An article in the business section of today’s Denver Post titled “Colorado’s Economic Recovery Lags Behind Rest of the Nation” (http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_16128924), using only unemployment numbers as its measure of economic recovery, provided only the following comparison between Colorado and national unemployment rates:
Nationally, the seasonally adjusted jobless rate was 9.6 percent in August, up from 9.5 percent in June 2009. In Colorado, it was 8 percent in July, down from 8.6 percent in June 2009.Huh? The only titles that can be generated by that statistic are “Colorado’s recovery remains ahead of the rest of the nation,” or “Colorado, though better off than the rest of the nation, still mired in high unemployment.” So, does this bizarre mismatch between the article’s title (and narrative position) and what it’s only statistical comparison actually indicates a product of the Post’s conservative agenda (exploiting the reality-inverting meme that our economic woes are the Democrats’ fault), or just incredibly sloppy journalism? Who knows.
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The South Jeffco Community Organization (which I founded) has been trying to persuade Jefferson County Public Schools to implement a community volunteer tutoring and mentoring program in Jeffco Schools. I spoke at a School Board meeting on the subject, had an article featured on it in the Columbine Courier, and finally met, last June, with the area superintendent for South Jeffco, Holly Anderson, to discuss it.
In that first (and only) meeting, Holly told me that I, a Jeffco resident and home-owner, the father of a Jeffco second grader, a former Jeffco teacher, the founder and president of a non-partisan community organization, and an independent policy consultant trained in law and social sciences, was disqualified from being directly involved with Jeffco Schools as an interested community member by virtue of being a candidate for our citizen legislature (though it’s hard to imagine that the sitting state representative, who has no children in, nor has ever taught in Jeffco schools would be similarly disqualified). I accommodated the district’s insistence on behaving with actual political bias, in the name of avoiding the appearance of bias, by putting Holly in touch with another representative of the South Jeffco Community Organization, and by getting my Republican opponent in my house district race to agree (at least in private) to come on board in our efforts to implement a community volunteer tutoring and mentoring program.
Despite these accommodations, after months of being strung along, Holly sent the SJCO member who has been working with her the following suggested letter for us to send to potential volunteers interested in helping to improve Jeffco Schools:
Dear [NAME]
Thank you for expressing an interest in volunteering in a Jeffco school. While the school district is not involved in our South Jeffco Community Organization in any way, they are receptive to volunteers in the schools. Because you know your talents, interests, and schedule best we have been advised that it would work best for you to contact a school principal directly. We have attached contact information for the south area Jeffco schools.
If volunteering is still of interest to you at this time, we would encourage you to look at the attached list and give the appropriate school principal a call. They will inform you of their needs and discuss what possibilities for volunteering exist at their site. Together you can develop a mutual agreement regarding the process for volunteering at their school based on the schools’ requirements/needs and your availability. Please be advised that you may be asked to provide references and/or background information prior to being invited to volunteer. You will need to present proper identification and follow all security guidelines at the school site.
Sincerely….
Translated: “You’re free to do what you’ve always been free to do, and we don’t care enough to encourage you to do it.” Essentially, Jeffco Schools made it clear that it is not willingly going to form a partnership with the members of the community begging to help it improve the quality of education we deliver to OUR children.
Jeffco Schools has demonstrated once again that it is more committed to preserving a dysfunctional but comfortable status quo than to providing our kids with the best possible education.
It’s time to break free of the ritualized kabuki theater of modern American education. It’s time to do more than invest in school improvement plans and “best practices” research, the products of which are then shelved and forgotten, swept away by the combination of overwhelming inertia and petty local politics that seem to define American public education today. It’s time to start exploring robust and meaningful alternatives that could dramatically improve the breadth and depth of education that our children receive. A good place to start is by expanding the human resource base on which our students are able to draw, by utilizing the free and abundant community resources that are available.
