Category: Rants

Boy, you can't open the paper these days without seeing something about how irrevocably fucked California's finances are. With a budget deficit approaching a staggering $40 billion dollars, it's worth noting that not only is their deficit the biggest in the country in absolute terms but also as a proportion of state GDP. That's pretty impressive given that California's economy is bigger than all but a handful of countries.

In my line of work, "Raiding the UCs" is a very real phenomenon. Faculty have seen salaries slashed by 20% (with talk of more cuts to come) while students have experienced dramatic tuition hikes – although it's fair to note that in-state tuition before the hikes was far lower than in most states. The recent cuts come on the tail end of a 15 year trend that has seen the university system's share of the state budget halved. With too many obligations and not enough money, it would make sense that cuts to a vital sector like education would be indicative of cuts across the board.

Oh.

Lost in the budget debate is the fact that California spends nearly 10% of its annual budget on the Department of Corrections. Eight billion dollars. Let's see that with the zeroes: $8,000,000,000. This is, of course, in addition to other money spent on law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Such figures look reasonable only in comparison to a trainwreck like Michigan, where a mind-blowing 22% of the state budget is spent on warehousing the poor in prisons.

We can re-hash all the usual, obvious, and valid culprits – "guideline" sentencing, mandatory minimums, three strikes, a vast social underclass deriving minimal benefit from the state's aggregate wealth – but we'd say nothing new.
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The more important questions is how prison systems, and California's in particular, can absorb the coming increase in crime concomitant with an extended period of double digit unemployment. At a time when every agency needs to get cheaper, the CDC must continue to get bigger (and inevitably costlier) to provide a convenient dumping ground for society's expendables.

This problem is fascinating because like the Federal budget there is no reasonable move that doesn't make the situation worse. California can start paroling more people.
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With no jobs available even for Californians with clean criminal backgrounds, we can imagine how few ex-inmates will find an "honest" living and how high the rate of recidivism will be. It can adopt different sentencing guidelines, which is politically unlikely and will provide only gradual long-term relief.
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They can simply stop arresting and/or charging so many people, but that too is politically infeasible and may ultimately lead to increased crime levels. They can, as publications as mainstream as Time have noted, formally surrender in the War on Drugs and legalize weed. I will believe that when I see it (although I don't entirely discount it as the budget situation gets progressively more desperate). They could simply slash the budget, which may not be realistic given the high fixed costs of the system and the current levels of overcrowding/understaffing.

Spending twice as much on prisons as higher education should prompt some soul searching.
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I won't hold my breath; in all likelihood the status quo will be maintained and the share of the budget devoted to corrections will continue to increase. Devoting one of every ten tax dollars to locking up the poor is understood as the cost of doing business in a state and society that choose to solve the problem of a persistent underclass the same way it deals with trash; that is, by collecting it in cities and shipping it out to the middle of nowhere to be buried under a mountain of other garbage, never to be seen or thought of again.

Mike and many others have commented on the watered-down Senate version of the Consumer Financial Protection Act – does anything come out of the Senate unworthy of the adjective "watered-down"? – courtesy of Chris Dodd. Krugman commented that no regulation at all is preferable to something that creates the appearance of regulation but accomplishes nothing. This legislation is representative of, well, the entirety of the post-Election 2008 period. As I expected the Great Savior and his colleagues in Congress have been unable or unwilling to do anything except cut taxes (again), hold some hearings to no effect, and hand out money to banking conglomerates.

Policy preferences aside, the most disturbing aspect of this is how completely disillusioned the millions of people caught up in Obamania must be. Yet another generation is broadsided by the reality of our political system and the functional plutocracy in which we live. Another vast segment of the population will respond to politics with a shrug and, "It doesn't matter." And they will largely be right, of course. It is difficult to blame Obama, though. His election is just the latest in a long list of events we've tried to turn into the Great Collective Victory we've been seeking since the end of World War II.

Robert Putnam made himself famous arguing, with considerable empirical support, that the WWII generation was oriented toward society differently than generations that followed. The catalyst was the great national coming-together (or at least the believable myth thereof) that defined America during the War, the overwhelming focus on a single goal that we actually accomplished. Everybody felt like they pitched in and everyone basked in the collective glory of victory. Hey, remember when we all banded together and kicked Hitler's ass?
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Me too. That sure was awesome.

