Charles M. Blow: "Britain is winning the war on child poverty. The US should be able to, too."
“42% of American children live in low-income homes and about a fifth live in poverty. It gets worse. The number of children living in poverty has risen 33% since 2000… And, according to a 2007 Unicef report on child poverty, the U.S. ranked last among 24 wealthy countries. This is a national disgrace.”
“In 1994, about 30% of British children were below the country’s poverty threshold. Fifteen years later, that number has fallen to 12%. How did the British do it? It was a three-pronged attack:
1. They established a welfare-to-work program and a national minimum wage (which, at about $9, leaves ours wanting) and instituted tax reductions and credits for low-income workers. They made work more attractive, and people responded. The report said, “Lone-parent employment increased by 12 percentage points — from 45 percent to 57 percent — between 1997 and 2008.”
2. They raised child welfare benefits, especially for families with small children, whether or not the parents worked.
3. They invested directly in the lives of young children with things like doubling paid maternity leave, providing universal preschool, assisting with child care and allowing parents of young children to request flexible work schedules.
The British example shows that child poverty is not an intractable problem. If we can rise above the impulse to punish parents and focus on protecting children, we might replicate Britain’s success.
Come on pro-lifers, you should be on board with this!
(via divineirony)
Source: thesoapboxschtick
Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.
“Always produce” is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.
Source: paulgraham.com
“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.” — Kurt Vonnegut
(via divineirony)
Source: cosmicnoisedrifter
Managing a school — say, setting the hours, deciding how to spend the budget, and deciding which teachers are doing the job — is an oxymoron. Public schools today are, by law, basically unmanageable.
The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.
Ptolemaic Economics in the Age of Einstein
Firstly, there are similar underlying principles to the DSGE models that now dominate Neoclassical macroeconomics, and as with Ptolemaic Astronomy, these underlying principles clearly fail to describe the real world. They are:
- All markets are barter systems which are in equilibrium at all times in the absence of exogenous shocks—even during recessions—and after a shock they will rapidly return to equilibrium via instantaneous adjustments to relative prices;
- The preferences of consumers and the technology employed by firms are the “deep parameters” of the economy, which are unaltered by any policies set by economic policy makers; and
- Perfect competition is universal, ensuring that the equilibrium described in (1) is socially optimal.
If that were actually the real world, then not only would there not be a crisis now, there would never have been a Great Depression either—and recessions would simply be minor statistically unpredictable but inevitable events when the majority of shocks hitting the economy were negative, and they would rapidly be resolved by adjustments to relative prices (wages included, of course).
Source: azspot
some facts about the role poverty plays in the USA’s education system.
(via questionall)
Source: cartoonpolitics
The Hunger Games
There is no way that one person can unilaterally stop watching what is on TV and start a revolution that way. But by participating without allowing ourselves to be dehumanized and made callous or turned into cutthroat murderers by the way the game is played, we can make a difference. We see this ever so powerfully when Katniss takes the time to place flowers around and upon Rue after she has been killed, and offers a kiss and sign of concern to her district.
It sparks an uprising in the film.
I was astonished to read that racist fans of the book were surprised that black actors and actresses played certain roles. When I asked myself what our society’s “hunger games” are, I thought immediately of Trayvon Martin (and now reading through posts I skipped when I had not yet seen the movie, I find that I am not the only one). Whole segments of our society are left to live in poverty, while a select few rule from fancy homes and watch the “games” of gang and poverty and crime-related violence, and their victims, from within elegant surroundings, as a form of entertainment. And even when those placed in that situation seek to live in peace and kindness, they still often end up dead before their time. The odds are not in their favor, just as the same is true in the movie’s Hunger Games, even as people wish the participants that the odds might always be in their favor.
How do we not merely survive or win but challenge a society that makes us play its “hunger games,” without allowing ourselves to be transformed into killers in the process? The movie actually provides the answer. By deciding that we would rather die than kill one another for its entertainment.
Source: azspot
The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste
Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.
Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:
There are more African American adults under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.
Source: azspot
“Capitalism did not arise by a set of natural laws which stem from human nature: it was spread by the organised violence of the elite.The concept of private property of land and means of production might seem now like the natural state of things, however we should remember it is a man-made concept enforced by conquest.Similarly, the existence of a class of people with nothing to sell but their labour power is not something which has always been the case - common land shared by all was seized by force, and the dispossessed forced to work for a wage under the threat of starvation or even execution. As capital expanded, it created a global working class consisting of the majority of the world’s population whom it exploits but also depends on.”
Source: blog.steveklabnik.com
““Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes.The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour.You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.””—
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (via mirroir)
I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a gangsta rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich. Of course, the worst is having a convertible if you’re over 20 years old. If you’re 50, please, buy a painting.”
- John Waters
The Hunger Games isn’t really the future. It’s today. The masses suffer while the few live in preposterous affluence. The Capitol of Panem has more than enough to spare, as do the mega celebs of our days. We have hungry and homeless and all around the world people live in sub-human conditions. This is a story about greed and about turning a blind eye.
Source: The Huffington Post
Internet marginalia and comments on stuff that crosses my horizon, news feed, or computer screen.
