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The Budget Deal Gives the Pentagon Just As Much Money As It Got During the Iraq War

by LauriMcClemens Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Can’t Touch This: Why nobody in D.C. messes with the Pentagon budget.

Today’s the last day for Congress to pass a budget deal and avert a government shutdown. Part of the $1.1 trillion “Cromnibus” package is the 2015 defense budget. While there’s been some wrangling over pay and benefits for service members, finalizing the Pentagon budget has been relatively uncontentious.

That’s because the Pentagon is one of the few recipients of discretionary spending that most budget-slashing tea partiers and entitlement-friendly Democrats are reluctant to touch. If the current deal passes, the Pentagon’s total funding in the 2015 fiscal year, including war-fighting costs, will come in at around $554 billion—close to what it got during the height of the Iraq War.

To be fair, the Pentagon is making do with less. Its total budget has shrunk more than 20 percent since it recently peaked in 2010. The bipartisan sequestration deal that went into effect in 2013 is supposed to keep it on a diet for the foreseeable future. However, those budget caps are looking more and more like irksome suggestions rather than requirements. Congress gave the military a partial reprieve from the caps last year, and even President Obama has spoken out against “the draconian cuts that are called for in sequestration.”

The Pentagon’s proposed 2015 base budget comes in under the spending caps; yet its 2016 budget will face tighter constraints—if lawmakers stick to them. There’s already talk that the administration’s next defense budget will exceed the caps by $60 billion. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that the Pentagon’s base budget will exceed the spending caps by more than $300 billion over the next six years.

One workaround for the budget caps is the Pentagon’s war-fighting budget, A.K.A. Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO). Since it’s not part of the base budget subject to automatic caps, some critics have described it as “an off-budget war chest slush fund.” The current defense budget before Congress authorizes more than $63 billion for overseas operations, including ongoing operations in Afghanistan, the air campaign against ISIS, and the military response to Ebola in West Africa. There is no similar safety valve for non-defense discretionary programs, whose funding has dropped 15 percent since 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And just to keep things in perspective: Even with sequestration and the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, defense spending remains close to its highest level since World War II.

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The Budget Deal Gives the Pentagon Just As Much Money As It Got During the Iraq War

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Of course Portland wants you to bike to the airport

by LashondFairclot Posted on December 1, 2014

Planes, bikes, and pedestrians

Of course Portland wants you to bike to the airport

By on 1 Dec 2014commentsShare

Have you ever tried to get to the airport without a motor vehicle? In most cities, it’s nearly impossible. Unsurprisingly, however, bike-besotted Portland is leading the way toward empowering travelers and terminal workers to cycle or saunter to the airport, rather than driving.

Michael Anderson of Bike Portland quips that “Portland International Airport’s new bike-pedestrian plan is probably thicker than the average city’s.” It’s 50 pages. He dishes the deets on the new Bicycle & Pedestrian Master Plan in a recent blog post: 

Fifteen years after a rising bike-commute rate among airport workers led PDX to begin a strategic focus on its biking and walking connections, links to the airport keep getting better. Now, the airport is preparing to double outdoor bike parking, and, in the longer term, help the City of Portland pay for a multi-use path looping the entire airport plus three bike lanes that’ll greatly improve airport access from the city.

Port of Portland

Portland International scored best in a 2013 survey of bicycle access at eight U.S. airports, in large part because the seven others didn’t have detailed plans. Most airports don’t invest much in people-powered transportation options because parking, ground transportation, and rental cars together make up over a quarter of their total revenue.

But lest Portlanders think that they can get off the hook for all that jet fuel they’ll burn on their next flight to New York, consider this: A round-trip ticket between Stump Town and the Big Apple puts a traveler on the hook for just over a metric ton of CO2 emissions, or 2,310 pounds of climate-cooking carbon dioxide. I got that number by averaging the results from online carbon calculators provided by Carbon Footprint Ltd, TerraPass, and ClimateCare, three companies that sell climate-conscious flyers (dubious) carbon offsets to assuage their green guilt.