It is safe to say that the ensuing 70 years have been a continuous effort to re-create that experience. For conservatives this has manifested itself in a procession of increasingly silly and costly military conflicts. After a frustrating draw in Korea the national crisis of masculinity ("Aren't we a bunch of pussies if we don't have a big war like Dad did? What kind of men will we be without our own War Stories and VE Day?
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") drove Baby Boomers into the Vietnam War, which was as successful as it was glorious. By the 1980s they were so desperate that they were reduced to declaring the invasion of Grenada a huge military victory in an effort to salve their wounded sense of self. We followed that with a drubbing of Iraq in 1991 – replete with Hussein=Hitler imagery in spades – that ultimately accomplished nothing except to make lard-assed suburban white guys feel better about themselves. But it didn't even do that. Deep down, no matter how hard one squints it's not possible to make Grenada look like Normandy or Iraq like Nazi Germany.

Liberals, on the other hand, have attempted to find the Great Collective Victory in a series of "wars" on social ills – racial inequality, poverty, pollution, and so on. They also tried to rally behind a peace movement that failed to impact the waste of blood and money in Vietnam. They've thrown themselves into a series of increasingly futile political saviors – presidential candidates like McGovern, Mondale, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and countless people in lower offices – to no effect.

That changed in 2008. Obama's election over the forces of Bush-era evil was the great collective We Did It!

moment. Everyone pitched in an shared in the elation of victory. It didn't take long for reality to settle in.

It's unnecessary to state how patently ridiculous the idea of separate "collective" victories based on ideology.

Even in the face of an economic crisis that could very well qualify as the second Great Depression when all is said and done we are unable to do anything but divide ourselves and argue. Lacking political leadership there's no cause behind which we can unite except for nearly unanimous agreement that recessions are Bad and we sure wish someone could do something about it. So we'll continue grasping at straws, squinting, and trying to convince ourselves that we have collectively slain evil like our grandparents did back in dubya-dubya two. And once reality sets in and our delusions of having defeated the Enemy fade, one generation after another will wander away a little more disillusioned than the last. Absent victory we will do as losers always do, growing bitter, angry, and unwilling to risk experiencing defeat again.

In news that can't be interpreted independently of my arrival just a few short months ago, Georgia is the latest state to reach budgetary armaggedon. Having already gotten $265 million in rather draconian cuts out of the state university system, the state legislature yelled "Surprise!" and flying drop-kicked us in the nuts by demanding $300 million more. Just to be clear, that's over half a billion in cuts from higher education in a state that is one city away from being Mississippi. This is going to necessitate closing entire campuses, eliminating entire departments, and firing tenured faculty – not to mention jacking up tuition, although part of the problem is that half of our students aren't paying anything anyway (why make white people in the suburbs pay tuition when we can send their kids to college for free with money taken from poor people?)

The last round of cuts hurt, bringing furloughs, layoffs, and paycuts. This round will be fatal, especially for people like me who are untenured and easy to fire. These decisions are always made with the maximum of highly public hand-wringing and boilerplate monologues about how we had to "make some really tough choices" (the judges would also accept "tightening our belts" or "making sacrifices" for full credit).

This is at best a serious misrepresentation of the political choices being made and at worst, not to mention more likely, it is a bald-faced lie. There is nothing remotely "tough" about the choices Georgia and the other states in similar financial predicaments are making.
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This is, by any reasonable understanding of the motives and incentives of elected legislators, the easy way out. Raising taxes would be a tough choice. Making in-state students pay tuition (or at least pay a few tax dollars into HOPE rather than funding it solely out of the Lotto) would be tough.
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Cutting money-losing athletic departments from universities would be almost suicidal in this state.

The state legislature is doing none of these things; they barely have the balls to whisper them in private let alone propose or vote on them. Instead they choose to beat up on the schools, gut public transportation, and eliminate services that mostly benefit the poor. In the context of modern American politics this is the very definition of the easy way out.
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Aside from disagreeing with this course of action ideologically and politically, I resent the phony emotional agony with which our elected officials make such easy and expedient decisions. What I would like to hear is one legislator saying "Hey, in this hillbilly backwater we don't dare touch taxes.
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But our dedicated base of rubes will be perfectly happy to see us hack away at fancy book learnin' and the buses that poor Negroes use in Atlanta." It makes no difference in the practical outcome, of course, but I prefer to hear some honest commentary while I'm getting fucked.

