Half Changed World

In his quasi-blog* at The Atlantic, James Fallows asked whether anyone can name a more stupid policy that passed with bipartisan support during the last 50 years than the McCain-Clinton proposal for a gas-tax holiday.  His pick from the many submissions he received is the mandates and subsidies for corn-based ethanol.  The full list of popular submissions is worth reading — Fallows notes that while some of them had worse effects than ethanol subsidies, in order to make the short list, a policy had to be obviously bad even without the benefits of hindsight.

The policy that I was surprised not to see on the list is the mortgage interest deduction, the one policy that everyone from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to the American Enterprise Institute agrees is terrible policy.  It’s expensive, regressive, and most people agree that it makes homeownership MORE expensive for the people likely to be on the margin between owning and renting.  I don’t know if it misses the 50 year cut off, or if Fallows’ readers are likely to be in the group that benefits from it, and so are blind to its faults.

What else would you put on the list?

*It’s a quasi-blog because it doesn’t allow comments.  This is clearly Fallows’ choice rather than The Atlantic’s because Yglesias has a real blog on their site.

I took the BoltBus up to NYC and back this weekend, so thought I’d post a review.  This is unsolicited, and they didn’t comp me anything.

Although you can’t tell it from their website, BoltBus is actually run by Greyhound/Trailways.  It’s their attempt to compete with the "Chinatown buses" which have been kicking their behinds over the past few years on the DC-NY and NY-Boston routes.  Like the Chinatown buses, it’s very cheap — I paid $35 round trip, but they’re selling at least one seat on every trip for just $1 — and doesn’t require you to go to the bus terminal.  (The Port Authority isn’t too bad in NYC, but the bus terminal in DC is several blocks from the metro, and not in the best of neighborhoods).

Unlikely the Chintown buses, on BoltBus, the seats are spread out enough to provide decent legroom, there are powerpoints for each pair of seats, and there’s free wi-fi.  There are screens on the buses, but they didn’t show movies on the trips I took, and it was blessedly quiet.  The buses are new and shiny — in fact, the worst problem on my trip was one of the buses was so new that it stunk from the plastics outgassing.

I hate driving long distances, so even when gas was cheap, I’d almost never drive up to NYC by myself.  As a solo traveler, the question for me is whether the cost savings of a bus is worth the inconvenience compared to taking Amtrack.  Two years ago, the last time I took the bus to NYC, I took the bus one way, the train the other.  With these new buses, the "price" I pay in discomfort for taking the cheaper option has gotten a lot smaller.  (Note that I did go up Thursday and return Saturday — I suspect the more crowded Friday and Sunday buses may be less comfortable.)

The bus is almost comfortable enough that I’d consider taking the boys on it, rather than driving as a family.  With the outlets, I could probably hypnotize them with the portable DVD player enough to keep them from being disruptive.  And between the cost of gas, tolls, and parking in NYC, busfare for three or four is somewhat cheaper than driving, even if we don’t get the super-cheap fares.  But the boys are used to traveling by car, and being able to bring their own sleeping bags and suitcases, and I wouldn’t want to deal with hauling all that on and off the bus.

I’ve been at a couple of meetings lately where there’s been discussion about flexible work  — both part-time work, and arrangements where people work full-time, but at flexible hours or locations.  And there’s some interesting conversations about whether this discussion should be framed as about caregiving or not.

The arguments against making this a conversation about caregiving are:

• As long as flexible work is seen as a special privilege or accommodation for a limited population, it will be stigmatized — the mommy track.
• Moreover, special privileges create resentment among those who don’t get them — this is where you hear the stories from childless workers who complain that their colleagues with kids race out the door at 5.30, and assume that they’re always available to work late.
• If we truly believe that business should only care what you achieve, not when or where you do it, this should apply to everyone, regardless of the reason they desire flexibility.

Interestingly, I’ve heard that in the United Kingdom, where there’s a right to request flexible working conditions (although the employer is allowed to say no), employers think that it’s awkward that the right is limited to parents of young children — they’d prefer something broader.

The argument on the other side is that we shouldn’t be afraid to say that caregiving is important.  In the US, we often treat having children as a sort of expensive hobby — something that people do for their own pleasure, and that doesn’t incur any societal obligations.  If it takes up all their time and money, they should have known what they were getting into.  So, I have real misgivings about going down a path that says that it doesn’t matter whether you want time off to care for a child or a sick parent or to train for a triathlon, write a novel, or sleep off your hangover.