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Colin Powell spoke out on immigration reform recently (http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_16119612). He said what every reasonable person knows: That we have to provide a road to legal status for the roughly 12 million who are here illegally, and that we have to recognize that fairly massive immigration is still part of the life-blood of this country.
As Powell recognizes, leaving intact an underground undocumented population that constitutes over three percent of the entire population is simply untenable. Identifying, detaining, and removing a significant portion of that population is prohibitively costly, inhumane, and destructive to our own economy. The only reasonable course of action, by any measure, is to provide a path to some kind of legal status, and to make it more attractive than remaining undocumented.
Also, as Powell realizes, those millions of undocumented immigrants are fully integrated into our economy, into our culture, and into our society. Simply removing them, even aside from the incredible inhumanity involved, would send shock waves through all three. It would undermine our economic vitality, disrupt our social systems and networks, and impoverish our culture.
Virtually everyone agrees that some kind of immigration reform is necessary. The argument is over what form it should take.
A few quick facts to keep in mind:
1) The United States has historically exploited the permeability of our southern border, and the relative poverty south of it, to create a membrane through which cheap disposable labor can pass (sometimes assertively imported) when it is convenient for us, and can be blocked and removed when it is inconvenient for us.
2) The true economic impact of illegal immigration is far more complex, and far less large, than the xenophobes contend. Most analyses conclude that there is either pretty much a net nation-wide economic wash, or a small net nation-wide economic gain due to illegal immigration, though the distribution of costs and benefits does lead to real strains on local social services. Illegal immigrants pay far more taxes, and are far more obstructed from collecting the benefits funded for by those taxes, than some people realize. Most importantly, they are paying into social security to support current retirees, but are not accruing social security benefits upon which they can draw.
3) Human beings have always migrated away from poverty and toward opportunity, and always will. Any responsible parent would place greater weight on their children’s future than on the prohibition to cross a line drawn in the sand by historical (and opportunistic) military conflicts. To villify people for doing so is simply reprehensible.
4) The more factors of production can flow freely, which includes how open borders are, the more global wealth is produced, and, in this case, the less inequitably it is distributed.
5) We rely on massive immigration demographically, with a burgeoning retired population and a shrinking working-age population supporting them. Immigrants come to work, redressing that imbalance.
Here’s my analysis:
From a global economic efficiency and distributional justice point-of-view, the ideal is the free flow of people and goods across borders. From a global leadership and fairness in distributing the burden point-of-view, the US should be in the lead on moving the world in the direction of that ideal.
I’m both a global humanist and a realist: I recognize the ideals we should be striving for, and the current realities that force us to compromise our efforts. One of the realities of the world is that people are locally and immediately biased: costs and benefits closer to home and closer to the present are weighted much more heavily than costs and benefits farther from home and farther in the future.
I’m less sympathetic to the reactions of people who resent (though are only marginally burdened by) the unstoppable flow of people from poverty and destitution toward opportunity than I am cognizant of its inevitability. For that reason, more than any other, we need federal laws that are enforceable, and that are a reasonable compromise between who and what we should be, and who and what we are.
The history of immigration law in America is a lot uglier than a lot of people realize, more often racist than not, and still somewhat brutal in the fierce protection of what’s ours, even against the most innocent and vulnerable victims of a cruel world. It’s hard to admire that, when the vast majority in America are walking around with i-phones, and pay cable subscriptions, and live comfortably and eat well. And here’s one of my objections to some in my own party: the branch of American labor that does not recognize any international responsibility beyond protecting our own wealth against foreign intrusion is as odious to me as any aspect of right-wing ideology.
Furthermore, we are capable of restructuring our priorities, and investing in our future, in ways which will provide native-born Americans with better opportunities to fill higher-paying, more information-intensive positions in our national (and the global) economy, leaving those eager souls from beyond our borders with the opportunity to fill the lower-paying, unskilled positions that Americans no longer want. This is, to a limited extent, the nature of illegal immigration today; in reality, the demand for low-paid foreign labor exists because Americans want, and can usually find, better opportunities (and the demand for highly paid, highly skilled foreign labor exists because we are failing to educate our own children to be able to satisfy it). But to the extent that there still is some competition for jobs between those born here or here legally, at the bottom of our economic ladder, and those who are newly arriving illegally, a greater commitment on our part to robust and effective public education, and provision of affordable, varied higher educational opportunities, will mitigate this problem, by moving those already here up the economic ladder, and leaving the rungs at the bottom to those newly arriving.
Even so, the use of immigrant labor to depress wages and to displace higher paid American labor still exists. Despite our relative wealth and comfort, the pressures and anxieties of an uncertain economy, of an uncertain future, of family responsibilities and assumptions about what we will be able to give to our children, all make our protectionist reflexes understandable, if neither ideal nor admirable. I’m not unsympathetic to the worker whose livelihood is made less secure by the competition of desparately poor people elsewhere, nor to the folks in border states and communities whose local resources are strained by undocumented waves of humanity pouring in.
But I’m a human being first, and an American second. The problems and stresses of Americans are nothing compared to the problems and stresses of those against whom we are protecting ourselves. And our mythologies and rationalizations with which we reassure ourselves that that is just and right do not in any way actually make it just and right. Furthermore, our own long-term interests are best served by including massive immigration in the equation, and creating a context in which those who enter fill positions that those who are here no longer need to settle for.
So that’s the nature of the challenge, as I see it. How do we negotiate all of those imperatives, all of those needs, all of those legitimate concerns? I don’t know. But the first step is to achieve a higher degree of honesty about the nature of the world in which we live, and the nature of the role we play, and could play, in it.
In Sunday’s edition, The Denver Post published an excerpt from Gary Hart’s new book, “The Thunder and the Sunshine: Four Decades in a Burnished Life” (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16096254). In it, Senator Hart describes his participation on the Church Committee, established to investigate the excesses of U.S. intelligence agencies. While discussing how to pry information from these agencies, Senator Hart suggested that maybe they should start by asking the intelligence agencies for the files they had on each of the members of the committee. The silent reaction was broken when Barry Goldwater said, “I don’t want to know what they’ve got on me.”
J.Edgar Hoover’s files on John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. are well-known, and the fact that he used such or similar information, on various occasions, to exercise power over the people to whom it pertained is rarely doubted. Governments, and corporations, employ spies to acquire information about one another, to steel secrets, to plant lies, and, in general, to obtain and manufacture information.
On scales large and small, possession of sensitive information that someone or someones don’t want revealed imparts power over those that have it, and can use it to blackmail those who don’t want it published. On scales large and small, successfully imparting to others a belief, an artifact of knowledge true or false, is the fundamental exercise of political power. Possessing and controlling, to some limited degree, the flow of accurate knowledge in order to manipulate the actions of individuals, and supplementing it by orchestrating or encouraging the flow of inaccurate information in order to manipulate the perceptions of others, is the essence of political power.
By various means, and through various agencies (both public and private), nations, corporations, and other organizations invest large sums of money in research and development, in the production of scientific and technical information, in order to produce goods more efficiently and effectively, or to produce goods not yet offered, or to prevail in military contests, or to conquer diseases, or to achieve some other goal never before achieved (and thus extend human liberty into new domains never before available to it). Knowledge both improves a social entity’s ability to compete and prevail, and expands the range of actions or feats that are possible.
But, ironically, part of the product of this process is expertise in the deception of others. The politics of timed and honed leaks, of intentional gaffs, of the selective release of accurate information supplemented by well-placed falsehood, is part art and part science, increasingly sophisticated and effective. Even so, it is embedded in more complex and organic human processes, the conflicting agendas of various actors with various talents, the uncontrollable forces of profit-seeking and self-aggrandizing propaganda. The real political struggle is played out on the field created by this chaos, by the various professional manipulators of information attempting to impose their preferred order upon it.
