“I, Pencil,” updated and animated — and not so offensive as I expected (even if free market nuts think it is)

May 16, 2013

English: Title page of Adam Smith's Wealth of ...

Title page of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, 1776. Wikipedia image

This is an encore post.  The topic is probably timely just about any time — the debates about which comes first, free markets or free people, or the balance of government regulation necessary to keep a truly fair and truly free market, or the utility of regulation at all, are debates that are good to have.  It’s a pity there isn’t more discussion of Adam Smith’s ideas, instead of the idol-worshipping of a bronzed copy of Smith’s famous treatise.  In any case, a spate of links to this post reminded me that it’s good to recirculate from time to time.

Have you read “I, Pencil?” You should.  There’s a link early in the article.  It’s a quick read.

Every economics teacher knows that old Leonard Read piece, “I, Pencil.”   It’s a good, practical demonstration of the concept of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” free markets, and the way economies put stuff together for sale without a government agency issuing instructions, written by Read in 1958, for the Foundation for Economic Education, a once-free-market economic think tank that recently made an unexpected (by me) lurch to the radical right.

Pencils

Pencils – Wikipedia image

The essay is dated, though, for high school kids today.  Most of the stuff Read properly assumed people knew something about, is left out of modern curricula in elementary and middle school, so a high school teacher must do remedial work in mining, international trade, lumbering, manufacturing, chemistry and metallurgy, just to make the thing make sense.  Where we used to learn about pencils in first or second grade, my students in recent years labor under the misconception that pencil leads are made out of lead, and I have to explain to them that graphite is a form of carbon.  They don’t know cedar from pine, or mahogany, they don’t know copper from tin from zinc from steel, and they think rubber has always been synthetic.

Imagine my surprise on this:  I got an e-mail touting an animated, YouTube update of Read’s essay. It’s not bad, even though it’s from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is neither competitive, nor an institute, but is instead a propaganda arm of crazy right-wing wackoes.

Whoever made this film appears not to have had much interference from the CEI poobahs.

Am I missing something? Is this film more right-wing than I see?

I worry that I missed something, or that the producers of this movie wove a spell over the usual radical near-fascist groups.  This movie has been touted in recent days by almost all of the usual crypto-black-shirt think puddles, American Enterprise Institute, the unreasoning Reason magazine from the so-called libertarian view, the cartoonish Glen Beck effluent pipe The Blaze, the Coors family’s Heritage Foundation, the offensively-named Lexicans, the biased Cafe Hayek (which is often a good read anyway, so long as you don’t take them seriously on any science issue),  the sanctuary for authoritarian-leaning victims of lobotomy Hot Air, and even that publication from the propaganda organization, The Daily Capitalist — in short, it’s been plugged by organizations covering the entire political spectrum from Y to Z, the far right end of the alphabet.

English: From US Patent 19783 Combination of L...

From US Patent 19783 Combination of Lead-Pencil and Eraser by L. Lipman, March 1858. (Patent later invalidated — so much for free market rewards to inventors) Wikipedia image

Maybe they didn’t watch it? 

For today’s teenagers, someone should do a couple of updates.  “I, SmartPhone” and “I, Tablet Computer” could include lessons in government regulation of radio spectrum and how such regulation allows public safety functions and air traffic control to exist alongside great profit-seeking groups, and how such developments would be impossible without government regulation. There would also be a section on the mining and milling of rare Earths, of ores like Coltan, which would introduce the concept of blood or conflict diamonds and ores, the collapse of order in unregulated areas like Congo and Somalia, slave labor as in Pakistan and China.  “I, Fast Food Breakfast” could include side lessons in importing of orange juice from Brazil and other nations, artificially-flavored syrups from China and the threat from climate change to U.S. maple tree farmers, and meat from Australia and Argentina, along with the ideas of food safety regulation on eggs and egg products by USDA and FDA.  “I, Burrito” could include lessons in cultural diffusion and migrant farm workers who pick the tomatoes . . .

Colored_pencil

Color pencils. Wikipedia image

By the way, the fact that pencil leads are graphite (and clay), and not lead, should not be taken to mean that pencil manufacturers came up with a kid-safe product on their own; lead in the paint on pencils was enough to worry the health officials, until regulation got different paints used.

We need a classroom guide on Read’s piece and this new movie that seriously discusses the need for regulation in pencil manufacture, from the safety of the saws used to cut the trees, and in the mills, to the anti-child labor provisions of the graphite and rubber import agreements, to the forest regulation and research necessary to keep the incense cedar wood in production, through the anti-deforestation requirements on rubber plantations and the regulation of lead in the paint.  The movie is good, much less right-wing than those groups who fawn over it, but still in need of some real-world economic reality.

Mechanical pencil leads spilling out of their ...

Mechanical pencil leads spilling out of their plastic case. Wikipedia image

More:

More, in 2013:  

1 Comment | Economics, Education, Food Safety, Freedom - Economic, History, Regulation | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Teacher salaries and raises hammered by recession

May 7, 2013

Daily salary IMG 0077

Accounts for daily salary sealed by a high civil servant named Ur-Shara – Girsu, Sumerian object dated to circa 2044 BCE, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon via Wikipedia.  Finding evidence of significant teacher raises since 2044 BCE can be difficult.

I’ll let the press release speak for itself for a moment:

.

National Council on Teacher Quality

..

..

For Immediate Release// Contact: Laura Johnson
May 7, 2013

PRESS RELEASE

New NCTQ Report: Teacher Salary Growth Slowed as Result of Recession

Over the Last Four Years, Teachers Continued to Get Raises, But at Only One-Third to One-Half of What Raises Were at Start of Recession

Washington, DC – A new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) finds that although teachers continued to get raises following the recession, there was a noticeable slow-down in teacher salary growth on par with that of comparable professions. Post-recession raises have been one-third to one-half of what they were at the beginning of the recession, with almost all 41 districts studied by NCTQ freezing or cutting at least one component of scheduled teacher raises at some point between the 2008-09 and 2011-12 school years. In 80 percent of the districts sampled (33 out of 41), teachers had a total pay freeze or pay cut in at least one of the last four school years.

“There is no question that teacher salary growth took a hit post-recession,” said Kate Walsh, President of the National Council on Teacher Quality. “The good news is that the economy is strengthening and districts are slowly getting back to investing more in teacher pay. The question is, will education leaders choose to go back to the status quo of step increases and regular annual adjustments, or will they evaluate teacher performance and reward the most effective teachers with raises? Expectations for students are increasing, which means the bar is being raised for teachers as well— and a support that should accompany this shift is the ability to reward the best-performing teachers.”

