Half Changed World

Ok so it's Thursday not Tuesday, but I wanted to post about this book while I still remember the points I wanted to make.  This week's book is Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), by Tom Vanderbilt.  It's an engaging book, about something that most of us do, but generally don't think much about. 

While there's a bunch of different examples in the book, it mostly comes down to two main arguments:

• Things designed to keep us safe while driving (divided highways,  signs, seat belts) mostly have the effect of making us FEEL safe, thereby encouraging us to act in more risky ways.  We're probably more safe when we feel a bit less safe, and thus drive slower and pay more attention.
• There's a huge correlation between risky driving and other risky behaviors.  The people who are mostly likely to speed are least likely to be persuaded to wear a seat belt just because it's the law.

My neighborhood email list has been having endless discussions of traffic calming, with people getting extremely heated about the possibility of speed bumps.  Vanderbilt suggests that the best way to slow people down is to have lots of people walking along the roads, using the median, etc.  And it's certainly true that I slow WAY down when I see the neighborhood kids riding their bikes in the street.   But I'm not real happy about having my kids act as human speed bumps.  (There are no sidewalks in our part of the neighborhood.  And they did in fact come closer than I'd like to getting squashed by a garbage truck while waiting for a school bus the other day.)

So, I thought the book was interesting.  But I'm not quite sure what to do with the information it gave me.

I'm still waiting to find out the details of the conference agreement on the recovery package, but I'm cautiously optimistic.  I don't think it's going to be a magic wand, but it will be a big step forwards.  I won't really relax until it clears the Senate, but what I'm hearing sounds like they made some reasonable choices.

MomsRising sent out an alert to their members on the recovery package, and asked for reports "if you or a family member have lost a job, a house, healthcare, or sleep because of the recession."  Here are some of the responses they've gotten.  It kills me to read them.  It's scary out there.

I installed TurboTax tonight in order to take the first baby steps towards dealing with our taxes.  At the start, they ask you about a number of things that you might have done during the year that affect the questions they'll ask you — things like did you marry, have a baby, move, start a new job. 

One of the questions was "Did you lose a home to foreclosure?" 

I'm pretty sure that they didn't ask that question last year.

Did you know that there are horrific wildfires burning in Australia, with several small towns totally consumed?  Did you know that temperatures in Melbourne have been in the 115-range (Fahrenheit) over the past week?

I wouldn't have known either, except that I have an online friend who lives in Melbourne, and her parents live in Marysville, which is one of the towns that has been devastated.  She's been sitting up all night, posting reports. The last she heard, their house was one of the few still standing and the Red Cross reported that they had checked in.

I went looking on the Post and Times websites for more news, and all they're carrying is the AP and Reuters stories, although the Times does have a slideshow of the fires.
On the Australian newspaper's sites, it's the top story of course.

Just makes me think about how many things like this happen every day around the world, and that they don't qualify as news unless they're nearby, or unless we happen to know someone in the middle.  My thoughts and prayers go out tonight to all those who are in danger, or waiting for word from their loved ones, wherever they may be.

My blogging time tonight got consumed by putting together the PTA newsletter. 

I'm not sure whether anyone reads the newsletter, as most of the content is repeated by single-topic flyers included in the take-home folders.  But it's a chance to provide a bit more advance notice of events and to thank the volunteers who make everything happen.

I picked this job to volunteer for because it's easy to do on my own schedule.  But I don't feel like it's allowed me to get to know as many people as I'd like, since I get all the info for it by email.  Volunteering at the election day bakesale was much better for that.

The hot topic right now is the school schedules.  For years, a group of parents have been campaigning to rejigger the schedule so that the high school students don't have to get up so early.  There's a bunch of research that says that teens really are biologically wired to stay up late.  But, the same buses do multiple routes a day, so if the high schools start later, most of the elementary schools will start earlier.

I don't really personally mind if the school starts at 7.50 (as would happen under the proposed plan).  The school is right on my way to work, so I'd probably drop the boys off in the morning on my way out, rather than having them waiting for the bus at the crack of dawn.  Before we moved, D's school started at 8 am. 

But the principal is really concerned about it.  The worries that she expressed are:

• older kids not being home in the afternoon to watch younger kids
• teachers who live a long way out not being able to make it in on time and so transferring to other schools
• overall, need to provide coverage for a longer day (since it will start earlier but aftercare will have to run just as late).

I don't really know how this will play out.

In somewhat-related political news, Arne Duncan says he's going to send his daughter to public school, but in Arlington, not DC.

Obama signed the SCHIP reauthorization today.  About 4 million more kids will have health insurance as a result.  Yes, it matters who is in the White House.

I think Robert Reich got it dead on in describing the popular anger about Daschle's nonpayment of his taxes. 

I think this is right — I'm just as horrified by the $5 million Daschle earned in two years as an "advisor" and "rainmaker," as by the tax issues.

