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A battle royale has broken out between clean power purists and pragmatists.

by Mitchel3832 Posted on June 20, 2017

Two years ago, a paper came out arguing that America could cheaply power itself on wind, water, and solar energy alone. It was a big deal. Policy makers began relying on the study. A nonprofit launched to make the vision a reality. Celebrities got on board. We named the lead author of the study, Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson, one of our Grist 50.

Now that research is under scrutiny. On Monday, 21 scientists published a paper that pointed out unrealistic assumptions in Jacobson’s analysis. For instance, Jacobson’s analysis relies on the country’s dams releasing water “equivalent to about 100 times the flow of the Mississippi River” to meet electricity demand as solar power ramps down in the evening, one of the critique’s lead authors, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science, told the New York Times.

Jacobson immediately fired back, calling his critics “nuclear and fossil fuel supporters” and implying the authors had sold out to industry. This is just wrong. These guys aren’t shills.

It’s essentially a family feud, a conflict between people who otherwise share the same goals. Jacobson’s team thinks we can make a clean break from fossil fuels with renewables alone. Those critiquing his study think we need to be weaned off, with the help of nuclear, biofuels, and carbon capture.

Grist intends to take a deeper look at this subject in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Link – 

A battle royale has broken out between clean power purists and pragmatists.

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Medicaid Is the Most Widely Used Benefit Program in Existence

by AlyciaLinder Posted on June 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Aaron Carroll points me to this surprising result from a new Kaiser survey:

Is it really true that 71 percent of Republicans think it’s important to keep ACA’s Medicaid expansion? Yes it is, though with less intensity than Democrats and Independents. Is it because they’re confused and think this is about Medicare? Nope. The question explicitly starts out, “Now thinking specifically about Medicaid, the program for certain low-income adults and children…”

The answer probably lies here:

Even among Republicans, nearly half say Medicaid is personally important to their family. If that’s the case, it’s not really surprising that 71 percent support Medicaid expansion. That includes all the Republicans who think it’s personally important plus another sizeable chunk who have one or more friends who depend on it. (Plus, presumably, some who are unaffected by Medicaid but support it out of ordinary human decency anyway.)

These numbers may seem surprisingly high, but they’re really not. In the Kaiser poll, among all party IDs, 58 percent say that Medicaid is personally important to them and their families. In the US there are, roughly speaking:

68 million Medicaid enrollees
85 million families

If, say, there are 35 million families with one Medicaid enrollee; 10 million with two; and 4 million with three or more; that’s a total of 68 million Medicaid enrollees spread out among 49 million families. And that’s 58 percent of all families.

It’s a big number because Medicaid is the most widely used major benefit program in existence.1 Most people don’t know this.

1I think. It’s more widely used than Social Security (61 million), Medicare (55 million), food stamps (44 million), unemployment insurance (6 million at the height of the recession), the home mortgage deduction (about 60 million), 401(k) plans (about 52 million), IRAs (about 60 million), EITC (26 million), and TANF (about 4 million). Am I missing any major programs?

There is one fly in this ointment: employer health insurance. About 155 million people receive medical coverage through their employers, and they all benefit from the tax advantages of employer health plans. If you count this, then Medicaid is only the second most widely-used benefit program.

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Medicaid Is the Most Widely Used Benefit Program in Existence

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Why Do Republicans Tell Such Obvious Lies?

by Silvester Mongan Posted on May 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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These tweets from Paul Ryan’s press secretary kind of crack me up:

This is a pretty crude evasion, and a seemingly pointless one. Anybody who’s savvy enough to know what a CBO score is in the first place also knows that this is badly misleading. Earlier bills were scored. Earlier bills went through committee. Earlier bills were posted online a month ago. But none of that applies to the actual bill that was passed on Thursday.

So why bother? Donald Trump has taught Republicans that Twitter is a useful tool for communicating with your base, and that’s all this is. Most people who read these tweets will have no idea what they’re about, just that they’re more examples of how the lying left is always telling lies about Republicans. It will become a useful attack meme on the right for a while, and that’s all it’s for.

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Why Do Republicans Tell Such Obvious Lies?

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This Feminist Has a Lot of Opinions About Sex on Campus

by JannieGrose Posted on April 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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In the winter of 2015, a group of university students armed with mattresses, pillows, and petitions staged a protest at Northwestern University. The props were meant to evoke the sexual assault protests occurring on other campuses. Yet the object of these students’ ire was not a lecherous male professor or a sexually aggressive frat bro, but a feminist cultural critic and professor of media studies, Laura Kipnis.