I see virtues to both arguments.  What do you think?  Both as to whether you think government should be neutral about caregiving, and which approach is more likely to succeed.

Christine tagged me to come up with a list of five classes that I wish they’d taught (or I’d taken) in high school.  Here’s my list, in no particular order:

1. An economic history of the United States.  It wasn’t until I got to college and took a class on the American Labor Movement that the Jacksonian era and the bank wars made any sense to me.
2. A class in US history that got past World War II.
3. A class in robotics. 
4. A sex ed class that used Cycle Savvy as the text book.
5. Spanish.  I took 6 years of French, but and then a year of college German, but am not fluent in either.  I’d have far more chances to use Spanish.

The most useful classes I’ve taken (at various levels of schooling) are:

1. Typing.  (6th grade — on manual typewriters — I hated every minute of it, and am so glad that they made me take it.)
2. American Government (high school.  Not because of the content, but because the teacher made us write papers that could not be longer than 3 pages, double spaced.)
3. American Labor History (college)
4. Microeconomics (grad school)
5. Statistics (grad school)
6. Group Dynamics (grad school)

The most useless classes I’ve taken are:

1. Drafting (mandatory at my high school)
2. "Energy shop" (You had to take a shop, and didn’t get to choose which one.  The only part I remember is making a wind powered goose ornament)
3. Yiddish (took a term of it in college, mostly because my favorite teacher was teaching it)

I’m not going to tag anyone, but post a comment if you feel like taking this one up.

In honor of Earth Day, I wanted to post about the LED lights that we’ve put into our new kitchen. They’re LR6 lights, from Cree Lighting.  If you walked in, you wouldn’t notice them — and that’s the point.  They look like standard lights, are even more energy efficient than CFLs, don’t contain mercury, and can be dimmed (although they require a digital dimmer). 

So, what’s the downside?  Well, for now they’re somewhat overpriced.  If they last as long as the company claims (on the order of 20 years), they’ll more than pay for themselves, but that assumes that we don’t discount the future stream of savings.  And they’re fairly new products, so no one really knows that they’ll actually last that long.  But we decided they were worth a try.  And they look good enough that we’re probably going to use them in our living room as well.

I was more than a bit nervous about buying these without being able to see what they’d look like in practice.  (Amicus Green has them, but as part of a display with a bunch of other lights, so it’s hard to see what the light looks like.)  So, if you’re in the DC area and you’re considering these lights, feel free to email me if you want to come see them.

From my friends at the Coalition for Human Needs:

On Tax Day, we ought to feel that we’re paying for a government that helps when a recession hits.

Now
we’re in a recession.  The President opposes help to the unemployed and
others facing hardships.  Some in Congress want to do the right thing –
and some are mostly hearing from corporate lobbyists.  Who will prevail?

Call on Monday and Tuesday, April 14-15:  1-800-473-6711*
Tell your Representative and Senators to do more to reverse the recession – by helping those in need.

You can make the difference! Here’s how:

Call 1-800-473-6711* toll-free, and ask for each of your U.S. Senators and your Representative; tell them: 

I am a
constituent of Rep/Sen ___ and I am calling to urge him/her to do more
to reverse the recession.  Economists agree that the best way to boost
the economy is to help those in need.  That’s why he/she should support
extending unemployment insurance, more nutrition and home energy
assistance, and aid to states to prevent harmful cuts in health care
and other services.   

Economists of all stripes agree that the best
way to boost the economy is to put money into the hands of those who
will spend it quickly:  low- and moderate-income people.  But if
Congress only hears from corporate lobbyists, there will be more deals
that ignore the 80,000 who lost jobs and 20,000 who lost their homes last month alone – as well as the millions who are going without because of skyrocketing food and energy prices.

 (For more information: see Towards Shared Recovery, http://www.chn.org/pdf/2008/stimulus4142008.pdf)

At tax time, it’s worth remembering that for 2007 millionaires each
average more than $114,000 for the tax cuts enacted since 2001.
They’re doing okay.  But the bottom half of U.S. families have seen
their income shrink during the same period, and the recession will make
things far worse for those whose incomes are low to middling.  Helping them helps all of us.

