Sheila Kennedy – Page 980 – A jaundiced look at the world we live in.

Appropriate Snark

I see where the Superintendent of Schools of a small district in Michigan reacted to draconian cuts to education in that state with a nice piece of snark: He wrote a letter to the editor proposing to turn his schools into prisons, since spending on prisons was protected from the deep cuts imposed on other state functions.

He had a point.

The Governor of Michigan–one of the current crop of crazed right-wing “true believers”–insists that the state needs to cut spending, which it undoubtedly does. But where does he propose to make those cuts? He proposes to reduce K-12 spending by nearly a billion dollars (yes, that’s not a typo–a billion dollars), to significantly reduce spending for universities and community colleges, and to make further cuts in Michigan’s already meager welfare payments. Along with his obedient legislature, he also raised taxes on pensions for seniors.

At the same time, he got the legislature to lower business taxes by $1.8 billion. This isn’t even “class war”–it’s insanity.

I understand there is a recall movement underway. For the sake of the people living in Michigan, I hope it succeeds.

Why Evidence Matters

Steve Benen has an important post up today at Political Animal, discussing the GOP’s recently-unveiled and badly misnamed “Jobs bill.”

As Benen points out, “the jobs agenda, such as it is, is practically a conservative cliche: the GOP wants massive tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, more coastal oil drilling, and huge cuts to public investment. Republicans are confident this will work wonders, just as they were equally confident about the identical agenda in the last decade, and the decade before that, and the decade before that.

Indeed, the most glaring problem with the GOP jobs agenda is that it won’t work, but nearly as painful is the realization that it’s already been tried, over and over again, to no avail. They either haven’t heard the famous axiom about trying failure repeatedly and expecting a different result, or they don’t care.

The agenda is the agenda: tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, cut public investments. Good times and bad, deficit or surplus, war or peace, it just doesn’t matter.”

The entire post is well worth reading.

Way back when I became politically active, I bought into the theory that tax cuts for the wealthy would spur investment, and that investment would create jobs. It made a lot of sense; unfortunately, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that it doesn’t work that way.

The ability to change ones opinion when faced with new evidence is how humans learn and thrive. When people “double down” on beliefs even when faced with facts debunking those beliefs, we call that a delusion.

Comments

Hate to be a Broken Record, but….

This morning, the American Constitution Society blog referenced a recent report from the Associated Press:

“The Associated Press has provided new details about a push by the nation’s largest Tea Party umbrella group to teach the Constitution in public schools using materials from an organization that promotes the Constitution as a divinely inspired document.

As originally reported by Mother Jones, the Tea Party Patriots are encouraging public schools to participate in “Constitution Week” in September by utilizing teaching materials from the National Center for Constitutional Studies, a group that ACS Executive Director Caroline Fredrickson called so outside the mainstream that even the conservative Federalist Society would object to its materials.

Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer participated in a daylong seminar with NCCS last year, and reported:

If its public school curriculum resembles anything like what I witnessed, it has no place in the nation’s classrooms. Among other things, NCCS uses materials written by Skousen suggesting that Anglo-Saxons are descended from a lost tribe of Israel; Skousen claimed this meant the Constitution may have been inspired by God, who intended for America to be a Christian nation. The very same bogus history has been perpetuated by the white supremacist movement.”

When the public schools fail to teach real history–when most “social studies” classes are taught by people hired for their ability to be athletic coaches rather than their ability to teach American history or the constitutional architecture–students are defenseless against this sort of propaganda.

Here’s a proposal for those of you reading this. Ask the next three teenagers you encounter to answer a couple of these questions: what was the Enlightenment? What are checks and balances? What does the Establishment Clause do? How did the 14th Amendment change the Constitution?

My guess is the results of such an experiment wouldn’t be very pretty.

Car Talk

When the federal government decided to bail out Chrysler and GM, I’ll admit I was torn. I am inherently skeptical of “too big to fail,” and I’m convinced that we have way too much corporate welfare. I’m a believer in free enterprise, defined as a genuinely level playing field, where private businesses all play by the same rules, and sink or swim on their own merits. But I also recognized that we were in the midst of a recession that might well have become a depression. The economy was so fragile–and the probable loss of American jobs that would accompany bankruptcy was so massive–that we really didn’t have a choice. I figured the taxpayers would lose a lot of money, but on balance, that would be cheaper than a depression.

I was wrong.

Yesterday, Chrysler repaid the nearly $5.9 billion lent to it by the administration, including fees and interest payments — and it did so six years ahead of schedule. Not only has Chrysler paid us back, but together, GM and Chrysler have added 115,000 new jobs since emerging from reorganization.

It was a gutsy call, and it paid off. But I’m sure the “Party of No” will explain it away, or credit the Bush Administration, just as they’ve tried to do with respect to another gutsy call–taking out Bin Ladin.