The Trump administration will probably go down as one of the most corrupt in US history. This podcast series from WNYC and ProPublica investigates the public records on Trump and his family’s businesses (and various investments). Each episode looks at a different business, deal, venture, etc., and tries to follow the money. There’s a lot of very good evidence that the Trumps and Kushners launder an incredible amount of money (apparently real estate and casinos are very good for that!). And they’ve gotten away with most of it for decades. No-one should be surprised the country’s falling apart, when the law rarely applies to the wealthy. (And we can blame the last several administrations for slowly eroding our legal protections.)
American Schools Now Officially Have More Cops Than Counselors →
Our schools have more police officers than counseling staff. Some schools have an assigned officer, but not a single counselor. This indicates an insane and immoral misallocation of very limited school resources. As a society, we need to value mental health far higher than we currently do, and it’s pretty obvious we’re missing the mark based on these numbers.
How many “behavioral incidents” in schools could have been mitigated by having more trained counseling staff? Instead, because of media- (and lobbyist-) fueled hsytery over (thankfully rare) school shootings, we’re spending more and more on security and in-school police, which has created its own problems. The constant push for more security increases stress and fear at schools, making behavioral issues worse. And the introduction of “school resource officers” has meant that we’re now jailing kids for behavior that used to result in punishment like detention (and there’s a lot of evidence that this ramp-up in legal punishment isn’t racially neutral, either).
In 2012, police arrested a student in Milledgeville, Georgia. The student was crying and flailing in the principal’s office and was inconsolable. The student was charged with battery. The school was Creekside Elementary School. The student was a six-year-old girl in kindergarten.
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As school behavior is increasingly the purview of criminal prosecution, fewer counselors and mental health professionals are around to help students, according to findings from a series of studies conducted by UCLA and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The American School Counselor Association recommends one counselor per 250 students, but 60 percent of schools did not meet this standard. Instead, the average is one counselor serving 444 students. But for 1.7 million students, there are no counselors, only cops.
According to the ACLU, schools nationally reported 27,000 sworn law enforcement officers, but only 23,000 social workers. And this has caused the issue of school discipline to change the scope of punishment from detention to prosecution.
Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not.
The headline is taken from the New York Times article quoted below, but I thought it fitting to keep. The article talks about how wages should be much higher, by various historical measures, and how the vast majority of workers have basically been cheated out of wages. But there’s another point that the headline could refer to: in the (hopefully) long span of human history, “jobs” as currently conceived could end up being a historical anomaly. Someday we may not have to “work.” Nevertheless, addressing more pressing concerns…
The immediate Post-War era was a unique event in human history so far. To those who survived it, it was clear that World War II happened in part because power had concentrated too much: anyone who wasn’t part of the elite was treated as expendable, and the downtrodden masses threw in behind anyone that promised them a better deal. In some countries that meant warmongering autocrats.
The Great Compromise that followed the war laid down a path to ensuring peace, through ensuring a large middle class: much higher taxes on the wealthy, to constrain their power and pay for new social support services so fewer people would fall into permanent poverty; and the deliberate support and creation of middle skill/middle wage jobs, so one’s wealth was largely determined by how hard you wanted to work (well, if you were white; extreme racism was still pervasive). This arrangement lasted the better part of two decades, and the economy flourished. In fact, economists of the time looked at the trend and speculated that by the new millennium, the country would be so rich that everyone would only have to work a few hours a day to maintain a middle class lifestyle. But that assumption rested on the fact that wages for all jobs were growing with national productivity (as they had for the basically the whole course of human history). Unfortunately, that wouldn’t last.
Almost as soon as the new policies were implemented, greedy sociopaths began undermining it, slowly building power and rigging the legal system and economy in their favor once again. We’ve had steady economic growth ever since (excepting a few recessions, and the big housing bubble, which were temporary setbacks), but during the 70s, wages stopped rising along with national production. While productivity has continued to grow, profits have steadily gone to fewer and fewer at the very top, instead of being broadly shared as either higher wages or more free time. The rich grow richer, and everyone else slowly sinks deeper and deeper into debt, as wages aren’t keeping up with inflation.
No-one should wonder why our political system is so screwed up! Power (money) is again concentrated in too few hands. Some of them just don’t care about the rest of us and are fine if people die because they’re poor. But even those who do care can’t see the big picture (because we’re all just tiny humans, in our own worlds), nor should they be the only ones making decisions about how to handle all of the tough, complex issues. If we’re going to have a vibrant, free society, we’re going to have to literally spread the wealth around, and an obvious place to start is restoring the link between national wealth and wages, including boosting the minimum wage to its historical level.
Longer-term, though, we’ll still run into major issues if we remain wedded to the notion that traditional “low/middle/high skill” job categories should determine the level of one’s wage. Food for thought, for those skeptical of something even as simple as raising the minimum wage: what happens if/when robots are able to perform most menial and middle-skill jobs?
