Category Archives: Vintage

It’s Time to Change Up the Debate Rules

by CarenRubensohn Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Question for those of you who watched last night’s debate: what did you think of the questions the moderators asked?

It was an odd display. The wording of the questions often veered close to outright rudeness. For example:

Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?
You’re skipping more votes than any senator to run for president. Why not slow down, get a few more things done first or least finish what you start?
In terms of all of that, it raises the question whether you have the maturity and wisdom to lead this $17 trillion economy.

At the same time, if you take a look an inch below the surface, most of the questions the CNBC crew asked were actually very substantive. The candidates generally didn’t feel like engaging with anything other than their plans to cut taxes and slash regulations, but that’s not the fault of the moderators. That’s because it’s a Republican debate, and these are pretty much the only economic issues Republican candidates like to talk about.

This year’s debates have all followed a similar pattern, with the moderators asking each candidate at least one “tough” question near the beginning of the show. Fox did it too, and Anderson Cooper did it to the Democrats, so it’s not a liberal media conspiracy. Mostly it seems to be some kind of alpha chimp display to demonstrate that the moderators are real live journalists, not just pretty faces letting the candidates make stump speeches.

I didn’t really mind this the first time or two, but I’m starting to find it annoying. Fine: you folks are real journalists. Now let’s move on and ask questions that are really tough. Dig a little more deeply into policy and then follow up. Maybe switch up the rules and get rid of the “anyone who’s named gets 30 second to respond” nitwittery. Give the moderators a couple of minutes for each question, and make it a real back-and-forth. Less mud wrestling and more policy depth.

It probably wouldn’t work. I’m not sure there’s any power on earth that can get the candidates off their rehearsed talking points. But it might be worth a try.

POSTSCRIPT: And on the candidate side, how about giving the attacks on the media a rest? I know it’s a great applause line, but honestly, who cares? It’s just pandering. Find something new to get applause for.

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It’s Time to Change Up the Debate Rules

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Debate Liveblogging Tonight!

by AllenSturdivant Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Will I be liveblogging the Republican debate tonight? Yes. Yes I will. I’ll probably grow hair on my palms as a result, but I’m doing it anyway.

The debate is on CNBC and allegedly starts at 8 pm Eastern, but I imagine the actual debating probably doesn’t begin until 8:30 or thereabouts. So if you want to be part of history, come on by between 8 and 8:30 and join the snarkfest.

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Debate Liveblogging Tonight!

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The Color Line Baseball Doesn’t Want to Talk About

by MikaylaBazile Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier this month, the Seattle Mariners fired their manager, Lloyd McClendon, the only African American skipper in Major League Baseball. Now, for the first time since 1987, there isn’t a single black manager in the league.

Just six years ago, in 2009, 10 teams employed black or Latino managers. And while 37 percent of coaches on major league staffs in 2015 were African American or Latino, roughly equal to the percentage of black and Latino big leaguers, there is currently just one manager of color: the Atlanta Braves’ Fredi González.

This is exactly the scenario that former Commissoner Bud Selig was trying to avoid when, in 1999, he sent a memo to league owners that required every club to consider minority candidates “for all general manager, assistant general manager, field manager, director of player development and director of scouting positions.” The progress made since Frank Robinson became the first black manager in 1975 had started to fade; when the “Selig Rule” went into effect, three managers of color led major league teams. Three years later, though, there were 10.

Richard Lapchick, executive director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, once lauded the Selig Rule and the NFL’s so-called Rooney Rule as “dynamic forces of change” for front offices. More recently, though, both initiatives have been criticized for not doing enough. At least the Rooney Rule requires NFL franchises to interview minority candidates; the Selig Rule, on the other hand, says that teams merely must include minority candidates on their lists of potential hires and submit those lists to the league office. (During Selig’s tenure as commissioner, which ended before this season, there were always at least three big-league managers of color.)

Earlier this year, Commissioner Rob Manfred sent out a notice to owners reiterating the league’s stance, hours before the Milwaukee Brewers fired manager Ron Roenicke. The team hired Craig Counsell to take over the team the next day without conducting a formal interview process. The move raised questions about the league’s ability to hold teams accountable for following through on its hiring recommendations.