The recession’s impact on teacher raises varied district by district. Cutting annual adjustments, which are raises for cost-of-living and other market forces, was the most common method used to reduce raise amounts. However, no district had a pay cut or freeze every year and eight districts had positive salary growth over the entire four-year period (Fort Worth, Memphis, Milwaukee, New York City, Jefferson County, KY, Fresno, Chicago, and Baltimore City). Of the 41 districts in the sample, Chicago Public Schools had the highest average raise over the four years at 6.5 percent. The report includes detailed information on teacher raises in each of 41 districts from 2008-09 to 2011-12, including the methods each district used to reduce raises. To view the full report, visit http://www.nctq.org/tr3/docs/nctq_recession_salary.pdf.

Methodology
The report draws on data from the 50 largest U.S. public school districts in 2010-11 (the most recent year for which such data are available). Forty-one of the 50 districts responded to the data request with enough information to be included in the report. NCTQ calculated the average annual salary growth in the 41 school districts from 2008-09 to 2011-12 by analyzing districts’ salary schedules and determining teachers’ movement on the schedules (using information reported by the districts). Salary growth calculations take into account raises for earning additional years of experience (also known as “step increases”) and annual adjustments for cost-of-living increases and other market factors. They do not take into account raises for completing additional coursework.

About NCTQ
The National Council on Teacher Quality advocates for reforms in a broad range of teacher policies at the federal, state, and local levels in order to increase the number of effective teachers. In particular we recognize the absence of much of the evidence necessary to make a compelling case for change and seek to fill that void with a research agenda that has direct and practical implications for policy. We are committed to lending transparency and increasing public awareness about the four sets of institutions that have the greatest impact on teacher quality: states, teacher preparation programs, school districts and teachers unions. For more information, visit: www.nctq.org.

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More:  

A new Landaff teacher in the 1940s watches as ...

“A new Landaff teacher in the 1940s watches as a student writes on the blackboard.” Wikipedia image

 

1 Comment | Economics, Education, Politics, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Teaching | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

How’s that austerity working for you?

April 6, 2013

NJ State Police Benevolent Association sign

Sign outside Atlantic City, New Jersey. Image from NJSPBA.com

“Even the bad guys are feeling lucky.”

With declining income, American cities lay off cops.

No problem for the rich!  Just hire private cops! Story in the Christian Science Monitor:

After people in Oakland’s [California] wealthy enclaves like Oakmore or Piedmont Pines head to work, security companies take over, cruising the quiet streets to ward off burglars looking to take advantage of unattended homes.

*  *  *  *  *  *

Long known for patrolling shopping malls and gated communities, private security firms are beginning to spread into city streets. While private security has long been contracted by homeowners associations and commercial districts, the trend of groups of neighbors pooling money to contract private security for their streets is something new.

Besides Oakland, neighborhoods in Atlanta and Detroit – both cities with high rates of crime – have hired firms to patrol their neighborhoods, says Steve Amitay, executive director of the National Association of Security Contractor.

“It’s happening everywhere,” Mr. Amitay says. “Municipal governments and cities are really getting strapped in terms of their resources, and when a police department cuts 100 officers obviously they are going to respond to less crimes.”

Potential issues:

  1. Is the cost less than the modest increase in taxes required to keep the cops on?
  2. What happens when a rent-a-cop finds criminals in action?  Private security firms are not bound to stop criminal action, nor put their lives on the line to catch criminals.
  3. Would it be as effective if those people who fire private security simply donated that money to local law enforcement agencies?

File this under the so-called conservative rich cutting off their fingers to spite their hands:  Does it ever occur to them that they would have more bankable cash if they didn’t have to hire a security service to guard their homes, but instead paid modest taxes to educate would-be criminals to do non-criminal work, and to provide police protection instead of private spies?

Didn’t Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association say his agency would support bigger budgets to hire more cops?  Where is that lobbying action today?  What’s that — he was just jerking whose chain?  (I’d be more comfortable if I knew LaPierre does not regard Somalia as the model for how a national government ought to work.)

More:

3 Comments | Citizenship, Civil Rights, Economics, Government, Police Powers, Politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

CSCOPE chart Glenn Beck doesn’t want you to see

April 2, 2013

. . . because he screwed it up.

Thanks to Morgan Freeberg over at House of Eratosthenes — shows he’s a fair player (I doubt he’s got much sympathy with the CSCOPE project).

Here’s the chart Glenn Beck, or perhaps his partner-in-calumny David Barton, appears to have mis-identified, the one that no one else who joined his witch-hunt bandwagon bothered to read:

CSCOPE chart on economics

CSCOPE chart on rise of economic systems in the 19th century that critics claim, erroneously, promotes socialism and Marxism. This is copyrighted material, posted here in the interests of correcting false claims. Will CSCOPE complain?

I’m not sure which episode of “The Blaze” this appeared on in the fuzzy version in my earlier post (anyone know?); but it’s clear that it’s been grotesquely mischaracterized by CSCOPE critics.  Think about a Texas high school kid; the readings say communism prohibits private property ownership.  Given that, how do you think a Texas high school student — generally a sophomore for  world history —  would answer the questions in the “Communism” box:

What about Private Property?

How much government control?

(Say it ain’t so, Glenn Beck:  Did David Barton really complain that Texas’s curriculum puts the family at the the foundation of our culture, and our government?  (Yes, he did.)  He fought to get that in; is Barton on drugs, or depressed, or drunk?  If so, get him help.  If not, he’s corrupt.)

More, from the rational world:

More from the irrational world, the Wall of Shameful reporting:

English: Cropped from a photo of a group of pr...

Cropped from a photo of a group of predominantly anti-Glenn Beck protesters holding home-made placards in Beck’s hometown of Mt. Vernon, Washington, outside the venue where Beck received the ceremonial key to the town. Even his home town people don’t believe him. Photo via Wikipedia

4 Comments | CSCOPE, Curricula, Economics, Education, History, Political Smear, Politics, Teachers, Teaching | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Neil Tyson, still at it: We need to spend more in government research, in space, in science, in education

March 7, 2013

Here’s a guy who Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and other “deficit hawks” refuse to debate.  Grover Norquist blanches when you mention his name, and hopes and prays you won’t listen to him:  Neil de Grasse Tyson.

