Stiglitz and Krugman

There's a bit of a disagreement between economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman on how much of an impact inequality has on a sluggish economic recovery.

The Working Poor

A policy brief from The Working Poor Families Project reports that 32 percent of families in the United States with a defined work effort are considered to be low income.  That means 200 percent of the poverty level or below ($45,622 for a family of four with two children in 2011). That is an increase of four percentage points since 2007.  Ten states saw an increase of five percentage points or more.

Update (January 24):  The Five-Step Process to Cheat the Middle Class Worker.

Update (February 6):  Alternet starts an ongoing series called Hard Times USA.  One fact:  137 million people (43.9 percent of the population) don't have enough money to live at the poverty level for three months in the event of a personal crisis.

Update (February 25):  4 Bogus Right-Wing Theories About Poverty.

Special Report on Global Income Inequality

"The Great Divide" at Global Post documents growing inequality in the United States and around the world.

Update (June 1):  New link for the original video.

Global Civilization

An article by Paul and Anne Ehrlich published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society asks, "Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?"  Their short answer is "probably not."  Of course, they don't rule out the possibility.  But they do conclude that most people don't understand the signs of impending collapse and that the biggest barrier is the fact of paying now to benefit those in the future.  That would take a rather conscious choice among most people in most countries. And I would guess most of us just don't give it very much thought.

Update (January 19):  Chris Hedges writes about the difficulty of accepting what is happening to us.  He quotes author Ronald Wright:

We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring.  It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational decisions when faced with a serious threat.

If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for awhile to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea. 

Proportional Representation

Rob Richie and Devin McCarthy argue that gerrymandered districts aren't the only problem with the House of Representatives.  Single-member, winner-take-all districts don't accurately reflect the partisan balance of a state.  The Center for Voting and Democracy has a plan to bring fair voting and proportional representation to Congress using multi-seat districts.

Update (January 13):  A visual history of Congress from xkcd.

Update (August 3):  Two articles that argue gerrymandering has less impact than commonly believed.

Update (October 20):  The effect of gerrymandering is overstated, but has worked to reduce the number of "wasted" votes in Republican districts.

Also, the number of "Highly Partisan Districts" has increased, leaving fewer competitive seats.

Update (March 26, 2016):  Paul Rosenberg explains how pluralities are hurting Republicans in the presidential primary. The solution is ranked choice voting (instant runoff) and is being promoted by FairVote (formerly the Center for Democracy and Voting).

Update (April 2, 2016):  The Republican State Leadership Committee has a report called “How a Strategy of Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010 Led to a Republican U.S. House Majority in 2013”. The effort to gerrymander Congressional districts was appropriately called REDMAP.

Update (June 13, 2016):  David Daley discusses his book about REDMAP.

[T]he Republicans [may] have interest in fixing the system as well. After all, this last gerrymander locked in control, but it changed the nature of the party base and led to a very extreme House Freedom Caucus and took the ability to manage the caucus and the Congress away from the establishment. It’s among the factors that created the conditions under which [the nominee] could walk away with the party. ... We ignore these issues at our extreme peril — as we have seen these last several years of inaction and decay.

Update (February 10, 2018):  David Daley has an updated story on how Republicans rigged Congress.

Update (June 12, 2018):  Daley explains the statistic evidence used to show how there's nothing "natural" about a Republican advantage in redistricting.

Republicans defended the maps in federal court by suggesting the GOP advantage was “unavoidable” due to clustered Democrats and more evenly spread Republicans. Any districting plan, they argued, would favor Republicans naturally. They presented expert testimony, however, that the court found wholly inadequate to explain the historic Republican lean over two cycles on these maps. If the geographic advantage was inevitable, the Court suggested, it must not be possible to draw any maps without that partisan slant. But Republican mapmakers had produced “multiple alternative plans” without that dramatic bent, despite the modest pro-GOP geography. Fair maps could be drawn, despite Wisconsin’s political geography. Republicans drew them — but merely to use them as a starting point.

Update (June 18, 2018):  The Supreme Court declined to rule in the Wisconsin case by questioning whether plaintiffs in one district had standing to challenge the entire state map.

Update (June 19, 2018):  After the Court non-decision, David Daley expects gerrymandering in 2020 to be even worse. Which leaves Republicans entrenched and the Court unchanged for the foreseeable future.

Update (May 6, 2019):  Courts in Michigan and Ohio have thrown out gerrymandered maps. David Daley explains the significance.

One by one, these maps are being deemed unconstitutional. Only it’s now 2019, and Republicans in all these states, and in Congress, have had a decade to institute policies and install judges, despite repeatedly earning fewer votes on maps found to violate the First and 14th Amendments. Voting rights, labor rights, reproductive rights, the environment — gerrymandered legislatures have assaulted them all nationwide, moving the country backward, in opposition to public will, at a crucial moment in history.

Update (June 28, 2019):  In a 5 to 4 decision, the Supreme Court will allow states to destroy representative government. Justice Elena Kagan dissents:

The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives.

In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters' preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.

Update (August 11, 2019):  David Daley interviews Representative Don Beyer about the Fair Representation Act. It would establish multiple members districts for Congress.

Update (September 3, 2019):  A state court has ruled that North Carolina's legislative districts violate the state constitution.

Update (October 31, 2019):  State judges have ruled that North Carolina's Congressional districts violate the state constitution.

Update (December 31, 2019):  David Daley explains the connections between gerrymandered districts and voter suppression.

Here’s the thing: When you’re trying to ensure that the side with less support continues to hold power, when you’re trying to maintain control without talking to a changing nation, your tactics aren’t likely to end with redistricting. Indeed, efforts to make it harder for citizens to vote were among the very first actions by gerrymandered state legislatures, especially in Wisconsin and North Carolina, where a federal court found that those barriers were "surgically" crafted to target blacks. Gerrymandered legislatures can take such anti-democratic actions because the people’s representatives need not fear the judgement of the people. And after the U.S. Supreme Court undid essential protections within the Voting Rights Act, in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, states and other entities didn’t have to fear the courts, either, when they wanted to change the rules around voting. Across much of the nation, but especially in the South, as well as in states with one-party control and newly gerrymandered legislatures, came a flood of voter ID bills, cutbacks in absentee and early voting, voter roll purges, precinct closures and more.

Gerrymandered legislatures felt free to ignore the will of the people.

Record Temperature

The contiguous United States experienced a record high mean temperature in 2012.  The new record of 55.32 degrees Fahrenheit exceeded the previous record set in 1998 by more than a degree.

Heartless Bastards

Even the biggest Republican assholes see a role for government when it comes to relief from natural disasters.  Not so much when it comes to relief from man made disasters.  To see value in that sort of government intervention means conceding that capitalism isn't everything it's cracked up to be.