Some numbers on the decline of wages, from Matthew Desmond in the New York Times:
These days, we’re told that the American economy is strong. Unemployment is down, the Dow Jones industrial average is north of 25,000 and millions of jobs are going unfilled. But for people like Vanessa, the question is not, Can I land a job? (The answer is almost certainly, Yes, you can.) Instead the question is, What kinds of jobs are available to people without much education? By and large, the answer is: jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
In recent decades, the nation’s tremendous economic growth has not led to broad social uplift. Economists call it the “productivity-pay gap” — the fact that over the last 40 years, the economy has expanded and corporate profits have risen, but real wages have remained flat for workers without a college education. Since 1973, American productivity has increased by 77 percent, while hourly pay has grown by only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage tracked productivity, it would be more than $20 an hour, not today’s poverty wage of $7.25.
…Today, 41.7 million laborers — nearly a third of the American work force — earn less than $12 an hour, and almost none of their employers offer health insurance.
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America prides itself on being the country of economic mobility, a place where your station in life is limited only by your ambition and grit. But changes in the labor market have shrunk the already slim odds of launching yourself from the mailroom to the boardroom. For one, the job market has bifurcated, increasing the distance between good and bad jobs. Working harder and longer will not translate into a promotion if employers pull up the ladders and offer supervisory positions exclusively to people with college degrees. Because large companies now farm out many positions to independent contractors, those who buff the floors at Microsoft or wash the sheets at the Sheraton typically are not employed by Microsoft or Sheraton, thwarting any hope of advancing within the company. Plus, working harder and longer often isn’t even an option for those at the mercy of an unpredictable schedule. Nearly 40 percent of full-time hourly workers know their work schedules just a week or less in advance. And if you give it your all in a job you can land with a high-school diploma (or less), that job might not exist for very long: Half of all new positions are eliminated within the first year. According to the labor sociologist Arne Kalleberg, permanent terminations have become “a basic component of employers’ restructuring strategies.”
Amazon Isn’t Paying Its Electric Bills. You Might Be →
Amazon’s history is littered with crony capitalism. The company exists partially because states took a decade to finally get it to pay taxes, driving a lot of local retail out of business because of the unfair practice. Cties have recently been scrambling to outdo each other’s wild promises in order to get Amazon to build a new headquarters nearby (some are promising new access roads just for Amazon vehicles, or sweetheart zero-tax deals for the first few years, or new high density housing for its workers). And now we’re learning that it’s twisted state regulators’ arms to give it cheap electricity (passing the costs onto the rest of the residents in these states):
For a little while earlier this year, it seemed as though 87-year-old Rosie Thomas and her neighbors in the small town of Gainesville, Va., had beaten Amazon. Virginia’s largest utility, Dominion Energy Inc., had planned to run an aboveground power line straight through a Civil War battlefield—and Thomas’s property—to reach a nearby data center run by an Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary. After three years of petitions and protests in front of the gated data center, skirmishes punctuated by barking dogs and shooing police, Dominion agreed to bury that part of the line along a nearby highway, at an estimated cost of $172 million.
Within a month, however, the utility and state legislators had passed on the cost to Thomas and her fellow Virginians. The state’s House of Delegates approved Dominion’s proposal to raise the money needed for the Amazon line with an as-yet-unannounced monthly fee…
This sort of thing is becoming a pattern. Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing business, is its fastest-growing and most profitable division, but it comes with a lot of upfront infrastructure costs and ongoing expenses, the biggest of which is electricity…
Unlike tax incentives, which must eventually be disclosed to the public, the costs of electricity deals usually remain hidden, because they’re technically struck between companies. They do, however, require approval by state regulators. Although data centers typically yield few new jobs, politicians desperate to make up for fading manufacturing businesses have worked closely with utility companies to land Amazon data centers, using the company’s name as a shorthand for economic resurgence.
In Virginia, where Amazon’s Vadata Inc. is believed to operate at least 29 data centers and be planning 11 more, the company’s 78-page application for a special rate agreement has two versions—a heavily redacted public one and another under seal with state regulators.
