Half Changed World

Webb and Allen are debating tonight.  I’m watching with about a 20 minute delay, because at 8 pm I was putting the kids to bed.  But I’m blogging as I watch, so it’s almost liveblogging.

Opening statements:

Allen: Trying to associate Webb with Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and liberal national Democrats.  He’ll raise your taxes.

Webb: How you’re doing depends on where you stand — 2/3 of Americans think we’re heading in the wrong direction.   Republicans claim Iraq is a front in the global war on terrorism, but aren’t willing to risk their family members.   Have great hospitals, but 15 percent of Americans are uninsured.

Iraq:

Allen: Trying to associate himself with Secretary Baker and Senator Warner (who is very popular in Virginia).  Want to bring troops home, but in victory.  "We’re liberators, not occupiers."

Webb: Agrees with Baker — needs to be a diplomatic solution, US needs to state that we have no desire for long-term bases in Iraq.  Can attack terrorism in Iraq from troops that are based outside of the country.  Need creative leadership.

Race/macaca

Allen: "Baseless allegations."  Look at my record in Congress.  "I don’t recall using that world."  lists his endorsements.

[Allen is doing a much better job of looking at the cameras.  Webb keeps looking at the moderator, and when he’s not look at him, he seems to be casting his eyes down — at notes? at the live audience?]

Webb: Been talked to death.  "bullying" of a staffer.  Lists his diverse endorsements.

Women in the military:

Webb: Article was 27 years ago.  Look at my record as Secretary of the Navy — opened up positions for women.  Look at my campaign staff — lots of women leaders.  Very comfortable with the current US military position on women in combat.  Raises Allen’s record of opposing women at VMI.

Allen: Webb has written stuff more recently 1997-1998.  Allen is proud of his record as Governor.

Secrecy in Government:

Allen: More information should be online.  Should be more sunlight on the spending process.  More scrutiny of taxpayers money — no more bridges to no where.  Should be a line item veto.

Webb: Number of classified items has skyrocketed.  Sign of the weakness of Congress and a one-party system.

Marriage Amendment

Webb: I oppose it, and will vote against it.  I’m a Christian, and believe marriage is a union between man and a woman, but government isn’t going to take sacrament away.  Second paragraph goes too far, takes away rights from couples.

Allen: Support it and will vote yes.  Marriage is fundamental to society.

Immigration

Allen: Nation of immigrants and a nation of laws.  Shouldn’t reward illegal behavior.  Opposes amnesty, supports fence.  Voted against Senate bill.

Webb: Oppose both House and Senate bills.  This Administration has failed to address illegal immigration — talk about it, but haven’t done anything.  Shelters for day laborers remove the burden from local businesses.

Debt/international security.

Webb:  I have been talking about China for 19 years.  China is developing a strategic relationship with Moslem world.  Have allowed them to devalue their currency.

Allen: Taxpayers Bill of Rights.  Balanced Budget, line item veto, supermajority for spending faster than the rate of inflation.

Fossil fuel

Allen: Biodiesel is great.  US needs to reduce dependence on foreign fuels.  But can’t be piped, needs to be trucked.  Need more plants.

Webb: Allen’s energy plan is to give tax breaks to oil companies.  We need government incentives — solar, biodiesel, nuclear.

Affirmative Action

Webb: Designed to remedy the evils of slavery.  But now expanded to every ethnic group — only white males are excluded.  Should be restricted to African Americans, who suffered from

Allen: American Indians have also been excluded — went back to energy question.

Allen to Webb: Tax Relief — you said we can’t afford war and tax cuts

Webb: Tremendous migration of wealth toward top 1 percent.  Huge deficits — need revenues.  Where is that going to come from?  Suggests closing loopholes in corporate taxes.  Can’t keep spending like this without increasing revenue.

Allen: Do you know how many Virginians benefit from tax cuts you oppose.

Webb: you allowed tuition tax credit to die.

Webb: How can you vote for Congressional pay raise and not for minimum wage?

Allen: needs to provide relief for small business — supported minimum wage [as part of trifecta that would have provided $10 million estate tax exemption, tax cuts]  Class warfare, Hillary Clinton.

Webb: You’ve never voted for a clean minimum wage increase.  I actually thought the estate tax cut proposal was reasonable.

Allen: Wiretapping/Habeas Corpus.

Webb: We all want security.  But with no oversight, don’t know who you’re listening to.  This Administration rejects any type of oversight, whether from Congress or Judiciary.  Need to make sure they’re not listening to Colin Powell or George Allen.

Allen: Don’t need detainees filing lawsuits asking for DVDs and high speed internet. 

Webb: Listen to McCain, Warner, need to make sure that whatever we’re doing is compliant with Geneva Convention — need to have the moral high ground.

Webb:  Asked about some islands off the coast of Taiwan.  Allen had no idea what he was talking about.  Neither did I.  Webb passed on his 30 seconds at the end.  I have no idea what he was trying to accomplish here.

Should Hastert resign?

Webb: How leadership handles these questions demands accountability.  Haven’t followed this in detail.

Allen: I find this behavior despicable.  I support a full investigation — anyone who is guilty should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, stripped of pensions.

Allen: Susan and I thank you.  Ideas, experience, track record matters.  Tax cuts, 9/11, not letting enemies clog our courts matters.   Hillary Clinton.

Webb: "how absurd some of the things George Allen has said."  Referendum on this administration.  Allen votes with Bush 97 percent of the time, 100 percent of the time on foreign affairs.  Opportunity to return to the Democratic party. Principal duty of elected officials should be to speak for those who have no voice. 

My reactions:

I have to say I think Allen did a better job with the debate.  Not on substance, but I think he looked more relaxed and stayed on message better.  Webb got bogged down in details and was a bit too reactive — got stuck saying "you’re mischaracterizing me" rather than "this is what I believe in."   He needs to be more aggressive on the tax cut issue — that spending eventually needs to be paid for, and that most Americans don’t want to saddle their children with debt.

See also my post Why liberals should be enthusiastic about Jim Webb, over at Gather.com.  I think you can read it without registering, although you need to register in order to comment.

"At virtually every level, education in America tends to perpetuate rather than compensate for existing inequalities."

Anyone who believes that opportunity — the ability of children to have a future that isn’t defined by their parents’ socio-economic position — is an important value should read Isabel Sawhill’s issue brief on Opportunity in America: The Role of Education.  The whole volume of The Future of Children on Opportunity is worth reading, but the issue brief is only 5 1/2 pages, so there’s no excuse for not reading it.

Sawhill begins by discussing how, contrary to the public image, the US does not have particularly more intergenerational mobility than other industrialized countries, and how such mobility is declining over time.  She notes that Americans are quite resistant to more progressive schemes of taxation and benefits, but — in theory — are highly supportive of the role of education in creating equality of opportunity.  And then she makes the statement I quoted above: "At virtually every level, education in America tends to perpetuate rather than compensate for existing inequalities." 

First, she argues that the K-12 system is generally weak, and "a society with a weak educational system will, by definition, be one in which the advantages of class or family background loom large."  Then she notes that because of the ways that public schools are funded, poor kids go to worse schools than well-off kids.  And finally, she notes that "access both to a quality preschool experience and to higher education continues to depend quite directly on family resources."

Sawhill goes on to mention some possible ways to address these deficiencies.  This part of the essay is not as convincing.  I’m not sure I think all of the proposals are good ideas, and I’m fairly confident that they don’t add up to enough to eliminate the systemic problems that Sawhill has identified.

But go read the brief, because the description of the problem is spot-on.  And then come back and we can discuss whether it’s possible to change any of this.

D got his first report card, or "interim progress report" today.  All Ps, for "progressing in understanding" or something like that.  The skills measured are things like letter recognition, being able to hold a book the right way, understanding the difference between capital and lower-case letters.  In math, they’re focusing on pattern recognition and counting tangible objects.

The school has decided to hire an additional kindergarten teacher and have 3 classes instead of 2.  The good news is that this means there will be about 14 kids in each classroom, with a teacher and a full-time aide.  The bad news is that D is one of the kids who will be switching classes, and the new teacher is a total unknown.  I’m trying not to twitch too much about it, particularly since D seems quite undisturbed.  (The long NYTimes article about The Blessing of a Skinned Knee cites Mogel’s suggestion that parents "spend no more than 20 minutes a day ‘thinking about your child’s education or worrying about your child, period.’"  It seems like a reasonable goal.)