To offset that by biking to your flight departure and back home instead of driving alone in your 2010 Ford Fusion, you’d better live over 1,000 miles from the airport, according to those same three emissions-counting tools.

Of course, there are other ways to make up for traveling’s carbon footprint. Just ask Grist’s Greenie Pig, who vowed to even out the impact of her trip to a friend’s wedding by going on a strict carbon diet, which proved much more difficult than foregoing flying in the first place.

All this is to say: Good on you Bikelandia for giving kombucha-powered pedalers some paths and bike parking. Now folks who work at the airport can bike to the office!

But for plane passengers who cycle to the airport for environmental reasons, remember that you’re about to partake in what is probably the most climate-damaging activity possible that doesn’t involve breaking the law.

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Of course Portland wants you to bike to the airport

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16 Interesting Photos From the Ferguson Grand Jury Files

by JeannieHeberlin Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

After St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced Monday that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for killing Michael Brown, the county released a collection of documents from the grand jury proceedings. Among them were hundreds of photos from the investigation, depicting everything from the crime scene to Wilson at the hospital after the shooting. Here are just a few (all photos provided by the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Office):

Wilson’s police SUV after the shooting. Brown’s hat lies next to it.

Brown’s hat.

The inside of the police SUV where the initial encounter between Wilson and Brown took place.

Shots were fired inside the car, and at least one went through the door.

The driver’s side door handle with what appears to be blood on it.

Wilson’s gun

A closer look shows what appears to be blood on the gun.

Blood on the street (presumably Brown’s)

Wilson, according witnesses and his own testimony, missed several times as he fired at Brown. Some of those bullets struck nearby buildings.

Where one of Wilson’s shots entered the wall of a nearby apartment building.

This shot narrowly missed a window.

There has been contention about the distance between Wilson’s car and Brown’s body. This shot shows Brown’s body behind a screen with Wilson’s SUV off further down the street.

Here’s the diagram of the entire crime scene. The New York Times created a color-coded version (see here).

Wilson said in his grand jury testimony that he only went to the hospital because a superior told him to. Here he is during his examination shortly after Brown’s death.

The left side of Wilson’s face.

The right.

A shot of Wilson taken Aug. 21 (according to the photo’s metadata), less than two weeks after the shooting.

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16 Interesting Photos From the Ferguson Grand Jury Files

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The GOP Controls Congress So Now It Can Change How Math Works

by LilyRapphshaum Posted on November 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Republicans took control of both houses of Congress earlier this month, they won an important new power: They can change how Congress does math.

Seriously. Republicans, led by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), their budget guru, are considering altering the way Congress calculates the costs of tax cuts—a move that could make big tax cuts for the rich appear less costly than they really are.

Here’s how it would work. In January, Republicans will be in charge of Congress. And that includes the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), which calculates how tax laws affect revenue, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which produces official budget projections. Right now, when the CBO and the JCT calculate the impact of tax laws on government income, they consider how Americans might alter their behavior in response to tax rate changes. But the tax-math bodies do not evaluate how tax legislation could affect economic growth—largely because those sorts of impacts are hard to predict. Republicans have long claimed that tax cuts lead to greater economic activity that inexorably yields more tax revenues—a point much disputed. But Ryan, who in January will head up the House Ways and Means committee—which has jurisdiction over tax reform—and his fellow GOPers are looking to enshrine this Republican belief into the hard and fast calculations of Capitol Hill’s number-crunchers.

Last THIS week, in an interview with the Washington Post, Ryan said he will push to make sure that the two congressional budget scorekeepers use this accounting method when evaluating GOP tax reform legislation. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who will chair the Senate finance committee starting in January, said last week that he was open to implementing the change.

Ryan and Hatch can implement dynamic scoring by simply ordering the two budget scorekeepers to accept this budgeting method. Not only that, Republicans can require the CBO and JCT to use very optimistic assumptions about how tax cuts affect the economy—including people’s motivation to work, the response of the Federal Reserve, and household and business decisions on how much to work, save, and invest. Budget analysts then plug those assumptions into several models estimating economic growth, and GOPers can cherry-pick the model that produces the largest number. “The risk is that a Congress that is politically motivated takes the most unrealistic models and plugs in highly rosy assumptions,” says Chye-Ching Huang, a budget expert at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

If Republicans don’t want to make these complex choices themselves, they can install directors at the CBO and JCT who they think will use the kind of assumptions they like, Huang adds. Neither congressional Dems nor President Barack Obama can prevent any of this.

Republicans have pushed for this budget-math tweak since the Reagan days. And for years, policy wonks have debated the merits of this novel budgeting method, known as dynamic scoring. Kenneth Kies, a GOP-nominated former director of the JCT, told the Washington Examiner last week that this accounting trick falls “somewhere between pure mathematics and theology.” Because this arcane tweak can make tax cuts for the wealthy appear to cost the government less than they actually do, it is extremely appealing to Republicans. If they make this change, they could argue that new tax cuts would partly pay for themselves.

Democrats say the budgeting trick is a gimmick designed to allow Republicans to chop taxes for the rich without paying the political cost. Ryan’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

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The GOP Controls Congress So Now It Can Change How Math Works

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California Voters Helped Kick Off the Prison Boom. They Just Took a Huge Step Toward Ending It.

by JacobRaphael Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Voters in the birthplace of mass incarceration just gave it a major blow. With California’s passage of Proposition 47, which reclassifies nonviolent crimes previously considered felonies—think simple drug possession or petty theft—as misdemeanors, some 40,000 fewer people will be convicted of felonies each year. Thousands of prisoners could be set free. People with certain kinds of felonies on their records can now apply to have them removed.

The state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates the reforms will save California hundreds of millions of dollars annually, money that will be reinvested in school truancy and dropout prevention, mental health and substance abuse treatment, and victim services.

The proposition’s passage represents a pendulum swing: Just two decades ago, California overwhelmingly passed a three-strikes ballot initiative that would go on to send people to prison for life for stealing tube socks and other minor offenses. Last night, the state’s voters turned back the dial.

The new law requires the savings from reducing prison rolls to be reinvested into other areas that could, in the long-term, further reduce the prison population. Take dropout prevention: Half of the nation’s dropouts are jobless, and according to a 2006 study by the Gates Foundation, and they are more than eight times as likely to get locked up.

The same goes for increased funding to aid the mentally ill. In California, the number of mentally ill prisoners has doubled over the last 14 years. Mentally ill inmates in state prisons serve an average of 15 months longer. Lockups have become our country’s go-to provider of mental health care: the nation’s three largest mental health providers are jails. There are ten times as many mentally ill people behind bars as in state hospitals. Sixteen percent of inmates have a severe mental illness like schizophrenia, which is two and a half times the rate in the early 1980s. Prop 47 will provide more money for mental health programs that have been proven to drop incarceration rates. For example, when Nevada County, California started an Assisted Outpatient Treatment program, average jail times for the mentally ill dropped from 521 days to just 17.

Keeping drug users out of prison and putting more money into drug treatment is probably the most commonsense change that will come out of the measure. Sixteen percent of state prisoners and half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses. Yet there is growing evidence that incarceration does not reduce drug addiction. And while 65 percent of US inmates are drug addicts, only 11 percent receive treatment in prison. Alternatives exist: a pilot project in Hawaii suggested that drug offenders given probation over being sent to prison were half as likely to be arrested for a new crime and 70 percent less likely to use drugs.

California’s vote comes at a time when it seems more and more Americans are questioning how often—and for how long—our justice system incarcerates criminals. Last year, a poll of, yes, Texas Republicans showed that 81% favored treatment over prison for drug offenders. The passage of Prop 47 is yet another example that prison reform is no longer a partisan issue. The largest single backer of the ballot measure was Bradley Wayne Hughes Jr., a conservative multimillionaire who has been a major financial supporter of Republicans and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. His donation of $1.3 million was second only to contributions from George Soros’s Open Society Policy Center.

