Half Changed World

It is 10:43.  I have a pile of clean clothes to put away, a load of laundry in the washer, and one in the dryer, and a sink full of pantyhose soaking.  I have a pot of beef stew and a pot of red lentil-chickpea soup simmering on the stove.  I have played "runaway dinner" with N and read to D about opals, amber and pearls (from Ranger Rick), and then showed both boys my jewelry collection.  And I posted pictures of our kitchen on the house blog.

(And before you ask why T isn’t doing some of this, so far this week he’s painted the living and dining rooms, repaired the dryer, and visited a kitchen design center.  In addition to the usual chasing after the boys, driving them around, stopping them from killing each other, etc.)

I’ve discovered that if you google "thanksgiving poems" you get a bunch of truly awful poetry. So here’s my attempt to rectify the matter.

• My favorite remains Raymond Carver’s Gravy, which I posted two years ago.
• I also like Marge Piercy’s The Art of Blessing the Day.
• Here’s a very non-traditional choice for a Thanksgiving poem, by Louise Gluck, chosen by Annik Stahl.

May you have a Thanksgiving day full of warm thoughts and good smells.

This week’s book is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz.  It’s gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews and deservingly so.  It’s funny, smart, educational (the footnotes provide a capsule review of 20th century Dominican history), profane, and tender.   

Ten years ago, my parents gave me as a Hanukkah present Diaz’s first book, Drown, a collection of short stories.  I know that I thought they were good, but I can’t quite remember anything that happened in any of them.  They were New Yorker-type short stories, albeit with a working-class Dominican flavor, full of what Michael Chabon describes in his afterward to Gentlemen of the Road* as "the fates of contemporary short-story characters– disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace."  The Publisher’s Weekly review of Drown quoted on the Amazon page refers to "Diaz’s restrained prose."

Well, Diaz’s prose in Oscar Wao is anything but restrained.  It gleefully jumps from English to Spanish and back in the course of a sentence, nimbly weaving in references to science fiction, comic books, and Oscar Wilde.  And his characters suffer very non-New Yorker-ish fates — torture, imprisonment, a suicide attempt, kidnappings.  And in spite of all that, it’s still a fun read, mostly due to that irrepressible narrative voice.

Is the book perfect?  No.  It doesn’t quite deliver as much as it promises (but it promises more than most).  I would have liked more emphasis on Oscar and his sister, and even their mother in the present day, and a little less on his mother as a young girl.  But I’d definitely recommend it.

* Gentlemen of the Road, on the other hand, was quite the disappointment.  I love the idea of Jews with Swords, but there’s nothing in the book that makes you know that the characters are Jewish other than Chabon’s statement that they are.  By contrast, in The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, he really thought through what a mid-twentieth-century Eastern European Jewish culture would look like transplanted to Alaska.

From the Center for American Progress, a set of ads on what it means to be progressive.  The ones that play off of the Mac vs. PC are funny, but this one gives me the shivers. 

Since I highlighted Hillary Clinton’s proposals on work-family issues last month, I feel like it’s only fair to point out that John Edwards has released his set of work-family proposals. 
Obama also touched on these issues in his Reclaiming the American Dream speech last week, but hasn’t gotten into the details as much (at least as far as I’ve been able to find).

Clinton and Edward’s proposals got a lot in common, and both would be a vast improvement over the current policy.  Here’s some of the similarities and differences that jump out at me:

• Both Clinton and Edwards would make the Family and Medical Leave Act apply to employers with 25 or more employees, down from the 50 employee cut-off that currently applies.  (Obama has said he’d expand it, but I haven’t seen a specific cut-off cited.)
• All three would provide a minimum guarantee of 7 paid sick days a year.
• All of them would try to expand paid family leave by providing incentive funds to states that develop state paid leave programs (e.g. like California does now).  Clinton offers $1 billion a year, and sets a goal of having all states adopt a program by 2016.  Edwards offers $2 billion (presumably each year, although that’s not entirely clear from his website) and sets a goal of having everyone covered by 2014.  He also says that tax incentives to businesses wouldn’t count — it would have to be a statewide plan.  Advantage Edwards, I think.
• Both Clinton and Edwards talk about the need for improved child care and expanded subsidies.  Clinton says she’d increase the Child Care and Development Block Grant (which provides subsidies) and "work with Congress to reform the Dependent Care Tax Credit to address its shortcomings."  Edwards has specific proposals for increasing the amount of the tax credit and making it partially refundable, but doesn’t say anything about CCDBG.  Advantage Clinton.  I just wrote a paper on the subject, and child care credits just don’t work very well for low-income families, even if refundable.  The problem is that you have to be able to afford to lay out the full cost of care up front, and not get paid back until you do your taxes the next year.
• Both suggest that families with stay-at-home parents should also benefit from child care subsidies. Again, Clinton says this would apply to subsidies under CCDBG, while Edwards talks about the tax credit.  I’m a lot more comfortable applying it to the low-income families who qualify for subsidies than for the full income range.  Also, at that point, I don’t see why you don’t just expand the child tax credit and not force people to document their child care expenses.
• Obama says he’d double spending on after-school programs.
• Clinton and Obama both talk about prohibiting discrimination based on parental status, and encouraging flexible scheduling.
• Edwards talks about benefits for non-traditional workers — contractors, part-time workers, temps — and cracking down on misclassification.

Update:  here are some good comparisons of the proposals from elsewhere:

• Mothers Movement Online
• Take Care Net
• Progressive States

As you probably know if you have kids, you can claim a child tax credit of up to $1,000 per child.  As you might not realize if you’re not low-income, this credit is only partially refundable, meaning that the lowest-income families don’t benefit at all from it.  The threshold for partial refundability started at $10,000 a year, but goes up each year with inflation, even though the wages of low-earning families often don’t keep up with inflation.

The House passed AMT patch bill includes a modest expansion of the refundability of the child tax credit, pushing it down to $8,500 a year.  This would reach an additional 13 million low-income kids.  The Senate Finance Committee is deciding this week whether to include such a provision in their bill.

If you can call your Senator and ask him or her to support this provision, it could make a big difference. 

Here is some background on the Child Tax
Credit from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

FAMILIES HELPED BY THE CHILD TAX CREDIT EXPANSION WORK HARD IN LOW-PAYING
JOBS: Nursing Home Aides, Cooks, Pre-School Teachers, and Construction Workers
Would Get a Boost By Sharon Parrott and Arloc Sherman

IMPROVING THE REFUNDABLE CHILD TAX CREDIT: An Important Step Toward Reducing
Child Poverty By Aviva Aron-Dine

This week we’ve got a guest reviewer for the Tuesday Book Review — my husband.  HarperCollins sent me a copy of Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence to review, but before I could get around to reading it, T. had borrowed it.  So I asked him if he wanted to write the review….

I don’t have the words to say how appalled I was by today’s Washington Post article on how Senator Schumer has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the hedge funds.  If being a Democrat doesn’t mean that it’s a no-brainer to vote for closing a loophole that lets people who earn tens of millions of dollars a year pay taxes at a lower rate than people earning the minimum wage (because payroll taxes are over 16 percent), then being a Democrat doesn’t mean squat.

Last week, I listened to most of the Ways and Means Committee debate over Rep. Rangel’s one-year patch bill, which would fix the AMT for one year, extend a bunch of expiring credits for a year, and also help some low income families by extending the refundability of the child tax credit.  No one argued against any of these things, but all the Republicans were saying that they didn’t need to be offset with tax increases anywhere else, because taxes are too much of the GDP already.  The Democrats were all responding by saying that it would be irresponsible to increase the deficit.

It’s sort of bizarre that the Dems have become the spokespeople for fiscal responsibility (at least on the House side).  I listened to a radio show a few weeks ago where a bunch of traditional fiscal conservatives sounded totally shell shocked about how little today’s Republican leadership cares about running deficits. In principal, I agree that modest deficits aren’t inherently a bad thing, if they’re supporting investments in future productivity.  (And I’d add that government spending needs the flexibility to be countercyclical — e.g. to expand when the economy gets bad).  But given the Republicans’ willingness to mortgage the future, I think there’s more to be gained than lost from "paygo" rules (e.g. where any tax cuts or spending increases need to be offset).