When you shop, you automatically associate low price with quality, right? I mean, the least expensive car must be the best one. Those $1.99 dinners on the Long John Silver's commercials…there's no way they could taste like Tucker Carlson's asshole or anything. I bet they're delicious and good for you. The "we keep you legal for less!" insurance companies probably provide red carpet service when you get in an accident. When you get dragged into court you peruse the phone book for the lawyer who promises to take any case for $99, right? When you're looking for someplace to move, you naturally gravitate toward the "low cost of living" in Detroit or Beaumont, Texas. The $150 per course online college must kick Yale's ass all over the place. Cheaper is always better.

In reality, with the occasional pleasant exception cheap usually equals shit.

Yet we as a country are obsessed with it. Cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. Who cares what Wal-Mart does to suppliers and who cares what's in the food – just make it cheap. Many of us are forced into this mindset by a lack of resources; the rest of us are simply obsessed with paying less and less so we can buy more and more. This works out well given that the Cato Institute wet dream that has been the last three decades of our economic history – deregulation and privatization as far as the eye can see – serves no purpose but to make everything cheaper, consequences be damned.

I can't strongly enough recommend the most recent Frontline, "Flying Cheap" (full episode online for free; thanks, socialist public television!). My unhealthy interest in the airline industry means that I wasn't entirely unaware of the problems with subcontracting and "regional" carriers, but it is jarring to see the evidence laid out so methodically. If you fly regularly you're familiar with this drill, even though you may not realize it. Scan the fine print on your ticket and you're likely to see "Operated by…" and a name you don't recognize under the name of the airline that sold you the ticket. The major carriers only really operate flights on major routes and, thanks to deregulation and an indifferent FAA, they contract feeder routes out to rinky-dink commuter airlines flying smaller planes and employing inexperienced pilots who make less than the average bus driver.
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The crash of Continental 3407 – a flight actually operated by something called "Colgan Air" on contract from Continental – brought some of these problems into the spotlight, but the public's attention span is short and the relationship between the FAA and the industry is a textbook case of regulatory capture. Without regulation, routes are subcontracted under terms that seem designed to cause accidents. Regional carriers are paid a flat fee per route, which encourages corner-cutting on maintenance and labor costs. They are not paid at all unless a route is completed, encouraging a cowboy attitude toward flying in severe weather. Maintenance records are falsified with impunity. Novice pilots are on duty for 16 hour shifts flying planes on which they haven't trained. The crash of Flight 3407, for example, was caused by a pilot who hadn't trained on the Q400 pushing the rudder the wrong way in reaction to a stall. Then the First Officer raised the flaps – during a stall – and sent the plane into the ground. That's what $19,000 per year to work 80 hours per week will get you. It must be a coincidence that the last 8 fatal air accidents in the US were on regional carriers.

I love Frontline because unlike the mainstream media they treat "industry representatives" and lobbyists with the disgust due a class of people with a private section reserved in hell. The soul-crushing part is realizing just how little difference there is between the lobbyists and the people who are supposed to be regulating them. You know, enforcing safety regulations and other inconvenient shit like that.

If you watch the episode you'll be treated to the Bush-era FAA chief defending a self-policing policy that allowed airlines to report their own safety violations rather than be inspected by claiming, "Who would know more about the day-to-day safety problems airlines encounter than the airlines themselves?" And thus a Daily Show punchline became the law that was supposed to protect us.

The best part, of course, is that you don't have a choice – only Southwest refuses to use regional feeders, and they have their own maintenance issues – and the industry goes to great lengths to conceal this information. Free Markets may be the gospel of the right, but one of the necessary preconditions, full information, attracts considerably less enthusiasm.
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Your ticket says Delta or United even though your flight is actually on Pinnacle or Colgan or Two Guys and a Turboprop Air. There is no sign on the plane letting you know that your pilot is 23, has less than 500 hours in the air, has already flown 6 legs that day, and makes about $1200 monthly for his 80 hour weeks. The ticket does not state "We don't get paid unless we take off and land, so we'll pretty much fly you into Hurricane Camille." The captain does not announce on the intercom that the plane has been overloaded with cargo and is probably too heavy to climb. There is no big red X painted on all of the parts that need to be replaced but aren't.

