Hear no science, see no science, acknowledge no science…
“The North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission has found a solution to the political impasse posed by the conflict between science, which predicts the acceleration of sea level rise as the glaciers of western Antarctica collapse into the Southern Ocean, and Republican, money-driven politics tied to coastal development. The Coastal Commission voted to ignore long-term sea level rise.
The Commission voted, with one lone dissent, to limit the period of consideration of sea level rise to 30 years. Keeping the period to 30 years allowed the Commission to avoid considering the consequences of the collapse of west Antarctic glaciers, the speed up of the melting of Greenland’s ice cap and the slowing of the Gulf Stream. This vote will end the conflict between the Republican dominated state legislature and the Commission that happened in 2010 when the Commission’s panel of experts predicted as much as 5 feet of sea level rise by 2100. The legislature rejected that report and prohibited state and local government offices from considering the possibility that sea level rise would accelerate.”
Governor Mike Pence has unveiled a proposal to expand Medicaid using Healthy Indiana, prompting blogger Steve Benen to suggest that Indiana’s Governor might be “evolving.”
Although I’m sure Pence would reject terminology that even slightly referenced evolution, his plan to expand Medicaid through Healthy Indiana is a good thing. That it is also a brave thing is a sad commentary on the current GOP, which is where most criticism of the proposal has come from.
It seems to be slowly dawning on Pence that there is a considerable difference between pontificating in DC and actually running a state. In Washington, the man who has been described as “a Tea Partier before there was a Tea Party” could–and did– sermonize ad nauseum without paying a political price. He could–and did–ignore the nitty-gritty of actual lawmaking (he served 11+ years without passing any legislation). A chief executive doesn’t have that luxury; he’s expected to actually do something.
And a chief executive with ambitions/delusions of higher office will be evaluated on the “somethings” that he did.
The problem is, when you are a Republican Governor, you have to satisfy a base that demands ideological purity and ever-more-red meat, at the same time that you have to deal with real budgets, real challenges and the real consequences of bad decisions.
Pence–and several other GOP officeholders–think they’ve figured a way to thread that needle.
We saw it earlier with Common Core. When the GOP suddenly turned on a dime and decided that Common Core was evil (right after the scary black dude in the White House embraced it), Republicans who’d previously been very supportive of Common Core faced a dilemma. They solved the problem by passing “Indiana” standards that looked a lot like Common Core, but were called something else.
Now we have Medicaid expansion by a different name.
Mind you, these strategies are A-OK with me. There really is no “Hoosier” version of math (unless you count the time our legislature passed a measure changing the value of pi…); and 350,000 Indiana citizens desperately need access to affordable health care. If the current Administration has to engage in a bit of misrepresentation to get it done, I won’t complain.
It’s just a shame that these gyrations are necessary in order to avoid being eaten alive by the angry, uninformed people who now control the party.
In 2012, Young, a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, claimed a house in Bloomington was his primary residence and deducted more than $200,000 from his property taxes – saving himself almost $5,000. Turns out, Young was renting the property, not living in it, according to documents obtained by CNN.
Young apologized for what he insisted was a “mistake”–although knowing whether you rent a property ought not be too complicated for a Congressman who sits on a committee writing tax laws. The County Treasurer disputes the “mistake” excuse:
Monroe County Treasurer Catherine Smith said that when Young was in her office in 2012 (paying $4,000 for 2011’s back taxes), she gave him the opportunity to update his records and remove the homestead deduction from the property, but he didn’t.
“It’s homestead fraud. He knew the state law,” the Democratic treasurer said. “A man that makes (a salary) from tax money should be held accountable for his own taxes.”
Smith was already frustrated that the check Young used to pay the $4,000 in back taxes bounced.
Well, yes, I can see how that might be frustrating…
Can we please start electing people who aren’t a complete and total embarrassment?
The American Conservative has a lengthy article arguing for a raise in the minimum wage from a conservative perspective. A couple of highlights:
Although the direct financial benefits to working-class Americans and our economy as a whole are the primary justifications for the proposal, there are a number of subsidiary benefits as well, ranging across both economic and non-economic areas.
First, the net dollar transfers through the labor market in this proposal would generally be from higher to lower income strata, and lower-income individuals tend to pay a much larger fraction of their income in payroll and sales taxes. Thus, a large boost in working-class wages would obviously have a very positive impact on the financial health of Social Security, Medicare and other government programs funded directly from the paycheck. Meanwhile, increased sales tax collections would improve the dismal fiscal picture for state and local governments, and the public school systems they finance.
Furthermore, as large portions of the working-poor became much less poor, the payout of the existing Federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) would be sharply reduced. Although popular among politicians, the EITC is a classic example of economic special interests privatizing profits while socializing costs: employers receive the full benefits of their low-wage workforce while a substantial fraction of the wage expense is pushed onto the taxpayers. Private companies should fund their own payrolls rather than rely upon substantial government subsidies, which produce major distortions in market signals.
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Public policy experts sometimes glorify complexity, proposing intricate, interlocking systems aimed at a desired result. But such structures are only as strong as their weakest link, and a proposal too complex to fully understand is also too complex to fix. Our government has sought to ensure a decent living for American workers through an enormous array of income subsidies, public benefits, training programs, and educational loans; at this point, many of these components have accumulated powerful and parasitic side-beneficiaries while leaving the working class behind.
Since this vast and leaky conglomeration has failed at its intended goal, perhaps we should just try raising wages instead.
Reducing the quoted material to its essence, the argument has 3 parts. First, raising the minimum wage will help the economy and the federal budget by increasing demand and tax revenues, by reducing the amount government pays out in various subsidies, and by strengthening social programs like social security. Second, it will be simpler and less costly than the ungainly patchwork of programs necessitated by poverty-level wages.
Third (and in my opinion most compelling), it will require employers to pay their own workers (and not so incidentally, compete with others in the market on equal footing) rather than depending on taxpayers to subsidize those wages as we do now.
Back when the GOP was a genuinely conservative party, it would have understood–and embraced–these arguments.
Creationism is a religious belief. It can be taught in classes on comparative religion, or in courses on the history of science, but it can’t be taught as science.
Recently, I stumbled on a blog post that says it better than I ever could. The blogger quoted a Congressman who is running for the Senate in Montana–and who clearly has no freaking idea what a scientific theory is— saying “teach students that there are evolutionary theories, there’s intelligent-design theories, and allow the students to make up their minds.”
And presumably they can also decide for themselves whether the earth goes around the sun…or
We can believe that the earth is balanced on the back of a giant space turtle. After we go to space and take pictures that show no turtle there, however, we can no longer “believe” that with any credibility. We don’t (most of us) suggest that the turtle is simply invisible. We don’t (most of us) say that the turtle only exists when nobody is looking at it. We don’t (most of us) suggest that scientists have spirited the turtle away because they don’t want us to know the truth about the giant space turtle, or that they are involved in the lucrative cash business of pretending there are no turtles in places that there are turtles. We don’t (most of us) do that.
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So we’ve got yet another actual maker of our laws and decider of the rules of our civilization saying that the space turtle theory must be taught, because while there is no actual evidence of the space turtle so far, students whose parents believe in the space turtle must not just be accommodated or treated politely, but given public validation, under rule of law.