Vince Carroll assures us in today’s Denver Post that the federal law prohibiting lying about having received military honors never received is a violation of the First Amendment, and for good reason (http://www.denverpost.com/carroll/ci_16096264). He admits that certain kinds of predatory or destructive forms of speech are not protected by the First Amendment, and that the purpose of First Amendment protections broadly applied, to avoid the chilling of legitimate free speech and preserve the legitimacy of that which is said, is not implicated by this law. But he is concerned about the slippery slope, that ever-ready rationalization for irrationality that insists we draw lines in admittedly sub-optimal places in order to avoid drawing them in opposite sub-optimal places. Carroll is concerned that if we criminalize lying about receiving military honors, then we may end up criminalizing lying about one’s height or weight. And Carroll insists that the concern that permitting such lying devalues the authentic military honors of ours is not supported by any evidence.
To take Carroll’s last point first, the evidence is indirect but overwhelming, embedded in one of the cornerstones of economic thought, the law of supply and demand itself. If the monetary supply, for instance, is artificially increased without any corresponding increase in actual wealth, it creates an inflationary pressure, a devaluation of money. Worse, if some of that money is known to be counterfeit, it not only devalues money, but undermines confidence in it, leading to greater skepticism regarding the authenticity of any particular monetary note. We’ve seen both of these phenomena well-documented with considerable frequency throughout the course of human history. To apply that knowledge to a new variant isn’t to make an assumption in the absence of evidence, but rather to apply evidence to situations other than those from which the evidence was derived, which is precisely the purpose and function of evidence.
Carroll justifies his assumption that reputational capital defies the laws of supply and demand with the assumption that the stock of admiration is infinite. First, I doubt that it is infinite; it is far more probably that people, psychologically, have limited capacities to bestow admiration on others. (Imagine a person who finds everyone around them presenting legitimate claims to be worth of extraordinary admiration. It is hard not to imagine that they would quickly suffer from “admiration fatigue”). Second, even if the stock of admiration were infinite, the devaluation resulting from reduced confidence in its authenticity in any given instance is not depended on its stock being limited.
Perhaps more importantly, Carroll doesn’t understand how and why the line is drawn between protected and unprotected speech. Any speech that can be proven to be intentionally deceptive either for self-enrichment at others’ expense, or for predatory or malicious purposes, and that does not fall within a range of speech that, despite these characteristics, must be protected anyway to avoid chilling or discrediting legitimate free speech, falls within the range of speech that can be prohibited, if we the sovereign, through the agency of our representatives, determine that we consider the harm done significant enough to warrant such a prohibition. Some may consider claiming to have received military honors never received is not significant enough to warrant such a prohibition, but that is not the issue here; if it were, it would be an issue to be debated and resolved in our nation’s legislature, as it was. The issue is whether it is so qualitatively different from other prohibited forms of speech, such as fraud, that we cannot even arrive at the discussion of whether it is significant enough to prohibit.
But it clearly is not qualitatively different from fraud. Claiming military honors never received, in order to derive some benefit from the false belief that they were received, at the expense of both those who believe the lie and those who have actually received military honors whose honors are devalued and placed in doubt as a result of the lie, is qualitatively indistinguishable from fraud. The only thing that distinguishes it is that the capital fraudulently acquired is reputational rather than monetary. But, in the real world, reputational capital can be just as valuable as money. It is just as valuable to those who acquire it, and just as valuable to those who deserve it but receive less of it, with less confidence, as a result of the intentional deceptions of some. The cost of being deceived into wrongly bestowing such reputational benefit, to the person bestowing it, may even be comparable, in some ways, to the cost of being defrauded out of something of material value. Therefore, it is fair game for a legislature to debate whether the harm is significant enough to warrant legal attention.