The film was put together from several statements by Tyson, by Evan Schurr.

WRITE TO CONGRESS:
http://www.penny4nasa.org/take-action/

The intention of this project is to stress the importance of advancing the space frontier and is focused on igniting scientific curiosity in the general public.
Facebook cover: (not sure who made this but thank you!)
http://i.imgur.com/yqAGm.png

*FOR THOSE SAYING THE MUSIC IS TOO LOUD* This is the adjusted one http://youtu.be/Fl07UfRkPas

I give immense credit to The Sagan Series for providing the inspiration for this video.
http://www.youtube.com/user/damewse?f…

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. All copyrighted materials contained herein belong to their respective copyright holders, I do not claim ownership over any of these materials. In no way do I benefit either financially or otherwise from this video.

MUSIC:
Arrival of the Birds and Transformation by The Cinematic Orchestra http://www.amazon.com/The-Crimson-Win……

Credits
When We Left Earth http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/nasa/nasa…
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart http://www.thedailyshow.com/
HUBBLE 3D http://www.imax.com/hubble/
NASA TV http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv…
The Amazing Meeting http://www.amazingmeeting.com/TAM2011/
“US Mint” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZzKDL…
“New $100 Note” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgaytK…
Real Time with Bill Maher http://www.hbo.com/real-time-with-bil…
Pale Blue Dot – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blu…
STS-135 Ascent Imagery Highlights http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikzxtw…
CSPAN State of the Union Address http://www.c-span.org/
The Sagan Series http://www.facebook.com/thesaganseries
The Asteroid that Flattened Mars http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgMXPX…
University of Buffalo Communications http://www.communication.buffalo.edu/
Mars Curiosity Rover http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnlvvu…
Red Aurora Australis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC7Qro…

Thank you to user florentgermain for the French subtitles

Hey, this is a year old.  Why are you sitting on your hands?  Our future, our children’s future, our great-great-grandchildren’s futures, are on the line.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Robert Krulwich at NPR, who pulled this out and started discussing it again.

More:

1 Comment | Economics, History, NASA, Politics, Science, Space exploration, Space Race | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

How wealth inequality crowds out America’s success

March 4, 2013

What happens when a lot of money — I mean, a lot of money — is concentrated in a few hands?

The nation runs the risk of economic failure.

This short video says that more money is concentrated in fewer hands than we think.

Description from the maker, Politizane:

Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is.

This is just one facet of the figures necessary for having rational discussions about tax reform, federal budget and deficit cutting, tax policy, and economic and monetary policy.

But it’s an ugly portrait, isn’t it?  How much does it differ from the France of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette?  How much does it differ from the going-to-hell-in-an-accelerating-handbasket U.S. of 1929?  Wealth’s concentration in the hands of a tiny few literally crowds out hundreds of millions of Americans from the ability to successfully accumulate modest nest eggs.

What do you think?

I wish the film’s creator had provided citations.

Have things improved since 2007?  Look at this chart based on Institute for Policy Studies figures:

Maldistribution of U.S. wealth, 2007; Inst for Policy Studies

Source: Institute for Policy Studies, via BusinessInsider

More:

More, since the original posting:

Update March 9, 2013:  This is funny, to me:  Some people think just talking about this stuff is “class warfare.”  How are they so familiar with class warfare, you wonder?  That’s a self-answering question, isn’t it?

6 Comments | Economics, History, Income Distribution, Politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment repeat: Robert C. Lieberman, “Why the Rich Are Getting Richer: American Politics and the Second Gilded Age”

February 20, 2013

What? You missed this, on February 20, 2011? Well, here it is again. Please pay attention this time.

The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams.  Unemployment remains at nearly ten percent, the highest level in almost 30 years; foreclosures have forced millions of Americans out of their homes; and real incomes have fallen faster and further than at any time since the Great Depression.  Many of those laid off fear that the jobs they have lost — the secure, often unionized, industrial jobs that provided wealth, security and opportunity — will never return.  They are probably right.

Cover of Winner-Take-All Politics, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

Cover of Winner-Take-All Politics, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

And yet a curious thing has happened in the midst of all this misery.  The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer.  And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer.  In 2009, the average income of the top five percent of earners went up, while on average everyone else’s income went down.  This was not an anomaly but rather a continuation of a 40-year trend of ballooning incomes at the very top and stagnant incomes in the middle and at the bottom.  The share of total income going to the top one percent has increased from roughly eight percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today.

This what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call the “winner-take-all economy.”  It is not a picture of a healthy society.  Such a level of economic inequality, not seen in the United States since the eve of the Great Depression, bespeaks a political economy in which the financial rewards are increasingly concentrated among a tiny elite and whose risks are borne by an increasingly exposed and unprotected middle class.  Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced democracy and by conventional measures comparable to that in countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan.

Robert C. Lieberman, reviewing the book Winner-Take-All Politics:  How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Simon and Schuster, 2010, 368 pages.  $27.00.; review appears in Foreign Affairs, January/February 2011, pp. 154-158.

More:

Two years later, even more:

1 Comment | Books, Business, Democracy, Economics, Free market economics, Freedom - Economic, Freedom - Political, Gilded Age, Government, Great Depression, Liberty | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment: Herbert Hoover, on credit, in Des Moines, Iowa, 1932

February 4, 2013

Herbert Hoover and crowd in West Branch, Iowa, 1932 - dedication of Hoover Library

Herbert Hoover, 88, attended the opening of the Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, on August 10, 1962, 30 years after his speech in Des Moines defending actions to shore up the credit of the U.S.  At this 1962 event, former President Harry Truman came to pay respects, mensch that he was; Truman is walking ahead of Hoover here.  Photo from Travel Iowa blog, and probably from the Hoover Library and Museum

Let me remind you that credit is the lifeblood of business, the lifeblood of prices and jobs.

  • Herbert Hoover, address at Des Moines, Iowa, October 4, 1932. — The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Herbert Hoover, 1932–1933, p. 467.  (courtesy of Wikiquote)

_____________

Just a month before he would be crushed at the polls by Franklin Roosevelt, President Herbert Hoover returned to Iowa, his proud home state, to deliver this speech in Des Moines, detailing actions his administration had taken over the previous 18 months to save the U.S. and world economies.  Much of this action had been out of the glare of popular press.  Hoover hoped that by explaining the difficult battles his administration fought behind the huge oak doors of boardrooms and international diplomacy, Americans might appreciate more what he had accomplished, and not focus so much on the fact that the Great Depression still ravaged millions of Americans.

