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Monthly Archives: May 2014
Religious Privilege
Yesterday’s decision by the Supreme Court in Town of Greece was predictable, given this particular Court’s history. That doesn’t make it any less unfortunate. The Court, in a 5-4 decision, upheld the town’s practice of opening town council meetings with a (very Christian) prayer.
It is ironic that all five Justices in the majority are Catholic; it wasn’t all that long ago (at least in legal time) that Catholic children attending the country’s public schools were required to participate in decidedly Protestant bible readings. The Protestant majority saw no reason to accommodate Catholics (or Jews or Freethinkers or anyone else), and the Catholics found that exercise of majoritarian privilege so offensive to their beliefs that large numbers of them left the public system. That was the genesis of the parochial schools with which we are familiar.
How soon they forget….
Don Knebel has an excellent post about Town of Greece over at the Center for Civic Literacy’s website. As he notes,
Under the Court’s decision, that practice [inviting only Christian pastors to deliver the prayer] can continue so long as there are no non-Christian congregations in the town. And, if say a Hindu temple comes to Greece, the town will still have no obligation to include prayers acceptable to Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and all the other traditions that its residents may follow. There is something unsettling about that. Meetings of the town council should not be places for the dominant religion to trumpet that dominance. As Justice Kagan noted: “[T]he [challenged] prayers betray no understanding that the American community is today, as it long has been, a rich mosaic of religious faiths.”
Does this decision threaten religious liberty? Not much. It’s just another “f**k you, you don’t count” to people who don’t genuflect to the gods of the majority. Just another reminder that the pious hypocrites demanding that government privilege their beliefs–by allowing them to deny contraception coverage to their employees, for example–are totally unwilling to respect the equally sincere beliefs of others.
CommentsWho Gets What–And Why
Joseph Stiglitz–a Nobel Prize-winning economist–recently testified before the Senate Budget Committee about America’s growing inequality.
As disturbing as the data on the growing inequality in income are, those that describe the other dimensions of America’s inequality are even worse: inequalities in wealth are even greater than income, and there are marked inequalities in health, reflected in differences, for instance, in life expectancy. But perhaps the most invidious aspect of US inequality is the inequality of opportunity. America has become the advanced country not only with the highest level of inequality, but is among those with the least equality of opportunity—the statistics show that the American dream is a myth; that the life prospects of a young American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in other developed countries. We have betrayed one of our most fundamental values. And the result is that we are wasting our most valuable resource, our human resources: millions of those at the bottom are not able to live up to their potential.
Stiglitz made several important observations about the situation in which we find ourselves: first–and perhaps most importantly–he pointed out that our current levels of inequality are the result of policy choices we have made, either deliberately or inadvertently. Stiglitz identifies our education system and the manner in which it is financed, our health system, our tax laws, bankruptcy and anti-trust laws, the functioning of our financial system, corporate governance…. and he says that existing policies in each of these areas help enrich the top at the expense of the rest.
Stiglitz also pointed out that the folks currently enjoying their status as members of the 1% are “not those who have made the major innovations that have transformed our economy and society.” They are disproportionately the manipulators and rent-seekers, the speculators and financiers–not the entitled producers or “makers” they evidently believe themselves to be.
Stiglitz noted that “trickle-down”–the belief that gains at the top will eventually raise the prospects of those on the bottom–has been thoroughly discredited. He explained that the recent Great Recession has exacerbated–but not caused–our growing inequality. He underlined what should be obvious to all of us by now: jobs are not created when wealthy individuals get to keep more of their money–they are created by demand, and when middle-class folks don’t have discretionary income, demand remains weak.
In a recent column, Paul Krugman–also a Nobel prize winning economist–explained why improving demand is so critical:
Economists who took their own textbooks seriously quickly diagnosed the nature of our economic malaise: We were suffering from inadequate demand. The financial crisis and the housing bust created an environment in which everyone was trying to spend less, but my spending is your income and your spending is my income, so when everyone tries to cut spending at the same time the result is an overall decline in incomes and a depressed economy. And we know (or should know) that depressed economies behave quite differently from economies that are at or near full employment.
Stiglitz also talked bluntly about the likely consequences for the country–both democratic and economic– if we don’t change the policies that are feeding, rather than curing, the problem.
His entire testimony is both depressing and illuminating, and well worth reading.
CommentsAbout that Dustbin of History….
