Tag Archives: bronx

Quote of the Day: "We Don’t Have a Strategy Yet."

by KatiaSimas Posted on August 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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From President Obama, asked if he needs congressional approval to go into Syria:

I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet.

That’s not going to go over well, is it? Three years after the Syrian civil war started and (at least) half a year after ISIS became a serious threat in Iraq, you’d think the president might be willing to essay a few broad thoughts about how we should respond.

Don’t get me wrong. I think I understand what Obama is doing here. He’s basically trying to avoid saying that we do have a strategy, and the strategy is to do the absolute minimum possible in service of a few very limited objectives. And generally speaking, I happen to agree that this is probably the least worst option available to us. Still, there’s no question that it’s not very inspiring. You’d think the brain trust in the White House would have given a little more thought to how this could be presented in a tolerably coherent and decisive way.

In the meantime, “We don’t have a strategy yet” is about to become the latest 24/7 cable news loop. Sigh.

Oh, and the tan suit too. It’s quite the topic of conversation in the Twittersphere.

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Quote of the Day: "We Don’t Have a Strategy Yet."

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In the Restaurant Biz, It Pays To Be a Man

by BrendanMauger Posted on August 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Wonkblog, here’s a chart showing the pay gap between men and women in the restaurant industry. It comes from a recently released EPI report, and as you can see, not only are men better paid in virtually every category, but the premium goes up for the highest paying jobs. Bussers and cashiers are paid nearly the same regardless of gender. But when you move up to cooks, bartenders, and managers, the premium ranges from 10-20 percent.

This data isn’t conclusive. There are other reasons besides gender for pay gaps, and the EPI report lists several of them. Whites make more than blacks. High school grads make more than dropouts. Older workers make more than younger ones. You’d need to control for all this and more to get a more accurate picture of the gender gap.

But in a way, that misses the point. There are lots of reasons for the gender gap in pay. Some is just plain discrimination. Some is because women take off more time to raise children. Some is because women are encouraged to take different kinds of jobs. But all of these are symptoms of the same thing. In a myriad of ways, women still don’t get a fair shake.

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In the Restaurant Biz, It Pays To Be a Man

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Is Europe’s Central Bank Finally Getting Worried About Deflation?

by WillUHJbrl Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Brad DeLong notes that Mario Draghi, the head of Europe’s central bank, went off text in his speech at Jackson Hole. Here’s his summary of Draghi’s extended ad-lib:

The speech text says:

  1. The ECB knows that inflation has declined.
  2. The decline in inflation has not led to any decline in expectations of inflation.
  3. THE ECB will, if necessary, within its mandate, use QE and other policies to keep expectations of inflation from declining.

The speech as delivered says:

  1. The ECB knows that inflation has declined.
  2. My usual line is that the decline in inflation is due to temporary factors that will be reversed.
  3. That explanation is now long in the tooth: the longer “temporary” lasts the greater the danger.
  4. In fact, it is too late to “safeguard the firm anchoring of inflation expectations”.
  5. Inflationary expectations have already declined.
  6. We will use all the tools we have to reverse this.

Is this deviation a mere line wobble….Is this deviation an audience effect….Or does it signal a recognition on Draghi’s part that the Eurozone is heading for a triple dip, and that if he doesn’t assemble a coalition to do much more very quickly to boost aggregate demand we will have to change the name “The Great Recession” to something including the D-word, and he will go down in history as the worst central banker since the 1930s?

I would like to know…

I suppose we’d all like to know. The Germans better start taking this stuff seriously pretty soon. They can’t stick their heads in the sand and live in the past forever.

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Is Europe’s Central Bank Finally Getting Worried About Deflation?

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Did Obamacare Wreck a Baseball Game?

by HwaCopewic Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

A few days ago, a Chicago Cubs game was called in the fifth inning after the grounds crew had so much trouble spreading a tarp that the field got soaked during a rain delay and play couldn’t be continued. The Corner reveals what really happened:

Insiders at the ball club report that the real culprit is Obamacare. Because the Affordable Care Act requires offering health benefits to employees who work more than 130 hours per month or 30 hours a week (“full time”), the Cubs organization reorganized much of its staff during the off-season. Sources that spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times claimed that, on Tuesday night, the crew was drastically “undermanned.”