In today’s anti-credit political environment, it is interesting to see one of our most ardent businessman presidents defend credit. In an irony unappreciated in today’s political discussions, much of the discussion in 1932 between Hoover and Roosevelt was over which one could better manage to get to and keep a balanced budget.

The full speech is available at The American Presidency Project housed at the University of California – Santa Barbara. Politics wonks, history fans, and economists will want to look at the full speech this line is ripped from, contextually bereft. Context, in this case, does not change the meaning, but deepens the complexity of the issues and time.  Hoover bragged about keeping the U.S. on the gold standard, because so many contracts and mortgages were written to be payable in gold, and not currency.  So leaving the gold standard could have enormous disrupting influence on credit.

The first of these perils was the steady strangulation of credit through the removal of $3 billions of gold and currency by foreign drains and by the hoarding of our own citizens from the channels of our commerce and business. And let me remind you that credit is the lifeblood of business, the lifeblood of prices and of jobs.

Much of the rest of the speech defended Hoover’s use of government in ways that would cause apoplexy among Tea Partiers and a blizzard of critical press releases from Republicans, today:

Hoover addresses a large crowd in his 1932 cam...

Hoover addresses a large crowd in his 1932 campaign. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now, we have fought an unending war against the effect of these calamities upon our people in America. This is no time to recount the battles on a thousand fronts. We have fought the fight to protect our people in a thousand cities from hunger and cold.

We have carried on an unceasing campaign to protect the Nation from those unhealing class bitternesses which arise from strikes and lockouts and industrial conflict. We have accomplished this through the willing agreement of employer and labor which placed humanity before money through the sacrifice of profits and dividends before wages.

We have defended millions from the tragic result of droughts. We have mobilized a vast expansion of public construction to make work for the unemployed. We fought the battle to balance the budget. We have defended the country from being forced off the gold standard, with its crushing effect upon all who might be in debt. We have battled to provide a supply of credits to merchants and farmers and industries. We have fought to retard falling prices. We have struggled to save homes and farms from foreclosure of mortgages, battled to save millions of depositors and borrowers from the ruin caused by the failure of banks, fought to assure the safety of millions of policyholders from failure of their insurance companies, and fought to save commerce and employment from the failure of railways.

We have fought to secure the disarmament and to maintain the peace of the world. We have fought for stability in other countries whose failure would inevitably injure us. And, above all, we have fought to preserve the safety, the principles, and the ideals of American life. We have builded the foundations of recovery.

Now, all these battles, related and unrelated, have had a single strategy and a single purpose. That was to protect your living, your comfort, and the safety of your fireside. They have been waged and have succeeded in protecting you from infinitely greater harm that might have come to you.

Thousands of our people in their bitter distress and losses today are saying that “things could not be worse.” No person who has any remote understanding of the forces which confronted this country during these last 18 months ever utters that remark. Had it not been for the immediate and unprecedented actions of our Government things would be infinitely worse today.

Instead of moving forward we would be degenerating for years to come, even if we had not gone clear over the precipice, with the total destruction of every ideal we hold dear.

Let no man tell you that it could not be worse. It could be so much worse that these days now, distressing as they are, would look like veritable prosperity.

In all these great efforts there has been a constant difficulty of translating the daily action into terms of public understanding. The forces in motion have been so gigantic, so complex in character, the instrumentalities and actions that we must undertake to deal with them have been so involved, the figures we must use are so astronomical as to seem to have but little relation to the family in the apartment or the cottage or on the farm.

English: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Herbert...

Five months after Hoover’s Des Moines speech, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover in convertible automobile on way to U.S. Capitol for Roosevelt’s inauguration, March 4, 1933 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If Hoover made that speech today, every fellow at the Hoover Institution would sign a petition demanding his impeachment, never mind that he’s not president any more.

____________

A few notes about the photograph at the top:  This photo shows two former presidents, Herbert Hoover and Harry S Truman, walking through a crowd at the dedication of the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, in West Branch, Iowa, in 1962.  One might pay careful attention to how lax security was, generally — the crowd is allowed within an arm’s length of the two former presidents — and this was after an assassination attempt had been made on Truman, in Washington, years before.  Insignia on the uniforms of the police are difficult to discern, but from the uniforms it looks as if there was a combination of local police, possibly a county sheriff’s staff, and Iowa state highway patrol troopers.  I found it interesting to note that several of the younger men appear to be Explorer Scouts, BSA — one wearing what appears to be an Eagle Scout neckerchief. Cameras were special event tools, but generally not of the quality that could get a decent photograph at an event like this, except for professionals with professional cameras.  Still, visible are double-lens reflex cameras held up in hope of a proper aim, small Kodaks, one man winding film in a 35-mm single-lens reflex, and a tiny handful of home movie cameras (with three lenses on the front — wide angle, normal and modest telephoto).  Click on the photo for an expanded view, and see what else you may.  If by chance you know anything about this photo, Dear Reader, please tell, in comments.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Henry Mowry at Mowryblog.

More, and resources:

Presidents Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover at the dedication of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum on August 10, 1962 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Presidents Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover at the dedication of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum on August 10, 1962 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

2 Comments | Boy Scouts of America, Campaigns, Economics, Famous quotes, Great Depression, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, History, Quotes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

GOP “no-budget” hoax

January 28, 2013

If you repeat some hoary old falsehood often enough, people will begin to assume it’s got some accuracy to it, right?

Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor are at it again, complaining that the Senate hasn’t passed a budget.

But that’s false.  In fact, no only did the Senate pass a budget, but so did the House — and then (perhaps stupidly), they made it a law instead of the budget resolution the Congressional Budgeting process calls for.

Then-Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, explained last April how this worked:

We’ve got a budget, by law — and it’s a disaster.

We don’t need a budget resolution nearly so badly as we need some Congressional leadership who understand supply and demand, and who are committed to good government and not the destruction of America (even if unintentional).

Oliphant cartoon on GOP leading nation over fiscal cliff

Cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Pat Oliphant, syndicated by Go Comics

More:

Text of Sen. Conrad’s remarks, below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Economics, Financial literacy, History, Hoaxes, Political cartoons, U.S. Senate | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Obamacare: Still the better way, still saving money, still a good deal

January 20, 2013

A guy named William Duncan at a blog called Sensible Thoughts posted something I found inherently unsensible a while back.  He listed six reasons why he thought the Affordable Care Act should be repealed. (“A while?” “Yeah, July 2012 is ‘a while.'”)