I'm not quite sure why Geithner got away with it and Daschle didn't.  In the abstract, I'd be more worried about the Secretary of Treasury not paying all his taxes than I would about the Secretary of HHS.   Maybe because Congress was convinced that the stock market would collapse if they didn't approve Geithner right away.  Maybe because someone who does his own taxes with TurboTax gets more sympathy than someone whose accountant is fudging things.  (Daschle supposedly asked his accountant in JUNE if he should be reporting the car service as income — it shouldn't have taken more than a week for the accountant to say of course — unless the question he asked is "can you get away with this?" rather than "what is legal?")  Maybe because it's hard to be sympathetic for someone who owes more in unpaid taxes than most people make in a year.  Or maybe he just had bad timing.

Some different points of view from blogs I read:

• Becca at Not Quite Sure confesses her own tax sins.
• Martin Manley at Jam Side Down tells the story of his vetting and worries that we're disqualifying good candidates for "jaywalking."

I agree that Killefer's error was pretty minor, and shouldn't have disqualified her.  I have trouble swallowing Daschle's multiple errors as just as trivial.

The New York Times ran a front-page story today about the failure of the welfare rolls to increase even as the economy tanks.  It's by Jason DeParle, who covered welfare reform for the Times in the 1990s, and wrote the best book there is on the subject: American Dream, and I think he got it just about right. There are some states with significant percentage increases in their caseloads, to be sure, but the base is so low at this point that the absolute numbers of new cases is pretty small.  And the two states with the highest unemployment rates — Michigan and Rhode Island — have experienced large decreases in the number of families receiving welfare.  Frankly, it scares me.

The article is currently #9 on the Times list of most emailed articles, and it received 171 comments on their website before the Times cut it off.  (I didn't know that the Times cut off comments on their articles… I wonder if this is based on a time limit, a number of comments, or a subjective judgment of the quality of the discussion.  Actually, the comments are far more balanced and reasonable than I would have guessed.)

As the article notes, there are some provisions in the recovery bill that provide incentives to states to let more people receive assistance.  So far, they haven't received much attention, and that's probably a good thing politically.  They're pretty small dollars in the scheme of the bill (although I'd have said the same thing about the family planning provisions, and that didn't protect them).  I think it's really key that Ron Haskins, who was the lead Republican staffer for the Ways and Means Committee during welfare reform, was willing to be quoted in the article that he thinks caseloads ought to be rising:

Even some of the program’s staunchest defenders are alarmed.

“There
is ample reason to be concerned here,” said Ron Haskins, a former
Republican Congressional aide who helped write the 1996 law overhauling
the welfare system. “The overall structure is not working the way it
was designed to work. We would expect, just on the face it, that when a
deep recession happens, people could go back on welfare.”

“When
we started this, Democratic and Republican governors alike said, ‘We
know what’s best for our state; we’re not going to let people
starve,’ ” said Mr. Haskins, who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution
in Washington. “And now that the chips are down, and unemployment is
going up, most states are not doing enough to help families get back on
the rolls.”

That provides a LOT of political cover to Republicans who don't want to do anything that can be seen as undoing welfare reform.

That said, I don't think it helps things when progressives refer to the bailout as "corporate welfare."  I think the term inherently suggests that welfare is a bad thing.

I was shocked by how thin today's Washington Post was.  The Book Review section, which is ending as a stand-alone section in a few weeks, had essentially no ads.  The car ads were a single folded sheet, so 4 pages.  The help wanted section was a sheet and a half, 6 pages.  I don't see how they can survive like this.

I guess I'm one of the people responsible for the collapse of print newspapers.  I subscribe to the Sunday Post only, read both the Post and the NY Times online.  (We also get hard copies of both, plus the Wall Street Journal, at work, but I usually wind up reading online anyway.  It looks more like I'm goofing off when I'm reading in the lunch room than when I'm in front of the computer.)

• Good bye Rod, and good riddance.

• I was pleased to hear Obama talking about the outrageousness of Wall Street bonuses.  I do think the bully pulpit can make a difference.

• Tuesday is a special election, to choose a new chair of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors, replacing Gerry Connolly who is now in Congress.  Special elections can be crazy, because turnout is generally low and so small groups can affect the results.  Fairfax county's budget is probably bigger than several states.  I strongly support Sharon Bulova, as does the Washington Post. Vote Tuesday, Feb 3, 6 am to 7 pm, at your regular polling place.

• I received a long phone survey tonight that led me to the definite conclusion that Kaye Kory (who represents this district in the Fairfax school board) is considering challenging Delegate Bob Hull in the primary.  A quick google search found that both Not Larry Sabato and the Falls Church News think she is running against him.  Then again, NLS thought she was running two years ago.  I told the pollster that I didn't know which one I'd support.  I have no idea what, if any, policy differences there are between them.

• Still don't know who I'm supporting for Governor.