Manfred later told the New York Times that the league would look at the rule, noting that he tried to get a commitment from teams that hired interim managers to conduct a full search after the season ends. (Although bench coach Dave Roberts served briefly as interim manager for the San Diego Padres this season, he has not interviewed for the full-time position. He’s reportedly a finalist to replace McClendon in Seattle, however.)

Baseball’s diversity problems go beyond the manager’s seat, of course. For the last three decades, the percentage of African Americans in the big leagues has declined (though that figure has remained relatively flat at 8.3 percent in the last five years, leaving a pinch of hope). And while the Selig Rule was intended to surface more minority candidates for front-office positions, a mere 13 percent of general managers are people of color.

Major League Baseball will continue touting its international pipeline and its efforts to bring the sport back to kids in America’s inner cities. But for now, managers of color may continue to feel, as McClendon told the New York Times in July, “like you’re sitting on an island by yourself.”

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The Color Line Baseball Doesn’t Want to Talk About

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Everyone Hated Sequestration, But Its Effect Was Never All That Huge

by ChristaU73 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Kevin Williamson doesn’t like the new budget deal. That’s no surprise: the reason Boehner is trying to pass this while he’s a lame duck is that he knows no one will like it. But that doesn’t matter to him anymore, so he’s willing to shrug and just get it done.

So what is Williamson’s specific gripe? That the deal basically does away with sequestration:

Democrats hated sequestration. Republicans hated sequestration.

Why?

Sequestration worked.

Sequestration is the reason why in recent years we’ve reduced federal spending substantially in GDP terms, from about 25 percent to about 20 percent. It is the main reason that we have reduced the federal deficit in GDP terms. Democrat-supporting welfare entrepreneurs hated it, and Republican-supporting military contractors hated it. Ordinary Americans did not have much in the way of strong views on the matter, which often is the case when a policy actually does what it is supposed to. Effective government rarely is dramatic government.

No argument with the first sentence. Sequestration was specifically designed to be so unlikable that neither party would ever support it. The fact that it took effect anyway is a testament to the dysfunction of the federal government, not to the budget-capping wonders of sequestration.

But let’s review that last paragraph. Is sequestration really the “main” reason we’ve reduced federal spending from 25 percent of GDP to 20 percent? Hmmm:

Spending hit 24.4 percent of GDP during the recession year of 2009. It was already down to 21.9 percent of GDP by 2012 and hit 21 percent in 2015.
Sequestration started in 2013, so at most it could be responsible for 0.9 out of 3.4 points of that reduced spending.
Was it? It theoretically reduced spending by $200 billion or so.
That’s about 1 percent of GDP.
In reality, CBO estimates that adjustments—primarily to fund overseas wars—ate into half of that. This means that sequestration lowered actual spending by about 0.5 percent of GDP.
The rest of the decline from 21.9 percent to 21 percent comes from the fact that GDP recovered.
So: of the spending reduction Williamson cites, about 0.5 percentage points was due to sequestration.

Now, I suppose that any kind of spending cut is a good cut to a conservative. But sequestration is responsible for only about a seventh of the spending reduction since 2009. The rest is due to (a) the end of stimulus spending, (b) reduced safety net spending as the recession eased, (c) the 2011 budget deal, and (d) the recovery of GDP growth, which automatically reduces spending as a percent of GDP.

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Everyone Hated Sequestration, But Its Effect Was Never All That Huge

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Here’s Our Exclusive Recap of Tonight’s Republican Debate

by charlenedean Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy recently acquired a time machine. But he didn’t go back into the past and kill baby Hitler. Instead, he traveled forward in time to Boulder, Colorado, to watch Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate. Here’s his report.

No one ever accused Donald Trump of bringing a knife to a gun fight. Wednesday’s showdown in Boulder was the first debate in which billionaire real-estate mogul Trump was not the Republican front-runner. Though he still holds double-digit leads in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Trump recently dropped into second place in Iowa, and on Tuesday, after leading the GOP pack for 100 days, he trailed Ben Carson in a national poll.

