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Student Loan Relief in Sight, Maybe

by CarsonBermudez Posted on July 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hooray! A new bipartisan bill has been introduced in the Senate to address the student loan crisis. It wouldn’t actually reduce the amount that grads have to pay (you didn’t expect that, did you), but it does make repayment easier by taking a program that already exists as an option and making it the default repayment plan. Jordan Weissman reviews the details:

It looks pretty solid overall. All federal loan borrowers would be enrolled in an income-based program where they paid 10 percent of their earnings each month, with a $10,000 annual exemption. Meanwhile, the government would collect the money directly from workers’ paychecks, just like tax withholding. One potentially controversial part: It would forgive up to $57,500 worth of loans after 20 years, but anything above that amount wouldn’t be forgiven for 30 years. (The current Pay as You Earn repayment program forgives all debts after two decades.) But borrowers who don’t like the income-based option could opt out and set their own payment timetable.

And now for the bad news. The bill is sponsored by Democrat Mark Warner and Republican Marco Rubio. And as Weissman puts it a family-friendly rewrite of Jon Chait, “Rubio doesn’t have a sterling track record of selling his own party on bipartisan policy proposals.” No, he doesn’t, does he? But who knows. Maybe after ripping his political guts out over immigration reform, Republicans will throw him a bone by supporting this bill. It’s not like it really costs any money to speak of, after all.

Then again, passing the bill would represent getting something done, and Republicans these days seem to be convinced that getting anything done makes government look efficient and responsive and therefore redounds to the credit of Democrats. And we can’t have that, can we?

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Student Loan Relief in Sight, Maybe

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Why Can’t We Teach Shakespeare Better?

by Harvey50Gffjqmb Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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After writing about a common misconception regarding a particular scene in Julius Caesar, Mark Kleiman offers a footnote:

Like many Boomers, I had to read Julius Caesar in the 10th grade; not really one of the Bard’s better efforts, but full of quotable passages and reasonably easy to follow. (As You Like It, by contrast, if read rather than watched, makes absolutely no sense to a sixt Shakespeare wrote great musicals.) This would have been a perfect scene to use as an example of dramatic irony. But I doubt my teacher had any actual idea what the passage was about, and the lit-crit we read as “secondary sources” disdained anything as straightforward as explaining what the play was supposed to mean or how the poet used dramatic techniques to express that meaning.

This was my experience too, but in college. I remember enrolling in a Shakespeare class and looking forward to it. In my case, I actually had a fairly good high school English teacher, but still, Shakespeare is tough for high schoolers. This would be my chance to really learn and appreciate what Shakespeare was doing.

Alas, no. I got an A in the class, but learned barely anything. It was a huge disappointment. To this day, I don’t understand why Shakespeare seems to be so difficult to teach. Was I just unlucky?

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Why Can’t We Teach Shakespeare Better?

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Nobody Is Very Excited About Obama’s Border Plan

by MaddisoLachance Posted on July 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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The latest ABC/Washington Post poll shows vividly just how hard a time President Obama is going to have getting his emergency plan to address the border crisis passed. The good news is that Americans approve of his plan by 53-43 percent. The bad news is that this is a pretty thin margin, and suggests there’s virtually no real passion in favor of it.

But the even worse news comes in a breakdown of the numbers. Among Republicans, disapproval reigns, 35-59 percent. So Boehner & Co. have very little motivation to act. What’s more, Hispanics, who ought to be the core constituency among Democrats for any immigration-related legislation, are only tenuously in favor, 54-43 percent. The reflects sharp divisions within the Democratic Party about the core idea of deporting any of the refugees in any way.

So Democrats are split and Republicans are opposed. This is not fertile ground for any kind of compromise. The only thing Obama has going for him is that what’s happening on the border really is a crisis, and at some point everyone might genuinely feel like they have to do something. But what? Even Obama’s fairly anodyne proposal has already drawn significant opposition from both sides, and any proposal that moves further to the left or the right will draw even more opposition. This could take a while unless, by some miracle, both parties decided they’re better off just getting this off the table before the midterm elections. But what are the odds of that?

For more of Mother Jones‘ reporting on unaccompanied child migrants, see all of our latest coverage here.

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Nobody Is Very Excited About Obama’s Border Plan

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Sacramento Should Leave AB32 Alone

by SherriD48gt Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

The LA Times scratches its editorial chin today over the prospect that California’s cap-and-trade program will increase the price of gasoline next year:

Gas prices already have risen by close to 50 cents a gallon since the beginning of the year, for reasons that have nothing to do with AB 32. The prospect of adding 15 cents more — though it’s relatively minor compared with the overall price increase — is daunting to many drivers. Assemblyman Henry T. Perea (D-Fresno) has introduced a bill to delay the extension of the law to transportation fuels for three additional years.

That won’t do at all….The state must give drivers strong incentives to take fewer trips, carpool, use public transit and purchase electric or fuel-efficient vehicles. At the same time, state officials must remain sensitive to the effect a price increase will have on low-income and working-class Californians, especially those who commute long distances in areas where robust public transportation systems have not been built.

