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Economy

Busting The Conservative Myth: Public Sector Pay Has Declined As A Percentage Of State Budgets

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 10, 2011 at 7:20 pm

The rationale that several Republican governors are using to justify their attempts to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights is that the state can’t afford growing pay and benefits for public employees. “Our state cannot grow if our people are weighed down paying for a larger and larger government — a government that pays its workers unsustainable benefits that are out of line with the private sector,” said Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI). “If you were paying attention, the problems here that are created on the state budget — sure we have a deficit problem that was helped by the economic downturn, but what we also have are benefits and costs that are out of control,” claimed Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ)

These Republican governors would have you believe that growing public sector pay has outstripped that of the private sector and crippled their states’ finances. The first claim, as many independent analyses have found, is simply not true. Public workers, once you control for education and look at comparable jobs, make less than their private sector counterparts.

As for the second claim, CAP’s David Madland and Nick Bunker found that over the last 20 years, far from spiraling out of control, public employee costs have fallen as a percentage of state budgets:

We find that in fiscal year 2009, the most recent year where data are available, average state spending on compensation as a share of total expenditures was 19.6 percent, below the 1992–2009 average of 20.7 percent…If state government employee compensation had suddenly overwhelmed state budgets, then a jump in compensation as a share of total expenditures would be apparent. Instead, the trend is relatively flat and declined over time. In 1992, compensation averaged 23 percent of total expenditures. That figure was 19.6 percent in 2009.

Over this period, neither compensation nor total expenditures grew at a rapid pace. In fact, measured in 2005 dollars, average total expenditures increased by 3.13 percent annually and total compensation increased by 2.19 percent annually, which is roughly in line with growth rate of the economy.

As the Roosevelt’s Institute’s Mike Konczal found, the housing bubble and negative home equity are better predictors of a state’s budget problems than public sector union membership. And as the Center for Economic and Policy Research found, the shortfalls in state pension funds are largely a result of “the plunge in the stock market following the collapse of the housing bubble.”

Security

Indiana Rep. Dan Burton Says U.S. Is ‘At War’ At Mexican Border

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Mar 10, 2011 at 6:20 pm

Yesterday, Indiana Rep. Dan Burton (R) proclaimed in a speech on the House floor that the U.S. is “at war.” However, Burton wasn’t talking about U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor is it readily evident that Burton was simply engaging in hyperbolic rhetoric. Instead, Burton went on a furious rampage about how the federal government will not allow federal agents to enter Mexico armed. “We shouldn’t be asking our CIA, DIA, DEA agents to go into Mexico to fight the drug dealers…and tell them they don’t even have a weapon to protect themselves,” stated Burton. According to him, the U.S. is fighting a war on U.S. and Mexican soil that may require the use of armed force:

We’re in a war down there on that border. If you talk to the people in Texas, they will tell you — there is a war between us and the drug dealers and the thugs that are coming across that line into our country. And, there’s a high suspicion that we’re seeing al-Qaeda and Taliban type terrorists coming across the border into the United States.

It’s a war make no mistake about it — the Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples said — and it’s happening on American soil. In this country! [...] We’re never going to solve that border problem unless we realize that it’s an area that we have to focus on, that it’s a war, and that our citizens are in danger down there.

Watch it:

To begin with, the Obama administration doesn’t arm federal agents operating in Mexico because it’s against Mexican law, which prohibits foreign diplomats or agents from carrying weapons or engaging in law enforcement activities. Ever since U.S. intervention in the Mexican Revolution, Mexico has been wary about allowing foreign officials to arm themselves while conducting business in the country. Given the fact that some U.S. politicians have actually floated the idea of U.S. military involvement in Mexico, it’s understandable that there may be some political unease associated with modifying the restrictions. It’s also worth noting that the federal agent who was killed in Mexico wasn’t there to “fight the drug cartels.” He was there for a training exercise.

Attorney General Eric Holder actually suggested asking Mexico to allow dozens of U.S. federal agents working there to be armed. Mexican President Felipe Calderon didn’t make any promises, but he did affirm that, “We definitely have to find a way to elevate the level of protection for all agents who, according to law, work against criminality. We will, of course, analyze alternatives and talk to the Mexican congress, which ultimately has the last word.” Ultimately, it seems like the best solution would be for the U.S. to tighten its gun restrictions and prevent our own weapons from flowing down south.

Meanwhile, as I pointed out yesterday, the U.S. side of the Mexican border is “safer than it’s ever been.” While Burton cites anecdotal evidence to back up his claims, hard data suggests quite the opposite. Counties along the southwest border have some of the lowest rates of violent crime per capita in the nation and those rates have dropped by more than 30 percent since the 1990s while immigration has soared. Border agents do carry guns.