Kipnis had just published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education arguing that the university’s newly minted code prohibiting professor-student dating infantilized students and teachers, and that university administrators should have no role in the private lives of consenting adults. She asserted that “bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square.” But “the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life.” Kipnis triggered a storm of criticism from students, and shortly afterward she was told that two graduate students had filed Title IX complaints against her, alleging her essay and subsequent statements had created a hostile environment.

Thus began a 72–day investigation that inspired her book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, published today, about sexual politics and academic freedom at universities. “If this is feminism,” Kipnis writes, “it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama.”

Kipnis, the author of seven books, appears to relish taking on hard-to-win arguments. In her 2015 book, Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation, she posited that Hustler magazine, which once featured a woman being put through a meat grinder on its cover, belongs in the “rabble rousing tradition of political pornography,” and that Anthony Weiner is “a humiliation artist.” She has even come out against love, which she says has become the “domestic Gulags” in our work-obsessed culture. “If sex seems like work,” she jokingly chides, “clearly you’re not working hard enough at it.”

With Unwanted Advances, Kipnis has placed herself at the nexus of two contentious battles playing out on university campuses: the debate over academic free speech and the approaches universities take in handling sexual-assault claims. “I can think of no better way to subjugate women than to convince us that assault is around every corner,” she writes, describing what she considers to be the paradoxically damaging effect of heightened consciousness about rape on college campuses. She compares closed-door, university-run sexual-assault hearings to McCarthyism and the Salem witch trials. “Zealous boundary-drawing and self-protective preciousness don’t auger well for the imaginative life,” she notes.

Kipnis knows her new book is controversial and suspects it “is going to test the limits of what can and can’t be said about the sexual and intellectual situation on campus and beyond.” I talked to Kipnis about her Title IX investigation, unwanted bedfellows (of both the intellectual and sexual variety), feminism, and the challenges of tackling these subjects.

Mother Jones: This was a really hard interview to prepare for. I kept hearing all your critics’ arguments in my head.

Laura Kipnis: I have the exact same problem. It’s a hard subject to write on because you find yourself preemptively answering the critics and then getting bogged down in some of these statistics or having to qualify what you’re saying. “Campus assault is a serious issue, but…” The chorus of voices in your head is definitely an impediment to trying to push past what the current conversation is. There is such an electrified sense around even discussing some of those things. People will automatically get accused of the victim-blaming and slut-shaming. This is why so many people are reluctant to start the conversation to begin with. You encounter all of these credential checks. Are you really a feminist? I was accused by somebody of profiteering off rape.

MJ: You say that you want to push past what the current conversation is. Where do you wish the conversation would go?

LK: On the question of women’s sexual freedom or female independence, there are still issues that haven’t been worked out. There’s an aura of traditional gender roles that is not talked about that really permeates these conversations. There is this vacillation between a desire for independence and having the kinds of sexual freedom that men have and, on the other side, issues about female vulnerability and susceptibility to male aggression and violence. We need more honesty about the actual conditions in which sex is happening. I talk about the levels of binge drinking in the last chapter. That is a symptom of something. It’s not, “We’re all just having fun here.”

MJ: Do you ever get tired of making arguments that cause so much outrage?

LK: Something I’ve been thinking about—one of those middle of the night “how to live” sort of questions—is whether you want to be someone who allows yourself to be shut up by critics, or backs down out of fear of ruffling feathers. When I wrote the first Chronicle piece, and there was first the campus protest march, then the Title IX complaints, it started seeming like there was a joint effort to shut me up. Which made me determined to write more, and not pipe down—out of orneriness if nothing else. It was the attempts to shut me up that really convinced me I was onto something.

MJ: Do you worry about people relying on sound bites to represent your argument, which is pretty complex?

LK: Making the kind of argument I am making does make you less media friendly. I do despair about having a four-minute slot on some TV show and trying to condense the type of argument I’m making in the book into the four questions you get asked. So that’s a problem. One way of dealing with this is just to stay off Twitter. Nobody young is able to do that, and when you have a book out staying off Twitter is harder. But it’s important to try to stay out of the stupid conversations. But yeah, I do feel a bit despairing in advance of trying to get points across in the four-minute media slot or the adversarial kind of situation.

MJ:Power is a common theme in your book. You talk about how students actually have a lot of power because they can get professors fired. On the other hand, there’s a kind of power I don’t think you discuss: The power to revoke mentorship, which can be devastating, particularly in graduate school. Grad students are a dime a dozen, but a good mentor is really hard to find.

LK: That’s a really interesting way of putting it. It’s always the case regardless of whether sex is involved. Mentorship can always be retracted. A grad student I know had mentorship revoked because of a student unionization effort that his professors were against, and he ended up having less of a career than he might have had. I would probably say that I would be in favor of some kind of code of best practices about situations like this. If there is a sexual relationship between a professor and a student then gets reported to the chair or something like that. That the person refrains from writing letters or being on committees that make some kind of assessment. But I think that relations between professors and grad students can be messy and not entirely boundable. Part of the problem is that those boundaries become eroticized. I don’t think people are quite so managerial with their sexuality. By suggesting that sex can be successfully regulated, we’re imposing stupidity on the issue.

MJ: You mentioned earlier that people have accused you of being a rape apologist. What do you say to them?

LK: I would say that we’re abandoning due process and being overly sentimental about this claim of victim or survivor status. There are a lot of ambiguous situations that are getting transformed into sexual-assault complaints. It’s very easy to file a sexual-assault complaint on campus and there’s very little scrutiny of the claims when they’re adjudicated. One of the other issues is that we’re mistaking a small cadre of activists for what all students are thinking on campus. There are plenty of students on campus who are not on board with all of this. There are a lot of divisions.

MJ: So what’s the way forward? Administrators aren’t going to want to appear soft on sexual assault. How could this be handled more fairly both for people making the claims and for the accused?

LK: It may be the courts. A lot of these cases are coming through from male students who have been subject to campus overreach. These cases are getting turned back by the courts. But you have to have a lot of money to bring a lawsuit. Weirdly—and this is where the politics of this becomes very confusing—it’s the right, particularly on free-speech issues, that is pushing back.

For women’s sake, I think all of these cases should be made public. Somebody mentioned to me that at their school there was some kind of report with names redacted released every week so people could see what kinds of crimes are happening. I think sexual assault should be treated this way. I’m all for redacting names. But we need to know: What were the details? What were the circumstances? To some degree that’s educational. One of the arguments would be that rather than turning toward the punishment model, we want to turn back toward the education model and transparency about what is actually happening and what is necessary to educate women in particular. It can’t only be men who are the focus of assault prevention. Women should be too. To say that that puts the blame on victims to have to prevent their own assault is crap and has to be treated as crap.

MJ: You’re a leftist. Are you worried that groups you don’t want to be associated with might appropriate your arguments?

LK: I have some worry as a leftist that the book is going to get taken up on the right by people I would not be happy to be politically affiliated with. I’m not thrilled about that possibility. Though I’ve also been pretty viciously attacked on Twitter by men’s rights activist types after making a joking remark in the first Chronicle essay about chemically castrating harassers and seizing their property. One guy threatened to cut my breasts off, among other lovely remarks. I did a lot of signaling throughout the book about my leftist feminism and made arguments consistent with that, about resource reallocation and so on. But you can’t control what stupid arguments people are going to make about your work. It’s less the MRA types who concern me, since I think of them as threatened dweebs, honestly. It’s the knee-jerkism of people closer to my own side I really despair about. I think the left-right divisions are really unclear on this. I don’t think that the forms of feminism that are prevailing on campus are left wing. It’s a conservative form of feminism in gender politics and there isn’t anything particularly progressive about it. That’s what is baffling. You’ve got conservatives acting like liberals touting free speech and due process.

MJ: Your Title IX investigation was decided in your favor, and the investigators dropped the hostile environment complaints. Did you ever worry that it wouldn’t go your way?

LK: I didn’t worry really that I was going to get fired. I did think that I could be found culpable of creating a hostile environment and that would be thrown around in the media by the accusers. I suspected they would have to throw a bone to the accusers. I did think in the back of my mind that if that happened and if I went public, which I was pretty sure I was going to do, that would create a huge academic-freedom stink. But I also thought it would put Title IX in the spotlight in terms of if it preventing free speech, and then that would become a big national issue. In my private thoughts I speculated about whether my being found culpable would move the conversation along. At this moment, so many calculations are off on what’s going to happen nationally.

MJ: Do you worry that this book will spark a new investigation?

LK: You can never predict how something will land.

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This Feminist Has a Lot of Opinions About Sex on Campus

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Leverage and Liquidity Are the Keys to a Strong Banking System

by CarrollBerk627 Posted on March 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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I’m a big fan of higher capital ratios (i.e., lower leverage) as a way of making the banking system safer, so I was disturbed when Tyler Cowen pointed to a new paper suggesting that high capital ratios don’t reduce the likelihood of financial crises. Instead, a team of researchers suggests that what’s more important is the type of capital. Deposits are the most stable source of funding for any bank, and liquidity is king. Put these together, and what’s important is the loan-to-deposit ratio:

As you can see, the LtD ratio rose steadily in the postwar era, doubling from 50 percent to over 100 percent by 2008. This indicates that credit was expanding, with banks making more loans for every dollar in deposits they took in. This, the authors say, is a better predictor of financial crises than raw leverage:

In this triptych, capital ratios are in the middle, and they don’t change much before and after a financial crisis (denoted by Year 0). However, right before a financial crisis there’s a steady decline in deposits as a percentage of total assets (which indicates a decline in the quality an;d stability of a bank’s capital base) and a steady rise in the loan-to-deposit ratio. These are the indicators that seem to be associated with financial crises.

So is there any point to higher capital standards? Yes indeed: they may not prevent financial crises, but they make recovery from a financial crisis much quicker. Just compare the green line and the red line in the charts below:

Both of these charts show the same thing: in countries with higher capital ratios, recovery from a financial crisis was far faster. Five years out, the difference was a full 13 percentage points of GDP per capita.

If these researchers are right—and I’ll add the usual caveats about this being only one study etc.—then the key to a strong, resilient banking system is twofold: a low loan-to-deposit ratio produces a liquid capital base that helps avoid financial crises, while a low leverage ratio produces the necessary capital to recover quickly if a financial crisis hits anyway.

Leverage and liquidity are key. In one sense, this is nothing new, since anyone could have told you that. But this paper suggests that they’re important for slightly different reasons than we thought.

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Leverage and Liquidity Are the Keys to a Strong Banking System

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Surprise: This Republican governor now wants his state to ban fracking.

by Mike Herman Posted on March 20, 2017

U.S. cities are packed with about 5 million medium-sized buildings — schools, churches, community centers, apartment buildings. Most use way more energy than they should. Many also have poor airflow and dirty, out-of-date heating and electrical systems. Those conditions contribute to high inner-city asthma rates and other health concerns.

“These buildings are actually making children sick,” says Donnel Baird, who grew up in such a place. His parents, immigrants from Guyana, raised their kids in a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, relying on a cooking stove for heat. Baird eventually moved to the South and then attended Duke University, before returning to New York as a community organizer in 2008.

In 2013, Baird launched BlocPower, which provides engineering and financial know-how to retrofit city buildings. The technical part is cool: Engineers survey structures with sensors and smartphone apps, figuring out the best ways to reduce energy use, like replacing oil boilers with solar hot water. But the financing is critical; BlocPower builds the case for each project and connects owners with lenders. It has already retrofitted more than 500 buildings in New York and is expanding into Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.

“The biggest way for us to reduce carbon emissions right now,” Baird says, “is efficiency.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

Excerpt from – 

Surprise: This Republican governor now wants his state to ban fracking.

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Proposed NOAA cuts would make predicting extreme weather even harder.

by FreemanUZNB Posted on March 6, 2017

The Trump administration reportedly plans to make deep cuts to the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, a key provider of information about the climate and weather.

All told, the proposed cuts amount to a full 17 percent of the agency’s budget, according to various reports. But the deepest would slash money for NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, which operates a squad of satellites monitoring the environment. These satellites tell scientists about climate variability, weather, oceans, and much else.

Roughly 90 percent of weather data in the United States comes from NOAA. So the cuts would stymie efforts by scientists and meteorologists to measure and predict not just everyday weather patterns, but also tornadoes, hurricanes, and severe thunderstorms.

Predicting hurricanes is already challenging enough, but it’s increasingly important as climate change adds fuel to big storms.

The administration would also scrap federal money for NOAA’s Sea Grant, a program that supports university research to assess the vitality of coastlines and their ecosystems.

Over the weekend, scientists and climate realists took to Twitter to vent their outrage.

Apart from accurate climate data, there’s another thing we’ll certainly miss if satellites wind up on the chopping block:

Taken from:

Proposed NOAA cuts would make predicting extreme weather even harder.

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Fast-Food-Loving Cornell Prof Faces Ethical Scrutiny

by AshleaMelina844 Posted on March 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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In 2014, I profiled Brian Wansink, a behavioral psychologist who studies how our surroundings affect our eating habits. Wansink runs Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab, a prolific group known for its clever dining research—one widely cited study, for example, found that people who keep their breakfast cereal in a cabinet weighed 21 pounds less on average than those who keep it on the counter; another showed that diners who sit near a restaurant’s entrance are 73 percent less likely to order dessert than those who sit in the restaurant’s interior.

I wasn’t the only one who thought Wansink’s work was cool. His research—some 200 studies since 2005—regularly makes headlines. But in January, a team of researchers reanalyzed the data from four of the Food and Brand Lab’s studies about pizza and turned up what appear to be serious problems: The researchers spotted 150 data inconsistencies. As Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman put it in a blog post: “Although the four papers were all based on the same data, they differed in all sorts of detail, which suggested that the authors opportunistically used data exclusion, data coding, and data analysis choices to obtain publishable (that is, p less than .05) results.”

In a blog post on Thursday, one of the researchers, University of Groningen Ph.D. student Nick Brown, pointed to what appear to be several incidences of self-plagiarism in Wansink’s writing. Brown also found that the data from two of Wansink’s studies—one from 2001 and another from 2003 “appear to be almost identical, despite purportedly reporting the results of two completely different studies.”

Wansink declined to comment on the accusations. Instead, he pointed to a statement on the lab’s website, where he writes, “We are currently conducting a full review of studies in question, preparing comprehensive data which will be shared and establishing new standards for future operations at the lab which will include how we respond to requests for research information.”

The statement also notes that Wansink has enlisted a Food and Brand lab member who wasn’t involved in the studies to reanalyze the data in question. This move has raised some eyebrows in the scientific community: Why not hire an independent researcher? Here’s how Wansink answered that question in a Q&A with the scientific integrity watchdog blog Retraction Watch:

That’s a great question, and we thought a lot about that. In the end, we want to do this as quickly and accurately as possible—get the scripts written up, state the rationale (i.e., why we made particular choices in the original paper), and post it on a public website. Also, because this same researcher will also be deidentifying the data, it’s important to keep everything corralled together until all of this gets done.

But before we post the data and scripts, we also plan on getting some other statisticians to look at the papers and the scripts. These will most likely be stats profs who are at Cornell but not in my lab. We’ve already requested one addition to the Institutional Review Board (IRB), so that’s speeding ahead.

But even though someone in my lab is doing the analyses, like I said, we’re going to post the deidentified data, the analysis scripts (as in, how everyone is coded), tables, and log files. That way everyone knows exactly how it’s analyzed and they can rerun it on different stats programs, like SPSS or STATA or SAS, or whatever. It will be open to anyone. I’m also going to use this data for some stat analysis exercises into one of my courses. Yet another reason to get it up as fast as possible—before the course is over.

In the same Q&A, Wansink defended his work on methodological grounds. “These sorts of studies are either first steps, or sometimes they’re real-world demonstrations of existing lab findings,” he said. “They aren’t intended to be the first and last word about a social science issue. Social science isn’t definitive like chemistry. Like Jim Morrison said, ‘People are strange.’ In a good way.”

Cornell has declined to intervene. In a statement to New York magazine, John J. Carberry, the university’s head of media relations, wrote, “While Cornell encourages transparent responses to scientific critique, we respect our faculty’s role as independent investigators to determine the most appropriate response to such requests, absent claims of misconduct or data sharing agreements.”

I’ll be tracking this story, and we will post updates as they occur.

Continued: 

Fast-Food-Loving Cornell Prof Faces Ethical Scrutiny

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Peter’s Choice

by FlossieLinder Posted on January 22, 2017

Mother Jones

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This past October, I taught a weeklong seminar on the history of conservatism to honors students from around the state of Oklahoma. In five long days, my nine very engaged students and I got to know each other fairly well. Six were African American women. Then there was a middle-aged white single mother, a white kid who looked like any other corn-fed Oklahoma boy and identified himself as “queer,” and the one straight white male. I’ll call him Peter.

Peter is 21 and comes from a town of about 3,000 souls. It’s 85 percent white, according to the 2010 census, and 1.2 percent African American—which would make for about 34 black folks. “Most people live around the poverty line,” Peter told the class, and hunting is as much a sport as a way to put food on the table.

Peter was one of the brightest students in the class, and certainly the sweetest. He liked to wear overalls to school—and on the last day, in a gentle tweak of the instructor, a red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. A devout evangelical, he’d preferred former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at the start of the primary season, but was now behind Donald Trump.

One day the students spent three hours drafting essays about the themes we’d talked about in class. I invited them to continue writing that night so the next morning we could discuss one of their pieces in detail. I picked Peter’s because it was extraordinary. In only eight hours he’d churned out eight pages, eloquent and sharp.

When I asked him if I could discuss his essay in this article, he replied, “That sounds fine with me. If any of my work can be used to help the country with its political turmoil, I say go for it!” Then he sent me a new version with typos corrected and a postelection postscript: “My wishful hope is that my compatriots will have their tempers settled by Trump’s election, and that maybe both sides can learn from the Obama and Trump administrations in order to understand how both sides feel. Then maybe we can start electing more moderate people, like John Kasich and Jim Webb, who can find reasonable commonality on both sides and make government work.” Did I mention he was sweet?

When he read the piece aloud in class that afternoon in October, the class was riveted. Several of the black women said it was the first time they’d heard a Trump supporter clearly set forth what he believed and why. (Though, defying stereotypes, one of these women—an aspiring cop—was also planning to vote for Trump.)

Peter’s essay took off from the main class reading, Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Its central argument is that conservative movements across history are united in their devotion to the maintenance of received social hierarchy. Peter, whose essay was titled “Plight of the Redneck,” had a hard time seeing how that applied to the people he knew.

“We all live out in the wilderness, either in the middle of a forest or on a farm,” he wrote. “Some people cannot leave their homes during times of unfortunate weather. Many still dry clothes by hanging them on wires with clothespins outside. These people are nowhere near the top, or even the middle, of any hierarchy. These people are scraping the bottom of the barrel, and they, seemingly, have nothing to benefit from maintaining the system of order that keeps them at the bottom.” His county ended up going about 70 percent for Trump.

Concerning race, Peter wrote, “In Oklahoma, besides Native Americans, there have traditionally been very few minorities. Few blacks have ever lived near the town that I am from…Even in my generation, despite there being a little more diversity, there was no racism, nor was there a reason for racism to exist.” His town’s 34 or so black people might beg to differ, of course; white people’s blindness to racism in their midst is an American tradition. As one of the African American students in the class—I’ll call her Karen—put it, whites in her town see “racism as nonexistent unless they witness it firsthand. And then it almost has to be over the top—undeniable acts of violence like hate crimes or cross burnings on front lawns—before they would acknowledge it as such.” But it’s relevant to the story I’m telling that I’m certain Peter isn’t individually, deliberately racist, and that Karen agrees.

Still, Peter’s thinking might help us frame a central debate on the left about what to make of Trump’s victory. Is it, in the main, a recrudescence of bigotry on American soil—a reactionary scream against a nation less white by the year? Or is it more properly understood as an economically grounded response to the privations that neoliberalism has wracked upon the heartland?

Peter knows where he stands. He remembers multiple factories and small businesses “shutting down or laying off. Next thing you know, half of downtown” in the bigger city eight miles away “became vacant storefronts.” Given that experience, he has concluded, “for those people who have no political voice and come from states that do not matter, the best thing they can do is try to send in a wrecking ball to disrupt the system.”

When Peter finished with that last line, there was a slight gasp from someone in the class—then silence, then applause. They felt like they got it.

I was also riveted by Peter’s account, convinced it might be useful as a counterbalance to glib liberal dismissals of the role of economic decline in building Trumpland. Then I did some research.

According to the 2010 census, the median household income in Peter’s county is a little more than $45,000. By comparison, Detroit’s is about $27,000 and Chicago’s (with a higher cost of living) is just under $49,000. The poverty rate is 17.5 percent in the county and 7.6 percent in Peter’s little town, compared with Chicago’s 22.7 percent. The unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent.

The town isn’t rich, to be sure. But it’s also not on the “bottom.” Oklahoma on the whole has been rather dynamic economically: Real GDP growth was 2.8 percent in 2014—down from 4.3 percent in 2013, but well above the 2.2 percent nationally. The same was true of other Trump bastions like Texas (5.2 percent growth) and West Virginia (5.1 percent).

Peter, though, perceives the region’s economic history as a simple tale of desolation and disappointment. “Everyone around was poor, including the churches,” he wrote, “and charities were nowhere near (this wasn’t a city, after all), so more people had to use some sort of government assistance. Taxes went up as the help became more widespread.”

He was just calling it like he saw it. But it’s striking how much a bright, inquisitive, public-spirited guy can take for granted that just is not so. Oklahoma’s top marginal income tax rate was cut by a quarter point to 5 percent in 2016, the same year lawmakers hurt the working poor by slashing the earned-income tax credit. On the “tax burden” index used by the website WalletHub, Oklahoma’s is the 45th lowest, with rock-bottom property taxes and a mere 4.5 percent sales tax. (On Election Day, Oklahomans voted down a 1-point sales tax increase meant to raise teacher pay, which is 49th in the nation.).

As for government assistance, Oklahoma spends less than 10 percent of its welfare budget on cash assistance. The most a single-parent family of three can get is $292 a month—that’s 18 percent of the federal poverty line. Only 2,469 of the more than 370,000 Oklahomans aged 18 to 64 who live in poverty get this aid. And the state’s Medicaid eligibility is one of the stingiest in the nation, covering only adults with dependent children and incomes below 42 percent of the poverty level—around $8,500 for a family of three.

But while Peter’s analysis is at odds with much of the data, his overall story does fit a national pattern. Trump voters report experiencing greater-than-average levels of economic anxiety, even though they tend have better-than-average incomes. And they are inclined to blame economic instability on the federal government—even, sometimes, when it flows from private corporations. Peter wrote about the sense of salvation his neighbors felt when a Walmart came to town: “Now there were enough jobs, even part-time jobs…But Walmart constantly got attacked by unions nationally and with federal regulations; someone lost their job, or their job became part-time.”

It’s worth noting that if the largest retail corporation in the world has been conspicuously harmed by unions and regulations of late, it doesn’t show in its profits, which were $121 billion in 2016. And of course, Walmart historically has had a far greater role in shuttering small-town Main Streets than in revitalizing them. But Peter’s neighbors see no reason to resent it for that. He writes, “The majority of the people do not blame the company for their loss because they realize that businesses are about making money, and that if they had a business of their own, they would do the same thing.”

It’s not fair to beat up on a sweet 21-year-old for getting facts wrong—especially if, as is likely, these were the only facts he was told. Indeed, teaching the class, I was amazed how even the most liberal students took for granted certain dubious narratives in which they (and much of the rest of the country) were marinated all year long, like the notion that Hillary Clinton was extravagantly corrupt.

Feelings can’t be fact-checked, and in the end, feelings were what Peter’s eloquent essay came down to­—what it feels like to belong, and what it feels like to be culturally dispossessed. “After continually losing on the economic side,” he wrote, “one of the few things that you can retain is your identity. What it means, to you, to be an American, your somewhat self-sufficient and isolated way of life, and your Christian faith and values. Your identity and heritage is the very last thing you can cling to…Abortion laws and gay marriage are the two most recent upsets. The vast majority of the state of Oklahoma has opposed both of the issues, and social values cannot be forced by the government.”

On these facts he is correct: In a 2015 poll, 68 percent of Oklahomans called themselves “pro-life,” and only 30 percent supported marriage equality. Until 2016 there were only a handful of abortion providers in the entire state, and the first new clinic to open in 40 years guards its entrance with a metal detector.

Peter thinks he’s not a reactionary. Since that sounds like an insult, I’d like to think so, too. But in writing this piece, I did notice a line in his essay that I had glided over during my first two readings, maybe because I liked him too much to want to be scared by him. “One need only look to the Civil War and the lasting legacies of Reconstruction through to today’s current racism and race issues to see what happens when the federal government forces its morals on dissenting parts of the country.”

The last time I read that, I shuddered. So I emailed Peter. “I say the intrusions were worth it to end slavery and turn blacks into full citizens,” I wrote. “A lot of liberals, even those most disposed to having an open mind to understanding the grievances of people like you and yours, will have a hard time with your words.”