But if Trump had an intention of moderating his style, it didn’t show. He stayed on the offensive throughout the night. When CNBC moderator John Harwood asked Trump if he believed Congress should raise the debt ceiling, he pivoted to attack Carson for his Seventh-day Adventist beliefs (“China has eight days”). And he raised a childhood incident in which the former pediatric neurosurgeon tried to stab a friend with a knife. Carson’s blade became caught in his friend’s belt buckle—no harm was done—and Carson has long credited the lucky break with turning his life around.

“When I stab someone, I stab them in the belly, where the flesh is softest,” Trump said. “That is how you do it. That way you can get right to their organs, and do a really tremendous amount of damage, very serious bleeding. This guy was a surgeon?”

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Here’s Our Exclusive Recap of Tonight’s Republican Debate

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Ben Carson’s Babysitter Attacks Press for Allowing Ben Carson on TV

by TobyGarrett17 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen points me to Jake Tapper, who interviewed Ben Carson recently about his opposition to “wealth redistribution”:

TAPPER: I want to ask you about comments you made year to Politico about education funding, in which you said—quote—“Wouldn’t it make more sense to put the money in a pot and redistribute it throughout the country so that public schools are equal, whether you’re in a poor area or a wealthy area?”

CARSON: Well, that’s a different concept altogether…

TAPPER: But isn’t it redistribution of wealth? It’s redistribution of education wealth, but it’s redistribution, right?

…CARSON: I think that’s very different than a situation where someone is working hard, is making, you know, a lot of money, is providing a lot of jobs and is contributing to the fabric of America and then us going along and saying, well, he’s got too much. And this guy over here, he has too little, so let’s just take this one and give it to that one. That’s much more arbitrary.

TAPPER: Well, you’re talking about doing it on an individual level. But when it’s school districts, if it’s funded from local taxes, so isn’t it the same principle at stake?

CARSON: No, it’s not the same principle at stake because we are talking about the entire nation and we’re talking about what makes us competitive in the world, and the great divide between the haves and the have-nots is education. That’s very different than redistributing funding because you feel that that’s the social thing to do.

After a while you start to run out of things to say about this. We’ve already been through this dance once before, posting all the idiotic things Donald Trump said and then shaking our virtual heads over them. That finally got boring, so now it’s Ben Carson’s turn. But it’s weirdly different. Trump used bluster to hide his ignorance, but at least that suggests he knew he was ignorant. Carson doesn’t even seem to know. He tosses out his flaky ideas and then earnestly defends them. In this interview, he didn’t take the easy route of saying he’d misspoken, or was taken out of context, or has since changed his mind. He just went ahead and defended himself. Massive redistribution in education funding isn’t real redistribution that’s done because “you feel that’s the social thing to do.”

In other words, it’s okay if your motives are pure. I guess. Anyway, one of Carson’s minders quickly covered for his boss, saying “Dr. Carson does not support the national pooling of property tax receipts. That is a falsehood.” So I guess we’re redefining “falsehood” too. Now it means something Carson actually said that turns out to be sort of inconvenient.

I can only assume Carson is a smart man. How can a smart man who’s running for president know less about policy than the average Joe in a construction yard? It is a mystery.

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Ben Carson’s Babysitter Attacks Press for Allowing Ben Carson on TV

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Kansas Is Still the Land of Make Believe

by AidaClunie Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Kansas governor Sam Brownback has been leading an epic battle to turn his state into a supply-side nirvana. So how’s it going? A new poll—possibly the greatest poll in American history—suggests that Kansans are a wee bit confused:

When it comes to Brownback’s tax policy, which has featured heavy cuts in income taxes and taxes on businesses, three-fifths (61 percent) of respondents felt the policy had been “a failure” or “a tremendous failure” in terms of economic growth. About one-third of respondents said it was “neither a success nor failure” and 7 percent said they felt it was at least “a success.” Only 0.2 percent agreed it was “a tremendous success.”