His sixth point was the old canard about Congress and the President being exempt.  Of course they are not exempt, and so I told him.

Your sixth reason is in error. There is no provision to exempt either the president or Congress from the act. There is no language in the bill such as you describe. Language from page 114 can be found here:

https://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/obamacare-making-stuff-up-to-complain-about/

At some length, Mr. Duncan removed that point, but said he still thinks the law should be repealed on the other five points I hadn’t dealt with.

Ed:
Thank you for the correction on point #6. I have gone back and looked at this, and you are absolutely right. Although the Wall Street Journal and folks like Sean Hannity reported that the President and members of Congress are exempt from participation in the Affordable Care Act, in the end that did NOT make it into the language of the legislation. I have deleted point #6 from the post as a result. Thank you for the correction. Now, if you copuld only prove me wrong on the rest of the points listed…. Unfortunately, this remains a bill the the American public did not want, and was purchased by shenanigans that the Administration should be ashamed of.

A quick and dirty response; we may need to put more meat on these response bones in the next couple of months, because the opposition to ObamaCare relies on severely distorted claims about the law and what it actually does.  Much if not most of the good stuff in the law is completely ignored by these critics, and we should point that out, too.

I responded (images added here):

Disproof?

What makes you think Americans didn’t want it? There was a whale of an anti-health care campaign after the act passed, but when it passed, it enjoyed a majority of support. And, when we take each provision of the bill and ask people about that provision, they approve overwhelmingly.

English: Depiction of the House vote on H.R. 3...

Depiction of the House vote on H.R. 3590 (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) on March 21, 2010, by congressional district. Democratic yea, dark blue; Democratic nay, light blue; Republican nay, red; No representative seated, white. Image from Wikipedia

For example, not even you are opposed to continuing the Reagan-era program that encourages medical schools to train more general practitioners. No one seriously objects to the provisions that pay physicians to practice in under-served areas, like West Texas, Iowa, and West Virginia. No one objects to the provisions that train more nurses. Only the most rabid racists complain about continuing and expanding the health care clinics on Indian reservations.

The law has dozens of provisions like those, and no one in their right mind objects to them.

Your other five points?

  1. The Supreme Court killed that one for you. They said that, even if you call it a fine, it’s a tax. And at that, it’s a helluva bargain. For those who do not purchase health insurance because they can’t afford to, they must pay $695 additional tax, per year. That’s about what I’d pay monthly on the open market.In any case, there are no fines, according to the Supreme Court.
    English: Depiction of the Senate vote on H.R. ...

    Depiction of the Senate vote on H.R. 3590 (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) on December 24, 2009, by state. Color code is difficult to decipher; let it suffice that if there are two Democratic yea votes, the state is colored deep blue; if two Republican nay votes, very red. Image from Wikipedia

    But I can’t imagine why you oppose bargains in health care, especially when they lower the costs of health care to the insured, who will no longer pay the 15% to 25% premium to cover indigent care.

  2. With all the “new taxes,” CBO, the non-partisan group that scores these issues for Congress, projects the bill will decrease federal spending and cut the deficits annually, when fully enacted in 2014 and all out years.Do you oppose deficits or not?All the other taxes are fair, strike only the tippy-top income tiers, and are cheap at that.These taxes make the system more fair. It’s stacked against anyone making less than $150,000 a year, now. That’s most of us. I don’t like it when government helps the rich, at the expense of the poor — that’s contrary to moral standards my church holds, for example, and it tends to damage the economy.So I think more fair taxes, and lower costs, will be quite popular, once we see them.So, new taxes aren’t a good justification to oppose the law.
  3. Speaking of fallacious accounting — CBO, the group you cite, says the bill will reduce the deficits. You assume the Law won’t work, while small portions of it have already slashed inflation in health care costs, from 20% in 2009 to 4% in 2011 and 2012.But, what about repeal? CBO looked at that, too — repeal of the law will increase deficits, not decrease them. It’s only $109 billion increase in deficits, but these number directly refute all claims that repeal would be cheaper. See the analysis gateway here: http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43471
  4. This Medicare issue was hashed out, accurately and well I thought, in the campaign. Medicare costs will be reduced by holding costs down — benefits will not be reduced. Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan ran into some difficulty with this, because their budget plans assumed the savings from the Affordable Care Act, while eliminating the law that produced the savings.I’m sure there will be some adjustments required. Medicare seems a little ham-fisted when it comes to dealing with local and regional cost differences, but nationwide, over the past 40 years, enormous savings have been realized by reducing some reimbursements for procedures that once were uncommon and expensive, to a less expensive rate, now that they are more common. On the whole, over 40 years, over thousands of procedures, physicians have changed their expectations, and things have worked fine. Oh, there have been grumblings, I know. But the cuts in costs, without cuts in benefits, have stuck.Under the Affordable Care Act, we hope a lot more people will move to company plans from Medicare, or at least to the exchange plans offered in each state.One of the changes already introduced is working [link added here]. Rather than pay providers for each procedure, Medicare now reimburses hospitals for effective hospitalization — that is, when a patient is discharged and then re-enters a hospital for the same complaint, the hospital will lose money. Hospitals are keeping patients a few days longer on many procedures, to insure that one hospitalization is all that is required. Savings are already being made in costs, while improvements have resulted in the health care – better health in the patients!In all, CBO says costs will come down with the Affordable Care Act, as advertised, and costs will rise and deficits will rise if the Act is repealed.
  5. Your abortion argument is too metaphysical, and not enough real-world. Do you want to reduce the number of abortions? Then provide health care, make sure contraception is freely available (not for free, but freely), and stand back. Those two things reduce abortions, as they did during the Clinton administration.Restrictions on abortion, on the other hand, make it more likely a woman will choose to terminate a pregnancy under a number of circumstances: She doesn’t have health care coverage, her coverage does not cover pre-natal care, her coverage won’t cover a new infant, the pregnancy is unplanned due to lack of good information on family planning or lack of access to affordable contraception.You can choose: Restrict abortions and increase the number of abortions, or provide health care, and reduce the number of abortions.It may be a bit counter-intuitive, but you’d better study the issue. The Affordable Care Act’s provisions, Obamacare, have over the years reduced abortions where applied; cutting off that care has increased the number of abortions.My advice would be, don’t kill the babies to make a political point.

I am concerned that you don’t appear much familiar with what the bill actually does. Here are a few reasons to keep the law.

  1. We need more physicians, and the bill provides them.
  2. We need more physicians in underserved areas, and the bill provides them.
  3. We need more nurses, and the bill provides them.
  4. We need more community clinics in underserved urban areas [link added here], where illnesses and injuries frequently go untreated until extreme trauma results, and the victim must get extremely expensive care in an emergency room. This will be one of the biggest cost savers — and the law provides those clinics.
  5. The law will cut the private bureaucracy, and completely dismantle the private death panels set up by insurance companies, saving at least 10% of every health care dollar, applying that money to care instead of bureaucracy. This is already occurring.
  6. Preventive care under the Act is greatly encouraged — if we can boost flu vaccines by another 10%, it will save thousands of lives annually, and millions of dollars in hospitalization costs. Flu shots came with no co-pay this year — did you notice? — so that anyone with any insurance at all could drop by any pharmacy offering flu shots and get one with no out-of-pocket expenses.
    This is huge. Everyone agrees the cheapest health care is for healthy people. The Affordable Care Act changes the way health care is delivered, to emphasize prevention of disease and injury, instead of triage. Prevention usually costs about 10% what the triage would cost.
  7. Removing the lifetime cap on insurance payments, per patient, will save a few thousands of lives, annually. It should kill the phenomenon where many families, hit with a costly disease or accident, had to declare bankruptcy as a result. A significant portion of all bankruptcies have been “not adequately-insured” cases. Those should almost disappear.
  8. Allowing children to stay insured, on a parent’s plan, for those critical years after high school and college and into the second job, with benefits has already benefited millions of Americans, saving millions of dollars and probably a few lives.

I cannot imagine why anyone would want to go back to 20% annual health care cost inflation, the highest per capita health care costs in the world by a factor of two, while leaving one out of every seven people uninsured even though we were paying amounts more than the insurance would have cost.

Obamacare reduces the deficits, and puts our health system on the path to catch up to the rest of the industrialized world, with better care for less cost.

I’ll keep it, thank you.

(See this, too: “More good news about Obamacare: CBO says it will save money”

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1 Comment | Barack Obama, Economics, Health care, History, Medicare, medicine, Politics, President Obama, Presidents | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

You need to watch this: Paul Krugman, ‘Jobs NOW, the key to our recovery’

January 15, 2013

As so often the case, Bill Moyers finds THE expert, who has the real answers.  Hint:  Cutting deficits now could bring economic disaster; Paul Krugman carefully and clearly explains why.

Description at Vimeo:

Krugman's book End This Depression Now!

Cover of Paul Krugman’s book, End This Depression Now!

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman explains why our top priority should be getting America back to work – if only Congress and the President would stop throwing distractions in the way. He also details the catastrophic impact the economic downturn continues to have on average Americans, as well as avenues of hope and recovery. Krugman’s latest book, End This Depression Now!, is both a warning of the fiscal perils ahead and a prescription to safely avoid them.

Yeah, yeah, I know — this thing is 47 minutes long!  Watch ten minutes now, and come back to it.

It’s only the fate of our nation, and the planet, that rides on this information.

Moyers explained on his blog:

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues that saving money is not the path to economic recovery. Instead, he tells Bill, we should put aside our excessive focus on the deficit, try to overcome political recalcitrance, and spend money to put America back to work. Krugman offers specific solutions to not only end what he calls a “vast, unnecessary catastrophe,” but to do it more quickly than some imagine possible. His latest book, End This Depression Now!, is both a warning of the fiscal perils ahead and a prescription to safely avoid them.

Some moments from the conversation:

ON JACK LEW, NOT KRUGMAN HIMSELF, AS POSSIBLY THE NEXT TREASURY SECRETARY
“I probably have more influence doing what I do now than I would if I were inside trying to do the court power games that come with any White House, which I don’t think I’d be any good at… What the president needs right now is he needs a hard-nosed negotiator. And rumor has it that’s what he’s got.” Watch this clip.

ON SAVING VERSUS SPENDING
“We’re awash in excess savings. And if you decide to save more, it’s not actually going to help society… If there’s one crucial thing to understand about all this it is that the global economy, money moves around in a circle. And my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. And if all of us try to spend less because we want to save more, we don’t succeed. All we end up doing is creating a global depression… the thing that all the evidence of history says works in a situation like this is the private sector won’t spend, government can step in and provide the spending that we need in order to keep this economy afloat.”

ON THE POWER OF JOB CREATION
“The only obstacles to putting people to work, to having those lives restored, to producing hundreds of billions, probably $900 billion a year or so of extra valuable stuff in our economy, is in our minds. If I could somehow convince the members of Congress and the usual suspects that deficit spending, for the time being, is okay, and that what we really need is a big job creation program, and let’s worry about the deficit after we’ve had a solid recovery, it would all be over. It would be no problem at all… All the productive capacity is there. All that’s lacking is the intellectual clarity and the political will.”

ON WHAT SHOULD BE OBAMA’S ECONOMIC PRIORITY
“[Obama’s] policy priority right now should be doing whatever he can to at least move in the direction of the kinds of policies that we want for full employment, that we need for full employment. And that the obsessions of Washington about a grand bargain on the deficit are really pretty much beside the point right now. That, if given a choice between doing something that will help the economy in the next two years, and something that will allegedly settle our budget problems for all, you know, for all time, which it wouldn’t, that he should go for the stuff that will help the economy now…

Great Depression

In the Great Depression, people listened to Franklin D. Roosevelt urge full employment, on their radios; this statue is part of the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C. – Photo credit: Koshyk

We happen to have a very intelligent man as president. He’s for real. And he does understand. You can have real discussions with him. And I think he understands that, although things have improved some… it’s a glacial pace, compared with the way we should be… We cannot allow ourselves to be blackmailed into spending cuts, partly because blackmail should not be part of how the U.S. operates, and partly because spending cuts would be disastrous right now. So Obama’s right to say he doesn’t negotiate. I’d like to know exactly what he will do if it turns out that there is not a quorum of sane people in the Republican party.”

ON THE LONG-TERM DAMAGE OF A BAD JOB MARKET
“We have pretty good evidence on how long does it take to make up for the fact that you happen to graduate from college into a bad labor market. And the answer is forever… You’ll miss years getting onto the career ladder. By the time you get a chance to get a job that makes any sense, you know, that makes any use of your skills, you will already be tarred as somebody, ‘Well, you’re 28 years old and you haven’t held a responsible position?’ ‘Well, yeah, I couldn’t because there were no jobs.’ It just shadows your whole life. And it’s very clear in the evidence from past recessions, which have been nowhere near as bad as this one.” Watch this clip.