Carroll is concerned that making such determinations risks the slippery slope of eventually determining that more trivial forms of fraud are significant enough to prohibit. According to Carroll’s “logic”, we can’t be allowed to draw the line, lest we draw it in the wrong place. But clearly, as is so often the case, this is just a veiled argument for drawing the line in one place rather than another. In this case, Carroll accepts current anti-fraud laws which draw the line at things of monetary value. But his distinction is irrelevant; in fact, his preferred limitation suffers from exactly the same defect as his rejected extension of the concept. For, if fraud only applies to deceptively acquiring things of monetary value, then what is to stop us from criminalizing the deceptive acquisition of something worth only a few pennies? What stops us is that we consider it too trivial, just as what stops us from outlawing lying about one’s age is that we consider that too trivial as well.
We have less to fear from the slippery slope we already adequately negotiate than from the arbitrary distinctions that Carroll insists we should never transcend.
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Susan Greene’s column in today’s Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16114434) discusses the current CU Board of Regents, and the choices Coloradans have. Sue Sharkey, a Republican reactionary in the 4th Congressional District running for regent of our flagship university, states that “[c]ollege graduates are more likely to be liberalized than non-college graduates.” Her solution to this unacceptable result of receiving a higher education is to impose upon it her ideological agenda. Steve Bosley, a current regent, was one of four to vote no on “Preserving the Independence of the Board of Regents,” a vote on whether to appeal an appellate court decision that regents cannot ban concealed weaons on campus. At a Tea Party rally, Bosley said, “We’re the storm troopers. The storm troopers are going to take back America.”
One important measure of a civilization is how much it appreciates and cultivates the gift of human consciousness, and how sincerely it aspires to be a bastion of wisdom and compassion. The term “a liberal education” refers to our tradition of striving to ensure that as many of our young people as possible are guided through an exploration of human knowledge, learning about humanity, who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. Our universities are indeed our temples of human knowledge and thought, where we go to learn and to create new knowledge, to investigate the complexities and subtleties of our world and universe, to improve our ability to act wisely.
Not only is America under attack by self-proclaimed “storm troopers” admittedly determined to undermine our commitment to providing a broad and comprehensive education to our young people, but they are currently the majority on the Board of Regents of Colorado’s flagship university. When a large and vocal minority, passionate, angry, militant, motivated by the desire to catalyze and assist the contraction of the human mind and the human heart, by the rejection of wisdom and compassion, by the advocacy of ignorance and belligerence, succeed in taking over our temples of wisdom, our institutions for cultivating human consciousness, it is not hyperbole to suggest that this is a threat to the very foundation of what it means to be a civilized nation.
Coloradan’s do have a choice this November. As Susan Greene wrote, “The at-large race is a statewide referendum on what we want the regency to be.” By extension, it’s about something more than that as well: It’s a statewide referendum on what kind of a people we want to be. Melissa Hart, the CU Law professor who is a Harvard Law graduate and former U.S. Supreme Court clerk, represents the choice to be a civilized people committed to wisdom and compassion. The alternative is to allow one more victory of a movement determined to force America to worship at the alter of ignorance and belligerence. Let’s not falter in the face of this truly consequential challenge.
The Denver Post published an AP story about Obama’s appointment of Elizabeth Warren, “an aggressive consumer advocate and Wall Street adversary,” as de facto head of the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_16106784). This appointment is significant for two reasons: 1) It marks a continuation of the process of concentration of power in the White House to avoid increasingly difficult and lengthy senate confirmation processes associated with appointing regulatory agency directors, and 2) it is an expression of the Democratic Party’s wise commitment to preserve and continue to develop the sophisticated regulatory architecture necessary to manage the modern market economy.
David Brooks commented on the first aspect on The News Hour last night (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec10/shieldsbrooks_09-17.html). According to Brooks, this is a trend that has been growing over the course of the last five administrations. For good and for ill, there has been a gradual concentration of political power in the executive over the course of American history. The rise of the administrative state since the New Deal had led to some limited dispersion of that power (since Congress created each administrative agencies and confirmed the director appointed by the President), but, if Brooks’ assessment is correct, even that small moderating influence on presidential power has been eroded by the executive reaction to contentious confirmation hearings (not only by removing Congressional oversight, but also by shifting the power from semi-autonomous agency secretaries to, in this case, a “special assistant to the president”).