Overall, the person having the roughest time right now in the family is N.  He adores preschool, and has pretty much potty trained himself in the 3 weeks since it started.  But it runs until 1 pm, and D’s school lets out at 2.35, and that pretty much kills his nap on preschool days.  Yesterday he was so tired by the time I got home that he couldn’t stop crying enough to tell me what he wanted.  (D eventually figured out that he wanted to wear shin guards, for no obvious reason.)

How’s school going for everyone else?

Well, I can’t say I had any epiphanies while I was gone, but I think I benefited from taking a step back.  I enjoy blogging, but sometimes it just feels like another thing on the to-do list.  There have been some horrific stories in the news, and I can’t imagine what I could have said that would have been meaningful.

The details are a little up in the air, but I’ve been invited to post several times over the next month as one of a group of political bloggers at Gather.com.  Gather seems to be something of a cross between a social networking site and a set of community blogs.  I’ll let you know when things firm up.  In the meanwhile, tomorrow (e.g. Thursday), their front page poll question is going to be who do you think is going to win the Virginia Senate race, Allen or Webb.  At this point, I think it’s probably too close to call — Allen is still ahead in the last set of polls, but Webb has momentum and finally enough money to get on TV.

Sorry, didn’t mean to leave you hanging.  No, we didn’t all fit into our dining room, not all at once.  But we borrowed a children’s picnic bench from friends, and set it up in the living room, so all was well.

***

I’ve been trying to run in the mornings a few times a week.  I need to be out the door for my run by a few minutes after 6 in order to be back, showered, dressed, and ready to go in time to get D to school by 8.  This time of year, that means I’m heading out into the dark, with the sun coming up while I run.  I often linger over my stretches to watch the sun rise over the river.  It makes up for the pain of having to get out of bed so darn early (o’dark hundred, as one of my buddies used to call it).  The past few weeks, the moon has also been visible on most of my runs.  I’ve watched it fade into a sliver as the new moon approached.

As Rachel (the Velveteen Rabbi) noted, by a convergence of the lunar and solar cycles, this weekend was Rosh Hashana, the start of Ramandan, and the fall solstice.  Both the Jewish and the Moslem calendars go by moon cycles, but the Jewish calendar inserts "leap months" in order to keep the holidays roughly aligned with the seasons, so that Passover is always in the spring and Sukkot always in the fall.  The Moslem calendar does not make such adjustments, so Ramadan can land in any season.  And they’ll align with the solstice only when it happens to fall on a new moon.

Andrea, at Beanie Baby, is Wiccan, so she celebrated the solstice, or Mabon.  She wrote recently about her relationship with the annual cycle:

I seem to make this annual journey. Down into the underworld for six months of introspection and quiet and inaction. Up into the real world for six months of activity and learning and noise. Pull inward, push outward, pull inward, push outward, and all the while I feel like things are starting to come together, making sense, like it all fits.

For me, the fall has always felt like a time of new beginnings, of fresh starts.  In part because of Rosh Hashonah, but more because that’s when school starts.  And yes, I’m stuck on that cycle, even though it’s been 10 years since I last attended school on a full-time basis.  (My husband laughed this fall at how excited I was to buy D’s school supplies.)  Summer is for lolling around and living in the moment; fall is for making plans.

***

That said, I think I am going to take some time to turn inward for a bit. I don’t have a physical retreat to go to like Jo(e)’s, but I’ll do what I can to find some quiet.  I’ll be back after Yom Kippur.

May your year be both good and sweet.

(Tune in tomorrow to find out whether 7 adults and 6 kids can really fit into my dining room for Rosh Hashanah lunch.)

In the comments on Tuesday’s post, Kai Jones asked what’s the basis for comparison for the claim that risk has increased over time.  The answer is, of course, that mythical era, the 1950s.

At a meeting I went to last week, Brink Lindsey from the Cato Institute had a great line — "The right and left share this strange nostalgia for the 1950s.  The left wants to go to work there, and the right wants to go home there."  Ouch and touche.

