Toxic medicine

Pick your poison. Image by way of wikipedia.

 If there was a scarier place for a soldier to be in the American Civil War than a battlefield, it might have been a hospital, of either the field or conventional variety.

Medical science had not yet caught on to the germ theory of disease. Overworked doctors rushed from patient to patient with unwashed hands and instruments. Amputation was the order of the day.

But if there was anything scarier than Civil War-era surgery, it might have been the medicine. It was a common practice to administer heroic doses of calomel to patients for a variety of ailments, including diarrhea and dysentery.

Among the ingredients of calomel were a mixture of mercury and chloride.

I managed to avoid a chemistry class in my education, such as it was, but I don’t think you need an advanced degree in that field to get a bad feeling about that.

One obvious result was mercury poisoning, but the specific symptoms could be horrific, including loss of teeth, rotting jaws and gangrene in the mouth and jaws.

Calomel caused misery and sometimes death to countless people, even ruining the health of “Little Women” author Louisa May Alcott during her stint as a nurse for wounded soldiers.

It boggles the mind that generations of doctors would rely on a chemical that caused so much damage and prescribe bad medicine for so long.

But the same kind of thing has happened over and over in the realm of policy and politics for the last half century.

And it might be about to happen again in West Virginia unless people speak up.

The bad medicine I’m referring to is the idea that cutting taxes for the wealthy will create jobs and economic growth. We’ve been told that over and over for years, but the evidence for that is about a scarce as that of the benefits of ingesting calomel.

Recently, researchers at the London School of Economics did the math. In a big way. They examined the impacts of tax cuts for the rich over a 50-year period in 18 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The countries included the United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Among the findings:

“We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.”

And:

“Furthermore, we find no effect of tax reforms on real GDP per capita. When looking at the effect on unemployment rates, the estimates show a slightly different pattern. Here, tax cuts for the rich lead to slightly higher unemployment rates in the short term.”

And:

“Turning our attention to economic performance, we find no significant effects of major tax cuts for the rich. More specifically, the trajectories of real GDP per capita and the unemployment rate are unaffected by significant reductions in taxes on the rich in both the short and medium term..”

And:

“Cutting taxes on the rich increases top income shares, but has little effect on economic performance.”

If that’s not enough, other research in the field of public health from a variety of sources has found higher rates of inequality to be associated with many social problems, including increases in crime and violence, infant mortality, obesity, addiction, mental health problems and general unhappiness.

It’s very likely that there will be efforts in the coming legislative session to pursue this failed policy by changes to income and business property taxes that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

I’m sure we’ll be told that taking the fiscal equivalent of calomel will be good for us. I hope the people of West Virginia send a loud and clear message of thanks but no thanks.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Called it

 

I have a binge-watching confession to make: I'm hooked on The Crown, Netflix's portrayal of the drama of the British royal family. I'm not proud of it.

A lot of the show is pure aristocratic soap opera, which is also arguably the case of the real life counterparts. But it's not all melodrama. I was particularly hit by the portrayal of the cruelty of the Thatcher regime. And for what it's worth, X Files star Gillian Anderson does an amazing job of portraying that person...which couldn't have been easy for anyone with a living soul.

I think one reason for my reaction was living through the American version during the Reagan years, a time of extreme economic hardship for millions of Americans and most West Virginians, including myself. 

Those years were, in the words of the Gospel of Matthew, "the beginning of sorrows," of decades of bad policies, tax cuts for the wealthy, growing inequality.

And the results are in: the London School of Economics just released a report that looks at the effects of tax cuts for the wealthy over a 50 year period and covering 18 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And there's no surprise here.

As Hamlet said, O my prophetic soul! Here are some nuggets from the report:

We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment...

Furthermore, we find no effect of tax reforms on real GDP per capita. When looking at the effect on unemployment rates, the estimates show a slightly different pattern. Here, tax cuts for the rich lead to slightly higher unemployment rates in the short term...

We find that major tax cuts for the rich push up income inequality, as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The size of the effect is substantial: on average, each major tax cut results in a rise of 0.8 percentage points in top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect holds in both the short and medium term. Turning our attention to economic performance, we find no significant effects of major tax cuts for the rich. More specifically, the trajectories of real GDP per capita and the unemployment rate are unaffected by significant reductions in taxes on the rich in both the short and medium term...

...cutting taxes on the rich increases top income shares, but has little effect on economic performance.

The sad part is that I'm pretty sure the WV legislature is going to try to push for even more of this garbage in the coming session.

What could possibly go wrong?

The best crime fighter may well be a job

I'm not sure whether this is lazy or efficient or both, but here's the text of an op-ed I wrote in today's Charleston Gazette about how a short term jobs program led to a longer term drop in crime:


I am not generally on the same page as former vice president Dick Cheney, but he might have been onto something when he said “The best anti-poverty program I know is a job.”

Some recent research indicates that a job might just be the best way to stop a bullet as well.