However, while many pundits and politicos are most concerned about the distribution of power, I am most concerned with the efficacy of its use. As long as enough separationof powers exists to prevent any slide into dictatorship (and it does, despite the perennial overheated rhetoric on the Right), the distribution remains an issue of the means to our ends, and the salient question becomes whether the power thus exercised accomplishes goals which serve the public interest. Since neither our individual liberties are in any actual danger as a result of the concentration of power in the White House, nor, for the most part, is the functionality of distributed competences, the question really is whether increased regulatory oversight of financial markets serves the public interest.
And the answer is: Yes. The combination of the complexity of the modern market economy and the consequences of “information asymmetries” creates an indispensable need for an increasingly sophisticated regulatory architecture. The reason for this is that in information-intensive market sectors, where some minority of market actors are close to information that is remote and inaccessible to the majority of market actors, that minority of market actors will tend to manipulate markets to their advantage and to the public’s disadvantage, often with disastrous results. Examples of this abound, including the recent financial sector collapse, the Enron-fabricated California energy crisis of 2000-2001, and even Bernie Maddoff-like ponzi schemes (which exist in abundance). The challenge, indeed, is creating and running regulatory agencies capable of keeping up with those who are closest to the action.
This is not to say that there are not defects and downsides associated with the administrative state. Certainly, it is possible for market regulations to fail a cost-benefit analysis, and impose burdens on business more onerous than the benefits warrant, costing jobs and stifling wealth production. Agency rule-making processes, however, are highly attuned to this consideration, and make necessary assessments that offend less pragmatic sensibilities, such as placing price tags on the value of human life (since regulations that consider individual human lives infinitely valuable would inevitably lead to the complete shut-down of the economy).
The bigger problem is the phenomenon known as “agency capture,” in which regulatory agencies become “captured” by the industries they are supposed to regulate, and make rules that serve the industry’s rather than the public’s interests. This happens both as a result of political ideology and allegiances (mostly conservative presidents sympathetic and beholden to particular industry interests appointing agencies heads who represent and advocate for those interests), and organic processes (finding individuals competent to regulate information-intensive industries generally requires recruiting from the pool of people who have worked within those industries, and thus have friendships and loyalties tied to those industries).
But the challenge of effectively regulating our complex modern market economy does not counsel a retreat from the attempt to do so; rather, it counsels renewed vigor and assertiveness in the attempt to do so. The creation of this absolutely essential, and long overdue, new regulatory agency is a step in the right direction.
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Many of the most pressing social problems we face are embedded in the loss of community, in dysfunctional families, in unaddressed behavioral and situational problems of children. Some consider these spheres of life to be beyond the purview of public policy, and too expensive to address even if government could or should be used to address them. I think this is mistaken on all counts, and more profoundly than immediately apparent.
First, the unaddressed (or under addressed) behavioral and mental health problems of children, and the unstable or unsafe family environments in which many find themselves, end up being extremely costly to society in the long run, both monetarily and socially. These under addressed problems are implicated in poor educational performance, delinquent and future criminal behavior, and a myriad of related problems that reduce individual productivity, increase economic and social burdens on society, and reproduce themselves generationally.
Second, our current programs tend to be piecemeal, reactive, and both fiscally inefficient and of more limited effectiveness than necessary. This is not a set of defects that we cannot substantially improve upon, and, in fact, there are many advances taking place right now which are doing just that. By placing ever-increasing emphasis on coordination among services and agencies that perform interrelated services for children and families in need, we reduce the costs of fractured and redundant services performed by seperate agencies with unconsolidated administrative costs. Those costs are far greater than providing oversight boards which help to coordinate and consolidate these overlapping services. By doing so, not only is the fiscal efficiency of providing services greatly increased, but also the outcome efficacy of these services, for when schools and juvenile justice agencies and mental health providers and child welfare counselors and others involved in addressing individual children’s needs are engaged in those efforts in better coordinated ways, all do their jobs more effectively, and contribute to a more effective regime of service provision.
