Neil deMause

I’m not sure exactly why NPR.org is running content from National Review Online, but if they’re all as unintentionally funny as this one, I’m all in favor of it.

In today’s story, Michael Tanner of the arch-libertarian Cato Institute (one of the Koch brothers family of thinktanks) sets out to explain why the Obama administration is at fault for keeping Americans in poverty. Argument #1:

For example, few things are as important in helping people escape poverty as education. High school dropouts are more than twice as likely to end up in poverty as those who complete at least a high school education. They are less likely to find jobs, and if they do their wages will be low. In inflation-adjusted terms, wages for high school dropouts have declined by more than 23 percent in the past 40 years.

An excellent point, and one I’ve made myself in the past. So is Tanner going to argue in favor of allowing people to go to college while receiving welfare benefits, thus allowing them to pull themselves up by their libertarian-friendly bootstraps?

Not exactly:

Yet Obama and the Democrats, in thrall to the teachers’ unions, steadfastly resist proposals to give parents more control over their children’s education. Washington, D.C., has a public-school system that, despite spending more per child than almost any other system in the nation, still has a dropout rate of more than 50 percent. Yet one of the first actions of the president and congressional Democrats was to kill the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which offered vouchers to permit poor children to opt out of the city’s rotten public schools.

That’s right: The reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough charter schools. And never mind that charter schools aren’t any better on average than traditional public schools (or, for that matter, that D.C.’s school system is run by one of the nation’s loudest charter advocates, soon-to-be-replaced “Waiting for ‘Superman’” star Michelle Rhee).

On to argument #2:

And, of course, nothing is more important in fighting poverty than jobs. Yet the Obama administration is overtly hostile to the entrepreneurs and job creators in our economy. The wealthy are demonized rhetorically. Every other day seems to bring a new proposal to raise their taxes. Just look at the barrage of political commercials and presidential speeches that sneeringly denounce the Bush “tax cuts for the rich.” But, as former Texas senator Phil Gramm once noted, “No one ever got a job from a poor man.”

Phil Gramm has a Ph.D. in economics, which just makes that quip all the sadder: Anyone who runs or works for a business that sells products to the masses — which is to say, most people who are not economics professors — has “gotten a job from a poor man” in the very real sense that without the spending of the non-capital-owning classes, their company would be out of business. (You may have personal experience with this of late.) And it’s more than a rhetorical point: Economists consistently score tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy as lousy economic stimulus measures in terms of how much bang you get for your federal buck. (This is known around my household as the “you can only buy so many yachts” principle.) The best alternative? Giving money to those damn poor people, who you can at least count on going out and spending it.

There’s more, but it involves privatizing Social Security as a way for poor people to reap the riches to be made by playing the stock market, and I’m laughing too hard already. So kudos to NPR for its new humor column; I just hope no overly gullible readers take it seriously.

For anyone wondering whether Obama’s reported plan to give lots of investment tax breaks to businesses is really that bright an idea, Robert Reich today gives a resounding “no way, no how“:

The economy needs two whopping corporate tax cuts right now as much as someone with a serious heart condition needs Botox.

The reason businesses aren’t investing in new plant and equipment has nothing to do with the cost of capital. It’s because they don’t need the additional capacity. There isn’t enough demand for their goods and services to justify it. Consumers aren’t buying because they’re trying to come out from under a huge debt load, including mortgage debt; they have to start saving because their nest eggs are worth substantially less; and they’ve lost or are worried about losing jobs and pay.

For those who’ve followed the world of corporate subsidies, this should be a familiar refrain: It’s the but-for question, stupid! When considering whether to subsidize economic development of any kind, the first question needs to be: Would the development happen anyway without the subsidy? Obama’s investment tax credit fails this first test, says Reich: Businesses will take the credit for investments they’d make anyway, but nobody’s going to build a factory to build crap they can’t sell just because they can get a tax credit for it.

So what we’re likely to see if this passes is the government handing out lots of money for spending that would have happened anyway, but not much else. At best, it might get some companies to shift some spending from early 2012 to late 2011 to take advantage of the tax credit, much like everyone rushed to buy houses back in April to get in under the gun for the homebuyers tax credit. And we see how well that worked out.