ON COVERING BOTH THE ECONOMY AND POLITICS
“If you write about economics right now and implicitly adopt the perspective, ‘Well, let’s get reasonable people together in Washington and reach a solution here,’ you’re paying no attention to reality. And, of course, if you talk about the politics without talking about the economics, you’re also missing everything. So how could I not be writing about both?”

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5 Comments | Economics, Employment, Politics, Taxes | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

December 31, 2012: Bright Idea Day, anniversary of Edison’s light bulb

December 31, 2012

Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, here at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub we celebrate a variety of historically holy days.  December 31, by tradition, is Bright Idea Day, the anniversary of the day Thomas Edison demonstrated for the public a working light bulb in 1879.

100,000 people gather in Times Square, New York City, tonight, and millions more around the world, in festivities for the new year made possible by the work of Thomas Alva Edison.

Here it is, the invention that stole sleep from our grasp, made clubbing possible, and launched 50,000 cartoons about ideas:

The light bulb Thomas Edison demonstrated on December 31, 1879, at Menlo Park, New Jersey - Wikimedia image

The light bulb Thomas Edison demonstrated on December 31, 1879, at Menlo Park, New Jersey – Wikimedia image (GFDL)

The light bulb. It’s an incandescent bulb.

It wasn’t the first bulb. Edison a few months earlier devised a bulb that worked with a platinum filament. Platinum was too expensive for mass production, though — and Edison wanted mass production. So, with the cadre of great assistants at his Menlo Park laboratories, he struggled to find a good, inexpensive filament that would provide adequate life for the bulb. By late December 1879 they had settled on carbon filament.

Edison invited investors and the public to see the bulb demonstrated, on December 31, 1879.

Thomas Edison in 1878, the year before he demonstrated a workable electric light bulb. Library of Congress image

Thomas Edison in 1878, the year before he demonstrated a workable electric light bulb. CREDIT: Thomas Edison, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing left, 1880. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction number LC-USZ62-98067

Edison’s successful bulb indicated changes in science, technology, invention, intellectual property and finance well beyond its use of electricity. For example:

  • Edison’s Menlo Park, New Jersey, offices and laboratory were financed with earlier successful inventions. It was a hive of inventive activity aimed to make practical inventions from advances in science. Edison was all about selling inventions and rights to manufacture devices. He always had an eye on the profit potential. His improvements on the telegraph would found his laboratory he thought, and he expected to sell the device to Western Union for $5,000 to $7,000. Instead of offering it to them at a price, however, he asked Western Union to bid on it. They bid $10,000, which Edison gratefully accepted, along with the lesson that he might do better letting the marketplace establish the price for his inventions. Other inventive labs followed Edison’s example, such as the famous Bell Labs, but few equalled his success, or had as much fun doing it.  (Economics teachers:  Need an example of the marketplace in action?)
  • While Edison had some financial weight to invest in the quest for a workable electric light, he also got financial support, $30,000 worth, from some of the finance giants of the day, including J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts who established the Edison Light Company.
  • Edison didn’t invent the light bulb — but his improvements on it made it commercial. “In addressing the question ‘Who invented the incandescent lamp?’ historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison’s version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve (by use of the Sprengel pump) and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.”
  • Edison’s financial and business leadership acumen is partly attested to by the continuance of his organizations, today — General Electric, one of the world’s most successful companies over the past 40 years, traces its origins to Edison.

Look around yourself this evening, and you can find a score of ways that Edison’s invention and its descendants affect your life. One of the more musing effects is in cartooning, however. Today a glowing lightbulb is universally accepted as a nonverbal symbol for ideas and inventions. (See Mark Parisi’s series of lightbulb cartoons, “Off the Mark.”)

Even with modern, electricity-saving bulbs, the cartoon shorthand hangs on, as in this Mitra Farmand cartoon.

Fusilli has an idea, Mitra Farmand, Fuffernutter

Brilliant cartoon from Mitra Farmand, Fuffernutter

Or see this wonderful animation, a video advertisement for United Airlines, by Joanna Quinn for Fallon — almost every frame has the symbolic lightbulb in it.

Other resources:

Patent drawing for Thomas Edison's successful electric lamp. Library of Congress

Thomas Edison’s electric lamp patent drawing and claim for the incandescent light bulb CREDIT: “New Jersey–The Wizard of Electricity–Thomas A. Edison’s System of Electric Illumination,” 1880. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-97960.

Yeah, this is mostly an encore post.

Even More, in 2012:

Leave a Comment » | Creativity, Economics, Electricity, Gilded Age, Historic documents, History, History of Science, Invention, Patents, Progressive Era, Science, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Prisons, or schools? Prisons, or mental health care? Prisons, or freedom?

December 19, 2012

Here’s one from a maybe-odd source, but with relatively good citations.

If we have limited money to spend in government, can we put spending on a balance to see where it should be spent?  This is one example out of many pending before the U.S. Congress and state legislatures, today — right now, and for the coming several months.  When you hear elected representatives say “we must cut spending to reduce deficits,” you need to understand that their proposal is to cut spending for education, for job training, for employment assistance, for unemployment payments, for health care, for mental health care, for drug rehabilitation programs, but generally NOT for incarceration programs.  In short, they are saying we must cut off the education of poor kids, to build jails to house them if they run afoul of the criminal justice system after being unable to get the education and training to get a job that will produce the income that would have made them great parents and taxpayers.

If we have limited money to spend in government, can we put spending on a balance to see where it should be spent?

  • Prisons, or schools?
  • Prisons, or mental health care?
  • Prisons, or drug rehabilitation?
  • Justice, or incarceration?
No Justice For All poster, prisons vs. education - OnlineJusticeDegree.com

From OnlineJusticeDegree.com; check references listed on the chart.

What do you think?