While the murder of border agent Brian Terry was certainly tragic, there have also been several cases in which it appears border agents used excessive force and killed unarmed Mexican teenagers.

Politics

Woman Forced To Watch Her Baby Die Because Nebraska Anti-Abortion Law Prohibited Doctor From Acting

By Tanya Somanader on Mar 10, 2011 at 6:15 pm

Since the start of the year, Republican lawmakers on the federal and state level have charged headlong into a comprehensive assault on a woman’s right to choose.

In Nebraska, one law already in existence heaped needless trauma on a mother’s tragedy. Thirty-four-year-old Danielle Deaver was 23 weeks pregnant when she faced a fate “worse than your own death” — her baby would not make it. Her water broke early and, without amniotic fluid, the fetus would not develop lungs to survive outside the womb. Deaver and her husband decided they wanted to let “nature take it’s course” and would not risk harming the child further, so they asked their doctor to help “put an end to this nightmare.”

But because of Nebraska’s law prohibiting any abortion after 20 weeks, the doctor could not assist or he would “face criminal charges, jail time, and lose his medical license.” Her doctors told her “she’d just have to wait.” So she did, in “torture,” and gave birth to Elizabeth at 3pm, watched her gasp for breath, and then watched her die at 3:15pm on December 8, 2010. “The outcome of my pregnancy, that choice was made by God,” said Deaver, but “how to handle the end of my pregnancy, that choice should’ve been mine.”

She told her story to the Des Moines Register, watch it:

“If they thought about their daughter, their sister, their mother, their wife being in this situation, they would never want them to go through that,” Deavers said of the legislators who created the law.

Yesterday, in a 94-2 vote, the Oklahoma House passed a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks based on the dubious assumption the fetus “can feel pain.” Oregon, Minnesota, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, and Ohio are also considering joining the 31 states that currently have such a ban. Should these states successfully push the ban through, Danielle Deaver’s personal tragedy may become a common expectation.

Climate Progress

Brulle: NY Times article on climate science hearing “fails to inform the public, and plays into the strategy of the climate denial effort.”

By Joe Romm on Mar 10, 2011 at 5:40 pm

The New York Times has published one of its worst climate science pieces.  The headline, “At House E.P.A. Hearing, Both Sides Claim Science,” perfectly captures the he-said/she-said nature of the piece.

Yes, it’s true, both sides ‘claim’ science, but in fact one side rejects actual science.  The NYT mostly played the role of the stenographer here.

I asked Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, whom the NYT itself quoted in 2009 as “an expert on environmental communications,” for his comments:

Read more

Yglesias

Labor Unions and Tax Rates

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 10, 2011 at 5:29 pm

Via John Sides, Jason Sorens presents research on the relationship between union density and tax rates:

What they show is that even when you control for overall state ideology (Democratic states have higher taxes, and really Democratic states have much higher taxes), union density increases tax rates. Increasing union density from 10% of the workforce, as in Nebraska, to 25%, as in Hawaii and New York, increases the tax burden by about one and a quarter percentage points of state personal income. For a sense of scale, the mean tax burden was 10.0% of personal income in 2008, and the standard deviation was 1.23, so this is essentially a standard deviation increase.

By passing right-to-work, Indiana could expect its unionization rate to drop anywhere between four and nine percentage points, taking in the range of values observed in other right-to-work states. This change would decrease Indiana’s tax burden in the long run by between a third and three-quarters of a percentage point of personal income. The predicted effects in New Hampshire would be slightly less, since New Hampshire is slightly less unionized than Indiana.

It’s difficult to make causal inferences based on these kind of statistical correlations, but the underlying theory here seems pretty clear. Under both the conservative “greedy public servants demand high pay for themselves” theory and the progressive “unions are a crucial counterweight to the political influence of the rich” theory, higher levels of public spending are a major political consequence of unionization. One alternative interpretation that I would like to see statistically tested would be that richer places have higher burdens (which is the general global and historical trend) and right to work laws happen to have proliferated in poor southern states 50 years ago.

Climate Progress

During Climate Hearing, Markey Asks If Anti-Science GOP Will Repeal Gravity, Heliocentrism, Relativity

By Brad Johnson on Mar 10, 2011 at 5:20 pm

With sardonic humor, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) mocked today’s markup of legislation to overturn the scientific finding that fossil fuel pollution is causing dangerous climate change. Markey, who championed climate legislation that passed the House of Representatives in 2009, protested the energy subcommittee’s consideration of the Upton-Inhofe bill to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules on climate pollution, including its endangerment finding:

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet.

However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room.

I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.

This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process!

Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise.

And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.