Indiana culture warriors Micah Clark and Eric Miller cannot be happy campers.
I get Pew Research Center’s Daily Religion Headlines in my inbox. On Thursday, two headlines confirmed what anyone watching the American landscape already knows: gay rights has gone mainstream.
The first headline was from the Detroit Free Press. It read Major Michigan companies want to ban LGBT discrimination against workers. The story highlighted an effort by the Michigan business community to include sexual orientation under the state’s civil rights laws. Note, this isn’t the business community trying to block a mean-spirited measure; it’s an affirmative effort to guarantee civil rights.
The second was a headline from the Christian Science Monitor, in the form of a question. Gay Marriage: Is GOP Tiptoeing Away from Opposition? The article cited a Pew poll that found 61 percent of Republicans under age 30 favoring the right to same-sex marriage, and it pointed to movement on the issue around the country.
- Earlier this month, the Nevada Republican Party removed opposition to gay marriage from its platform.
- On April 19, most of the Illinois Republican officials who tried to remove the state party chairman over his support of same-sex marriage lost their party positions.
- On April 29, the Washington College Republican Federation announced it had passed a resolution calling for a change to both the state and federal Republican platforms’ stance on marriage to make them more “inclusive.”
- In January, the New Mexico College Republicans agreed to drop language opposing same-sex marriage from their platform.
The day when Karl Rove could turn out the Republican base by demonizing GLBT folks is over. The party can elect people to Congress by dint of voter suppression and gerrymandering, but if it wants to elect a President sometime this century, the GOP will have to recognize that this battle is over.
The base (in both senses of that word) lost.
CommentsDoes “Right to Work” Work?
Recently, the Washington Examiner interviewed Indiana Governor Mike Pence. It ran the subsequent story under a banner headline: “Indiana’s Right to Work law has sparked economic rebirth for the Midwest.”
I’d never heard of the newspaper, so I consulted Dr. Google, and discovered (surprise!) that it is owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz[4] who also owns the influential conservative opinion magazine The Weekly Standard. In other words, the paper has a very definite point of view.
But…”economic rebirth”? Sparked by Right to Work?
It is almost impossible to find credible research on the effect of Right to Work laws. Most researchers–even those who are not ideological–have difficulty controlling for the multiple factors that affect a state’s economy. The little sound academic research that does exist suggests the real impact of the laws–for good or ill– is not nearly as dramatic as the heated debate might suggest.
For example, Michigan State University researchers Dale Belman, Richard Block and Karen Roberts examined state economies from 1998 through 2000 and concluded in 2009 that right-to-work laws “seem to have no effect on economic activity.”
In fact, they found that unions in general “have little impact, despite conventional wisdom.”
The Economic Policy Institute is a left-leaning, but generally credible and unbiased research resource. In a 2011 study, the Institute compared Right to Work states to those without that law.
- In 2009, the unemployment rate was 1.0 percentage points lower in RTW states than states without the legislation. In RTW states, it was 8.6%, In other states it was 9.6%.[16]
- Wages in right-to-work states are 3.2% lower than those in non-RTW states, after controlling for a full complement of individual demographic and socioeconomic variables as well as state macroeconomic indicators. Using the average wage in non-RTW states as the base ($22.11), the average full-time, full-year worker in an RTW state makes about $1,500 less annually than a similar worker in a non-RTW state. The study goes on to say “How much of this difference can be attributed to RTW status itself? There is an inherent “endogeneity” problem in any attempt to answer that question, namely that RTW and non-RTW states differ on a wide variety of measures that are also related to compensation, making it difficult to isolate the impact of RTW status.”[16]
- The rate of employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) is 2.6 percentage points lower in RTW states compared with non-RTW states, after controlling for individual, job, and state-level characteristics. If workers in non-RTW states were to receive ESI at this lower rate, 2 million fewer workers nationally would be covered.
- The rate of employer-sponsored pensions is 4.8 percentage points lower in RTW states, using the full complement of control variables in [the study’s] regression model. If workers in non-RTW states were to receive pensions at this lower rate, 3.8 million fewer workers nationally would have pensions.
You’d never guess any of that from the glowing report in the Washington Examiner.
In our current media environment, however, data and verification–let alone nuance and complexity–are less important than creating a reality that will appeal to the audience being targeted.
Remember the old song lyric, “a good man is hard to find”? Try looking for a good newspaper these days.
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