Peter’s answer was striking. He first objected (politely!) to what he saw as the damning implication behind my observation. Slavery and Reconstruction? “I was using it as an example of government intrusion and how violent and negative the results can be when the government tries to tell people how to think. I take it you saw it in terms of race in politics. The way we look at the same thing shows how big the difference is between our two groups.”

To him, focusing on race was “an attention-grabbing tool that politicians use to their advantage,” one that “really just annoys and angers conservatives more than anything, because it is usually a straw man attack.” He compared it to what “has happened with this election: everyone who votes for Trump must be racist and sexist, and there’s no possible way that anyone could oppose Hillary unless it’s because they’re sexist. Accusing racism or sexism eliminates the possibility of an honest discussion about politics.”

He asked me to imagine “being one of those rednecks under the poverty line, living in a camper trailer on your grandpa’s land, eating about one full meal a day, yet being accused by Black Lives Matter that you are benefiting from white privilege and your life is somehow much better than theirs.”

And that’s when I wanted to meet him halfway: Maybe we could talk about the people in Chicago working for poverty wages and being told by Trump supporters that they were lazy. Or the guy with the tamale cart in front of my grocery store—always in front of my grocery store, morning, noon, and night—who with so much as a traffic violation might find himself among the millions whom Trump intends to immediately deport.

I wanted to meet him halfway, until he started talking about history.

“The reason I used the Civil War and Reconstruction is because it isn’t a secret that Reconstruction failed,” Peter wrote. “It failed and left the South in an extreme poverty that it still hasn’t recovered from.” And besides, “slavery was expensive and the Industrial Revolution was about to happen. Maybe if there had been no war, slavery would have faded peacefully.”

As a historian, I found this remarkable, since it was precisely what all American schoolchildren learned about slavery and Reconstruction for much of the 20th century. Or rather, they did until the civil rights era, when serious scholarship dismantled this narrative, piece by piece. But not, apparently, in Peter’s world. “Until urban liberals move to the rural South and live there for probably a decade or more,” he concluded, “there’s no way to fully appreciate the view.”

This was where he left me plumb at a loss. Liberals must listen to and understand Trump supporters. But what you end up understanding from even the sweetest among them still might chill you to the bone.

Read Peter’s full essay at motherjones.com/oklahoma.

Link – 

Peter’s Choice

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Here’s the Truth Behind Obamacare’s Horror Story Deductibles

by ZegBrewster Posted on January 9, 2017

Mother Jones

Recently, the go-to argument from the anti-Obamacare forces has been about deductibles. Sure, 20 million people have insurance. Sure, most of them can afford the premiums. But what’s the point if all it buys you is crappy insurance with a $6,000 deductible? As Nathan Nascimento put in National Review a few months ago, “what good is health-insurance coverage for middle- and low-income families if they can’t afford to use it?”

These crocodile tears would be amusing if they weren’t so infuriating. Nobody on the right has ever been willing to support higher funding so that deductibles can come down. In fact, folks on the right love high deductibles. It puts “skin in the game.” A combination of HSAs and high-deductible health policies is one of the standard bits of smoke-and-mirrors offered up by conservatives when you ask them what kind of national health care plan they’d like to see replace Obamacare.

But let’s put that aside for a moment and ask another question: what are the deductibles under Obamacare really like, anyway?1Here’s the answer:

The average deductible decreased from $900 to $850 in 2016. And as you can see if we extrapolate from the figures in the table, it looks like nearly two-thirds of all enrollees had deductibles under $1,000. Only about a fifth had the horror-story $6,000+ deductibles that we hear so much about.

But that’s not all. We don’t have figures for how this breaks down, but my guess is that the majority of the people with high deductibles are the famous “young invincibles” who are single, don’t qualify for subsidies because they’re fairly well off, and don’t think they’re going to get sick. So they buy the cheapest plan they can, take advantage of the preventive care stuff they’re allowed before the deductible kicks in, and go about their lives. No one in their right mind who had any kind of real health issues would ever buy a plan like this.

There are undoubtedly exceptions to this. There always are in a country the size of ours. I’m all for helping these folks out, but one way or another, that calls for more money, not less. Anybody who says otherwise is just playing with you.

1Hat tip to Andrew Sprung, who drew my attention to this table today.

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Here’s the Truth Behind Obamacare’s Horror Story Deductibles

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