This is what happens when regulatory agencies consider the people who they are supposed regulate to be their clients. This is the logical end result of the laissez faire attitude we have adopted toward…oh, everything. The only surprising thing is that the accident rate is so low.

But gee, look at those low fares.

It makes my head spin to think that I have already been teaching long enough to tell this tale, but…

In 2004 I taught my very first undergraduate course, 16 weeks on presidential elections for 90 students. Based on my own belief that the amount of money in presidential elections is increasing exponentially rather than linearly – essentially doubling every four years rather than a steady increase on the order of 10% annually – I promised the students that they would see a half-billion dollar election in 2004. To say they were incredulous would be an understatement; they wrote me off as either a complete idiot or a tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist with some curious ideas about what made the World Trade Center collapse. The class ended before the FEC data were finalized, but the combined Kerry (5 million) and Bush (2 million) campaigns fell within millimeters of the half-billion figure.

And that was merely the official, on-the-books "hard money" raised and spent by the campaigns themselves. Hundreds of millions more were spent by 527 groups, the DNC/RNC, unsuccessful presidential candidates, and so on.
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Ed 1, credulity 0. For the next several years in a variety of courses I promised groups of skeptical students that we would see a billion dollar election in 2008 (major party nominees' campaigns only) with 0 million left over for the primary losers and non-campaign spending.
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I guessed low.

In 2008 we had a half-billion dollar primary and a general election that saw the Obama campaign raise $58 per second for the entire month of October. Obama raised 5 million, McCain a "mere" 0 million.

Mitt Romney spent $107 million and didn't make it out of February. Rudy Giuliani spent $58 million and didn't make it out of Florida. The RNC threw another $120 million onto McCain's sinking ship. Non-campaign groups poured in more. It was, by almost any account, obscene. We even had a burst of passion for reform from conservatives (oddly enough it came when they were outspent for the first time since reliable records became available).

Now in the wake of Citizens United vs. FEC plenty has been said about the folly of corporate personhood and the opened floodgates courtesy of the patriotic, non-activist majority on the Supreme Court. There appears to be widespread consensus that this is a bad thing. This is all correct, of course, but here is the thing: you have no idea how fucking ridiculous this is going to get in 2012. We will look back on 2008 as a simpler time.

A decent guess is impossible to generate since we are in uncharted waters from this point forward. An obvious guess would be another 100% increase; I think that will be a baseline. The campaigns themselves will double the $1.5 billion spent by all contenders in 2008. How much will corporate groups – not to mention various other tax code loophole groups – toss on the fire? Another $3 billion seems like a reasonable guess, equal to the amount that the candidates spend on the books. I think that's an understatement. $10 billion? $20 billion? More? It's not out of the question. I could just be a pessimist, but I think we are in for something so grotesque and ridiculous that we'll scarcely be able to grasp it. In short, we could be in for an election so obscenely expensive that it could shock us into real reform.

But I wouldn't count on it.

Like many people in their thirties, I consider age 31 an appropriate time to do some reflection on my station in life.
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Personal goals and feelings aside, one thing that strikes me is how completely useless I am to the economy.

Our post-industrial economy, as I and people much smarter than me have pointed out continuously, is based entirely on consumer spending.
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The negative trade balance "knowledge and services" economy exports nothing of interest to the rest of the world but manufacturing jobs and Treasury debt. Our economy hums along when people spend money like drunken sailors and comes to a screeching halt when we can't or won't. This has always been the case to some extent in America, but the recent economic troubles have placed this reality in the spotlight. I don't have to look very hard to figure out why recovery is nowhere in sight.
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I'm 31. According to the American Dream, I am supposed to have some small kids, a house, two Fords, a down payment on a boat, and two vacations per year. In non-1950s reality, I have been renting for 13 years and driving the same car for 11. I haven't been on a vacation in three years (and that was a car camping trip which cost about $200). I go out to eat maybe twice weekly, see around one movie per month, and buy a new 9 laptop every 18 months when the previous one falls prey to the high quality of its Taiwanese components.
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Maybe the economy would be better if more people joined me in not buying things that we can't afford. But the reality is that these are the kinds of major purchases that oil the gears of our economy.