Providing such proactive services more effectively, addressing the behavioral health challenges that so many of our youth face, helping to ensure that each child has a safe and nurturing permanent family environment in which to grow up in, and coordinating these efforts with both juvenile justice agencies and public schools, not only increases the present and future welfare of those children, but also reduces both the costs of reactive solutions to the problems thus avoided, and the costs to society of the problems themselves.
The costs of the relative failure of our educational system, for instance, are enormous, on many levels, costs that can be dramatically reduced through improvements in the effectiveness of our schools. And the enormnous costs of having the dubious distinction of being the nation, of all nations on Earth, with both the highest absolute number, and highest percentage of our population incarcerated, are perhaps directly tracable to our failure to address the childhood problems that lay the foundation for that unfortunate statistic.
Improving our proactive services to children and families is an up-front investment in our future, cultivating productive and well-adjusted members of society who contribute more to our collective welfare and less to our collective suffering. And even marginal gains on that dimension promise enormous future fiscal savings. It’s an investment we can’t afford not to make.
But the potential to improve the quality of our lives, and the prospects for our children, do not stop there. Increased community involvement provides one more pillar to the structure of improved support to children and families, increasing the vigilance with which problems are identified, the informal neighborly assistance and interventions with which they are avoided or mitigated, and the positive human capital with which child development is cultivated. Implementing robust community volunteer tutoring and mentoring programs is one easy step we can take to increase the strength of our communities, improve the quality of education our children receive, and provide our youth with a greater number of positive role models to emulate. In addition to such benefits are the benefits of increased informal mutual support in times of need, and just as an ordinary part of life, each of us helping one another out just a little bit more, because we have spent more time working together as members of a cohesive community.
There are no panaceas, and I do not mean to imply that the policy agenda I am outlining would solve all of our problems, would magically make all children well-behaved and studious, and all neighbors helpful. I am suggesting that, as always, we can do better or worse, we can improve on our current social institutional framework or not, and we can strive to increase the opportunities available to our children for their future success, and our improved shared quality of life.
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The German economy seems to have forgotten that there’s a global recession (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/08/europes_economies). By supplying the increasing consumer and industrial demand in fast-emerging large economies like China, India, and Brazil, the German economy grew at an annual rate of almost nine percent in the last quarter, the most robust growth since reunification 2o years ago. Unemployment in Germany is lower than it was before the recession hit. And German economic success is fueling increased demand at home, sending a positive ripple throughout the world economy.
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2008 Nobel Prize Winning Economist and New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman calls out Mitch McConnel for attempting to use political extortion to preserve fiscally irresponsible tax breaks for the super-wealthy (Even conservative Alan Greenspan has said that Congress should let the Bush tax breaks for the super-wealthy sunset, and not renew them), describes how how the Bush administration got them passed in 2001 by bundling them with smaller tax breaks for the middle class and circumventing fiscally responsible senate rules requiring off-sets for the tax breaks in reduced spending, and argues persuasively that it is in both the Democrat’s political interests and the nation’s economic interests to take a tough stand against Republicans trying to continue this national debt-inflating redistribution of wealth to the wealthiest Americans: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/opinion/17krugman.html?_r=1&src=twt&twt=NytimesKrugman.
Why on Earth does anyone vote for Republicans anymore? Because the right’s economic disinformation campaign has successfully disguised their economic hypocricy and incompetence in the eyes of many. It’s time to relegate to the dust heap of history these worhshippers at the alter of feathering the nests of the wealthy at the expense of the middle class and of future generations, and continue to reinstate reasonable government by responsible and committed public servants.
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