Gonna leave a mark

More smack-downs please!

Liberals subsidize the economic fallacies of red state conservatives

It has been well known for some time that liberal states such as my home state of Massachusetts subsidize conservative states such as my original home of Tennessee. The idea bubbled up recently from Aaron Carroll to Paul Krugman to Matthew Yglesias. Krugman explains the graph best, but this point of Yglesias's is key (though badly written):

[H]igh-income people living in low-income states are generally very conservative in their political ideology but probably benefit more from federal income support programs more than they realize. If you own fast food franchises in the Nashville area, for example, you're going to form a self-perception as a self-reliant businessman but the existence of Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit are helping to ensure that your customers have adequate income to sometimes eat at your Taco Bell.

Hard to understand why he didn't say Godfather's Pizza instead of Taco Bell.

Conservatives imagine themselves as heroes in Ayn Rand's fantasy novels, and liberal aid to the poor is one reason they are not confronted with the sheer vanity of their imaginations.

Apologies for my cynicism

Secret Santas are sweeping the nation, paying off the layaway accounts of a few random lucky members of the 99%. Wonderful Christmas time story to warm the cockles of even Scrooge's heart, right?

“It is honestly being driven by people wanting to do a good deed at this time of the year,” said Salima Yala, Kmart’s division vice president for layaway.

Then why are they for the most part only paying off accounts at Kmart? And how does she know exactly?

Oh, sure, we'll start to hear about copycats (and good for them, unless of course they're from a competing HQ in Bentonville). But this smacks of a purely cynical guerrilla marketing campaign. It's brilliant in its way, but at bottom there's a soul-killing ugliness to the willingness to leverage small money into tremendous free media.

If you want to prove that the problem is in my heart, not in the hearts of the secret Santas, find out who called the press. Acts of generosity that happen when no one is looking don't make good copy unless a writer is tipped off.

I'd really like to be wrong about this. But I think it's not even noblesse oblige, instead fakery.

While I'm on the topic, one more thing about layaway: The need for layaway shows how far the middle class has fallen. You only need layaway if you can't get a few hundred dollars in credit. Layaway terms are one-sided - the poor consumer pays and pays and pays and still has to keep returning to the store. This is the world of widespread penury that Republicans want to return us to. So that we'll be more cowed and leave their sponsors an ever larger share of the pie.

What's the word?

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Back in the 1970s, we used to answer, "Johannisburg." Maybe we can bring that good ole apartheid back home (from where?) as the teabaggers want.

Why is this?

There could be lots of maps like this one from the New York Times on food stamp nutritional support:

The now solidly Republican and always conservative South is anti-tax as an article of faith, but it suckles lustily at the teat of the federal government. The liberal states, which not coincidentally are the states with strong educated upper middle classes, subsidize the states whose political heroes so often call us un-American.

So what's the problem? Is it that we're willing to feed your black people?

(This graphic, by the way, is great, an example of how informative Internet journalism could actually be. Click on the thumbnail and play around with the app; there's a lot there to learn.)

Obituary logic

I read obits, not all the time but often enough. Inside their formula, I often find nuggets of lives well lived - or of lives of suffering and woundedness, some of those wounds self-inflicted.

I've read enough to know that sometimes "heart failure" euphemizes suicide. I've read enough - and lived enough - to know that many a fierce battle with cancer ended with a final acquiescence and peace and farewell and sometimes acceleration that for some reason we seldom talk about.

When I started this reading habit maybe twenty years ago, I told myself that I was looking for the poignant or evocative final character sketch, a biography that I might imagine into a novel. I also told myself that I was trying to get a handle on mortality data, on what kills and when in a life death comes.

Those motives were real and not just rationalizations, but I soon noticed that I actually took comfort from the obits - they seldom marked the death of someone like me. I started to look in each obit for the reason that I could distance myself from the dead, the reason that I could rationalize why I still lived and the dead person did not.

Mostly, I was young, and the dead were old.

Most of the men my age who died were outrageously drunk and not wearing their seat belts. But I also read about so many women in their late forties dying of breast cancer that, despite my relative safety, I started to take their deaths personally on behalf of women in my life. AIDS also took many of my age cohort, and the obits of mostly gay men made their tragedy very real for me.

Nowadays, many more of my peers turn up dead of heart attacks, and that is damn sobering, which might explain my continuing elation at recently getting this year's much better cholesterol numbers - the measure of a middle-aged man.

This has all been preamble to an attempt to understand the sheer hatred and lack of human sympathy seen so often on newspaper comment threads and particularly today on the Washington Post's rare story on poor people as human beings, as distinct from the usual story on poor people as social burden and problem.

I understand seeking safety in differences from the victim. Rationalizing away the vulnerabilities we all have and feel is a human universal. Poverty, like dying, is for other people or so we hope, and if we can show the reasons, all the better.

Just as distance from dying helps, distance from poverty helps. I cherish my distance from those thin years when canned beans from my grandfather's burned down factory helped my parents make ends meet. But I don't try to blot that time out of memory.

I have a hard time understanding how strongly people want to blame both the sick and the poor. There's no doubt that many poor people make poor decisions, even from among their dearth of choices. There's a reflex among conservatives that these poor decisions are the whole picture and absolve us of any social responsibility to help. Never mind that lots of affluent people, including me, make lousy economic decisions - we can afford them to a degree that the poor cannot.

CW polluted me, too

Something from Paul Krugman's column today that I didn't know:

L. B. J. declared his “War on Poverty” 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.

That's a forty percent reduction in six years.

Two sides to every story

Every story has two sides. But there's so much to say about this story that makes me sick that I have to say that sometimes those sides are good and evil.

Here in the Christmas season, I'm supposed to be finishing up the regular work of disappointing my family, near and far, and myself and trying to finish my "joyful" shopping. Instead, I'm morose that anyone can defend keeping people in penury this close to bondage.

I'm outraged that anyone like Reggie Brown of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange can utter so much bullshit in support of craven desire to exploit the poor:

• It's "un-American" to form anything that looks like a union.
• It's illegal to try to pressure buyers to force their suppliers to pay a fairer wage, yet it's fine for the Exchange to fine growers who agree.
• The pickers already get $12.50 an hour. (Oh, bullshit!)
• Readers should consider the free transportation to the fields from their American favela.

The quote that encapsulates the whole depravity of Reggie Brown and his tomato cartel, though, is this:

If we weren’t paying a very competitive wage and giving these workers enough money to send to their families in Mexico and Central America, we wouldn’t be able to attract a labor force...

He wants to pay third-world wages. It's his business model.

This is our economy. Brown is competing with Mexican and Brazilian tomatoes, which are picked under third world conditions. If his competitors held slaves, he would want to do so as well.

Can we stop claiming now that we live in a class-free society? Classless, sure...

Update: Now, this is rich. The Exchange has a website, where they claim:

The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is an agricultural cooperative of Florida tomato growers who operate as socially accountable farm employers by participating in comprehensive programs that certify employment, health, housing and safety practices. The industry is strongly committed to supporting long-term solutions that improve the lives of their employees.

I love tomatoes. Now I know what they're fertilizing them with.