Tag Archives: backbreaking

Take Two: Are Americans Really in Love With War?

by XLBAntoine Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Yesterday I wrote that the American public is “in love with war.” This was obviously a bit of a rant, born of frustration with our seemingly bottomless tolerance for addressing foreign policy problems in suitably small countries with military force. Greg Sargent pushed back with some polling evidence, and Daniel Larison takes things a step further:

Far from being “in love” with war, a better way to think of the public’s reaction is that they have been whipped into a panic about a vastly exaggerated threat by irresponsible fear-mongers. Most Americans support the current intervention because they wrongly think it is necessary for U.S. security, and they have been encouraged in that wrong view by their sorry excuse for political leaders.

I got this same kind of pushback from several people, but I really think this is a distinction without a difference. As it happens, my primary point was actually the same as Larison’s: that the American public is very easily whipped into a war frenzy. In the case of ISIS, all it took was a couple of atrocities on YouTube; a bit of foaming at the mouth from the usual TV permahawks; and a presidential decision to take action. Obama didn’t even need to wave the bloody shirt. In fact, he’s been relatively restrained about the whole thing. Still, he did commit us to military action, and that was enough. Public support for bombing ISIS went from 39 percent to 60 percent in a mere twelve weeks.

Does this mean the American public is in love with war? Or merely that when a war is proposed, they can be persuaded to support it pretty easily? I submit that there’s not really a very big difference between the two.

Read More:  

Take Two: Are Americans Really in Love With War?

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Take Two: Are Americans Really in Love With War?

Chart of the Day: The Death of Print

by RondaNovotny Posted on September 26, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here’s a BLS chart that shows how much we spend on reading-related materials. But what does it mean? It’s true that young folks spend less on reading material than anyone else, but that’s mostly because of their complete non-interest in dead-tree magazines and newspapers. Also, presumably, because young folks spend less on everything than prosperous older folks.

But if you add up the books + e-readers category, young folks are spending nearly as much as anyone else. It’s just not clear what they’re reading. E-books? Longform articles? Blogs? TMZ? Hard to say. Then again, it’s not clear what the older folks are reading either. It may be on paper, but it’s probably not Shakespeare for the most part.

In any case, this shows fairly dramatically that print is dying. As we all know by now, young folks mostly prefer digital. And so do plenty of non-young folks like me. I occasionally have to read a print book, but I’m annoyed whenever it happens.

Continue reading here:  

Chart of the Day: The Death of Print

Posted in Casio, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chart of the Day: The Death of Print

Second Look: Tax Reform Act of 2014 Turns Out to Be a Pretty Good Effort

by StefanWillison Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Credit where it’s due department: I was pretty skeptical of Dave Camp’s tax reform proposal last night, figuring that it would just be the usual Republican mush of lower tax rates on the rich combined with some handwaving about elimination of tax breaks that would theoretically make it revenue neutral.

But I was wrong. It turns out that Camp’s plan specifies the tax breaks he wants to close in considerable detail. And according to the analysis of the Joint Committee on Taxation, which is usually fairly reliable, it would be both revenue neutral and distributionally pretty neutral too. Over ten years it would raise about $3 billion more than present law, and the chart on the right shows how tax rates would be affected. Generally speaking, effective tax rates would go down for the poor and the middle class, and would go up slightly for the affluent. (These are estimates for 2015. They change slightly in subsequent years.)

Needless to say, this all depends on his plan being passed as is, which isn’t likely. In fact, it seems unlikely to pass at all. Nonetheless, Camp’s plan isn’t just a Trojan Horse to cut taxes on the rich. There are, unsurprisingly, aspects of it I don’t like, but it seems to be a tolerably serious effort at tax reform that both parties could live with. It’s certainly a lot better than I expected.

Link:

Second Look: Tax Reform Act of 2014 Turns Out to Be a Pretty Good Effort

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Second Look: Tax Reform Act of 2014 Turns Out to Be a Pretty Good Effort

Obesity Drop Among 2-5-Year-Olds Is Even More Baffling Than I Thought

by AmparoQmoipxlt Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last night I wrote about a new CDC study showing a 43 percent drop in obesity rates among 2-5 year-olds. It seemed inexplicably large to me, especially because no other age group showed any decline at all. Today, Zachary Goldfarb helpfully publishes a bit more of the data, and I’ve extracted two lines from his chart. This only deepens the mystery.

As you can see, there’s a fair amount of noise in the chart, and it’s possible that this explains the whole thing. But if we take the data seriously, you can see something even more dramatic than a 43 percent drop over a decade. Between 2003-04 and 2005-06, there’s a 25 percent drop. That’s a gigantic decline over the space of two years.

But there’s more. If there’s anything real going on here, you’d expect to see some kind of correlation between 2-5 year-olds and 6-11 year-olds with a time lag of a few years. But I don’t see anything. The 2005-06 cohort of 2-5 year-olds is noticeably less obese, but the 2007-12 cohort of 6-11 year-olds shows barely any change at all.

So this whole thing is very strange. As I said, it’s possible that noise is responsible for a lot of this. But even if there really is something going on, it doesn’t seem to be having any impact at all once children get a few years older. That’s both strange and disappointing. I wouldn’t expect miracles, but the whole point of obesity interventions in small children is that it prevents a lifetime of bad habits. As the New York Times put it, “New evidence has shown that obesity takes hold young: Children who are overweight or obese at 3 to 5 years old are five times as likely to be overweight or obese as adults.” But if that’s true, it sure isn’t showing up in the data. As near as I can tell, reducing obesity among 2-5 year-olds has precisely zero effect on obesity later in childhood.

Read the article:  

Obesity Drop Among 2-5-Year-Olds Is Even More Baffling Than I Thought

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obesity Drop Among 2-5-Year-Olds Is Even More Baffling Than I Thought

The Fed Cares About Inflation 10 Times More Than It Cares About Unemployment

by 4ko9dra Posted on February 25, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Ryan Avent, having exhausted his conventional analysis of the Fed’s 2008 transcripts, turns today to a more analytical approach: counting words. I think others have already made this point without numbers, but Avent’s most powerful finding is that the Fed cares way more about inflation than it does about unemployment:

There is only one winner in the dual mandate. The word “inflation” (or variants thereof, such as “inflationary”) was mentioned a cool 2,664 times in 2008; “unemployment” pops up just 275 times.

I’m assuming he played fair and also looked for variants of “unemployment,” like “employment” or “jobs.” In any case, I don’t think this comes as much of a surprise to anyone, since it’s been obvious for decades that the Fed not only doesn’t care about unemployment, but gets positively worried when too many people have jobs. That would mean the labor market is tight and workers might get paid more, you see, and that could be inflationary. Still, it’s nice to see this verified quantitatively.

Avent also found that there were fewer mentions of “recession” as the year went on, which seems odd but might not be. Early on, when it was still unclear if the economy was in recession, I suppose they argued about this a lot. By June, when there was no longer any question about it, they all took it for granted and no longer even needed to mention it.

As for the finding that laughter increased later in the year, I guess I can’t blame them. There’s only so much globe-destroying financial panic you can take without cracking a few jokes.

Original post – 

The Fed Cares About Inflation 10 Times More Than It Cares About Unemployment

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Fed Cares About Inflation 10 Times More Than It Cares About Unemployment