Dave s commented that the rigid family structure of the 1950s was itself a form of risk for women, due to "the uncertainty and absolute dependence on men’s behavior choices of women in the suburbs."  I think there’s certainly some truth to that, although there’s a complicated set of interactions:

• Women who divorced suffered much more severe financial consequences in the 1950s than they do today because of both massive discrimination in employment against women and underinvestment in education.  BUT, far fewer women experienced divorce.  Women were more likely to suffer financially due to the death, disability, or indolence of their husbands than from divorce.  (See, for a case study, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio.)  Germany today is probably the place that most resembles America of the 1950s in this regard.
• Women who divorce today are far less likely to be absolutely destitute as a result.  Compared to never-married mothers, divorced mothers are far more educated, and have more employment history.  But divorced women still experience major drops in their standard of living.  And, especially if they try to minimize disruption for their kids by staying in the same house/schools, they’re quite likely to wind up in bankruptcy.
• What’s new is that men also suffer significant financial hits from divorce.  Katharine Bradbury and Jane Katz have shown that as wives contribute an increasing share of family incomes, divorcing (and widowed) men are more likely to be downwardly mobile due to divorce.

The economics of the 1950s clearly contributed to the social structure in significant ways.  Men married far younger than in the past, mostly because they could afford to support families at earlier ages.  And large numbers of families could afford to live on the income of one breadwinner for one of the first times in history (while married white mothers didn’t work very much outside the home in the early 20th century, families often relied on the labor of older children).  I’m not seeing an argument for causality in the other direction, but I’m sure someone could come up with one.

I didn’t get to hear Jim Webb speak this evening, because just when Barack Obama was starting to introduce him, N insisted that he needed to use the potty.  Not a message I was able to ignore, I’m afraid.  We raced off to the bookstore that has public toilets and got back just in time to hear his last line, which was that "if you know me, you know there will be beer there!"  I assume that this was in reference to his victory party in November.

It was nice to hear Obama speak, although he didn’t say anything especially memorable.  His main line was that he didn’t ordinarily quote Newt Gingrich, but that Gingrich had said that if he were running as a Democrat this year, his campaign line would be just two words: "Had enough?"

I did get to see my recording of Meet the Press debate from Sunday, and think Webb did a good job, especially in the first half of the debate, which focused on Iraq.  Even if he didn’t have the huge advantage of his personal story, his argument — that this Administration doesn’t understand that you have to use diplomacy as well as force — would be a strong one.  Allen ducked hard on the question of whether he’s going to support Bush or Warner on the interrogation of prisoners, but he’s going to have to vote one way or the other before the election. 

I do think Webb’s answers on the role of women in the military were pretty weak.  I would have liked him to have said flat out that, with the benefit of hindsight, he wishes he hadn’t written that article about women in the Academy.  And I just don’t get the argument that says that it’s ok for women to be shot at and blown up (as they are when "attached" to combat units as military intelligence, translators, etc.) but not ok for them to be part of the combat units and shoot back.  But Allen calling him on it is a classic case of Pot, meet Kettle.

Webb is incredibly lucky that Allen screwed up with that macaca line.  Not because I  think that many voters are ultimately going to decide based on that moment.  But the Webb campaign was suffocating from lack of money — according to the Post, at the end of June, Allen had $6.6 million in the bank, and Webb less than half a million.  That’s a brutal disadvantage, since this is an expensive tv market.  Webb clearly hates to ask for money, and is bad at it.  Bu the macaca quote got the race back onto people’s lists of competitive races.  And that in turn brings in the national donors.  (Webb’s now #3 in the ranking of candidates who have raised money through the Netroots campaign on ActBlue.)

Today’s book is The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement And How You Can Fight Back, by Jacob Hacker.  Can I just say that I wish I had written this book?  It answers the question that a bunch of us wrestled with in the spring — how can we be so affluent, and yet feel like a "middle-class" life is out of our reach?  Hacker’s answer is that we’re facing more risk than ever before, so even if we’re doing well today, we worry that it could slip out of our grasp tomorrow.