Huh. What do you think of that, Dean Baker?

The problem with this story is that employer sanctions are not in effect for 2014. In other words, the Cubs will not be penalized for not providing their ground crew with insurance this year even if they work more than 30 hours per week. Apparently the Cubs management has not been paying attention to the ACA rules. This is yet another example of the skills gap that is preventing managers from operating their businesses effectively.

Quite so. My guess is that this is just another installment in the long-running effort of American corporations to use Obamacare as a scapegoat for everything under the sun. Usually this has to do with raising copays for their employees or something like that, but the ingenuity of American capitalism knows no bounds. Why not blame a rain delay on Obamacare too?

For a more likely cause of penny pinching on the grounds crew, the Wall Street Journal has you covered.

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Did Obamacare Wreck a Baseball Game?

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Wondering What #NMOS14 Is?

by SaraHxbrbywtm Posted on August 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Starting tonight at 7pm Eastern time, a National Moment of Silence event will be playing out in gatherings big and small across the country. It’s headed up by a New York-based activist and social worker who writes online as Feminista Jones and talked to USA Today about the event:

After an activist posted on Twitter that there would be a vigil in downtown Manhattan for Brown, Feminista Jones reached out.

“I wonder why they always have vigils so far removed from the people who are most likely to be affected by police brutality,” she wrote back to the poster. “I just know that people in the Bronx and Brooklyn will struggle getting there on Sunday trains.” (The correspondence is documented in a Storify.)

Plans for the peaceful assemblies began through that platform, then moved to Facebook. It’s an update to activism Jones compares to “phone banking and letter writing — just reaching 90,000 people.”

“We’re having a national moment of silence — one chord, one silent voice — to honor not only Mike Brown, not only Eric Garner, but all victims of police brutality, especially those who have lost their lives,” she said.

The Root, the online black culture and politics mag, is using the #NMOS14 tag to post heartbreaking photos of unarmed black men shot by police over the years, from Amadou Diallo to Kimani Gray to Oscar Grant to far too many others.

To find an #NMOS14 event near you, check out the Twitter hashtag #NMOS14 and this Facebook listing of local groups.

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Wondering What #NMOS14 Is?

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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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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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Prior Experience Doesn’t Matter (Much)

by LouellaBenjamin Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points to yet another story today about how HR departments are using big data to hire and manage employees, and it’s fairly interesting throughout. However, my appreciation for the power of this approach was certainly enhanced when I read the following:

For Xerox this means putting prospective candidates for the company’s 55,000 call-centre positions through a screening test that covers a wide range of questions….The results are surprising. Some are quirky: employees who are members of one or two social networks were found to stay in their job for longer than those who belonged to four or more social networks (Xerox recruitment drives at gaming conventions were subsequently cancelled). Some findings, however, were much more fundamental: prior work experience in a similar role was not found to be a predictor of success.

This was something I always scratched my head about back when I was a hiring manager. Obviously you want someone with work experience that’s related to the job you’re trying to fill, but an awful lot of my fellow managers seemed pretty obsessed with finding candidates with almost identical experience. I understood the attraction of hiring someone who seemed like they could be slotted in immediately and hit the ground running, but it still seemed misplaced. Which would you rather hire? Someone fairly good with exactly the right experience, or someone really good who might take a month or two to learn some new things? I’d choose the latter in a heartbeat.

On the other hand, I suppose valuing experience highly might be a good idea if you really had no faith in your ability to distinguish good from really good. And the truth is that most of us probably don’t. So maybe finding perfect fits makes more sense than I gave it credit for. After all, back in the Middle Ages we didn’t have access to Xerox’s whiz-bang big data.

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Prior Experience Doesn’t Matter (Much)

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Republicans Love Obamacare!

by LorrieWolford Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s an additional tidbit from that recent Commonwealth Fund survey about Obamacare:

That’s a lot of Republicans who are satisfied with their Obamacare coverage. They might not realize it’s Obamacare—perhaps they know it as Kynect or Covered California—but they like it. And if you take it away, they’re going to be unhappy. That’s several million potentially unhappy Republicans if the national GOP continues its anti-Obamacare jihad. Just saying.

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Republicans Love Obamacare!

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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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