RIP Racism: 3000 B.C. - 11/04/2008

In 2010, the Biloxi Public School District in Mississippi voted to shut down Nichols Elementary School, due to "budget concerns." The board, which is overwhelmingly white, cited a 400,000$ loss each year for the district as the reason, despite that fact that it later turned out to have a 10$ million surplus. Even when the Kellogg Foundation stepped in with a 1.5$ million grant, the board said their decision was final. The school was closed.

Nichols was the top performing elementary school in Biloxi that year; it ranked 16th out of 432 public elementary schools in the state; it was the only school in Biloxi to earn the state's GreatSchools designation, and produced the state's 2009 Teacher of the Year. The school has been around since 1886, and the student population was 90% black (surprise!). (Note: you can find this story, and others like it in Chuck Thompson's Better Off Without 'Em)

Racism doesn't ride a horse, with a sheet drapped over its head, and a noose swinging from its hands in the 21st Century. It comes in the form of local school boards citing fictitious budget concerns so they can close the black school that was outperforming the white schools. Abstract things, like Mr. Lee Atwater once counseled the Republican party to focus on. Here's that quote, and make sure to remember it:

" You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

So remember this- when you hear a politician say, "cut, cut, cut", you know what he really means.



Two Americas: Richistan vs Broadland

In their book, "Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made The Rich Richer -- And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class", authors Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson provide analysis into the groundbreaking research on wealth inequality conducted by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. I recommend the book, but in case you don't read it, I feel that the information is too relevant and useful for progressives for me to sit on.

By now, you're aware that we have a distributional problem in our economic structure. As an example, during the last economic expansion ('02-'07), 53% of all economic gains went to the top 1%. And in the current economic "recovery" over 90% of all economic gains have gone to the top 1%. That covers two administrations, one Republican and one Democratic. Bush and Obama have been in office while inequality skyrocketed. However, the trend precedes them both.

From 1979-2006, real household income rose by 50% overall. How was that income distributed? Laughably unequally. If you include government tax breaks/benefits and employer-sponsored benefits, the bottom fifth saw a 10% gain over those 27 years. But households had to work 400 more hours in 2006 than they did in 1979 in order to keep this meager increase. Without those 400 hours, the bottom fifth would have LOST money. By contrast, the top 1% saw a 260% increase from 1979-2006, up from an average of 337k in 1979 to 1.2 million in 2006.

Hacker & Pierson show what our economic class divisions would look like if the economic gains from 1979-2006 were spread equally across all groups. They broke it into two groups: Richistan & Broadland.

Richistan represents what our current situation is after 30 years of skewed distribution:

-The bottom fifth of households brought home 16k in 2006.

-The second fifth of households brought home 35k.

-The middle fifth of households brought home 52k.

-The third fifth of households brought home 73k.

-The 80-90th percentile of households brought home 100k.

-The 90-95th percentile of households brought home 132k.

-The 95th-99th percentile of households brought home 211k

-The top 1% of households brought home 1.2 million.

Meanwhile, in the lovely hypothetical Broadland, the distribution of household income gains from 1979-2006 would have been far more equal:

-The bottom fifth of households would have brought home 22k in 2006, a gain of 6k.

-The second fifth of households would have brought home 45k, a gain of 10k.

-The middle fifth of households would have brought home 64k, a gain of 12k.

-The 80-90th percentile of households would have brought home 106k, a gain of 6k.

-The 90th-95th percentile of households would have brought home 128k, a LOSS of 3k.

-The 95th-99th percentile of households would have brought home 181k, a LOSS of 30k.

-The top 1% of households would have brought home 506k, a LOSS of 694k.

The numbers are clear- Broadland would be better for 90% of households. Is there anyone reading this that feels 506k isn't enough to live on each year at the top?

So the question for progressives to think about for the next election is this: will our candidate try and turn Richistan into Broadland? Or will she be coming from Richistan with tall tales of entrepreneurs and carrot on a stick opportunities?



CATO, Welfare & the Minimum Wage

A CATO Institute study (go ahead and swallow your vomit now) from last ywar claimed that government aid pays more than the minimum wage does in 35 states. In 13 states, the authors say it's the equivalent of 15$ per hour.

I'll be damned, but CATO inadvertently makes a strong case for raising the minimum wage to at least 15$ per hour. If we're going to incentivise people to seek employment (three applicants for every one job opening, FYI) we need to make work pay. Let's call it the Make Work Pay Act.

The bill would take the CATO study, and verify its findings to determine the wage floor for employment. If "welfare" pays the equivalent of 15$ per hour in 13 states, then the minimum wage would have to be higher than that to discourage these lazy moochers (three job applicants for every one job opening, FYI) from collecting a government check.

Another takeaway from this study is that the government could cut aid until it's the equivalent of less than the minimum wage, thus offering an incentive for people to work at subhuman wage levels, rather than receive aid at a level comfortably between subhuman and human (the sweet spot!).

But who wants to be a sociopath?