney, the former automobile executive who became the centrist Republican governor of Michigan in 1963, was considered a presidential possibility leading up to the 1964 election. Moderate Republicans around the country were getting awfully nervous about this Goldwater fellow and seeking out plausible alternatives. But Romney, a tall and square-jawed man with impressive hair, had made a commitment to the voters of his state that he would serve four years, and Romney was a man who meant what he said, so a 1964 run was out of the question.

The task of opposing Barry Goldwater fell to other moderates—Nelson Rockefeller and Pennsylvania’s William Scranton. Romney did, however, leave his mark on the campaign: having deemed Goldwater an enemy of civil rights, which he backed ardently, he walked out of the party’s convention at San Francisco’s Cow Palace. He had his seventeen-year-old youngest son, Mitt, in tow, and thus Mitt, too, occasionally gets credit...for stalking away from his party on a matter of the highest principle.

Today, as the younger Romney struggles to secure the GOP nomination that seemed his for the taking until his crushing loss to Newt Gingrich in South Carolina, to think about that anecdote and his father’s towering influence on him...and to watch Willard Mitt Romney run a campaign in which he has charged as hard and fast to the right as he could on almost every issue you can think of lead inevitably to comparisons between the two Romneys, comparisons in which the younger Romney comes up dramatically short.

What the heck is the PBGC? Believe it or not, a very important reason to vote for President Obama instead of that Bain Capital guy!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A Reagan Conservative debunks the current GOP's economic proposals

Picture credit: mariopiperni.com

Given the iconic status of Ronald Reagan and "Reaganomics" that is serially invoked among the current crop of GOP candidates - particularly at the level of presidential aspirants - it's useful to listen to one guy who actually did help formulate Reagan's economic strategy three decades ago and who isn't impressed with the rubber-stamped "Reagan(!)" pretenders.

Bruce Bartlett - one of the few sane voices left in contemporary conservatism (or, perhaps more accurately, left in the wake of extremist right-wing radicalism that pays lip service to conservatism) - was a domestic policy advisor in the Reagan administration and adheres to conservative fiscal policy, which he doesn't interpret as simply "more tax cuts all of the time."

Here's Bartlett's explanation of why the current GOP agenda - tied to simplistic invocations of Ronald Reagan - doesn't make sense in 2012:

In their debates, ads and speeches, the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are vying for the label of most Reagan-esque.

On taxes, “I take the Reagan approach,” former senator Rick Santorum said at a recent Florida debate.

On the economy, “under Ronald Reagan, we had . . . the right laws, the right regulators, the right leadership,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich said in a debate before his South Carolina primary victory.

Judging from the candidates’ tax proposals, they seem to believe that the most Reagan-like candidate is the one with the biggest tax cut. But as the person who drafted the 1981 Reagan tax cut, I think Republicans misunderstand the premises upon which Reagan’s economic policies were based and why those policies can’t — and shouldn’t — be replicated today...

Willard M. Romney breaks with Reagan regarding the "very poor", the working poor and extensions of the "safety net"

Mark Schmitt at The New Republic:

Let’s give Mitt Romney the benefit of the doubt: He didn’t really mean it when he said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Or, let’s just say he cares about them no less than he cares about the rest of us. Only 41 percent of respondents in a recent poll said that Romney “cares about people like me,” so if the wisdom of crowds is any guide, the very poor are hardly unique as objects of his indifference.

"Battling for America's soul..."

Let’s look instead at Romney’s follow-up: That there’s a “safety net” for the very poor, and “if there are holes in it, I’ll fix them.” This isn’t just a walk-back of the “not concerned” comment. It represents a very real element of an emerging conservative argument, one that deserves to be taken seriously. In this antiquated vision of the economy, everything is fine for most people, but there is a slice of the “very poor” who might need some help. Poverty, in this vision, is the exception; prosperity and opportunity without government aid is the norm...

"Unto whom much is given, much is required..."

President Obama speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast:

At a time when it's easy to lose ourselves in the rush and clamor of our own lives, or get caught up in the noise and rancor that too often passes as politics today, these moments of prayer slow us down. They humble us. They remind us that no matter how much responsibility we have, how fancy our titles, how much power we think we hold, we are imperfect vessels.