Amazon has also negotiated an unknown rate discount with American Electric Power in Ohio, where it received $77 million in tax incentives for three data centers in 2016. Late last year, Amazon dangled 12 more in exchange for reduced electricity rates, and AEP exempted it from surcharges other Ohioans must pay. “That’s de facto cost-shifting,” says Ned Hill, an economist who teaches economic development policy at Ohio State University. “Other businesses and households in Ohio are now bearing all the costs of those riders.”…
Student Loan Watchdog Quits, Says Trump Administration 'Turned Its Back' On Borrowers →
Since 2011, the CFPB has handled more than 60,000 student loan complaints and, through its investigations and enforcement actions, returned more than $750 million to aggrieved borrowers. Frotman's office was central to those efforts. It also played a role in lawsuits against for-profit giants ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges and the student loan company Navient.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has increasingly sidelined the CFPB's student loan office. Last August, the U.S. Department of Education announced it would stop sharing information with the bureau about the department's oversight of federal student loans…
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The Trump administration has also taken steps outside the CFPB to curb oversight of the student loan industry. The Justice and Education departments have argued that debt collectors should be protected from state efforts to regulate them. And, earlier this month, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos moved to scrap a rule meant to punish schools where graduates struggle with poor earnings and deep debt…
The Weight of Numbers: Air Pollution and PM2.5 →
Emanating from smokestacks, vehicle engines, construction projects, and fires large and small, airborne pollution – sometimes smaller than the width of a human hair, and very often the product of human activity – is not just contributing to climate change. It is a leading driver of heart disease and stroke, lung cancer, and respiratory infections the world over. Exposure to such pollution, the most deadly of which scientists call PM2.5, is the sixth highest risk factor for death around the world, claiming more than 4 million lives annually, according to recent global morbidity data. Add in household pollutants from indoor cooking fires and other combustion sources, and the tally approaches 7 million lives lost each year…
How Money Affects Elections →
Campaign spending is out of control. Studies show that the obscene amounts of cash flowing through ad companies actually does little for the vast majority of candidates. Instead, our current system appears to be a legal way for the wealthiest donors to try to buy politicians, and increasingly ensure only the rich run (though we’ve recently seen a few notable exceptions). We should push for a robust, fair public finance system, with clear spending limits, and a much higher standard of transparency for where large donations are coming from.
…If you focus on general elections, he said, your view is going to be obscured by the fact that 80 to 90 percent of congressional races have outcomes that are effectively predetermined by the district’s partisan makeup — and the people that win those elections are still given (and then must spend) ridiculous sums of money because, again, big donors like to curry favor with candidates they know are a sure thing.
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But in 2017, Bonica published a study that found, unlike in the general election, early fundraising strongly predicted who would win primary races. That matches up with other research suggesting that advertising can have a serious effect on how people vote if the candidate buying the ads is not already well-known and if the election at hand is less predetermined along partisan lines.
Basically, said Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, advertising is useful for making voters aware that a candidate or an issue exists at all. Once you’ve established that you’re real and that enough people are paying attention to you to give you a decent chunk of money, you reach a point of diminishing returns (i.e., Paul Ryan did not have to spend $13 million to earn his seat). But a congressperson running in a close race, with no incumbent — or someone running for small-potatoes local offices that voters often just skip on the ballot — is probably getting a lot more bang for their buck.
Another example of where money might matter: Determining who is capable of running for elected office to begin with. Ongoing research from Alexander Fouirnaies, professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, suggests that, as it becomes normal for campaigns to spend higher and higher amounts, fewer people run and more of those who do are independently wealthy. In other words, the arms race of unnecessary campaign spending could help to enshrine power among the well-known and privileged.
“That may be the biggest effect of money in politics,” West wrote to me in an email…
Alaska Gives Cash To Its Citizens Every Year. The Rest Of The U.S. Could Too. →
There’s now a lot of evidence that inequality is so high in the US that it’s become a drag on the economy. “Too many” people are stuck in poverty—inadequate, full-time job opportunities; mass incarceration; inadequate retirement options; etc…
While the larger and more difficult problem is too much power concentrated in too few hands, we could deal with inequality (to a reasonable extent) right away by implementing a “social wealth fund”: a simple, economically safe way of ensuring everyone a base level of spending cash each year or month.
David Dayen in the Huffington Post, surveying its use, and summarizing a recent report on how it could work across the US:
In one of America’s most libertarian states, people are benefiting from what is essentially a universal basic income. In 1976, Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond, a liberal Republican, established the Alaska Permanent Fund, putting a percentage of all state oil revenues into a fund, which buys stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets. Money made on these investments is distributed to every man, woman and child in Alaska in the form of an annual dividend, which since 1982 has ranged between $1,000 and $3,000.
This cash has reduced income inequality in Alaska to the lowest level in America in 2016. And the state’s libertarian bent has not dampened enthusiasm for redistributing wealth from oil companies into money for all. “It’s been described as the most popular program in the history of the U.S.,” said Bill Wielechowski, a Democratic state senator from Anchorage. “It’s hugely relied on for fuel and food. It helps bridge the gap.”
America is struggling with a huge wealth inequality problem. The wealthiest 1 percent of households control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, and this gap has been widening over the last few decades.
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…About 30 percent of all income is derived from capital, according to Bruenig’s calculations. When trying to tackle wealth inequality, “liberals tend to focus mostly on labor income,” Bruenig said in an interview. “That’s all well and good but you’re just missing one-third of the pie.”
Here’s how it would work. The U.S. government would gradually build up assets for the wealth fund. Independent fund advisers under the direction of the Treasury Department would manage it. The Treasury could create rules and directives to guide what fund managers could purchase.
Everyone over age 17 and not collecting a Social Security old-age pension would receive a non-transferable share, entitling them to an annual dividend equal to a five-year average of the market value of the fund. (For the first five years, the average would be based on the number of years the fund has been in existence.) The aim would be to prevent the dividend rising and falling sharply depending on the success of the fund.