Random Blogging – Page 301

Now I Understand Why People Believe What They Hear on Fox News….

Ever wonder why people don’t recognize when “news” reports are blatantly, obviously incorrect, improbable or impossible? Or wonder why anyone in his right mind would vote for Michelle Bachmann or Louis Gohmert or Ted Cruz?

My working thesis is that folks who don’t know anything–who are hazy about history, have no clue about how government functions and have only the most tenuous connection to the Constitution–simply have no context within which to judge the reasonableness of assertions that more knowledgable people simply laugh at.

Recently, Bill Maher cited a study showing that fewer than 17% of incoming college freshmen knew what the Emancipation Proclamation was (he described the incoming class as “Basically, golden retrievers with smartphones”). Unfortunately, we have a lot of studies that conclude we don’t know anything. And the hits keep coming.

As if we needed even more evidence of Americans’ abysmal lack of knowledge, here are the results of yet another survey I stumbled across:

1. Only 45% of Americans were able to correctly identify what the initials in GOP stood for: Grand Old Party. Other popular guesses were Government of the People and God’s Own Party. Republicans obviously scored much better than Democrats did on this answer. [source]

2. 55% of Americans believe that Christianity was written into the Constitution and that the founding fathers wanted One Nation Under Jesus. This includes 75% of Republicans and Evangelicals. [source]

3. Although a “relatively” high 40% of people were able to name all three of the United States branches of government — executive, legislative and judicial — a far lower percentage knew the length of a Senator’s term. Just 25% responded that a Senator’s term stretches for six years. Even fewer, 20%, knew how many Senators there were. [source]

4. Americans are known to pick recent heads of state as among the best president in history, which is why Clinton and Reagan regularly rank higher than Lincoln, FDR and Washington. However, Hoover used to routinely top polls of the worst, but today, just 43% of Americans know who he was, according to statistics from the University of Pennsylvania. [source]

5. When asked on what year 9/11 took place, 30% of Americans were unable to answer the question correctly, even as few as five years after the attack. This was according to a Washington Post poll conducted in 2006. . [source]

6. It’s not shocking that 80% of Americans believe that there is life out there somewhere, because it’s hard to look at a vast universe and think we’re completely alone. But 1 in 5 allege that an alien life form has abducted a friend or family member of theirs. Based on population estimates of around 300 million, that means that a terrifying number of people believe they have been probed. [source]

7. When looking at a map of the world, young Americans had a difficult time correctly identifying Iraq (1 in 7) and Afghanistan (17%). This isn’t that surprising, but only a slim majority (51%) knew where New York was. According to Forbes and National Geographic, an alarming 29% couldn’t point to the Pacific Ocean. [source]

8. 25% of Americans were unable to identify the country from which America gained its independence. Although 19% stated that they were unsure, Gallup findings indicated that others offered answers varying from France to China. Older folks scored much better than young people on this question, as a third of those 18-29 were unable to come up with the correct answer. [source]

9. Despite being a constant fixture in school curricula, 30% of Americans didn’t know what the Holocaust was. [source]

10. Even though we are a predominantly Christian country, only half of Americans knew that Judaism came before Christianity, because the words “Old Testament” are apparently very confusing in that regard. [source]

11. A surprisingly high percentage of Americans, 20%, believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth, instead of the opposite, aka the correct answer. This is despite the fact that centuries of science have consistently proved otherwise. [source]

12. In 2011, Newsweek found that 29% of Americans were unable to correctly identify the current Vice President, Joe Biden, when asked to take a simple citizenship test. Although a relatively low 6% didn’t know when Independence Day was, a much, much higher percentage (73%) had no idea why we fought the Cold War. [source]

13. According to most polls, Americans didn’t know that Obamacare was scheduled to go into effect. Kaiser puts the number at 64%, whereas others say as few as 1 in 8. [source]

14. 2006 AP polls showed that a majority of Americans were unable to name more than one of the protections guaranteed in the first Amendment of the Constitution — which include speech, assembly, religion, press and “redress of grievance.” Just 1 in 1000 could name all of these five freedoms. However, 22% were able to come up with the name of every member of the Simpson family. [source]

And we wonder why we elect buffoons to high office.

Just kill me now.

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We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Government

I really shouldn’t read the Letters to the Editor.

A couple of days ago, I read one from a woman who applauded the government shutdown, because we don’t need all these ridiculous regulations of our foods, our businesses and our local governments.

It’s a familiar theme.

Later that day, we stopped for gas, and my husband noted that the gas pumps had a sticker denoting the date they were last inspected. “If the shutdown goes on much longer,” he said, “those pumps won’t get their next inspection. I wonder how long it will be before consumers get shorted–before the pump says one gallon but dispenses a bit less than that. It only takes turning a couple of screws.”

My more libertarian friends will undoubtedly respond that if that happened, eventually people would catch on and that station would go out of business. Maybe–after a lot of people paid for more gas than they received. Or maybe not, since people stopping at stations on highway interchanges or in unfamiliar neighborhoods are unlikely to be “in the loop” of local gossip.

Gas stations aside, I’d suggest that if the clueless author of that letter prefers not to die of botulism (I hear that’s pretty unpleasant), she should welcome those intrusive FDA food inspections. I might remind her that people working for government didn’t just wake up one day and decide–hey, wouldn’t it be fun to go inspect those pork chops!? A lot of people got sick and died, and a lot of other people demanded that government–the folks who work for us–do something about it.

Look–it is perfectly reasonable to keep an eye on government to ensure that it isn’t getting into areas it shouldn’t, or conducting itself in a less than businesslike fashion, or playing favorites. It isn’t reasonable–in fact, it’s a sign of terminal stupidity–to suggest that we really don’t need no stinkin’ government.

I have news for all these anti-government ideologues. Most Americans no longer go out to the back yard and strangle a chicken for dinner. We no longer live miles from our nearest neighbor, so we can’t just throw our garbage out back for the animals to eat. The days of settling our disputes via duels is long past. And in case you hadn’t noticed, women and minorities are no longer willing to meekly abide by a bunch of rules made by white guys to privilege white guys.

The world has changed.

Today’s America is densely populated and interdependent, and individuals have neither the time nor–god knows–the expertise to test our food for contamination, review the business practices of our merchants’ and bankers and candlestickmakers, put out fires in our neighborhoods and saddle up with the posse when a bad guy robs the local liquor store. We have things called airplanes now, and they need to be inspected; we have cars and they need roads to drive on and rules to regulate their use.

For these and a zillion other reasons, we need government.

Get over it.

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Whose Ox Was That?

One of America’s most enduring fault-lines is around convictions of personal self-sufficiency, and the very real degree of contempt that accompanies indicators of other people’s dependency. The “makers and takers” narrative is the most recent manifestation of this phenomenon, where people who “stand on our own two feet” engage in moral indignation aimed at those perceived as “sucking at the public tit.’

What is so ironic about this simplistic construct is that the self-proclaimed “makers” are the recipients of the largest percentage of government largesse. They just don’t see it that way. What they get is their due; what that other guy gets is charity.

It isn’t limited to corporatism, or crony capitalism or the tax loopholes and immense amounts of outright subsidy enjoyed by our so-called “captains of industry.” It goes much farther, and is frequently a product of well-meaning public policies.

I thought again about the multiple ways taxpayers subsidize the “haves” while I was reading a fascinating book about housing policy: The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving.

The mortgage interest deduction provides nearly 400 billion in subsidies to homeowners each year, propping up the market for single-family homes. Renters, of course, enjoy no such assistance. The unintended consequences of FHA mortgages have been amply documented–FHA regulations encouraged new construction to the detriment of repairs and improvements to existing housing stock, encouraged redlining (making it much more difficult for African-Americans to buy homes), and (by stipulating that homes had to be built far from “adverse influences” and in areas of “economic stability”) favored suburban over urban homeownership.

It’s not just FHA. Suburban development has been subsidized by everything from highway construction to artificially low gasoline prices. William Wimsatt wrote an article for the Washington Post a couple of years ago in which he detailed–and rebutted–five “myths” about the suburbs: myth number three was “the suburbs are a product of the free market.”

Taxpayer subsidies are everywhere–from the public schools that educate most American workers, to the “free” highways over which we ship our goods (if you ship by train, no such luck–pardon the pun, but you pay full freight), to the food stamps and other benefits that the makers scorn even while they supplement and thus enable the below-living-wage compensation paid by Walmart and its ilk.

The next time you hear a Tea Party crank fulminating over the cost of the hateful “Obamacare” and the illegitimacy of requiring that we all chip in to keep poor folks from dying, you might consider the fact that long before passage of the ACA, seventy percent of all medical costs in the US were being paid with tax dollars. From medical research to medical education to Medicare and Medicaid to emergency room services to the uninsured–we all paid for all of it. We just did it in the most inefficient possible way–a way that also, conveniently, allowed us to maintain the fiction that we had a “free market” health system. We didn’t, and we don’t.

What we have is an attitude: If a public service benefits me, it’s a natural outgrowth of the market. If it benefits poor people, it’s socialism.

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A Simple Quiz

I happened to catch a recent interview between a Tea Party Congressman and a reporter. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get the names of either.) The Congressman defended the decision to shut down government if that’s what it took to stop the hated “Obamacare” by saying that government had “no business” being involved in healthcare. When the reporter asked the obvious follow-up question, “what does that mean for your position on Medicare?”– the Congressman looked at her blankly and responded “What’s your point?” He rather clearly had no idea that Medicare is a government program.

Americans are electing to office people who are totally ignorant of the world they inhabit and the Constitution they claim to revere. As “Red George O’Malley,” a frequent commenter here, aptly put it, they are prisoners of their own ignorance.