The passage of Prop 47 might inspire campaigners to put prison on the ballot in other states. It might also push lawmakers to realize they can ease the penal code on their own without voters skewering them for letting nonviolent people out of prison—and keeping them out.

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California Voters Helped Kick Off the Prison Boom. They Just Took a Huge Step Toward Ending It.

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And the Prize for Ebola Fearmongering Goes to Louisiana

by Wyatt3221cnnews Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Louisiana attorney general Buddy Caldwell has a plan to stop Ebola: file a restraining order. Caldwell, a Republican, called the proposal to dispose of Dallas Ebola victim Eric Duncan’s incinerated belongings at a Lake Charles landfill “absurd” and pledged to use the legal process to stop the transfer. WBRZ Baton Rouge reports:

“We certainly share sadness and compassion for those who have lost their lives and loved ones to this terrible virus, but the health and safety of our Louisiana citizens is our top priority. There are too many unknowns at this point,” Caldwell said. The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office is in the process of finalizing the application for temporary restraining order and expects it to be filed as early as Monday morning.

Additionally, the office is sending a demand letter to Texas state and federal officials, along with private contractors involved seeking additional information into the handling of this waste.

Caldwell, whose decision was quickly supported by GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal, didn’t offer any details on how burying the incinerated materials would affect the people of his state. It’s hard to see any risk—Ebola is transmitted only through bodily fluids, and Chemical Waste Management Inc., which operates the storage facility, sees no problem. And it’s not as if the ashes are going particularly far, anyway—Lake Charles is just a quick jaunt over I-10 from Port Arthur, Texas, where Duncan’s belongings were burned.

But Caldwell’s stance is especially bizarre in light of the great lengths Louisiana lawmakers have gone to position the state as a repository for every other kind of waste. Fracking-waste disposal, for instance, has become a $30-billion industry nationwide over the last decade. Much of that waste water has been dumped into old wells in Louisiana. Louisiana may also soon begin accepting thousands of tons of other states’ shale waste-water, which will be shipped down the Mississippi on barges. In Louisiana you can even store radioactive materials in an abandoned salt cavern, and then, after the salt cavern collapses, creating a massive sinkhole and forcing hundreds of people to permanently relocate, pour wastewater directly into the sinkhole. Just don’t try to truck the ashes of an Ebola victim’s belongings across the Sabine.

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And the Prize for Ebola Fearmongering Goes to Louisiana

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 October 2014

by TawnyaSherwood Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Catblogging has become harder recently. There’s no shortage of cuteness, obviously, but getting good pictures of the cuteness is tricky. The problem is simple: 55-year-old human reflexes combined with cheap-camera shutter lag are simply no match for 10-month-old kitten reflexes. This produces lots of pictures like the one on the right. You’ll just have to take my word for it, but that’s Hopper carrying around one of her stuffed mice. I’ve muted all the chirping sounds from my camera, which reliably caused them to turn their heads just as the autofocus finally whirred to its proper setting, but even so I have hundreds of photos like this one.

Still, they slow down once in a while, so catblogging isn’t completely lost. On the left, Hopper is behind the drapes trying to chase down an errant bug. On the right, Hilbert is majestically surveying his space.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 October 2014

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Americans Hold Wide Range of Opinions on Various Subjects

by CortezEdmundlaT Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ashley Parker apparently drew the short straw at the New York Times and got assigned to write that hoariest of old chestnuts: a trip through the heartland of America to check the pulse of the public.

So how’s the public feeling these days? Here’s Heather Lopez, a church worker in Terre Haute, Indiana:

“Instead of being a country that’s leading from behind, I would like to see us spearhead an all-out assault on ISIS,” she said, referring to the Islamic State, the Sunni militant group that controls large portions of Iraq and Syria and has claimed responsibility for the beheadings of two American journalists. “I would like to see every one of them dead within 30 days. And after we’ve killed every member of ISIS, kill their pet goat.”

Roger that. You will be unsurprised to learn later that Ms. Lopez “said she got much of her information from Fox News.” Where else would she? We’re in the heartland, folks! And not by coincidence. Parker’s trip was deliberately designed to take her nowhere else. Because, as we all know, real people can be found only in small towns and cities in middle America.

