Tag Archives: fighting

Chart of the Day: Wages Are Down For Almost Everyone

by Margurite Axley Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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EPI’s Elise Gould provides us with wage data for 2014 today, and the results aren’t pretty:

Every group has seen a cumulative drop in wages since 2007 except for the top 5 percent (red line).
Every group saw a drop in wages in 2014 except for the bottom 10 percent (dark blue line).

Why did wages of the poor rebound a bit last year? Because 19 states raised their minimum wages:

A state-by-state comparison of trends in the 10th percentile suggests that these minimum-wage increases account for the nationwide 10th percentile increase. Between 2013 and 2014, the 10th percentile wage in states with minimum-wage increases grew by an average of 1.6 percent, while it barely rose (a 0.3 percent increase) in states without a minimum-wage increase.

In other news about wage growth, women have done slightly better than men; whites have done better than blacks; and college graduates have done better than high school grads. The full report is here.

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Chart of the Day: Wages Are Down For Almost Everyone

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Income Inequality Is Temporarily Down, But Hardly Out

by TristanFallis Posted on February 17, 2015

Mother Jones

Has income inequality increased under President Obama? David Leonhardt says no, and provides two reasons.

The first reason is fairly uninteresting: the rich suffered huge losses during the Great Collapse of 2008. So even though they’ve gobbled up nearly all of the earning gains since then, they still haven’t gotten back to their 2007 income levels.

This is uninteresting because it’s only temporarily true. Given current trends, the rich will regain all their losses within another year or two, and probably surpass them. Incomes of the rich have always been volatile, but the broad trend of the past few decades is pretty clear: they invariably make up the losses they incur during recessions and then soar to new heights. This is almost certain to happen again as the recovery strengthens.

Leonhardt’s second reason, however, is more interesting: government policy under Obama has increased the earnings of the poor and the middle class. Leonhardt cites a recent study from Stephen Rose of George Washington University:

The existing safety net of jobless benefits, food stamps and the like cushioned the blow of the so-called Great Recession. So did the stimulus bill that President Obama signed in 2009 and some smaller bills passed afterward. “Not only were low-income people protected — middle-income and some higher income-households had much lower losses because of these public policies,” Mr. Rose said. “For those who think government programs never work, maybe they need to think again.”

….Pretax income for the middle class and poor dropped substantially from 2007 to 2011 — about 10 percent for most groups. Yet including taxes and transfers, incomes fared better: Average income for the bottom fifth of earners rose 2.6 percent, to $24,100, and the average for the middle fifth fell only 2 percent, to $59,000. Such stagnation is hardly good news, but it’s a lot better than a large decline.

We can add Obamacare to that list too. It effectively increased the earnings of millions of low-income workers. And retaining the pre-Bush top marginal tax rates in the fiscal cliff deal of 2012 decreased the post-tax earnings of the rich slightly.

None of this is massive. The rich will make up their losses, safety net programs are already receding as the economy recovers, and middle-class wages continue to be pretty stagnant. The growth of income inequality may have taken a brief hiatus when the economy crashed, but it’s almost certain to return, bigger and badder than ever. As Leonhardt concludes:

Mr. Rose himself, who’s more optimistic about the state of the middle class than I am, says, the United States has “a real income-inequality problem.”

But the fact that inequality hasn’t continued rising in the last several years matters — first, because facts matter, and, second, because it helps show what Washington has the potential to do. For much of the last few decades, rather than attacking inequality, government policy has exacerbated it. Tax rates on the very rich, the same group receiving the largest pretax raises, have fallen the most.

In the last several years, however, the federal government has tried to combat inequality, through a combination of tax and spending policies. These efforts weren’t aggressive enough to bring major raises to most families. The financial crisis was too big, and Washington’s response was too restrained. Yet the efforts were aggressive enough to make a difference.

They are a reminder that rising inequality is not inevitable, and that the country has the power to shape its economy.

This is true. Unfortunately, Obama’s efforts to modestly address income inequality were nearly all completed during his first year in office, when he had big Democratic majorities in Congress. Since then, almost nothing has happened, and that’s the way things are likely to stay as long as Republicans remain resolutely opposed to anything that concretely helps either the poor or the middle class.