In honor of election day, this week’s book is The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, by Matt Bai. 

Bai is (was?) a reporter for the NY Times Magazine, and the book is based largely on his experiences covering the 2004 and 2006 campaigns.  Much of the book was vaguely familiar to me, but Bai provides more details on some topics, such as the origins of the Democracy Alliance (a group of very rich individuals who are making a concerted effort to build a progressive infrastructure).   He provides nice sketches of Markos (whom he describes as a natural entrepreneur who built Daily Kos into the leading Democratic political site almost by accident) and Jerome Armstrong (whom he describes as a jack of all trades who discovered his calling in campaigns).  He’s scathing about the bloggers at Firedoglake, and glowing about Gina Cooper.*  All this is very well written, although there’s so many characters that I started to lose track of them by the end.

But the meat of the book is Bai’s claim that Democrats don’t stand for anything in particular, other than being not-Bush.  And by "Democrats," he doesn’t just mean the presidential candidates, or the Congressional leadership, but the whole left-wing apparatus — bloggers, billionaires, think-tanks, etc.  And from where I sit, that’s just not true. There’s a bunch of organizations laying out progressive agendas. I think EPI is doing the best job of articulating the overall vision in their Agenda for Shared Prosperity.

Bai seems to dismiss all this as "same old New Deal."  As far as I can tell, his litmus test for something being a new vision is that it has to involve substantial change to Social Security.  If you’re not willing to slaughter the sacred cow, you must be trapped in old think. (At the same time, he seems to think that Mark Warner is a visionary, for reasons that are never quite articulated.) But Social Security isn’t really in all that bad shape. Yes, there’s a funding issue, but it could be resolved with relative small increases in the cap on taxes and the retirement age, and decreases in benefits.  (Medicare’s a whole ‘nother story.)  And Democrats and progressives acknowledge that, by and large.

More good discussion at TPMCafe.

*  I had never heard of Gina Cooper — she’s the person who took the lead on organizing the first YearlyKos.  I’m thrilled to hear that she’s getting some recognition, because from Bai’s description, she seems to have taken on the classical female role of doing the critical behind the scenes work while Markos was running around chatting up reporters. 

It occurred to me earlier today that tomorrow is election day and I still hadn’t figured out who I was voting for in the school board election.  There are 8 people running for the 3 at-large seats, and I didn’t have a good sense for the issues or the personalities.  It’s a non-partisan election, but the parties do endorse candidates.

So I started looking at the endorsements.

The Post endorsed Moon, Braunlich, and Cooper.
The teacher’s union endorsed Hone, Hunt, and Moon.
The Connection newspapers endorsed Cooper, Hone, Moon, Hunt, and Braunlich.
SLEEP (which wants Jr High and High Schools to start later) endorsed Hunt, Hone and Moon.
Fairfax Democrats endorsed Moon, Hone and Raney
Stop Redistricting endorsed Braunlich, Hunt, and Raney.

After reading the endorsements and looking at some of the websites, I think I’ve made my choices — Moon, Hone, and Cooper.

I haven’t figured out why the Dems endorsed Raney — his website just sounds like he’s drunk the management consulting kool-aid (everything is couched in terms of the "business case).  I seriously considered Hunt, as I do think it’s important for the board to be more than an echo chamber for the schools administration, but just couldn’t get past his letter to all the principals recommending ex-gay videos.

And I don’t really know all the issues around redistricting, but it seems like a mistake to take it off the table as an option.  Yes, redistricting can be traumatic.  But boundary lines weren’t handed down to Moses on tablets.  I’m almost certainly biased from our experience at D’s old school, but my perception of anti-redistricting advocates is that they’re trying to keep what they have, and tough luck to anyone else.