Specifically, Hacker shows how a range of economic and political forces have combined to increase risk in almost every aspect of our lives:

• Income volatility has increased significantly, and has increased more among the middle- and upper-class than the poor.  (The poor still have higher levels of income volatility.)
• Job loss is more likely to lead to long-term unemployment, and re-employment at significantly lower wages and/or in a different industry.
• Marriages are more likely to end in divorce.
• Education is an excellent investment, but also a risky one — students are borrowing more than ever, and going to college doesn’t guarantee a high income.
• Defined benefit pensions are rapidly disappearing, replaced by 401ks.
• More people are uninsured than ever before, and even people with insurance have a higher probability of being hit by large uncovered bills than in the past.

Hacker’s not the first one to say any of this, but he does a really nice job of pulling it together in one package.  (One of my few complaints about the book is that when Hacker incorporates true-life stories that illustrate his points, the stories are oddly familiar, because he picked most of them them up from the same newspaper articles that I’ve read.)

The most immediately politically salient part of this book is where Hacker takes on the proposals to privatize Social Security and to shift people from standard health insurance into Health Savings Accounts.  Hacker argues that these are part of an ideologically driven "Personal Responsibility Crusade" that is designed to increase risk, even though most people feel like they have too much risk in their lives, thank you very much. 

Hacker also makes some proposals for how to reduce risk from its current levels.  The simplest is probably his proposal for universal 401ks, that could be portable across jobs, and that workers would be automatically enrolled in unless they opted out.  He also proposes that the government would annuitize these accounts when people reach retirement.  He also proposes to open up Medicare for people under 65 and to create a system of Universal Insurance that would cover people against sharp drops in income.  (Neither of these proposals are described in any detail in the book, which attempts to reach a general audience and so tries not to scare people off with too many formulas.)

Like Warren and Tyagi, Hacker also offers some practical advice — build up some savings, sign up for a 401k if you can, buy life insurance, don’t buy a house that you can only afford with a variable rate mortgage, don’t enroll in a college that you can’t afford to stay in until you finish.  He also points out the significance of "loss aversion" — that it’s more painful to give up something that you have than to never have had it in the first place.

If all this isn’t familiar to you, read the book.  And if it is, send it to your Congressman.

Tonight our local school board is having a hearing regarding whether the city of Alexandria should allow students to attend Fairfax’s selective math and science high school, Thomas Jefferson. 

As I understand it, the argument in favor is that it opens up an opportunity for a few very talented high school students to attend a school where they’ll be academically challenged and surrounded by their peers.  The arguments against are that it takes away money from the local school system (as Fairfax charges participating districts more per student than Alexandria spends on average), and that it reduces the number of advanced courses that the Alexandria high school (TC Williams — yes, there’s only one high school for the city) is able to offer, by taking away some of the students who would take those classes.

As I’ve mentioned before, I attended a similar school, and it was an incredibly valuable experience for me.  The fact that it was normal to be smart, normal to read, normal to study, normal to like learning, was wonderful for me.  I truly never had to deal with BS like this.  I had a ninth grade bio teacher who told me that if I became interested in boys and decided to be stupid she’d wring my neck. And it also protected me from the arrogance of some smart people I’ve known, who are convinced that they’re the only ones with any brains.

I mentioned this to Maggie, who often comments on this blog, and she responded:

Isn’t it funny how all of our experiences shape our opinions? I’m sure I
would have enjoyed the intellectual companionship of going to
Stuyvesant, if my parents or I had had any idea that it existed – I was
bored a lot in high school. But I also think that a lot of what I like
about who I am today is the direct result of going to a high school
where there were kids across the spectrum, not just high achievers, and
learning to get along with them while still being a high achiever
myself. I learned how to talk to anyone, about anything, instead of just
burying myself in my books. There are lots of people with lots of brains
out there, but there are an awful lot of brainy people who have a dearth
of people skills.

Maggie obviously had better people skills than me to begin with — I came out of my shell at Stuyvesant, and think I would have disappeared totally into the world of books in many environments.

That said, the stress level at competitive high schools does seem to have ratched up a significant degree since I went to HS.  I started reading The Overachievers, and it’s pretty depressing.  (It’s also boring, so I’m probably not going to finish it.)   Maggie said that she’s "interviewed so many kids from TJ who are just basket cases that I really, really would be uncomfortable sending my kid there."