It always feels icky to hand out tax breaks to big businesses when tons of regular folks are losing their jobs and their homes. In this case, it’s not just ick-worthy, but lousy economics, too.

Why public schools need their own bailout. And pay no attention to that other guy who ripped off my topic today.

At my son’s elementary school, the news that Gov. Paterson is proposing $223 million in midyear cuts to city schools sparked about the same reaction you’d expect from telling a laid-off autoworker how the ice cap is melting: I’ve already got one crisis to worry about.

Last year’s cuts already cost our school its drama classes, a music teacher, and numerous aides. Library hours have evaporated. And the list of supplies that parents are asked to send in keeps getting longer… [read more]

Also pay no attention to the word “meltinger,” which was an editing error. If you want to read the original, slightly longer version, you can find it here.

Of all the inane chatter flying around about Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win, the award for the inanest has got to go to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, who first opines that this will make up for Obama’s devastating loss of the 2016 Olympics (sadly, no mention of Leno’s ratings), then proceeds to this conclusion:

Winning the Nobel Prize will allow Obama to go to his divided Democratic caucus and make the case far more forcefully that the time is now to stay united behind him on Afghanistan.

As my spouse noted on hearing this: “Oh, I see. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is a justification for going to war.”

UPDATE: At least one former Nobel Peace Prize winner agrees.

Geared toward small-business owners, but a worthwhile overview of coming legislation for the general public as well. I tackle health care, taxes, and credit cards:

Health care: Still on the critical list

Last year: The cost of providing health insurance to employees continued to skyrocket, jumping by an average of 5.7% per employee after a 6.1% hike in 2007, according to a study by consulting firm Mercer. A survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses found that health care was the number-one concern of small business owners, prompting the NFIB to become a major backer of an advertising campaign calling on the presidential candidates to make health reform a priority.

This year: President-elect Obama has endorsed a sweeping reform plan that would create a new National Health Insurance Exchange to allow more businesses access to insurance pools…[read more]

Paul Krugman has an excellent column in today’s New York Times, making some of the same points I made last week about how education and other social services (food stamps, anyone?) are just as deserving as “stimulus” spending as, say, highway construction. Krugman says it better than me, of course, being a Nobel Prize winner in Op-Ed Column Writing and all:

As a nation, we don’t believe that our fellow citizens should go without essential health care. Why, then, does a large share of funding for Medicaid come from state governments, which are forced to cut the program precisely when it’s needed most?

An educated population is a national resource. Why, then, is basic education mainly paid for by local governments, which are forced to neglect the next generation every time the economy hits a rough patch?

Krugman also notes that Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland is calling for any federal stimulus plan to include increased funding for education, food stamps, and Medicaid along with infrastructure spending. Maybe Strickland can be the Fiorello LaGuardia of the Obama era.

New York is looking at massive cuts in school spending – should an education bailout be part of Obama’s economic rescue package?

Anyone reading headlines of late has to feel like we’re on the fast track to apocalypse: Unprecedented bus and subway fare hikes; a slash of more than $2 billion from state education funding; and that’s before even getting into the indignity of paying $1.06 a song on iTunes.

The trick, as always, is figuring out which of the harbingers of doom are real, and which are scare tactics meant to shock the populace into finding other ways to stave off disaster… [read more]

Fun with Google caching!

Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion is “in hot water” after blurting out to Yale students that he’d already been picked for a top job in the Obama administration, as well as the target of “an anti-Adolfo e-mail campaign” to Obama’s change.gov by Bronx residents upset by his role in the Yankee Stadium controversy, according to a story by Daily News Bronx editor Bob Kappstatter. Wrote one angry Bronxite: “If he runs for a dog catcher, we will campaign against him and support the dogs.”

At least, that’s what you would have read on the Daily News website at 2:16 am, when it was posted. By this afternoon, the story, headlined “Adolfo Carrion under fire,” had disappeared from the Daily News site… [read more]