Stating the obvious

It's becoming clear that the COVID outbreak is threatening the economy as well as the health and lives of people all over, with people staying away from work and businesses (although not the local Kroger store!) and cancelling travel plans.

The Trump administration has come up with a "stable genius" plan to boost the economy: cut the payroll taxes that fund things like Social Security and Medicare.

This rivals the brilliance of building a border wall in Colorado or digging a moat and filling it with snakes and gators...

There are some obvious problems with the plan, as Chye-Ching Huang with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out in this blog post. For starters, this wouldn't do a whole heckuva lot for the people who need it most, i.e. the people who miss work and don't get paid.

Another problem is that the economy needs a pretty big jolt sooner rather than later. Getting a few dollars more in a paycheck over a long period of time wouldn't make that much of a difference and it would weaken Social Security, etc.

Huang argues that "Sending stimulus checks to most Americans would put more money in households’ hands much more quickly than a payroll tax cut of the same cost. Also, stimulus checks can be sent both to workers and to people without earnings, including people receiving Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, or VA benefits and people unable to find jobs."

She also stresses the importance of strengthening and reforming unemployment insurance and food assistance programs, as well as enacting and extending paid sick leave.

And, while we're stating the obvious, let's not forget investing in public health and not messing with Medicaid.

A disaster averted

In case you missed it, Congress actually got something right this week. For real. After an epic months-long back and forth between the House and Senate, a compromise was reached that leaves the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program basically intact.

The version initially considered by the House include requirements and restrictions that would have cut off many low income Americans. As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote back in May,

It would have reversed years of progress under Presidents of both parties by making SNAP less effective in reducing food insecurity and supporting families. It would have taken food assistance away from more than 1 million households including 2 million people and would have harmed children, people with serious health conditions, older workers, veterans, caregivers, and parents.

Fortunately, and thanks to a lot of work by a lot of people across the country, that didn't happen. Here's Greenstein on the latest version.  The latest and apparently final version of the bill reflects a rare bipartisan approach.

(For WV folks, this happened no thanks to our House delegation but with the support of Senators Manchin and Capito.)

 

A little good news...for now

A little crowing might be in order.

The (very nasty) House version of the Farm Bill failed by a vote of 198-213, no thanks to WV's congressional delegation. It's not over yet, though since House mis-leaders will keep trying to push something through.

Here's a statement about the latest developments by Bob Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities about the need for a bipartisan bill that doesn't take away food from millions of Americans.

Thanks to everyone who worked to derail this train. By way of follow-through, a call to your representatives offices either to thank or (metaphorically) spank might be in order. Here are the numbers for the DC offices of the WV guys:

McKinley 202.225.4172

Jenkins 202.225.3452

Mooney 202.225.2711

For those outside of WV, and who probably have a better delegation, you can put in your zip here to find out the contact information.

#Red4Ed

It all started here in WV.

It's been great to see the huge masses of teachers and their allies filling the streets in Raleigh, North Carolina today. I hope the ball that started rolling in West Virginia keeps moving on. And that the victories keep coming.

Like the WV strike, the protests in North Carolina highlight the damage done by passing irresponsible and unproductive tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy at the expense of things like education, health and infrastructure.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that tax cuts enacted in NC since 2013, which haven't even gone into full effect yet, have included:

*Across-the-board cuts to personal income tax rates that disproportionately benefit the wealthy by replacing the state’s graduated system (with rates of 6, 7, and 7.75 percent) with a flat rate, currently 5.499 percent.

*A cut of more than half to the corporate income tax rate, which has fallen from 6.9 percent in 2013 to 3 percent today.

*An end to the state’s estate tax, which will only benefit heirs of estates worth over $5.25 million — under 1 percent of estates.

I guess you could say you get what you don't pay for.

In case you were thinking this is just a coincidence, which anyone reading this probably isn't, check out this piece on how billionaires and corporations have been pushing this kind of agenda for years.
It gets pretty specific.

Then there's this Bloomberg story on how tax cuts pushed the the Kochs and their ilk have driven teachers to the streets. I particularly like this line:

"The wave of strikes in the past three months is just the latest sign that Tea Party-style austerity is losing favor."