Not that it matters. Also unsurprisingly, Parker ran into people with a wide range of opinions. It turns out that America contains lots of people and they think lots of different stuff. It’s remarkable.

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Americans Hold Wide Range of Opinions on Various Subjects

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If You Pay Them, They Will Come

by DorothyTremblay Posted on October 9, 2014

Mother Jones

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a news article about employers who desperately want to hire more people but just can’t find workers with the right skills. Oh wait. You do see that every day. What you don’t see are articles which make it clear that a willingness to pay higher wages is all it takes to fix this problem:

Manufacturing wages are rising at a rapid clip in some major industrial states as shortages of certain skills and gradually falling unemployment rates force more companies to pay up to attract and retain workers.

….“What we mainly need is welders,” said Terry McIver, chief executive and owner of Loadcraft Industries Ltd., a maker of parts for oil rigs in Brady, Texas….Dewayne Roy, head of the welding program at Mountain View College in Dallas, said he recently had a waiting list of about 250 people seeking to enroll. One student, Logan Porter, 22, started working for a metal-fabrication shop in the Dallas area in February and is putting in 55 to 60 hours a week. He earns $17 an hour, but with time and a half for overtime, his weekly take-home pay typically exceeds $800. “I love the work,” he said.

….Steve Van Loan, president of Sullivan Palatek Inc. in Michigan City, said job hopping is becoming more of a problem. “They get an offer for more money across town, and they’re gone,” he said. Wages on average at his firm, which makes compressors that power drills and other tools, are rising 4% to 5% this year, compared with 2% to 3% in recent years, Mr. Van Loan said.

How about that? If you pay more, you attract workers with the right skills. If you pay more, training programs start to fill up. If you pay more, you can steal folks away from your competitors.

Pay is the great equalizer. There are always going to be shortages of specific skills in specific times and places. But a long-term nationwide shortage? That just means employers aren’t willing to pay market wages. They should read their Milton Friedman. If you pay them, they will come.

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If You Pay Them, They Will Come

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Chart of the Day: Overweight Teenagers Earn Less as Adults

by JBWFlynnmh Posted on October 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a stunning chart for you. It comes from a paper by a team of Swedish researchers, and it shows the relationship between earnings and weight among men. As you can see, adult earnings reach a peak around a BMI of 23—smack in the middle of the normal range—and then steadily decline as you get more overweight. But here’s the kicker:

In particular, we contribute to the existing literature by showing that there is a large labor market weight-related penalty also for males, but only for those who were already overweight or obese in adolescence. We replicated this pattern using additional data sets from the United Kingdom and the United States, where the results were strikingly similar. The UK and U.S. estimates also confirm that the penalty is unique to those who were overweight or obese early in life.

The earnings penalty for overweight (and underweight!) men isn’t due to simple discrimination. Men who become overweight as adults face no special career penalty. It’s only a problem for men who become overweight as teenagers. The Economist summarizes the paper’s conclusions:

At first glance, a sceptic might be unconvinced by the results. After all, within countries the poorest people tend to be the fattest….But the authors get around this problem by mainly focusing on brothers….They also include important family characteristics like the parents’ income. All this statistical trickery allows the economists to isolate the effect of obesity on earnings.

So what does explain the “obesity penalty”? They reckon that discrimination in the labour market is not that important. Neither is health. Instead they emphasise what psychologists call “noncognitive factors”—motivation, popularity and the like. Having well-developed noncognitive factors is associated with success in the labour market. The authors argue that obese children pick up fewer noncognitive skills—they are less likely, say, to be members of sports teams or they may face discrimination from teachers.

In other words, social ostracism of both underweight and overweight teenagers produces lower cognitive skills and lower noncognitive (i.e., social) skills, and this in turn leads to lower earnings as adults. It may seem like harmless teenage clique behavior, but it has real consequences.

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Chart of the Day: Overweight Teenagers Earn Less as Adults

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