Recently, I was asked to develop a “quick and dirty” quiz that might test the actual civic knowledge of some of the folks who are so vocal about government and political life. My guess is that readers of this blog would do well on that quiz–and far too many of our elected officials and vocal opinionators wouldn’t. It’s ten questions: see what you think. (Answers are at the end.)

1. The American Constitution was based largely upon principles of “natural rights” and John Locke’s “social contract” theory. Those ideas came primarily from (a) the bible; (b) English common law; (c) Enlightenment philosophy; (d) James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

2. The first ten Amendments to the Constitution are referred to as the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights (a) is the source of rights that government has granted to American citizens; (b) is a list of human or ‘natural’ rights that the government is prohibited from infringing; (c) was included in the Articles of Confederation; (d) all of the above; (e) none of the above.

3. Checks and balances were intended to limit concentrations of government power. They include (a) the three branches of government; (b) federalism; (c) judicial independence; (d) all of these; (e) none of these.

4. Freedom of Speech is (a) protected by the First Amendment; (b) protection against government censorship; (c) intended to protect unpopular views, even when majorities of citizens believe those views are dangerous; (d) all of the above; (e) none of the above.

5. The phrase “separation of church and state” refers to (a) the assault on Christianity by liberal judges; (b) the rule that Churches are tax exempt; (c) the operation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment; (d) all of these (e) none of these.

6. The Fourth Amendment was an outgrowth of anger at searches by King George’s soldiers under what were called “General Warrants.” The Amendment (a) prohibits government from conducting searches without ‘probable cause’; (b) has been held to require individualized suspicion; (c) forbids government from conducting ‘fishing expeditions;’ (d) places the burden on government to justify a search; (e) all of these.

7. Equal Protection of the Laws requires government to (a) treat all citizens the same; (b) treat similarly-situated citizens equally; (c) protect citizens against discrimination by other citizens; (d) all of these; (e) none of these.

8. The Deficit is (a) the national debt; (b) the difference between what government takes in and what it spends on an annual basis; (c) calculated without taking entitlements into account; (d) all of these; (e) none of these.

9. The Debt Ceiling (a) is the amount of money the country is authorized to borrow; (b) allows the U.S. to borrow what is necessary to pay amounts Congress has previously spent or authorized spending; (c) has generally been raised by large, bipartisan Congressional majorities; (d) all of these; (e) none of these.

10. A scientific theory is (a) scientists’ best guess about the way a natural phenomenon works; (b) a systematic methodology based on the accumulation of empirical evidence; (c) based on Darwinian ideology; (d) a rejection of religion.

Answers: 1(C); 2(B); 3(D); 4(D); 5(C); 6(E); 7(B); 8(B); 9(D); 10(B).

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Bottom-line Ideology Bites

The news-magazine show Sunday Morning had a fascinating piece this week on a new approach to debt collection. The story reported on a collection company that refuses to employ the typical tactics–harassing phone calls, threats and the like. Instead, the collectors work respectfully with the debtors, helping them to renegotiate what they owe and manage their finances more prudently. The founder’s basic premise: people would pay their bills if they had the money, and hounding them is unlikely to give them the means to pay.

According to the company’s owner, his firm is twice as profitable as those using the more traditional tactics.

Respect for people–what a concept!

Respect for the worth of one’s employees can also boost profits, no matter how counter-intuitive some “hard headed” businesses might find that simple premise.

I’ve written before about the difference between the approach of Costco and Sam’s Club to their workers. Costco pays its workers, on average, twice as much per hour as Sam’s Club, and provides them with health insurance to boot. Yet it is far more profitable.

There is a self-defeating belief among some businesspeople to the effect that a healthy bottom line depends on cutting costs wherever possible, especially personnel costs. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary: employee turnover and disaffection can cost more than skimpy payrolls can save. That is a lesson that even Walmart appears to be learning. The company recently announced that some 35,000 part-time workers will be returned to full-time status–entitling them, not so coincidentally, to heath coverage as required by the Affordable Care Act.

As Forbes reported, Walmart’s unwillingness to pay most of its workers a living wage has left the company without enough full-time workers to properly run a retail outlet. The result has been that the company has placed dead last among department and discount stores in the Customer Satisfaction Index for the last six years.

Furthermore, again according to Forbes, Walmart sales have been “sinking dramatically”–a state of affairs that even Walmart has concluded is the result of its relentless effort to avoid paying decent wages and offering health insurance.

This was a lesson learned by Home Depot in the early 2000s, when its CEO cut full-time staffing in hopes that the savings would boost the bottom line. It worked–briefly. Then customer service declined, and with it, same-store sales. Home Depot reversed course–and profits rose.

As the Forbes columnist noted,

Who would have guessed that a well-staffed store filled with competent and reasonably paid employees might actually have an impact on the success of a company?

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