May it be so.

TANF at 20

Last week marked a major milestone in terms of public policy in the US. August 22 was the 20th anniversary of the signing by President Clinton of the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act," generally known as welfare reform.

I remember talking about it at the time with the future Spousal Unit. While nobody could deny that the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children could use some work, we thought that the legislation passed in the wake of the 1994 Republican "revolution" was mean-spirited and would ultimately hurt children and vulnerable families.

The name of the new program said a lot: "Temporary Assistance for Needy Families." Accent on "temporary."

I had no idea at the time that I'd be spending the next few years fighting what I sometimes call the "TANF wars." This was due to the fact that the federal legislation left a lot of decision making power in the hands of states. Some of the battles involved treatment of people with disabilities and their families, access to education and training, time limits, support services, and domestic violence. 

Sometimes these were fought out in the legislature, sometimes in the courts, and sometimes in the court of  public opinion. There were some victories and some defeats at the state level--and plenty of chances to practice.

At the national level, the DC based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities looked back after all these years and here's what they found:

Over time, TANF has provided basic cash assistance to fewer and fewer needy families, even when need has increased.

During the recession and slow recovery, TANF served few families in need.

The amount of cash assistance provided to families has eroded in almost every state, leaving families without sufficient funds to meet their most basic needs.

TANF plays much less of a role in reducing poverty than AFDC did — and the provision of less cash assistance has contributed to an increase in deep or extreme poverty.

Although a key focus of welfare reform was on increasing employment among cash assistance recipients, states spend little of their TANF funds to help improve recipients’ employability.
 
Employment among single mothers increased in the 1990s, but welfare reform was only one of several contributing factors — and most of the early gains have been lost. 

That sounds about right to me. 

If you've been good this year...

...and we are using an honor system, you have Goat Rope's permission to reward yourself by watching this cute duck billed platypus video. And take a look at these swimming pigs while you're at it.

Thanks to a friend for forwarding those links. Now, back to the salt mines:

BUDGET DEAL. Here are two takes on the recent federal budget compromise. Economist Dean Baker is not amused, but the good folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities seem to think it could have been worse. Maybe they're both right. Still, it's a shame the deal didn't include an unemployment insurance extension.

OWNING WEST VIRGINIA. There's been a good bit of press about the release this week by the WV Center on Budget and Policy and the AFSC WV Economic Justice Project about who owns the state. Here's my favorite.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Three for the road

It looks like Congress is stuck on the all drama all the time channel, which means a pretty dismal 2013. Here's an analysis by Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on the dangers ahead.

DENY THIS. No climate change around here, boss.

RACIAL STEREOTYPES AND CREATIVITY. Pick one or the other. They don't go well together.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

You be the judge

If you're anything like me, you are really pretty sick of hearing two words that were everywhere on the news in the weeks leading up to New Year's. Yes, I'm talking f****l c***f, as in that artificially created federal budget crisis that rhymes is ixkal zliff.

I was, however, amused when a friend told me that the vent feature in a small weekly paper in southern WV complained about the "physical clip." Was it a malapropism or a witticism? I can't call it...maybe you can.

I think the last best word on the whole thing came from The Borowitz Report. Here's an excerpt:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)--Official Washington was in celebration mode on New Year's Day after kind of averting a completely unnecessary crisis that was entirely of its own creation.

"The deal proves that if we all procrastinate long and hard enough, we can semi-solve any self-inflicted problem at the very last minute in a way that satisfies no one," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky)....."This is a new year, and much work remains to be done," he said. "It's up to us to concoct entirely new optional disasters that we will have to undo at some later date in a more or less half-assed way.

In a related story, an arsonist received an award for putting out his own fire.

(Thanks to a Goat Rope reader for passing that on!)

MEANWHILE, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that the deal makes permanent 82 percent of the Bush era tax cuts. There's more on the next steps here.

WISHING. I hope this lawsuit by former WV state school superintendent Jorea Marple rocks the world of the WV Board of Education.

Oh yeah, and then there's this:

WANNA SAVE THE WORLD? Eat bugs.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HOODOO

Caption: Hills have hoodoo.

Welcome to Haint Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit please click on yesterday's post.

For flatlanders, haint is Appalachian for things that haunt.

El Cabrero takes no position on the existence or nonexistence of haints. However, I am prepared to assert that some places have hoodoo, which is just as good.

They say that Appalachians have a strong sense of place, although we obviously don't have a corner on the market. But when I think of hauntedness, I think less about spectral beings than about places.

It seems to me that some places just seem to have hoodoo and others don't. Hoodoo, like the Oceanic term "mana" means some kind of weird immaterial force or quality that has been called "the stuff of which magic is formed."

Some places seem to have hoodoo because of things that happened there. Harpers Ferry is a prime example, almost as if events have left some kind of scar or imprint. So do the nearby battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg.

Other places, like the sacred New River, seem to have it naturally, although the history probably helps. I tend to doubt whether flatland has any hoodoo, but I'll try to keep my mind open on that point. Maybe if there's water around...

Hoodoo is hard to define but who feels it knows it.

BLOWING UP THE BUDDHAS. Here's an op-ed from yesterday's NY Times about the destruction of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban. This is pretty un-Buddhist, but El Cabrero is still mad about that.

DEATH PENALTY NEWS. This Reuters story is interesting:

The American Bar Association said on Monday it was renewing its call for a nationwide moratorium on executions, based on a three-year study of death penalty systems in eight states that found unfairness and other flaws.

The lawyers' group said its study identified key problems, such as major racial disparities, incompetent defense services for poor defendants and irregular clemency review processes, making those death penalty systems operate unfairly.

UPDATE ON MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH. Here's the Daily Mail on the controversy caused by a march planned by outside groups. And here's the latest from the Gazette.

POVERTY AND CLIMATE CHANGE. Low income Americans are likely to suffer most from the effects of climate change and from higher energy costs. Here are suggestions about dealing with this from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING, the world's oldest living animal as far as anyone can tell is a 400 year old clam.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: SUPERMUNDANE

RENEGADES, HERETICS AND DISSENTERS

Caption: There's one of each.

Along with links and comments about current events, the theme of this week's Goat Rope is the sociology of conflict. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Basically, this week El Cabrero has been strip-mining Lewis Coser's (1913-2003)sociological classic, The Functions of Social Conflict, which was published in 1956. It holds up pretty well after more than 50 years.

Coser had some interesting ideas about how different groups handle internal conflicts. Generally, open societies and loosely knit groups can handle lots of conflict without threatening the overall consensus:

In flexible social structures, multiple conflicts crisscross each other and thereby prevent basic cleavages along one axis. The multiple group affiliations of individuals makes them participate in various group conflicts so that their total personalities are not involved in any single one of them. Thus segmental participation in a multiplicity of conflicts constitutes a balancing mechanism within the structure.

In loosely structured groups and open societies, conflict, which aims at a resolution of tension between antagonists, is likely to have stabilizing and integrative functions for the relationship. By permitting immediate and direct expression of rival claims, such social systems are able to readjust their structures by eliminating the sources of dissatisfaction. The multiple conflicts which they experience may serve to eliminate the causes for dissociation and to re-establish unity. These systems avail themselves, through the toleration and institutionalisation of conflict, of an important stabilizing mechanism.

In totalitarian societies or sectarian groups (religious, political or otherwise), internal conflicts or antagonisms are often repressed. Often groups like this define themselves as being in conflict with other groups and need some kind of external enemy to function. If one isn't readily available, it will have to be invented. If internal conflict does break out, it is likely to be very intense and could threaten the group as a whole.

For example, if someone in such a group goes over to "the enemy," this threatens the boundaries of the in-group:

Therefore the group must fight the renegade with all its might since he threatens symbolically, if not in fact, its existence as an ongoing concern. In the religious sphere, for example, apostasy strikes at the very life of a church, hence the violence of denunciation of the apostate contained in the pronouncements of the early Church fathers or in rabbinical statements from the time of the Maccabees onward.