All of us – whether we buy nothing or buy what we can't afford – face the same fundamental problem: we simply lack anything resembling a stable career. Or we have a stable job that pays dick. Like so many industries, my field is slowly but decisively moving toward a no job security, no benefits "temp" model. We call them adjuncts, VAPs, Lecturers, and other euphemisms but it all means the same thing: at-will employment on a year-to-year basis for about $25-$30,000. It's far from poverty wages for my childless ass; I lack none of life's essentials. But this is pretty much it for me, the full extent to which the economy is going to benefit from my existence. I have no reasonable expectation of ever being able to buy a home (perhaps I could scrape together a down payment by 40, at which point a 30 year mortgage would basically mean I'd be buying my own coffin). Liz and I talk about going on a honeymoon with the wistfulness one usually reserves for phrases like "I want to walk on the moon someday." I might be able to swing a new car in five or ten more years.

The moral of the story could simply be that I am a big loser or that I'm simply forgoing middle-class spending rituals that are wholly superfluous. But I don't believe the situation I describe here is exceptional; what percentage of 30-somethings would fit this description? Our parents' generation decided to cash out ("If we ship all the jobs overseas our IRAs will go through the roof! And then all of our kids will be lawyers, or something!") and it's not a mystery why we are floundering in the present and for the foreseeable future. I read a lot about our economic troubles, even the stuff I don't understand, but I really needn't look far to figure out why automakers are on life support and home prices are cratering. Sure, there are macro-level explanations – asset price bubbles and so forth – but we might do well to give in to the seductive simplicity of reasons like "We can't afford this shit anymore."

Game theory is but one of the many things at which I am no good. But it's all I can think about when I look at something like this:

This graphic from the Washington Post is oversimplified but illustrates the basic dilemma of modern American politics. For an honors class I am teaching this semester, the class project is to balance the budget. While I'll let the class feel their way through the process without any commentary from me, when the President or Congress sits down and looks at the budget the ground rules are pretty clear.

But aside from that, have at it! The only way to "win" this game from the standpoint of a politician who wants to keep his or her job is…to not play. In practice, they nibble at the margins ("Let's freeze discretionary non-military spending and save $100 billion over 4 years!") and print more money. They do the latter because while deficits are unpopular it is the least damaging choice.
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The class, to my expectant horror, to a person decided that the first thing we need to do is cut taxes. As I am in Georgia and these are 18 year old freshmen this is hardly a surprise. I assume they have been raised on an ideological diet of supply side economics and Glenn Beck.

But more to the point, this is no different than Congress's response to the problem over the last three decades. Start with cutting taxes, say some shit about cutting spending, and borrow once we realize that nobody actually wants anything cut.

Cutting taxes is the knee-jerk reaction to all problems economic because it is the only move that elected officials can make without raising howls of blood-curdling rage from the public. When one realizes that only one course of action is politically expedient, it is not difficult to talk oneself into a bunch of half-assed rationalizations – "Cutting business taxes will spur economic growth!" or "Cutting taxes means people will invest more!" Humans are outstanding at convincing themselves that the easiest and/or only course of action also happens to be the best. So while some elected officials are motivated by ideological fondness for tax cuts or clientelism for their plutocratic backers, the majority of them (especially Democrats) go for tax cut after tax cut because they lack a plausible alternative.

The other alternatives are raising taxes or cutting a meaningful amount of spending (not trimming "earmarks" for show to the delight of teabagging rubes). Both would require a person with considerable political power telling the public to grow the fuck up and make some tough choices. We are a nation of ancestor worshippers in love with our own tales of sacrifice – how we marched through the snow to beat the hated Redcoats, tightened our belts to survive the Depression, or buckled down to arm the world and win WWII on our own. Our bold, self-congratulatory talk belies the fact that we appear completely incapable of actually making decisions that involve anything short of immediate personal gratification. The America we live in demanded tax cuts during a war – and got them. We couldn't tighten our belts if our lives depended on it. If Congress asked the country to make sacrifices we'd stare at them with the bewilderment reserved for watching a speech delivered in Mandarin Chinese.

I'm reminded of the apocryphal tale of Henry Ford promising that consumers could have a car in any color they desired as long as it was black. We elect people with the explicit understanding that we will follow them anywhere as long as it involves cutting our taxes and not touching our cherished military and entitlement programs. And then we wonder why every solution, from a freshman political science class up to the White House and Federal Reserve, sounds remarkably familiar.