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3 Comments | Economics, Education, Education spending, Health care, History, Justice | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Cliffhanger avoidance, from Robert Reich

November 30, 2012

Economist/policy wonk/good guy Robert Reich sends along notes on the discussions in Washington (at his Facebook site, and at his personal site) (links added here for your benefit and ease of use):

Robert Reich

Rhodes Scholar, former Secretary of Labor and UC Berkeley Prof. Robert Reich

Apparently the bidding began this afternoon. According to the Wall Street Journal (which got the information from GOP leaders), Tim Geithner met with Republican leaders and made the following offer:

— $1.6 trillion in additional tax revenues over the next decade, from limiting tax deductions on the wealthy and raising tax rates on incomes over $250,000 (although those rates don’t have to rise as high as the top marginal rates under Bill Clinton)

— $50 billion in added economic stimulus next year

— A one-year postponement of pending spending cuts in defense and domestic programs

— $400 billion in savings over the decade from Medicare and other entitlement programs (the same number contained in the President’s 2013 budget proposal, submitted before the election).

— Authority to raise the debt limit without congressional approval.

The $50 billion in added stimulus is surely welcome. We need more spending in the short term in order to keep the recovery going, particularly in light of economic contractions in Europe and Japan, and slowdowns in China and India.

But by signaling its willingness not to raise top rates as high as they were under Clinton and to cut some $400 billion from projected increases in Medicare and other entitlement spending, the White House has ceded important ground.

Republicans obviously want much, much more.

The administration has taken a “step backward, moving away from consensus and significantly closer to the cliff, delaying again the real, balanced solution that this crisis requires,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) in a written statement. “No substantive progress has been made” added House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio).

No surprise. The GOP doesn’t want to show any flexibility. Boehner and McConnell will hang tough until the end. Boehner will blame his right flank for not giving him any leeway — just as he’s done before.

It’s also clear Republicans will seek whatever bargaining leverage they can get from threatening to block an increase in the debt limit – which will have to rise early next year if the nation’s full faith and credit is to remain intact.

Meanwhile, the White House has started the bidding with substantial concessions on tax increases and spending cuts.

Haven’t we been here before? It’s as if the election never occurred – as if the Republicans hadn’t lost six or seven seats in the House and three in the Senate, as if Obama hadn’t won reelection by a greater number of votes than George W. Bush in 2004.

And as if the fiscal cliff that automatically terminates the Bush tax cuts weren’t just weeks away.

But if it’s really going to be a repeat of the last round, we might still be in luck. Remember, the last round resulted in no agreement. And no agreement now may be better than a bad agreement that doesn’t raise taxes on the wealthy nearly enough while cutting far too much from safety nets most Americans depend on.

If Republicans won’t budge and we head over the fiscal cliff, the Clinton tax rates become effective January 1 – thereby empowering the White House and Democrats in the next congress to get a far better deal.

Watch that space.

It’s especially interesting to me how House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) will work to get a solution, if the GOP continues its blockade to almost all action.

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5 Comments | Barack Obama, Economics, Government, History, Politics, President Obama, U.S. Congress, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

“I, Pencil,” updated and animated — and not so offensive as I expected

November 23, 2012

Every economics teacher knows that old Leonard Read piece, “I, Pencil.”   It’s a good, practical demonstration of the concept of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” free markets, and the way economies put stuff together for sale without a government agency issuing instructions, written by Read in 1958, for the Foundation for Economic Education, a once-free-market economic think tank that recently made an unexpected (by me) lurch to the radical right.

The essay is dated, though, for high school kids today.  Most of the stuff Read properly assumed people knew something about, is left out of modern curricula in elementary and middle school, so a high school teacher must do remedial work in mining, international trade, lumbering, manufacturing, chemistry and metallurgy, just to make the thing make sense.  Where we used to learn about pencils in first or second grade, my students in recent years labor under the misconception that pencil leads are made out of lead, and I have to explain to them that graphite is a form of carbon.  They don’t know cedar from pine, or mahogany, they don’t know copper from tin from zinc from steel, and they think rubber has always been synthetic.

Imagine my surprise on this:  I got an e-mail touting an animated, YouTube update of Read’s essay. It’s not bad, even though it’s from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is neither competitive, nor an institute, but is instead a propaganda arm of crazy right-wing wackoes.

Whoever made this film appears not to have had much interference from the CEI poobahs.

Am I missing something? Is this film more right-wing than I see?

I worry that I missed something, or that the producers of this movie wove a spell over the usual radical near-fascist groups.  This movie has been touted in recent days by almost all of the usual crypto-black-shirt think puddles, American Enterprise Institute, the unreasoning Reason magazine from the so-called libertarian view, the cartoonish Glen Beck effluent pipe The Blaze, the Coors family’s Heritage Foundation, the offensively-named Lexicans, the biased Cafe Hayek (which is often a good read anyway, so long as you don’t take them seriously on any science issue),  the sanctuary for authoritarian-leaning victims of lobotomy Hot Air, and even that publication from the propaganda organization, The Daily Capitalist — in short, it’s been plugged by organizations covering the entire political spectrum from Y to Z, the far right end of the alphabet.

Maybe they didn’t watch it? 

For today’s teenagers, someone should do a couple of updates.  “I, SmartPhone” and “I, Tablet Computer” could include lessons in government regulation of radio spectrum and how such regulation allows public safety functions and air traffic control to exist alongside great profit-seeking groups, and how such developments would be impossible without government regulation. There would also be a section on the mining and milling of rare Earths, of ores like Coltan, which would introduce the concept of blood or conflict diamonds and ores, the collapse of order in unregulated areas like Congo and Somalia, slave labor as in Pakistan and China.  “I, Fast Food Breakfast” could include side lessons in importing of orange juice from Brazil and other nations, artificially-flavored syrups from China and the threat from climate change to U.S. maple tree farmers, and meat from Australia and Argentina, along with the ideas of food safety regulation on eggs and egg products by USDA and FDA.  “I, Burrito” could include lessons in cultural diffusion and migrant farm workers who pick the tomatoes . . .

By the way, the fact that pencil leads are graphite (and clay), and not lead, should not be taken to mean that pencil manufacturers came up with a kid-safe product on their own; lead in the paint on pencils was enough to worry the health officials, until regulation got different paints used.

We need a classroom guide on Read’s piece and this new movie that seriously discusses the need for regulation in pencil manufacture, from the safety of the saws used to cut the trees, and in the mills, to the anti-child labor provisions of the graphite and rubber import agreements, to the forest regulation and research necessary to keep the incense cedar wood in production, through the anti-deforestation requirements on rubber plantations and the regulation of lead in the paint.  The movie is good, much less right-wing than those groups who fawn over it, but still in need of some real-world economic reality.

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7 Comments | Economics, Food Safety, Freedom - Economic, History, Regulation | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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