But at the same time, 61 percent of respondents favor “somewhat lower” or “much lower” taxes and spending in Kansas. And yet…about 63 percent of respondents felt taxes on top income earners should be increased while 6 percent felt they should be decreased.

What does this mean? That tax cuts have been a failure, but maybe they’ll work if we just cut them more? That tax cuts have been a failure, but Kansans just want low taxes anyway? That Kansans don’t really care if their economy is any good?

I do not know.

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Kansas Is Still the Land of Make Believe

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This Commercial Might Be One of the Only Factual Things to Air During Tonight’s GOP Debate

by KurtisBoisvert9 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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If you watch tonight’s Republican primary debate on CBNC, you can expect to hear opinions on the economy and pot, attacks on newly annointed front-runner Ben Carson, and more. You can also expect to see the ad above, which lays out the economic case for action on climate change.

The 30-second spot is part of a six-figure TV and digital ad buy from NextGen Climate, the advocacy group run by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer. At the beginning of the primary season, Steyer promised to focus his group’s energy on holding Republican presidential candidates accountable for their lack of climate action, and to pursue a campaign to “disqualify” any candidate who doesn’t accept mainstream climate science.

“America has never been a country of quitters,” the ad states, over bucolic b-roll of farmers, veterans, and small town Main Streets. “We don’t ignore threats like climate change.”

Then the scene changes to wind farms and solar panels, as the narrator promises that American-made clean energy will produce jobs, innovation, and energy independence. At the end, it advocates a specific goal of getting half the country’s power from renewable sources by 2030. (We’re at about 7 percent now.)

Steyer is clearly right that clean energy is a major 21st-century growth industry. Solar is the fastest-growing energy source in the country, and employment in that sector already outnumbers coal miners two-to-one. Nearly $40 billion was invested in clean energy in the United States in 2014, 7 percent higher than the previous year. Earlier this month, California adopted the same ambitious target that Steyer is calling for: The state’s power companies will be required to get 50 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030.

But the message hasn’t yet gotten through to most of the Republican presidential candidates. Marco Rubio’s energy plan is basically the exact opposite of what Steyer wants. Jeb Bush wants to eliminate all energy subsidies, including those for renewables. Other candidates have variously denied the existence of climate change, championed fossil fuels, and taken pot shots at President Barack Obama’s climate agenda.

The one exception, believe it or not, is Ben Carson, who—despite engaging in climate change skepticism—recently said he wants “more than 50 percent” clean energy. Maybe tonight we’ll learn more about how exactly he plans to get us there.

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This Commercial Might Be One of the Only Factual Things to Air During Tonight’s GOP Debate

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Stop Blaming Suburbia for Killing Off Friendships

by PhilippHampden Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Dave Roberts is unhappy with the fact that we struggle to make new friends after college:

I read a study many years ago that I have thought about many times since, though hours of effort have failed to track it down. The gist was this: The key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact. That’s why we make friends in college: because we are, by virtue of where we live and our daily activities, forced into regular contact with the same people. It is the natural soil out of which friendship grows.

….But when we marry and start a family, we are pushed, by custom, policy, and expectation, to move into our own houses. And when we have kids, we find ourselves tied to those houses. Many if not most neighborhoods these days are not safe for unsupervised kid frolicking. In lower-income areas there are no sidewalks; in higher-income areas there are wide streets abutted by large garages. In both cases, the neighborhoods are made for cars, not kids. So kids stay inside playing Xbox, and families don’t leave except to drive somewhere.

This is a common critique, but I don’t think it holds water. For starters, read The Organization Man. As William Whyte reports, spontaneous new friendships were quite common in 1950s suburbia—which was architecturally quite similar to today’s suburbia. This was certainly true of my stucco tract house neighborhood when I was growing up. Second, New Urbanists have been trying for a long time to create communities that encourage spontaneous friendships, and they routinely fail. Build houses with stoops, and everyone stays inside anyway.