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Income Inequality Is Temporarily Down, But Hardly Out

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A Simple Chart That Shows We’ve Locked Up Too Many People

by CarenRubensohn Posted on February 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Correlation is not causation. This has recently become something of an all-purpose comeback from people who want to sound smart without really understanding anything about a particular research result. Still, whether it’s overused or not, it’s a true statement. When two things move up and down together, it’s a hint that one of them might be causing the other, but it’s just a hint. Sometimes correlation implies causation and sometimes it doesn’t.

The inverse statement, however, is different: If there’s no correlation, then there’s no causation. With the rarest of exceptions, this is almost always true. Dara Lind provides an example of this as it relates to crime and mass incarceration.

The chart on the right shows the trend in various states at reducing incarceration. If reducing incarceration produced more crime, you’d expect at least some level of correlation. The dots would line up to look something like the red arrow, with lots of dots in the upper left quadrant.

Obviously we see nothing like that. In fact, we don’t appear to see any significant correlation at all. As Lind says, the scatterplot is just a scatter.

It’s possible that a more sophisticated analysis would tease out a correlation of some kind. You can show almost anything if you really put your mind to it. But if a simple, crude scatterplot doesn’t show even a hint of a correlation, it’s almost a certainty that there’s nothing there. And in this case it demonstrates that we’ve locked up too many people. Mass incarceration hit the limit of its effectiveness in the late-80s and since then has been running dangerously on autopilot. It ruins lives, costs a lot of money, and has gone way beyond the point where it affects the crime rate. It’s well past time to reverse this trend and get to work seriously cutting the prison population.

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A Simple Chart That Shows We’ve Locked Up Too Many People

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 February 2015

by LindseyGleadow Posted on February 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Chemotherapy may be over, but I still have to go in to the infusion center once a month for a bone-strengthening treatment. Unlike chemo, which was a pretty quick procedure, this actually takes a while, and this month it happens to be scheduled for mid-morning today. So that means I’m checking out early. Sorry about that. On the bright side you get early catblogging out of the deal. Here are the sibs posing for their dual royal portrait, Hopper on the left and Hilbert on the right. Have a good weekend, everyone.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 February 2015

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The Kansas Economy Sucks, So Let’s Do a Little Gay Bashing to Distract Everyone

by KellieBagot Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

Michael Hiltzik reports on Kansas governor Sam Brownback’s move this week to revive the culture wars:

Brownback’s latest stunt is to abolish state employees’ protections against job discrimination based on sexual orientation. In an executive order Tuesday, Brownback reversed a 2007 order by his Democratic predecessor, Kathleen Sebelius, that had brought state anti-discrimination policies in line with most of corporate America and 31 other states.

….Possibly, Brownback is hoping to deflect attention from the disastrous condition of the Kansas state budget, which has been hollowed out by Brownback’s extremely aggressive tax-cutting. Income tax receipts continue to fall below Brownback’s rolling projections — the latest estimates show them coming in 2% below forecast made just last November.

….The economic suffering that Brownback’s policies have imposed on Kansans is bad enough; to add to the pain by removing protections against workplace harassment over sexual orientation is a new low.

As Hiltzik points out, there’s no special reason for Brownback to do this now. The anti-discrimination policy has been in place for eight years, and Brownback apparently felt no particular angst about it during his entire first term.

But things are different now. When he was first elected, Brownback promised that his planned tax cuts on the rich would supercharge the Kansas economy and bring about prosperity for all. That turned out to be disastrously wrong, and now he’s slashing spending on education and the poor to make up for the catastrophe he unleashed. This is understandably unpopular, so what better way to distract the rubes than to engage in a bit of gay bashing? That’ll get everyone riled up, and maybe they won’t even notice just how much worse off they are than they used to be. It’s a time-honored strategy.

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The Kansas Economy Sucks, So Let’s Do a Little Gay Bashing to Distract Everyone

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Lead and Crime: The Brennan Center Weighs In

by LolitaMcKinley Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

The Brennan Center has released a lengthy report examining the reasons for the big crime decline of the 90s and aughts, and one section highlights the work of Jessica Reyes and others linking crime levels to gasoline lead emissions:

Reyes, and other researchers, have found that lead is connected to aggressive behavior and behavioral problems because it affects brain development of children….Reyes found that the decrease in lead caused a remarkable 56 percent of the decrease in violent crime in the 1990s….This theory had been previously suggested by another economist, Rick Nevin, in 1999. He illustrated a similarity in the trends between violent crime and gasoline lead 23 years prior.

….In December 2013, an NAS roundtable discussed the lead theory. There was an extended discussion in which most participants seemed to concur that the 56 percent drop in crime attributed to lead by Reyes was likely too large. Most experts seem to believe that lead played some role, but maybe not as high as the finding presented by Reyes. More research is needed to establish lead’s precise role in the crime decline.

….The authors do not draw a conclusion on this theory because they could not secure complete state-by-state data on this variable level for 1980 to 2013, as needed for the regression….Based on current research and expert reactions, it is possible that lead played some role in the 1990s drop in violent crime but perhaps not as large as that found by Reyes. Further, lead’s effect on the crime drop likely waned in the 2000s.

Now, you might think I’d be annoyed that lead was the 13th out of 13 theories they looked at, and that they downplayed the likelihood of a significant role for lead. In fact, I’m thrilled. This is one of the first reports I’ve seen that gives lead a substantial section of its own, and the authors clearly take the idea seriously. The fact that they want more research before committing themselves further is perfectly reasonable. It’s a new theory that needs more research from people not already committed to it one way or the other.

A couple of notes, though. First, if the authors are only willing to draw conclusions if they can get complete state-by-state data on lead emissions, then they’re stacking the deck. That data simply isn’t available, just as it’s not available for most things in a reliable way. Additionally, since people move in and out of states, even perfect data would be incomplete. This shouldn’t be an excuse for not analyzing the data that does exist, especially since it exists at local, state, national, and international levels.

It’s also worth noting something that I feel like I have to say again and again: state-level regressions aren’t the only evidence in favor of the lead-crime theory. In fact, regressions in general aren’t the only evidence available. There are also prospective studies and brain imaging studies that point in the same direction. Nobody should make the mistake of thinking that if only we had better data and could run cleaner regressions we’d get closer to the truth. What we really need at this point are tests of very specific hypotheses of the lead-crime theory. If, for example, a detailed cohort-level study failed to show age-specific effects of lead on crime, that would be a big blow to the overall theory. That would be a useful study—though, as usual, it would probably be very difficult to carry out properly because the raw data is unlikely to exist in detailed and reliable form.

I’d also note that although the authors are correct that the role of lead waned in the 2000s, it probably wasn’t until the late 2000s. Lead likely played a significant role in crime declines up to about 2008 or so, when the last cohort of children born in 1986 turned 22. Changes in crime rates since then are most likely due to other factors.

(Changes in incarceration rates, however, lag crime rates, and will probably be affected by the end of leaded gasoline for another decade or two. And in other countries, which banned lead in the 90s or the early aughts, the effect on crime rates will probably continue to be felt for another decade at least.)

Outfits like the Brennan Center are fundamentally interested in things like incarceration, poverty, and policing, and it’s only natural that these are the things they spend the most time discussing. Thus, the mere fact that they gave lead any attention at all is good news. It means people are taking the idea seriously, and eventually that might lead to the further research they’d like to see.

As always, if you want to read the complete argument in favor of the lead-crime hypothesis, it’s right here at Mother Jones in my 2013 piece, “America’s Real Criminal Element.” Just click for the whole story.

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Lead and Crime: The Brennan Center Weighs In

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Could this rock save the planet?

by SolomonParris Posted on November 10, 2014

Could this rock save the planet?

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10 Nov 2014 4:02 PM

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Meet olivine, a greenish rock that is basically the Clark Kent of the mineral world: It may look boring, but it has a secret superpower. Specifically, it can pull CO2 from the air and sequester it — nothing to sniff at when facing down the supervillain of our age: anthropogenic climate change.

Retired geochemist Olaf Schuiling has spent decades advocating for using the abundant mineral as a solution to our climate change woes — by carpeting as many surfaces as possible in the stuff, from playgrounds to roads to beaches, we could allegedly remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to slow the rate of climate change. According to one analysis, one ton of olivine can dispose of approximately two-thirds of a ton of CO2 — impressive, but that’s still a LOT of rock when we’re talking billions of tons of CO2 a year.

“Let the earth help us to save the earth,” Schuiling says, which makes for a catchy quip, but may not count as a scientific endorsement; Schuiling’s skeptics point out that the olivine cure would take 20 years to start making a difference, and likely account for a slew of new emissions from mining and distributing tons of rock over the surface of the planet. Schuiling rejoins:

Industry extracts and transports huge quantities of coal, oil and gas, he notes, so if society decided that geoengineering was necessary, why couldn’t it do the same with olivine? The annual amount needed, equivalent to about 3,000 Hoover Dams, is available around the world and is within the limits of modern large-scale mining. “It is not something unimaginable,” [Dr. Schuiling] said.