….The best solution to this dilemma was proposed this year by Senate leader Darrell Steinberg: Rather than extending AB 32, impose a carbon tax on gasoline, at least for a transitional period. But make it revenue-neutral by giving the money back to taxpayers — and especially low-income taxpayers — through tax credits on the state’s personal income tax.

Huh? Why should we replace one tax with another, and then rebate some of it to low-income taxpayer? If that’s what we want to do, why not just keep the cap-and-trade fees and offset them with the Steinberg’s tax credits? What am I missing here?

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Sacramento Should Leave AB32 Alone

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Economic Growth Looks Pretty Grim These Days

by AdellRomeo Posted on July 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via James Hamilton, the Atlanta Fed is now making its GDP forecasts publicly available. As you can see, they’ve gotten steadily more pessimistic since April and are now predicting a growth rate of 2.6 percent in the second quarter.

Now, there are two way to look at this. The glass-half-full view is: Whew! That huge GDP drop in Q1 really was a bit of a blip, not an omen of a coming recession. The economy isn’t setting records or anything, but it’s back on track.

The glass-half-empty view is: Yikes! If the dismal Q1 number had really been a blip, perhaps caused by bad weather, we’d expect to see makeup growth in Q2. But we’re seeing nothing of the sort. We lost a huge chunk of productive capacity in Q1 and apparently we’re not getting it back. From a lower starting level, we’re just going to continue along the same old sluggish growth path that we’ve had for the past few years. All told, GDP in the entire first half of 2014 hasn’t grown by a dime.

I am, by nature, a glass-half-empty kind of person, so feel free to write off my pessimism about this. Nonetheless, the GHE view sure seems like the right one to me. It’s just horrible news if it turns out that during a “recovery” we can experience a massive drop in GDP and then do nothing to make up for it over the next quarter. It’s even worse news that the unemployment rate is going down at the same time. I know that last month’s jobs report was relatively positive, but in the longer view, how can unemployment decrease while GDP is flat or slightly down? Not by truly decreasing, I think. It happens only because there’s a growing number of people who are permanently left behind by the economy and fall out of the official statistics.

But hey. This is just a forecast. Maybe the Atlanta Fed is wrong. We’ll find out in a couple of weeks.

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Economic Growth Looks Pretty Grim These Days

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Friday Cat Blogging – 11 July 2014

by JIGAlyciajpbd Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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For a variety of reasons, fresh catblogging just didn’t happen this week. So I’m going to do what everyone else does when they fail to meet an editorial deadline: run some old stuff and pretend it’s an extra-special feature. So here you are: rarely seen archival footage from January 14, 2007, Domino’s first day at home after we picked her up from the shelter. As you can see, she immediately made her way to a book about a magical cat who refrains from eating its shipmate. This was a good influence, I think.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 11 July 2014

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A Progress Report on "Reform Conservatism"

by CarltonBragg Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Does the new generation of “reform conservatives” represent real change for the Republican Party? In policy terms, not really. They’ve offered up a few variations on popular conservative themes (reducing taxes via child tax credits instead of cuts in top marginal rates, for example), but for the most part they’ve just nibbled around the edges. David Frum, however, says this is still a good start:

What matters most about the reformers is not the things they say but the things they don’t. They don’t abuse the long-term unemployed. They don’t advocate tighter monetary policy in the midst of the worst slump since the 1930s. They don’t urge an immigration policy intended to drive wages even lower than they have already tumbled.

They don’t pooh-pooh the risks of a government default on its obligations, as many conservatives did when radicals in the GOP forced debt-ceiling confrontations in 2011 and 2013. They don’t blame budget deficits for the slow recovery from the crisis of 2009. They don’t shrug off the economic and social troubles of 80 percent of the American nation.

Fair enough. At the same time, there have always been successful conservatives who were tonally distinct from the tea party. Paul Ryan is the best-known example. He’s mild-mannered and speaks in the language of an accountant. He always seems reasonable and willing to engage. He doesn’t participate in tea party histrionics. In short, he doesn’t say any of the things Frum mentions above.

And yet, Ryan remains a tea party darling, and for good reason: his budget is a radically right-wing enterprise. Perhaps the most genuinely radical, genuinely right-wing enterprise in all of Washington.

So the question for the reform conservatives is: What’s next? Are they trying to build credibility with conservatives so they can later nudge them in a new direction? Or are they mostly just trying to put a friendly veneer on an essentially tea partyish agenda? We don’t know yet, because so far they haven’t been willing to take many risks. And with good reason. As a friend emailed just a few minutes ago, “The reformers are one bad suggestion away from being fully Frumanized out of the party.”

I wish the reformers luck. And I don’t really blame them for their timidity so far. Still, it’s far too early to tell how serious they are. We’ll just have to wait and see.

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A Progress Report on "Reform Conservatism"

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Does Financial Literacy Matter?

by Joellen54X Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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We recently received the grim news that American schoolkids are behind their international peers when it comes to financial literacy. We can add this to the pile of grim news about American schoolkids being behind their international peers in math, science, reading, and every other subject imaginable.