We can all benefit from turning to our Creator, listening to Him. Avoiding phony religiosity, listening to Him. This is especially important right now, when we're facing some big challenges as a nation.

Our economy is making progress as we recover from the worst crisis in three generations, but far too many families are still struggling to find work or make the mortgage, pay for college, or, in some cases, even buy food.

Our men and women in uniform have made us safer and more secure, and we were eternally grateful to them, but war and suffering and hardship still remain in too many corners of the globe. And a lot of those men and women who we celebrate on Veterans Day and Memorial Day come back and find that, when it comes to finding a job or getting the kind of care that they need, we're not always there the way we need to be.

It's absolutely true that meeting these challenges requires sound decision-making, requires smart policies. We know that part of living in a pluralistic society means that our personal religious beliefs alone can't dictate our response to every challenge we face.

But in my moments of prayer, I'm reminded that faith and values play an enormous role in motivating us to solve some of our most urgent problems, in keeping us going when we suffer setbacks, and opening our minds and our hearts to the needs of others.

We can't leave our values at the door. If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries, and allowed us to become somewhat more perfect a union.

Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel -- the majority of great reformers in American history did their work not just because it was sound policy, or they had done good analysis, or understood how to exercise good politics, but because their faith and their values dictated it, and called for bold action -- sometimes in the face of indifference, sometimes in the face of resistance.

Let the games continue... UPDATED!

I'm sorry but I can't help myself. This is great news:

LAS VEGAS -- An advisor to Donald Trump says he will make a major announcement in Las Vegas tomorrow. Sources tell the 8 News NOW I-Team Trump will endorse Newt Gingrich.

According to Trump advisor Michael Cohen, "Donald J. Trump will be making a major announcement tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. at Trump International Hotel & Tower, Las Vegas, Nevada... The announcement will pertain to the Presidential race."


Gingrich enters the Nevada Caucus after getting beat by Mitt Romney in Florida. He has spent the day campaigning in Reno.

Last year, Trump decided not to run for the GOP nomination after attacking President Barack Obama over the validity of his birth certificate.

Update: "I don't know of anybody who does a better job of getting attention by announcing that he will presently announce something," Gingrich told the AP.

Update 2: Epic fail. The Titanic - against all odds - has sunk. We misunder-reported. The Ultra-Donaldest Maxi-Trumpalicious Uber-PsuedoMogul-Entity endorsed Mitt Romney. This, of course, is great news for Barack Obama! 

Omigod! David Brooks reads another book...but doesn't really want us to know what it's actually about.

Brad DeLong catches David Brooks in another embarrassment - like not forthrightly telling his readers what the true subject of the book he's frothing over happens to be:

"David Brooks sure reads a lot of books."

Charles Murray's new book is called: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

Now David Brooks:

"The Great Divorce: I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society…"

How can a book that explicitly leaves out Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Amerindians, African-Americans, people of mixed race, and Arab-Americans possibly describe "the most important trends in American society"?

"Liberals play a central role in unfairness."

How can the New York Times editors publish a piece without asking David Brooks why he does not dare mention the subtitle of the book he is puffing?

Charles Murray, of course, is the right-wing "think-tanker" currently writing for the American Enterprise Institute and, notoriously,  co-author of "The Bell Curve" tome which argued that differences in intelligence were embedded in race.

About half-way into Brooks' latest adulatory column he notes that  Murray "is at his best" analyzing "behavioral differences" between the well-educated and the poorly educated and that "he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play." 

That Murray's entire study of "the most important social trends" is premised as a meditation on the circumstances of white Americans exclusively is rather conspicuously evaded by our deep-thinking gadfly, Mr. Brooks.

Update: A commenter at Brooks' NYTimes column site, Aaron Hamburger, offers this cogent observation:

Brooks writes "he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play." Why is "white" not a race? What are the other "complicating factors" that don't come into play?

And why do I get the feeling that this whole column reeks of nostalgia for a time when people who had "complicating factors" were kept at society's margins, not needing to be accounted for.

Three key regulators saw the warning signs of a serious financial crisis. All three were ignored. All were women.

Keith Chrostowski of The Kansas City Star:

Summers: "Issues of women's intrinsic aptitude?"

More people in positions of power — government regulators, especially — should have foreseen the subprime financial crisis coming.

They could have saved us from this mess.

But wait …

Three regulators did indeed ring warning bells — at the right time, in the right places, and loud enough for other banking and financial system overseers.

Brooksley Born

 All three were women: Brooksley Born, Sheila Bair and Susan Bies.

All three were ignored.

You may have heard before about the warnings issued by Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the 1990s, and Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from 2006 to 2011.

Bies’ concerns, however, came to light recently when the Federal Reserve released transcripts of its policy meetings from 2006, a full two years before the crisis exploded.

Susan Bies

Bies was a central bank board member from 2001 to 2007. Several times in the transcripts she said she was worried about the housing bubble.

Bies warned fellow board members that exotic mortgages — for instance, negative amortization loans in which balances become bigger and not smaller over time — were too dangerous for consumers.

Sheila Bair

She warned about the Wall Street-created securities backed by risky mortgages.

“I just wonder about the consumer’s ability to absorb shocks,” she said at Fed meeting in May 2006.

“The growing ingenuity in the mortgage sector is making me more nervous as we go forward in this cycle, rather than comforted that we have learned a lesson. Some of the models the banks are using clearly were built in times of falling interest rates and rising housing prices. It is not clear what may happen when either of those trends turns around.”

The Death of Glass-Steagall: a former top banking exec's "Mea Culpa" and a former Senator's "I told you so!"

Bill Moyers interviews John Reed, the former head of Citigroup - who was personally involved in the extinction of the Glass-Steagall Act, which for 70 years separated traditional banks from speculative investment banking, and now regrets it - and former Senator Byron Dorgan - who was one of the few in Congress to forcefully oppose the change and warn of great risks, predicting with almost eery prescience in 1999 that "within ten years" the country would come to regret this landmark deregulation.

Moyers & Company Show 103: How power and influence helped big banks rewrite the rules of our economy. from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Thought for the day...on the GOP's Newtron Bomb

From John Heileman, who's been following Newt Gingrich on the campaign trail for New York magazine:

(S)o much has he come to despise Romney and the Republican Establishment that has brought down on him a twenty-ton shithammer in Florida, and so convinced is he of his own Churchillian greatness and world-historical destiny (that t)he same antic, manic, lunatic bloody-mindedness that has made him such a rotten candidate in the Sunshine State may be enough to keep him the race a good long time.

 You go, guy!

State and Local Budget Cuts Are Stalling Recovery

Jared Bernstein:

Sources: BEA, BLS

Last year, state and local squeeze shaved about 0.3% off of GDP and cost 266,000 jobs.  A simple regression of state/local job losses on the GDP contribution finds that for every point of growth that the states and locals take off of GDP, employment in the sectors falls around 700,000.

We generally recognize that GDP losses map onto job losses but the fit is not usually this tight—there are lags in the generalized relationship between growth and jobs and lots of other moving parts.  But that’s less the case in state and local governments.  Here, the chain of events is pretty obvious and pretty clear.  You squeeze their budgets, it shows up quickly and directly in growth and jobs.

Conversely, and here’s the policy part, were we to use federal stimulus to help relieve their budgets, we could get this relationship running in a better direction.

Update: The always righteous Larry Mishel (president of the Economic Policy Institute) points out that the job losses I’m citing above are only part of the story.  States and cities buy private services and contract with private firms.  Ethan Pollack writes: “For each dollar of budget cuts, over half of the jobs and economic activity lost are likely to be in the private sector.”

We need more federal assistance (aka "stimulus") to state and local governments. Of course, given the current Congress it's not going to happen.

Bill Maher wants to know: Who the F*** Is Saul Alinsky?

Newt Gingrich, trying to keep incoherent fear alive on the GOP campaign trail:  “The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky,”