Author Archives: SheilaGellert

Chained CPI Was Never Going to Happen, And Now It’s Still Never Going to Happen

by SheilaGellert Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Chained CPI is the dog that didn’t bark. President Obama’s latest budget proposal doesn’t include a switch to chained CPI, and this absence has put chained CPI back in the news. Does that make sense?

Probably not. In any case, you probably don’t care much about what chained CPI really is. I’m sure I’ve written up a technical explanation in the past, but I’m too lazy to—oh hell. Hold on. Here it is if you’re interested. Or you can just google it. Long story short, it slightly reduces the way we calculate inflation. And since Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation, it would slightly reduce future Social Security payouts.

Obama has proposed in the past that we adopt chained CPI. On its own, this is a terrible idea. However, under certain circumstances, it might be a good thing. At a minimum, those circumstances are threefold: (1) There would be some kind of adjustment to prevent low-income retirees from taking a hit. (2) It’s part of some broader deal on Social Security. (3) It’s adopted everywhere, including in the tax code, where it would raise taxes slightly by slowing down the inflation indexing of tax brackets. Hey, if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander. Chained CPI is either more accurate or it’s not, and if it is, then we should use it everywhere.

If these circumstances were met, I’d have a certain amount of sympathy for switching to chained CPI beyond the purely wonkish consensus that it’s a more accurate measure. One reason is that it forces everyone to put their money where their mouths are. And by “everyone” I mean today’s retirees. You see, one of the things that pisses me off about discussions of Social Security is that it’s always future retirees who are supposed to take one for the team. We’re supposed to believe that Social Security is in crisis mode, a true threat to the republic, and therefore we have to cut benefits. But look. If this is really such a huge crisis, then we should all pitch in to save Social Security, including current retirees. If current retirees think their existing benefits are too generous, then they should support cutting them. If they don’t think that, then why should they get to keep their current benefits but cut them for future retirees?

They shouldn’t. Either benefits are too high or they aren’t. And one of the features of chained CPI is that it would have a small but immediate effect on benefits, cutting future COLA increases slightly every year. If that’s acceptable to current retirees, then I figure I can accept a cut too. If not, then I want the same benefits they’re getting. Deal?

In any case, none of this matters, because Republicans have never shown the slightest willingness to cut a broader deal. They want chained CPI, but they want it only for future retirees and they want it only for Social Security. They are willing to make precisely zero concessions in return for this. So as Jonathan Chait points out, it really doesn’t matter if Obama includes chained CPI in his budget proposal:

In reality, the fundamentals of the situation have not changed at all. Last year, Obama was willing to adopt C-CPI in return for concessions Republicans would never, ever make. This year, Obama is still willing to adopt C-CPI in return for concessions Republicans would never, ever make. Putting the compromise in his budget was merely Obama’s way of locating the blame for the reality that Republicans in Congress will never, ever, ever strike a fiscal deal with him. The disappointed deficit scolds sitting just to Obama’s right, and the joyous progressives just to his left, are committing the same fallacy. They are mistaking a step premised on an impossibility for a semblance of reality.

One thing I’m curious about in an academic sort of way is whether Obama ever really truly supported chained CPI. He’s enough of a wonk that he might have. Or, it might merely have been a bargaining chip that he knew would never go anywhere. We’ll probably never know.

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Chained CPI Was Never Going to Happen, And Now It’s Still Never Going to Happen

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American Education: It’s Both Better and Worse Than You Think

by SheilaGellert Posted on December 16, 2013

Mother Jones

On Friday I excerpted an interview with M. Night Shyamalan in which he said that America practices “education apartheid.” If you look at just white kids, he said, “We beat everyone. Our white kids are getting taught the best public-school education on the planet. Those are the facts.”

Bob Somerby calls this “absurdly inaccurate,” and he has a point. Shyamalan is exaggerating, and I sloppily let it pass because I wanted to address what I thought was his primary point. So allow me to revise and expand a bit. Not as an excuse for a hurried post, but just to explain how I view this stuff.

For starters, when I look at international test scores, the first thing I usually do is toss out the scores from most Asian countries. Don’t worry: I don’t expect anyone else to do this, and I’m not claiming that any fair assessment should throw them out. But frankly, I just don’t care how well South Korea does, because I know how they do it. They do it by making their kids’ lives a living hell, schooling them for a dozen hours a day or more and then ruining their lives based on a single day or two of testing when they’re 17. As a result, they get high test scores. But who cares? I think we all know that you can get high test scores by cramming your brains out like that. It tells us nothing, and I very much doubt that it actually produces better-educated adults in the long run. It merely produces kids who can produce eye-popping standardized test scores at age 17.

So I toss out the fabled Asian miracle countries. Then I look at the rest. Do American kids outscore everyone else? Nope. Somerby is right about that. But that’s missing the forest for the trees. Let’s all agree that Shyamalan is both cherry picking a bit and inflating his claims. Two Pinocchios for Shyamalan! Instead, let’s just make the more accurate claim: If you compare America’s white kids to those of most other countries—aggregating all the evidence, not just one or two data points—they do pretty well. Not spectacularly well, but pretty well. I think a fair observer would conclude that these kids were getting a pretty good education. Probably as good or better than most other countries in the world.

And that claim, even though it’s more modest, is important. It means that American education isn’t, either philosophically or foundationally, a disaster area. Nor is it in decline. For most American children, it works fine and it doesn’t need radical changes. Rather, there’s a small subset of American children who have been badly treated for centuries and continues to suffer from this. We do a lousy job of educating them, but it’s not because we don’t know how to educate. We’ve just never been willing to expend the (very substantial) effort it would take to help them catch up.

Anyone who disagrees with this conclusion is welcome to argue about it. But I think it’s one of the paramount facts about education in America. If you ignore it, your diagnosis of our educational problems is almost certain to be badly wrong. In the end, the fact that Shyamalan recognizes this so forthrightly strikes me as more important than the fact that he gets a little too far over his skis when he talks about it.

As for Shyamalan’s proposed five-point plan to fix things, I’ll repeat that I don’t think they’re silver bullets or that they’re unassailable. But as a group, they struck me as pretty reasonable compared to most of the educational reforms that dominate our conversation. For that reason, I welcome his debut into the ed wars.

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American Education: It’s Both Better and Worse Than You Think

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