Is this actually true? Well, it depends on which tests you rely on and which countries you compare to. And when you disaggregate by income and race you often end up with different results. Still, it’s a good horror story, and one we can’t seem to get enough of. The financial literacy debacle fits right in.

But forget for a moment whether American high school students really suck at financial literacy. The Economist raises an entirely different question: does it even matter?

Perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behaviour. As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they’re in a position to apply what they have learned.

Now, I’ve long had my doubts whether any of the actual knowledge I learned in high school matters. Habits matter. Basic skills matter. The ability to figure out how to figure out stuff matters. Learning to sit still and concentrate for half an hour at a time matters. But trigonometry? Catcher in the Rye? The history of the Gilded Age? That’s not so clear. Maybe financial literacy falls into the same category.

Alternatively, it may be that education has little impact on our behavior in general. We all know that the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and yet that knowledge does us little good. Most of us overeat anyway. Likewise, even if we know that interest charges on credit card debt can eat us alive, we might just go ahead and buy that snazzy new big-screen TV anyway.

Who knows? Maybe education outside of (a) basic skills and (b) highly specific skills used in our professions really doesn’t matter much. If that turned out to be true, I can’t say it would surprise me an awful lot. Being a Renaissance Man may be overrated.

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Does Financial Literacy Matter?

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Fine. I Retract My Defense of Optics.

by ArielCoghlan Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday morning, conservatives were all atwitter over the fact that President Obama had been photographed playing pool and drinking a beer the previous night in Denver. A mere thousand miles away, there was a humanitarian crisis on the border! How out of touch can a guy get? Clearly this was Obama’s Katrina moment.

This combined two of the right’s favorite Obama-era tropes. First, it was about his millionth Katrina moment. Conservatives still can’t get it through their heads that George Bush’s Katrina moment was never really about those famous photographs of him mugging with a guitar while the levees were being breached in New Orleans and later staring moodily out an airplane window at the flooding below. It was about “heckuva job, Brownie.” It was about his casual near-destruction of FEMA over the previous four years. It was about the startling contrast between his laggard response to Katrina and his near-frenetic response to the Terry Schiavo panderfest just a few months earlier. But conservatives simply refuse to believe this. They’re convinced it was all about an unfair photographic comparison, and they’re determined to make a Democratic president suffer the same fate.

Second, it’s become practically a parlor game for conservatives to chastise Obama for engaging in some kind of social activity while there’s a serious crisis somewhere. This is an evergreen faux complaint. After all, there’s almost always something serious going on somewhere, which means you can always figure out an excuse to haul out this chestnut.

Now, to some extent none of this matters as long as it’s just a partisan response from the professional right. But yesterday it metastasized into something more over Obama’s answer to a question about why he wasn’t heading down to the border to see the refugee crisis for himself. “I’m not interested in photo-ops,” he said. “I’m interested in solving a problem.” This almost instantly turned into a misquote: “I don’t do photo-ops.” And with that, the mainstream press started piling on too.

This was, obviously, ridiculous. First of all, Obama didn’t say that he doesn’t do photo-ops. That would have been idiotic. What he very plainly said was that in this particular case he wasn’t interested in doing a photo-op. He had introduced a plan to address the crisis and he was in Texas to discuss it with state officials. That’s where he wanted to keep the focus.

And with that, as if to mock me, the whole thing exploded into a moronic national conversation about the optics of shooting pool in Denver but not going to the border to have his photograph taken with wistful-looking Latin American children. This came just a couple of days after I had defended the word optics against Jamison Foser, and plainly Foser had turned out to be right. The mere availability of the word seemed to change the whole tone of the coverage. As Dave Weigel put it, “The president is the star of most D.C. political stories, obviously, so many stories end up being about whether they help or hurt him. The problem is that the press can’t be sure if they will, or won’t.” So they just guess.

Now, I suppose I still have a feeble defense to offer. I did say there were good and bad uses of optics, and this just happened to be one of the bad ones. But the speed with which one photograph and one misquote saturated the punditocracy and morphed into an inane conversation about optics surely makes Foser’s case for him.

So I give up. There are still good uses of the word optics, but as long as the press remains so addicted to dumb uses that have such obvious roots in transparent partisan nonsense, it’s probably best to insist that they go cold turkey. No more optics, guys. Not until you demonstrate an ability to use the word like adults.

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Fine. I Retract My Defense of Optics.

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Pundits, Start Your Engines!

by Lubao2pzs Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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So what’s the next step in the border crisis? President Obama has introduced an emergency proposal; he’s traveled to Texas to discuss it with his political opponents; and in order to stem the tide of immigrants he’s declined to engage in photo-ops at the border that might encourage the tide to continue.

Republicans, for their part, appear at the moment to be completely unwilling to do anything at all.

So here’s the next step: a barrage of columns from our nation’s pundits acknowledging Republican intransigence but then insisting that, ultimately, the lack of action is Obama’s fault. Because leadership. Because LBJ. Because schmoozing. Because lecturing. Because relationships. Because political capital. Because great presidents somehow figure out a way to get things done. Rinse and repeat.

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Pundits, Start Your Engines!

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