Need Help finding your Member’s name?

• Find your Rep. at: www.house.gov.
• For your Senators’ names go to www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

*This
toll-free number is provided courtesy of the American Friends Service
Committee, a Quaker organization which works for peace and social
justice. AFSC welcomes groups to circulate and use the number in
support of non-partisan work for budget priorities that fund human
needs, not war and without linking the alert to a website that solicits
donations or is coordinated and/or publicized with actions used to
support or oppose any party or candidate for public office.

**********************

And here’s the paper my organization put out.

After reading yesterday’s post, my dad emailed me to say that he thought the question of whether young adults are better off than their parents depends mostly on what level of education each generation has attained.  Specifically, he argued that a young adult with a college degree is likely to be better off than her parents if she’s a first generation college student, but not if her parents also went to college.

Let’s look at the possibilities. 

• If your parents went to college, and you went to college, they are probably earning more than you are.  (Obviously, there are exceptions when the parent suffers from a disability, or chose to be a starving artist, or got laid off, or when the kid joined Google or Microsoft at just the right time, but on average, 55 year old college grads earn a lot more than 25 year old college grads.  To be precise, in 2006, the average 25-34 year old with a bachelor’s degree in 2006 earned $40,276 and the average 55-64 year old with bachelor’s degree earned $50,397. 
• I wasn’t convinced that young college graduates were necessarily earning more than their non-graduate parents but I looked up the numbers, and my father is right.  The average 55-64 year old with a high school degree and no college education earned  $29,283 in 2006.  While there are some plumbers and union mechanics who earn good money with just a high school degree, there’s not enough of them to affect the median.
• Young high school graduates are also earning less than their HS-grad parents — the average 25-35 year old with a high school degree and no college earned just $25,0354.
• And, to fill out the options, the HS grad child of college-graduate parents is clearly downwardly mobile.

[Sources PINC-03-part 37 and PINC-03-part 91.  All figures cited are medians.]

My dad’s point was that because the fraction of the population going to college has increased so much, a significant portion of college graduates are from families where their parents didn’t go to college. And they’re doing better than their parents.  At least in terms of income — they also have more college debt. And, as lots of people commented yesterday, their parents probably own a home that has appreciated significantly since they bought it, while in a lot of the country, homeownership is still out of reach for most young people, even those with good incomes.

Also, check out Figure 4 in this report.

In the discussion of Falling Behind, Jennifer commented that people compare themselves not just to what’s around them, but also to what their parents when they were little.

It made me wonder if part of the reason that young adults today — especially those from middle- to upper-class families — feel like they can’t keep up is that their parents waited until they were older, and more established, to have them.  So, you’ve got 20-somethings comparing their lives to what their 50-something or 60-something parents can afford now, rather than to what their parents were able to afford when they were in their twenties.  As Robert Frank suggests, maybe it’s a mistake to learn to tell the difference between good wine and Two Buck Chuck when you’re young, when you can’t afford the good stuff anyway.

Can you see the sidebar on this blog?  And what URL are you using?  I’m not seeing it on www.halfchangedworld.com, but it’s there on elb.typepad.com.  And I don’t understand how they could be showing different things.

Here’s the letter that I just sent to my Senators and Representative:

Dear xxx:

While I am deeply concerned about the current housing and economic situation, I am writing to urge you not to support a massive give-away to the banks and homebuilders who got us into this mess.

In particular, it is outrageous to provide a tax credit to encourage people to buy foreclosed or new homes, thus making it even harder for people who have stayed current on their mortgages to sell their houses.  I also oppose the provisions that would rebate previously paid taxes to those who prospered during the housing boom.

I think the idea of allowing a deduction for housing costs for those who do not itemize their taxes is appealing, but it should be paid for by capping the mortgage interest deduction for houses worth more than $1 million.

As the new jobs numbers show, we are heading into a recession.  Congress should extend unemployment insurance benefits, put more money into WIC and LIHEAP, and temporarily increase the Medicaid match rate to ensure that poor families don’t lose their health coverage.  That would help the people who are suffering the most, not the people who created the problems.

Thank you for your consideration.

***

There are some good things in the bill — some money for community-based actions, some money for financial counseling.  But they’re outweighed by the massive giveaway.  I’d rather no bill than this bill.