Here’s the story: A while back, the city of Chicago started an eight week summer jobs program for high school age students in high crime, low income neighborhoods. The jobs paid $8.25 an hour and generally involved placement in a public agency or non-profit where participants might be camp counselors, tend community gardens or work as office assistants.

The program was scientifically evaluated by Sara Heller with the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the University of Pennsylvania and published in the journal Science.

For the study, participants were placed randomly in three groups. One group worked 25 hours per week. Another worked 15 hours and received an additional 10 hours in learning about managing social and emotional issues. A third control group didn’t participate in the program but was free to pursue or not pursue other locally available opportunities.

The results were striking. While there wasn’t a great deal of difference between the first two groups, arrests for violent crimes decreased by 43 percent over 16 months compared with the control group. That’s pretty huge.

It’s especially interesting that the effects continued long after the eight weeks of employment were over.

Lots of things could have been involved here in the crime drop. More money is an obvious factor, as is less time to get in trouble. More household income might have allowed parents to reduce their work hours and be more involved with the young people.

It’s a little harder to account for the long-term effects, although the Washington Post’s Wonkblog suggests that “students who had access to jobs may have then found crime a less attractive alternative to work. Or perhaps their time on the job taught them how the labor market values education. Or maybe the work experience may have given them skills that enabled them to be more successful -- and less prone to getting in trouble -- back in school.”

As Jeff Mervis wrote in the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s website, the study shows you can have “lasting effects from a surprisingly simple and low-cost intervention: a summer job.” It should go without saying that solutions like this are way better -- and cheaper -- than locking people up.

These kinds of programs have long been advocated for communities like Charleston’s West Side by community leaders such as my friend the Rev. Matthew Watts and others.

Unfortunately, as the University of Chicago reports, youth employment in the summer months is near a 60-year low and there were many more young people to apply for the Chicago program than can be accepted.

One would hope that solid evidence like this would build support for more programs like this to provide real opportunities for people in disadvantaged communities.

And while West Virginia has a different set of problems than Chicago, we do have the lowest workforce participation rate in the nation, a fact that drags down all our other statistics. The rate is particularly low for young workers aged 16-24, which dropped from 56.6 percent in 2008 to 47.9 percent in 2013. It stands to reason that young people who are neither working nor pursuing educational opportunities are more likely to get in trouble.

State leaders should take another look the issue and develop programs, including subsidized employment, to increase participation rates, particularly among at-risk individuals, with a long range goal of working towards full employment.

And, since state leaders have spent the better part of a year pondering juvenile justice reform, they might do well to consider trying pilot youth employment programs. It makes a lot more sense than paying over $100,000 per year to lock up a kid who isn’t a threat to public safety.

It’s another example of the old saying about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure.

A better way to stop a bullet

Today a friend of mine shared an interesting item from the Washington Post that reinforces what quite a few people believe: sometimes a job is the best way to stop a bullet.

A few years back, the city created an eight week jobs program for students in high crime/low income areas. The jobs involved placement in government agencies or nonprofits. Some students worked 25 hours a week, while others worked 15 hours a week and participated in social and educational programs the other 10 hours. A control group did neither.

The University of Chicago Crime Lab tracked the results, which were amazing. As the Post's Wonkblog reports, students int he program had a 43 percent decrease in arrests for violent crimes over 16 months compared with those in the control group. The thing that is truly striking is that the results were most pronounced months after the jobs program was over.

It's hard to say just why that happened, but Wonkblog has some suggestions:

A lot of things could be going on here. Teenagers who might have committed crime to get money would no longer need to when they have a job. If their added income allowed parents to work less, they may also have gotten more adult supervision. It's also possible that students who were busy working simply didn't have idle time over the summer to commit crime — but that theory doesn't explain the long-term declines in violent arrests that occurred well after the summer program was over.... 

 That long-term benefit suggests that students who had access to jobs may have then found crime a less attractive alternative to work. Or perhaps their time on the job taught them how the labor market values education. Or maybe the work experience may have given them skills that enabled them to be more successful — and less prone to getting in trouble — back in school.

The bottom line is that positive prevention programs like these are a relatively inexpensive intervention that can provide a big payoff for everyone.

A soft landing?

According to projections, coal production in southern West Virginia is likely to go down in the coming years. However, this may not have the same long term impact on jobs. As this blog post from the WV Center on Budget and Policy points out, there is some chance that employment may actually rebound or even increase over the long term.

Going after highly priced but relatively scarce metallurgical coal, most of which is underground, may require more "miner hours," which adds up to more work for miners.

Of course, all of this is speculation. Southern West Virginia is headed for a rough transition regardless and it makes sense to prepare for that by convening an economic transition task force and by creating a Future Fund so that West Virginians in the years to come will enjoy some of the fruits of the extraction of non-renewable resources.

Blaming the president and the EPA for problems that go way beyond either, which is the sport of many of WV's political leaders, is intellectually and morally dishonest. And it just plain won't work in the long term. Whether southern WV is in for a hard or soft landing, we need to prepare.

CHILDHOOD NEGLECT is bad for the brain.

STRANGENESS may improve creativity. That explains a lot.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED