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Scooped by Dennis Richards onto Government for the People |
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"To regain our lead in educational achievement, we’ll have to work from the bottom up." - "Averages can be misleading. The familiar, one-dimensional story told about American education is that it was once the best system in the world but that now it’s headed down the drain, with piles of money thrown down after it. - The truth is that there are two very different education stories in America. The children of the wealthiest 10 percent or so do receive some of the best education in the world, and the quality keeps getting better. For most everyone else, this is not the case. America’s average standing in global education rankings has tumbled not because everyone is falling, but because of the country’s deep, still-widening achievement gap between socioeconomic groups. - And while America does spend plenty on education, it funnels a disproportionate share into educating wealthier students, worsening that gap. The majority of other advanced countries do things differently, at least at the K-12 level, tilting resources in favor of poorer students."
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The premise that greater government involvement in health care spells disaster isn’t borne out in Sweden, health economists there say.
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In a 7-to-2 ruling Monday, the Supreme Court said an Arizona law requiring prospective voters to give proof of their citizenship was displaced by legislation at the federal level.
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Some say Obamacare is cheap in California. Others say it's raising premiums by 146 percent. Who's right?
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"In 'The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,' George Packer weaves stories of people large and small to illustrate a superpower fraying at the seams." "Among this book’s few heroes is Ms. Warren, the former Harvard Law School professor and bankruptcy expert who is now the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts. 'The Unwinding' is largely about how banks have become unchecked and unholy forces in American life, and part of what Mr. Packer likes about Ms. Warren, a Democrat, is that banks fear her. His book specializes in plain talk, and in Ms. Warren he spies a rare politician with a gift for the same quality. Mr. Packer describes one of her appearances about banking this way: 'She seemed to have walked into the hearing room and taken her seat at the dais out of the past, from the era when the American prairie raised angry and eloquent champions of the common people, William Jennings Bryan and Robert La Follette, George Norris and Hubert Humphrey. Her very presence made insiders uneasy because it reminded them of the cozy corruption that had become the normal way of doing business around Capitol Hill. And that was unforgivable.' At one point in 'The Unwinding' we meet a talented reporter in Florida who is writing about the foreclosure mess. This reporter, we read, 'believed that there were two kinds of journalists — the ones who told stories, and the ones who uncovered wrongdoing.' Mr. Packer is both, and he’s written something close to a nonfiction masterpiece."
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"Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves. One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month — over the objections of the Treasury Department — was essentially Citigroup’s, according to e-mails reviewed by The New York Times. The bill would exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation. In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.) The lobbying campaign shows how, three years after Congress passed the most comprehensive overhaul of regulation since the Depression, Wall Street is finding Washington a friendlier place."
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"It's both a fun time of year in high school and a time to reflect. I've had kind of an interesting juxtaposition of a couple of items. We have a couple of students that I know at my school who are graduating and think they want to become teachers (we have a great Teacher Cadet program where they get an opportunity to learn about teaching/learning as well as a mini-student-teaching opportunity). In many ways I think this is great - we must be doing something right if we have bright, amazing students thinking they want to become educators. But the second item gives me pause, so I thought I'd take just a few minutes to share some numbers that I've come across recently."
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"When politicians want to turn scandals into metaphors, actual details of wrongdoing or incompetence no longer matter. In fact, the details of the troubles swirling around the White House this week are bluntly contradicting Republicans who want to combine them into a seamless narrative of tyrannical government on the rampage. The Internal Revenue Service, according to an inspector general’s report, was not reacting to political pressure or ideology when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny in evaluating requests for tax exemptions. It acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines. The tragedy in Benghazi, Libya, never a scandal to begin with, has devolved into a turf-protection spat between government agencies, and the e-mail messages Republicans long demanded made clear that there was no White House cover-up. The only example of true government overreach was the seizure of The Associated Press’s telephone records, the latest episode in the Obama administration’s Javert-like obsession with leakers in its midst. Many of the Republicans who have added this action to their metaphor blender were also the ones clamoring the loudest for vigorous investigations of national security leaks."
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"Don’t forget the lies "But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover. Think about his two main 'achievements', if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is that both were sold with lies. I suppose one could make an argument for the kind of tax cuts Bush rammed through — tax cuts that strongly favored the wealthy and significantly increased inequality. But we shouldn’t forget that Bush never admitted that his tax cuts did, in fact, favor the wealthy. Instead, his administration canceled the practice of making assessments of the distributional effects of tax changes, and in their selling of the cuts offered what amounted to an expert class in how to lie with statistics. Basically, every time the Bushies came out with a report, you knew that it was going to involve some kind of fraud, and the only question was which kind and where."
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"How can we keep from building a new inequality on top of the old one?" "A little pocket of Los Angeles County tucked into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains reflects a crucial facet of suburban life. There’s tiny, wealthy Bradbury, a town that prides itself on having one of the richest ZIP codes in Los Angeles, where a house is on the market for $68.8 million. A couple of miles to the east is Azusa. This modest suburb is more than two-thirds Latino, a town of working families whose incomes and home values are a sliver of the wealth nearby. These towns represent extremes of social inequality, but in Los Angeles and other areas, they reflect a defining pattern of contemporary suburban life. Nationwide, rich and poor neighborhoods like these house a growing proportion of Americans, up to 31 percent compared with 15 percent in 1970, according to a recent study by Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff. Meanwhile, iconic middle-income suburbs are shrinking in numbers and prospects. Today’s suburbs provide a map not just to the different worlds of the rich and the poor, which have always been with us, but to the increase in inequality between economic and social classes."
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"Many companies have retained lobbying firms that employ former aides to Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which will have a crucial role in shaping tax legislation." "Restaurant chains like McDonald’s want to keep their lucrative tax credit for hiring veterans. Altria, the tobacco giant, wants to cut the corporate tax rate. And Sapphire Energy, a small alternative energy company, is determined to protect a tax incentive it believes could turn algae into a popular motor fuel. To make their case as Congress prepares to debate a rewrite of the nation’s tax code, this diverse set of businesses has at least one strategy in common: they have retained firms that employ lobbyists who are former aides to Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which will have a crucial role in shaping any legislation. No other lawmaker on Capitol Hill has such a sizable constellation of former aides working as tax lobbyists, representing blue-chip clients that include telecommunications businesses, oil companies, retailers and financial firms, according to an analysis by LegiStorm, an online database that tracks Congressional staff members and lobbying. At least 28 aides who have worked for Mr. Baucus, Democrat of Montana, since he became the committee chairman in 2001 have lobbied on tax issues during the Obama administration — more than any other current member of Congress, according to the analysis of lobbying filings performed for The New York Times. 'K Street is literally littered with former Baucus staffers,' said Jade West, an executive at a wholesalers’ trade association that relies on a former finance panel aide, Mary Burke Baker. 'It opens doors that allow you to make the case.'"
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"There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens. That's the argument at the core of this blistering talk by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. With rapid-fire visuals, he shows how the funding process weakens the Republic in the most fundamental way, and issues a rallying bipartisan cry that will resonate with many in the U.S. and beyond.
Lawrence Lessig has already transformed intellectual-property law with his Creative Commons innovation. Now he's focused on an even bigger problem: The US' broken political system." Delete the scoop?
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Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges, which contributes to widening economic inequality, economists say.
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"If Obamacare works, the game will be over for those doomsayers who oppose the most change in American life in a generation’s time." "A friend of mine has an adult child with cancer, a young man just old enough to be beyond the age of coverage under his parents’ health care plan. After nearly killing him, the dreaded Hodgkin’s lymphoma is in remission. But he’s still a pariah in the eyes of the insurance industry, which means they can deny him a policy that might save his life. Not for long. In six months’ time, the heartless practice of refusing to let sick people buy affordable health insurance — private-sector death panels, the most odious kind of American exceptionalism — will be illegal from shore to shore. “I can’t wait for Obamacare,” my friend gushed the other day. And she’s not alone. About one in 10 people with cancer in this country have been denied health coverage. The cartoon version of the Affordable Care Act, that much-loathed government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, is now moving from Beltway gasbags and caricaturists into the hands of consumers. Its fate will be determined by the countless anecdotes of people who will apply the law to their lives."
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The justices ruled on Monday that brand-name drug makers could face antitrust charges for paying generic competitors to keep cheaper copies of a drug off the market.
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"The US Supreme Court rules police may routinely take DNA cheek swabs from suspects who have been arrested but not yet convicted of a crime."
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"The program’s a looming non-disaster!" "Still, here’s what it seems is about to happen: millions of Americans will suddenly gain health coverage, and millions more will feel much more secure knowing that such coverage is available if they lose their jobs or suffer other misfortunes. Only a relative handful of people will be hurt at all. And as contrasts emerge between the experience of states like California that are making the most of the new policy and that of states like Texas whose politicians are doing their best to undermine it, the sheer meanspiritedness of the Obamacare opponents will become ever more obvious. So yes, it does look as if there’s an Obamacare shock coming: the shock of learning that a public program designed to help a lot of people can, strange to say, end up helping a lot of people — especially when government officials actually try to make it work."