Of course, other geoengineering solutions might be easier to implement — say, spewing clouds of sulphur into the air to imitate volcanic cooling, or fertilizing the ocean to pull CO2 out of the air with a massive algal bloom — but they also hold way more potential for disaster. (As in, “Oh you liked your oceans alive and full of food? Oops.”)

In any case, Schuiling’s proselytizing has caught on in the Netherlands, where those in the know can spot green-sanded paths and gardens throughout certain cities. A Dutch company called greenSand (I bet you can guess why) has sprung up to provide Spanish-mined olivine to enterprising DIY geoengineers in the Netherlands. And more research is being done about the efficacy of fighting climate change with sandboxes:

At the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research in Yerseke, on an arm of the North Sea, Francesc Montserrat, an ecologist, is investigating the idea of spreading olivine on the seabed. Not far away in Belgium, researchers at the University of Antwerp are studying the effects of olivine on crops like barley and wheat.

The National Academy of Sciences is expected to release a report on geoengineering sometime this year, but I’d bet it will still include more questions than answers. Meanwhile, the things we know about climate change — that we caused it, and will continue to do so until we drastically cut emissions — are pretty straightforward.

I guess all I’m trying to say is that if we really want to address the problems of human-caused climate change, it might not make the most sense to start with a magical rock garden.

Source:
Climate Tools Seek to Bend Nature’s Path

, New York Times.

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Elizabeth Warren Challenges Chris Christie for the Science Behind His Ebola Quarantine

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is demanding Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) reveal the science behind his controversial decision to place all health care workers returning back from Liberia, Guinea, or Sierra Leone to be placed under a mandatory quarantine. Spoiler alert: the science does not exist.

“He should bring out his scientists who are advising him on that, because we know that we want to be led by science,” Warren said Tuesday during an appearance on CBS’s This Morning.

“That’s what’s going to keep people safe,” she added. “Science, not politics.”

Warren, who was promoting her book A Fighting Chance, was responding to a question about Christie’s earlier comments in which he defended the mandatory quarantine against claims the policy is draconian.

“I don’t think it’s draconian,” Christie said on the Today show. “The members of the American public believe it is common sense, and we are not moving an inch. Our policy hasn’t changed and our policy will not change.”

Warren’s criticism joins a widening chorus of politicians–both on the right and left–and health officials who have slammed Christie and Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) for placing involuntary quarantines in their respective states over the weekend after first Ebola outbreak in New York City last Thursday surfaced.

Both governors have been accused of playing politics at the expense of basic human rights–Christie hoping to recall the image of an unapologetic, bipartisan leader in times of crisis (a la Sandy); Cuomo hoping to exert any level of control.

On Monday, in light of the newly implemented quarantines, the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention unveiled a new set of federal guidelines for local governments to adopt.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also released a statement praising medical officials as “exceptional people.” Alluding to Christie and Cuomo’s policies, Ban also admonished against “restrictions that are not based on science.”

(h/t Mediate)

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Elizabeth Warren Challenges Chris Christie for the Science Behind His Ebola Quarantine

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National Briefing | West: California: Plane That Was Fighting Wildfire Crashes

by Myrna Posted on October 7, 2014

An air tanker fighting a wildfire near Yosemite National Park in Northern California crashed Tuesday, but there was no immediate word on the state of the plane or the pilot. Link to article – National Briefing | West: California: Plane That Was Fighting Wildfire Crashes

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National Briefing | West: California: Plane That Was Fighting Wildfire Crashes

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Tell the EPA what you think of its climate rules

by BrittnyMacaluso Posted on June 19, 2014

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« Federal bill would wash away plastic microbead problem

19 Jun 2014 7:21 PM

Tell the EPA what you think of its climate rulesBy Shutterstock

You know those proposed EPA power-plant rules that we’ve been going on and on and on about? Now you can go on and on and on about them yourself.

The Obama administration has opened up the official 120-day public comment period, after the proposal was published in the Federal Register. The EPA will accept feedback through Oct. 16, so now’s the time to speak your mind.

Here’s how to comment.

The big enviro groups are going to be pushing to make the rules stronger, while industry and Republicans are trying to undermine them.

The EPA will consider all the feedback and finalize the rules by June 2015 — but the fighting and litigation will continue indefinitely.


Source
EPA Starts Taking Comments on Clean Power Plan, Climate Central
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