About 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.

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Does “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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Is Justice Scalia Senile?

The legal community has been buzzing since Justice Scalia issued one of his dissents last Tuesday.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s factual error has been called “unprecedented” by legal experts. As Talking Points Memo noted,

It’s common for the Supreme Court to make typographical corrections and insubstantial edits to a decision after its release. But it’s exceedingly rare to see a factual error that helps form the basis for an opinion. Legal experts say Scalia’s mistake appears to be wholly unprecedented in that it involves a justice flatly misstating core facts from one of his own prior opinions…

Scalia was dissenting from a 6-2 decision upholding the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate cross-state coal pollution. To help back up his judgment, he cited a 9-0 opinion he wrote in 2001 called Whitman v. American Trucking Association. But the EPA’s stance in that case was the exact opposite of what Scalia said it was in Tuesday’s opinion.

Scalia has been a polarizing figure in the legal community, often criticized for using his obvious brilliance to twist precedent and law in order to get his preferred result. Critics note that his professed “originalism” is employed very selectively in service of his ideological preferences. Tuesday’s error, however, is of an entirely different order.

And that raises some eyebrows–and questions.

Where were his law clerks? Didn’t they alert him to the error? How could he misstate facts from a decision that he himself had written —and not just misstate some peripheral matters, but totally mischaracterize the parties basic positions?

Scalia has become more irascible in recent years; more contemptuous of longstanding Court rules and dismissive of the ethical guidelines that apply to others in the judiciary. This latest behavior raises a troubling question: is the Justice getting senile? And if so, what–if anything–can we do about it?

When the Court was first established, lifespans were shorter.  The average tenure of a Supreme Court Justice through 1970 was 14.9 years. Among those who’ve retired since 1970, it has jumped to 26.1 years.

Maybe we should consider a 20 year term for Justices. Long enough to shield them from political pressure, but not long enough to risk having them serve well into their dotage.

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Documenting Shameful Behavior

A few months ago, I got a call from a young man who wanted to interview me about Indianapolis’ homeless problem. Why me? He had interviewed service providers, police officers and others involved with Indianapolis’ homeless on a day-to-day basis, but was looking for someone who could address the policy choices involved. I said, sure, come on over.

In due course, three young men came over with camera and other gear, and we talked about the city’s recent forced removal of a “tent city,” the fact that there is nowhere for homeless people to go for anything other than short-term (10 day) shelter, and–especially–the fact that Indianapolis (unlike other cities our size) budgets no public money to address homelessness.

They wanted to know why the city can find dollars to support sports teams, to subsidize development projects and even to build a cricket field, but somehow cannot find resources to help  people dealing with the loss of their jobs and homes–not to mention those with mental health problems. They wanted to know why these vulnerable people were ignored until someone complained of a “camp” at which time they were forcibly removed, their few meager possessions trashed, and they were ordered to go…somewhere else.

And they wanted to know why Mayor Ballard refused to talk to them.

I didn’t have very satisfactory answers to those questions.

The truth of the matter–as we all know–is that the political system responds to people who have “voice,” people who can  volunteer or contribute to campaigns, people who “know people,” who can have dinner or drinks with elected officials, and who can otherwise make their policy preferences known.

The trio left, and I didn’t hear anything more until a couple of days ago. They’d finished the documentary, Uncharted: The Truth Behind Homelessness and invited me to see it. Despite their youth, the product was impressive. Good production values, a thorough and even-handed treatment of the issues involved, and a genuinely gripping story.

Don’t take my word for it, though–watch the trailer, and then buy tickets to the first showing, at 2:30, at the IUPUI Campus Center on Saturday, May 31st. I plan to attend, even though I’ve seen it once.

Perhaps this will spark a conversation that Indianapolis needs to have.

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Parity Would Be Nice….

A friend recently sent me some figures that put the rhetoric about the 1% and the 99% into rather stark perspective.

Big business is once again doing well. Among the nation’s top 500 companies, corporate profits in 2013 averaged $41,249 per employee. That was 38 percent higher than the profit level in 2008, so the Great Recession is evidently over–at least, for those enterprises. Those who run the companies are also doing nicely, thank you very much: CEOs at companies listed in the S&P 500 took home paychecks that were 331 times the pay of the average American worker last year — and 774 times the take-home of minimum-wage workers.

If the minimum wage had just kept pace with income gains enjoyed by the top 1% since 1968–that is, if there had simply been parity in the rate of increase–minimum-wage workers would now be making $31.45 per hour.

What was that old economic premise/promise? A rising tide lifts all boats?

Evidently, the tide has been very selective….

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