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"The senator says the Republican bill would turn students into 'profit centers.'" "On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) slammed a Republican student loan bill the House just approved that would allow interest rates on student debt to skyrocket. "The student loan bill passed by House Republicans takes a bad situation and makes it worse," she said in a statement. On July 1, rates for federal student loans called Stafford loans are set to double from the current rate of 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. The GOP bill, which passed the House on a mostly party-line vote of 221 to 198, would allow interest rates on those loans to rise or fall from year to year with the government's cost of borrowing, ending the system in which rates are fixed by law. Because market rates are low right now, the initial rate for those loans would be about 4.4 percent, but in coming years it could increase up to a cap of 8.5 percent."
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"'Who’s going to set interest rates, politicians here or the markets?' asked Representative John Kline, Republican of Minnesota, chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The House bill would allow student lending rates to reset each year, based on the interest rate of a 10-year Treasury note, plus 2.5 percentage points for Stafford loans. The Congressional Budget Office projected rates on Stafford loans would rise to 5 percent in 2014 and 7.7 percent in 2023. Under the legislation, Stafford loans would be capped at 8.5 percent, while loans for parents and graduate students would have a 10.5 percent cap. Senate Democrats want to extend the current, subsidized rate for at least two years. The cost to the federal government, several billion dollars, would be covered by closing tax loopholes, said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York and one of the Senate bills’ primary sponsors. Ms. Gillibrand would go further, allowing graduates with higher interest-rate loans to refinance at a subsidized 4 percent rate. But President Obama has a different proposal that would fall somewhere between the House and Senate bills. He, too, would set student lending rates each year based on Treasury’s borrowing costs, but those rates would be fixed for the life of the loan, not reset each year. He would also cap student-borrowing costs at 10 percent of a student’s income.
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"The I.R.S. and Justice Department scandals disrobe a culture festering in unrestraint and overreach." "We clearly have a values problem in the federal government. We clearly have a few or many agencies where the leaders don’t emphasize that workers need to check themselves, or risk losing what remains of the people’s trust. The rest of us just have to be more wary. For example, I generally support the little behavioral nudges that Cass Sunstein describes in his outstanding book “Simpler” — the subtle policy shifts that induce people to save more, or eat healthier. I’d trust somebody with a minimalist disposition like Sunstein to implement these policies. But I wouldn’t necessarily trust the people at the I.R.S. or Justice Department to implement them. They’d take a nudge and expand it into a shove. And what are we to make of financial regulatory reform and the new health care law? In a culture of unrestraint, will federal regulators use these rule-writing opportunities to expand their reach beyond anything now imagined? People can only have faith in a government that self-restrains, and there’s little evidence of that now."
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"With soaring costs, stagnating incomes and little help from the government, there is only one way to pay for higher education: debt." "Consider another dubious distinction: student debt is almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy proceedings. We’re a long way from the debtors’ prisons Dickens described. We don’t send debtors to penal colonies or put them in bonded labor. Although personal bankruptcy laws have been tightened, the principle that bankrupt individuals should be allowed a fresh start, and a chance to discharge excessive debt, is an established principle. This helps debt markets work better, and also provides incentives for creditors to assess the creditworthiness of borrowers. Yet education loans are almost impossible to write off in bankruptcy court — even when for-profit schools didn’t deliver what they promised and didn’t provide an education that would let the borrower get a job that paid enough to pay back the loan."
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Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists and supporters of libertarian causes, are exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers.
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"States are restricting undercover operations by activists in response to exposés that industry groups say have led to unfair scrutiny." "But a dozen or so state legislatures have had a different reaction: They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms. Critics call them 'Ag-Gag' bills. Some of the legislation appears inspired by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a business advocacy group with hundreds of state representatives from farm states as members. The group creates model bills, drafted by lobbyists and lawmakers, that in the past have included such things as 'stand your ground' gun laws and tighter voter identification rules. One of the group’s model bills, 'The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,' prohibits filming or taking pictures on livestock farms to 'defame the facility or its owner.' Violators would be placed on a “terrorist registry."
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"An enormous leak of confidential financial records has revealed the identities of thousands of wealthy depositors — including European officials and corporate executives, Asian dictators and their children, and even American doctors and dentists — who have stashed immense amounts of money in offshore tax havens. The leak of records, mainly from the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and Singapore, covers 2.5 million files that disclose proprietary information about more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts and nearly 130,000 individuals and agents, including the wealthiest people in more than 170 countries.
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Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges, which contributes to widening economic inequality, economists say.
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