Even more threatening than the apostate is the heretic, i.e. someone who claims to uphold the values of the group in a different way. Heretics threaten to split the group. Hostility to heretics (religious, political or otherwise) is often even greater than hostility to renegades:

It is less dangerous for a group if the one who breaks with it goes over to the enemy than if, as a heretic, he forms his own rival group...

The contrast between open and closed groups is pretty stark in the case of handing dissent. In flexible groups and open societies, crisscrossing conflicts and different tendencies can actually help hold the group together.

In closed societies or sects, internal dissent is seen as dangerous and will be suppressed or repressed. Instead of allowing realistic conflicts to take place, they may engage in scapegoating or other kinds of unrealistic conflicts as a safety valve. If the conflict ever manages to surface, it's likely to be nasty and threaten the group's survival.

Given the choice, I prefer an open society...

SCREWED UP PRIORITIES DEPARTMENT. This item from Wired Science contrasts the costs of CHIP with that of two months of the Iraq war. I used some different numbers and came up with something slightly different: six weeks of war=$35 billion for CHIP but the point is the same.

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? Just before vetoing the Children's Health Insurance Program, President Bush proclaimed Oct. 1 Child Health Day...

THE GOOD GUYS. Here's an op-ed from the Washington Post about the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a truly outstanding group that has done a great job of advocating for low income and working families. We are in the early stages of setting up an affiliated group in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

CREATIONISM IN EUROPE may be a non-starter according to Wired Science.

REASON #9763 why we need the Employee Free Choice Act...and a new NLRB.

JOHNNY, GET YOUR ETHNOLOGIST. Here's an item about the Human Terrain Team, which involves anthropologists working with U.S. military units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whatever the politics and ethics involved may entail, El Cabrero is still reeling from the fact that anthropology has become a practical major.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

REMEMBERING PAUL TILLICH (AND OTHER STUFF)

Caption: Daddy Rabbit should reflect on theological matters--the cat is after him.

Welcome to Goat Rope. El Cabrero is on a theological jag this week. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's entry.

Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was one of the 20th century's greatest theologians. He grew up in eastern Germany and studied and taught at several universities there. When the Nazis came to power, he was fired from his job and emigrated to America, where he spent the rest of his life, becoming a citizen in 1940.

He was a deep (his favorite spatial metaphors went down) and systematic thinker (hence the title of his 3 volume Systematic Theology wasn't just a clever name). Tillich wrote big dense books, little dense books and the occasional accessible little and middle-sized books. His books of sermons, however, such as The Shaking of the Foundations, The New Being, and The Eternal Now are his most accessible works.

Tillich believed that

Theology must be "answering theology"; it must adapt the Christian message to the modern mind while maintaining its essential truth and unique character.

While essentially Christian and Lutheran in perspective, he was also keenly interested in the perspectives of other world religions and Christian traditions and believed that the truths of revelation transcended the trappings of conventional religion.

For him, God was not an anthropomorphic "gaseous vertebrate" (to quote the German biologist Haeckel)or even a being among other beings but rather being-itself or the ground of being:

God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.

Religion for him was less about supernatural beliefs than about the subject of our "ultimate concern," which remains when all our finite concerns about daily living have been addressed.

Jesus for Tillich embodied "the New Being," in which all the tragic limitations of the human condition were overcome.

The demonic for him wasn't about little imps with pitchforks but rather with the bad consequences of trying to elevate any finite thing to an ultimate level. For example, nationalism in itself isn't necessarily harmful, but it becomes evil when the nation idolizes itself, and so on. Religion becomes demonic when its concrete form matters more than the realities towards which it points.

Sin represented separation: the separation we experience when we are alienated from others, from creation, from ourselves and from the ground of all being.

Grace was the overcoming of that separation, which is real even though we don't deserve it and could never earn it.

About which more later...

INTERESTING ANTIQUITIES ITEM. OK, so the ancient north African kingdom of Kush doesn't have all that much to do with economic justice issues...still this Times item is pretty cool.

MORE ON TASK, this report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggests how tax credit reforms could make higher education more affordable to low and moderate income families.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED