If you ever had any doubt that the so-called “reform” movement was about privatizing public schools, this should settle it:
Money is so tight in the Philadelphia School District that the unthinkable has happened. For the first time in 17 years, CAPA – the High School for Creative and Performing Arts, the district’s arts gem on South Broad Street – cannot afford to put on a musical.
“I was shocked and upset,” said Jack Schmieg, a freshman vocal major at Oberlin College in Ohio who starred as Jean Valjean in CAPA’s production of Les Misérables last year. “I couldn’t imagine not having a musical. . . . I was in the musical every year at CAPA, and it was the highlight of every year for me and everybody else that participated.”
Senior Daniel Wisniewski was disappointed, too. He played Javert in Les Mis and had expected to audition for an even bigger role this spring.
“I feel bad for all the other seniors,” he said. “This was going to be our year.”
But disappointment turned to disbelief when they heard that a new performing-arts charter high school that the School Reform Commission approved last year planned to buy GlaxoSmithKline’s former North American headquarters at 16th and Vine Streets for $29 million.
“Really?” said Wisniewski, who will major in theater at Ithaca College in the fall. “And we can’t get a musical?” Continue reading “The agenda”→
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Two years ago, federal mining engineers found potentially serious safety concerns at seven slurry impoundments scattered across West Virginia’s southern coalfields.
But the government has yet to finalize a report on the matter, and on Thursday refused to make public detailed findings from a draft prepared in 2011.
U.S. Office of Surface Mining officials refused to release the complete data, even after local citizen groups made public a leaked, one-page summary that described poor construction techniques, lax quality control for safety testing, and inadequate compaction of embankment materials.
“There are a lot of things there that the public isn’t being told,” said former miner Joe Stanley, an activist who has been monitoring impoundment issues. Stanley was among about a dozen citizens who gathered Thursday morning outside OSM’s field office in downtown Charleston to urge agency officials to make public the details.
OSM officials refused the request, saying they are working with the state Department of Environmental Protection on additional testing to try to verify the original results.
DEP officials said their additional testing, conducted in January, February, July and August 2012 and again this month, found no violations or safety concerns. But like OSM, DEP refused to release data from its testing.
The issue, simmering behind the scenes for months, burst into public view Wednesday night, with the release — initially in a Washington Post report — of the one-page summary of the OSM report drafted in 2011, when federal officials had initially planned to make public the entire study.
What the hell, it’s only about protecting poor people, amirite?
I was on the radio last night debunking the token liberal defending the chained CPI, and let me tell you, some people are really, really dumb. They’ve really bought into that whole “shared sacrifice” bullshit, which tells me a lot of people are really into masochism. From Talking Points Memo:
Last week, while the national media turned its attention to the events unfolding in Boston, the Congressional Budget Office released a report that under normal circumstances have received much more scrutiny.
And if House Republicans eventually relent and agree to return to the normal budget process, it will become relevant once again.
The report addressed and largely affirmed a key criticism of an inflation measure called Chained CPI, which among other things would reduce Social Security cost of living increases and kick people into higher income tax brackets, if adopted across the government.
The implicit finding: Chained CPI — which President Obama included as a compromise measure in his budget — will typically harm seniors more than the rest of the population.
Supporters of Chained CPI argue that, unlike the two main existing indexes the government uses, it incorporates the assumption that consumers will substitute cheaper goods for costlier ones when prices rise, counteracting the economic impact of inflation. Thus, they argue, Chained CPI provides a more accurate calculation of inflation, and the ones the government currently uses to index benefits and tax brackets are too generous. Continue reading “Chained CPI cut is even bigger than we thought”→
Austerians have had their worst week since the last time GDP numbers came out for a country that’s tried austerity.
But this time is, well, different. It’s not “just” that southern Europe is stuck in a depression and Britain is stuck in a no-growth trap. It’s that the very intellectual foundations of austerity are unraveling. In other words, economists are finding out that austerity doesn’t work in practice or in theory.
What a difference an Excel coding error makes.
Austerity has been a policy in search of a justification ever since it began in 2010. Back then, policymakers decided it was time for policy to go back to “normal” even though the economy hadn’t, because deficits just felt too big. The only thing they needed was a theory telling them why what they were doing made sense. Of course, this wasn’t easy when unemployment was still high, and interest rates couldn’t go any lower. Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna took the first stab at it, arguing that reducing deficits would increase confidence and growth in the short-run. But this had the defect of being demonstrably untrue (in addition to being based off a naïve reading of the data).
Countries that tried to aggressively cut their deficits amidst their slumps didn’t recover; they fell into even deeper slumps.
Enter Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They gave austerity a new raison d’être by shifting the debate from the short-to-the-long-run. Reinhart and Rogoff acknowledged austerity would hurt today, but said it would help tomorrow — if it keeps governments from racking up debt of 90 percent of GDP, at which point growth supposedly slows dramatically. Now, this result was never more than just a correlation — slow growth more likely causes high debt than the reverse — but that didn’t stop policymakers from imputing totemic significance to it. That is, it became a “fact” that everybody who mattered knew was true.
Except it wasn’t. Reinhart and Rogoff goofed. They accidentally excluded some data in one case, and used some wrong data in another; the former because of an Excel snafu. If you correct for these very basic errors, their correlation gets even weaker, and the growth tipping point at 90 percent of GDP disappears. In other words, there’s no there there anymore.
Dean Baker on the national disaster of long-term unemployment.
Paul Krugman talks about the human tragedy behind the economic policy failures of the Obama administration, which has prioritized deficit reduction over putting people back to work:
It goes without saying that the explosion of long-term unemployment is a tragedy for the unemployed themselves. But it may also be a broader economic disaster.
The key question is whether workers who have been unemployed for a long time eventually come to be seen as unemployable, tainted goods that nobody will buy. This could happen because their work skills atrophy, but a more likely reason is that potential employers assume that something must be wrong with people who can’t find a job, even if the real reason is simply the terrible economy. And there is, unfortunately, growing evidence that the tainting of the long-term unemployed is happening as we speak.
One piece of evidence comes from the relationship between job openings and unemployment. Normally these two numbers move inversely: the more job openings, the fewer Americans out of work. And this traditional relationship remains true if we look at short-term unemployment. But as William Dickens and Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University recently showed, the relationship has broken down for the long-term unemployed: a rising number of job openings doesn’t seem to do much to reduce their numbers. It’s as if employers don’t even bother looking at anyone who has been out of work for a long time.
To test this hypothesis, Mr. Ghayad then did an experiment, sending out résumés describing the qualifications and employment history of 4,800 fictitious workers. Who got called back? The answer was that workers who reported having been unemployed for six months or more got very few callbacks, even when all their other qualifications were better than those of workers who did attract employer interest.
So we are indeed creating a permanent class of jobless Americans.
And let’s be clear: this is a policy decision. The main reason our economic recovery has been so weak is that, spooked by fear-mongering over debt, we’ve been doing exactly what basic macroeconomics says you shouldn’t do — cutting government spending in the face of a depressed economy.
It’s hard to overstate how self-destructive this policy is. Indeed, the shadow of long-term unemployment means that austerity policies are counterproductive even in purely fiscal terms. Workers, after all, are taxpayers too; if our debt obsession exiles millions of Americans from productive employment, it will cut into future revenues and raise future deficits.
Our exaggerated fear of debt is, in short, creating a slow-motion catastrophe. It’s ruining many lives, and at the same time making us poorer and weaker in every way. And the longer we persist in this folly, the greater the damage will be.
Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the deficit-reduction duo, are trying to rekindle congressional interest in a $2.5 trillion package of spending cuts and tax increases with new details showing how it could work.
The updated plan, to be released today in Washington, includes $740 billion in increased revenue over the next decade that Republicans have deemed unacceptable and a higher eligibility age for Medicare that President Barack Obama has rejected.
The bipartisan pair are seeking to outline the elusive middle ground between the parties’ positions on deficit reduction, and continue to refine an alternative federal budget that few lawmakers have endorsed. Bowles said in an interview that they are trying to demonstrate what’s possible and absorb criticism so they can catalyze a deal. Continue reading “They’re baaaack”→
I think we already knew this. It’s why the chained CPI is such a bad, bad idea:
As millions of Americans raced to the post office this week to mail in their taxes, we were reminded that April is, indeed, the cruelest month. It’s cruel because the sagging economy continues to create economic hardships for working-class Americans — including the Rising American Electorate.
Composed of unmarried women, African Americans, Latinos, other people of color, and youth ages 18-29, the Rising American Electorate, or RAE, continues to feel the pinch of the underperforming American economy. Unmarried women in particular are economically living on the edge.
Of all women who are unemployed, two-thirds are unmarried. Of all women who have no health insurance, two-thirds are unmarried. And of all women below the federal poverty line, 81 percent are unmarried, according to recent data gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Just this past March, a survey conducted by the Democracy Corps and the Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund confirmed our fears about the RAE. The survey found that unmarried women and significant portions of the RAE had experienced economic hard times within the past year.
For the first time in decades, I was eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit this year (which was immediately applied to my tax debt, although it’s supposed to be a stimulus.) Good times!
Here’s something you can usually count on: the Washington Post editorial board is rarely on the side of human beings. They just love that political process!
If President Barack Obama’s budget offer is primarily an attempt to win over members of the Centrist Hack Pundit Community, and perhaps get them to train their fire on congressional Republican instransigence instead of constantly indulging in leadership surrealism, here’s some good news: The Washington Post editorial board is on board. Sure, chained CPI does not nearly go far enough in depriving Social Security recipients of the money that helps stave off destitution, but it’s a rollicking good start, apparently:
Though far from perfect, the budget President Obama released Wednesday represents the best hope for replacing sequestration with a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal before the federal government hits its statutory borrowing limit in late summer — and before Congress gets paralyzed by the politics of the 2014 elections.
The editors, naturally, refer to the chained CPI cuts, as well as reductions to Medicare, as the “most important” parts of the deal. (More important even than sparing the country from “excessive domestic-spending cuts falling most heavily on those Americans least able to afford them.” They are a little put out, however, that even as Obama offers these cuts to earned benefit programs, he doesn’t seem to actually wantit bad enough, in his heart of hearts: “Mr. Obama too often casts entitlement reform as a concession to extract Republican assent to higher taxes, rather than a worthy end in itself.”
You know what I say: Obama has been trying to give the GOP these cuts for so long that you might as well accept the fact that they are, at bottom, something he is not at all reluctant to do. That said, if it’s sometimes difficult to cast things like chained CPI as a worthy end in itself, well … that’s because it’s not a worthy end in itself.