Or take my current suburban neighborhood. It’s pretty typical. Everyone is friendly, and we know our near neighbors. Some close friendships have developed, but that’s about it. Across the street there’s a nearly identical neighborhood, but this one is far more close-knit, throwing Halloween parties and July 4th bashes and just generally socializing in a way that mine doesn’t. Why?

I’m not entirely convinced that the nature of friendships has actually changed all that much during the past few centuries of civilization. Some people are sociable and some aren’t. But if I’m wrong, I still don’t think it’s primarily because of changes in the built environment. Maybe it’s due to the fact that women don’t routinely stay home during the day and socialize with neighbors. Maybe it’s because of air conditioning and TV. Maybe we all figured out that picking friends by random location (i.e., living next door) didn’t make much sense once we had other options. Or maybe it’s just that smart verbal types tend to be a little introverted, and we hear from them more often than anyone else.

And stop blaming graduation from college! Half the country never went to college, but I’ll bet they have as many (or more) friends than the rest of us. How do they manage that if they skipped college and live in the same kinds of places as us overeducated types?

Anyway, consider this is a challenge. Do modern Americans really have fewer close friends than in the past? Establish that before you go any further. If it turns out to be true, why? I don’t think the evidence really supports the idea that it’s mostly due to the nature of suburban living. (Do apartment dwellers have more friends than homeowners?) This becomes a much more interesting question when we get over our obsession with the evils of suburbia.

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Stop Blaming Suburbia for Killing Off Friendships

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GOP’s Budget-Deal Win Over Obamacare Is an Empty One

by Jamie01L805961 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Congress announced a budget accord on Monday night to keep the government funded for the next two years, Republicans boasted that they scored a victory against the plague of President Obama’s health care reform law by striking a section of the original law. “By eliminating the law’s auto-enrollment mandate that forces workers to automatically enroll into employer-sponsored health care coverage that they may not want or need, we will repeal another major piece of ObamaCare,” soon-departing House Speaker John Boehner crowed in a press release.

But dig into the details, and that supposed victory doesn’t amount to much in terms of policy. “It’s not a big deal,” says Gary Claxton, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit focused on health care, noting that it’s “nothing that you’ll ever notice” if the budget deal becomes law.

The provision in question is a small section from the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. It would require companies with over 200 full-time employees that offer insurance to enroll all new employees onto the company’s health plan automatically. Employees would still be able to decline the insurance if they preferred. Currently, employees usually must actively opt into employer-based health care plans.

But the auto-enrollment provision has never gone into effect. The Department of Labor has continually punted on writing the actual regulation, and all the stalling has led experts to doubt whether the policy would be implemented anytime soon—with or without this proposed budget deal. Employers expressed dissatisfaction with the rule after the Affordable Care Act became law, and confusion over auto-enrollment ran the risk of placing workers in plans they didn’t want or enrolling their spouses who already had coverage. “Employers didn’t like it, a lot of labor organizations don’t like it,” Claxton says. “And there are some messy issues associated with it. I don’t think there’s a lot of people clamoring to keep it.”

Much like the budget bill’s supposed cuts to entitlements, which leave beneficiaries largely untouched, this reversal of a portion of Obamacare will have little impact in practical terms, even if it’s likely to be used for political ends. Republicans gain a rhetorical victory they can sell to the conservative base, while Democrats don’t lose anything on the substance of the policies.

The change will help offset the costs that the budget deal added by lifting earlier caps on government spending. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that 750,000 more people would end up with insurance each year thanks to auto-enrollment. Because expenditures on employer-provided health care are exempt from taxes, auto-enrollment reduces federal tax revenue. Eliminating auto-enrollment is estimated to raise an additional $8 billion over the next decade.

But Claxton doubts the figure is that high. The CBO used acceptance rates for auto-enrollment of 401(k) plans as the baseline for its projections, he says, and decisions about health insurance are far more complicated than those about setting money aside for retirement. “Maybe it’s estimated too high,” he says. “I don’t think people should give CBO too much of a hard time about things like this, because there’s just no data to do a decent job of estimating this.”

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GOP’s Budget-Deal Win Over Obamacare Is an Empty One

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