Watch it:

After Markey’s remarks, the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, chaired by Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), approved the science prevention bill by a voice vote.

Politics

Subprime Schools Throw Fundraiser For Rep. Kline After He Blocks Funding For Proposed Regulation

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 10, 2011 at 5:15 pm

House Education Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN)

For-profit colleges — which, as ThinkProgress has been documenting, make the vast majority of their revenue from the federal government, pay their CEOs huge salaries, and leave their students with crippling debt and bleak job prospects — have declared a lobbying “WAR” in order to block new regulations from the Education Department and preserve their almost limitless access to federal dollars. They have hired a bipartisan phalanx of lobbyists and are astroturfing on Capitol Hill, supplying students with their industry-approved talking points.

In the last election cycle, the for-profit college industry also donated millions to congressional candidates, including $100,000 to House Education Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN). Kline dutifully inserted a provision into the House Republicans’ 2011 spending bill that scuttled the Education Department’s regulations. And Tuesday night, as Higher Ed Watch reported, the industry threw Kline a personal fundraiser:

The Political Action Committee connected to the group formerly known as the Career College Association hosted a dinner reception for Rep. John Kline (R-MN) at “the refined and elegant” Capitol Hill Club, which is the premiere social club and restaurant for Republicans in the nation’s capital.

The career college group, which now known as the Association for Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), invited for-profit college officials who were in town for the organization’s “Hill Day and Policy Forum” to join in the festivities. Those who wished to attend were required to make a donation to Kline’s re-election campaign of either $2,500 to be considered a “sponsor” of the event, or $1,000 to be a “patron,” according to a copy of the invitation that Higher Ed Watch obtained.

Many for-profit schools make 90 percent of their revenue from the federal government, while posting profit margins of 30 percent. Strayer University CEO Robert Silberman was paid $41 million in 2009. With those sorts of numbers, giving $2,500 to Kline’s re-election campaign is likely a good investment. Senate Republicans have already introduced legislation similar to Kline’s, which would deny the Education Department funding to implement new regulations.

On Monday, a lobbyist for Kaplan University — which makes 91.5 percent of its revenue from the federal government — likened Democratic efforts to regulate for-profit colleges to “jihad” while speaking at a gathering of for-profit schools. “I’d guess almost everyone here agrees,” he added.

Cross-posted on The Wonk Room. For more information, see our report, “For-profits, not students.”

Alyssa

Pink Tie

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 10, 2011 at 4:37 pm

There are a number of reasons that Party Down shouldn’t be the kind of show that I like. I frequently find awkward humor intensely uncomfortable. I absolutely hate watching people throw up. The show has a lot of Hollywood cliches. But I just absolutely love it, and tore through most of the show this weekend.

I think there are a couple of things about the show that caught me in a way that’s never been able to sustain my interest in that other bastion of awkwardness, The Office. First, it seems plausible that the characters could get away with the slow-boil level of incompetence that’s their general state without running things completely into the ground. The show makes the Party Down crew’s place in the Los Angeles catering economy clear, and plausible, and gets a lot of humor out of it. It’s a big city, and there are a lot of weird, mediocre people who need caterers in it, and better caterers who can use weird, mediocre caterers as backup:
And the way the show situates its characters on the margins of the industry they actually want to be in, as well as the one they actually are. Whether it’s Kyle’s desire to be in bad action movies, Roman’s hopes to break into mediocre sci-fi even as he loves Snow Crash and Star Trek, Casey hoping to make it as a comedian on a cruise line and avoid stomach viruses, Ron and his franchise restaurant. It’s the side of Los Angeles that is only on-screen briefly in most places, because it’s more palliative to the audience to believe that no one gets stuck there, that virtue will lift everyone who deserves it out of financial insecurity. 
The show’s the inverse of The Office: rather than the fearless leader who believes everything is possible in Michael Scott, Henry essentially believes that nothing is possible. Instead of having to convince myself that there are mysterious forces that let Michael stay in business, I get a proxy in Henry, who sees the ridiculousness in everything around him, and who understands the value of getting by.

Yglesias

On Not Surrendering to Bad Ideas

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 10, 2011 at 4:29 pm

Ezra Klein’s list of common mistakes made by economists when engaging with politics makes a lot of good points. But where I disagree with Ezra it’s in what I see as an excessive level of concern with short-term practicality. Since one of his injunctions is to listen more to political scientists and another is to avoid the word “stochastic,” I’ll buttress the point with the observation that political science indicates that the operation of American politics is a good deal more stochastic than political practitioners (including journalists) generally realize. The conventional wisdom tends to simultaneously underrate the odds of the status quo persisting and underrate the odds of dramatic, rapid change.

Relatedly, I think there’s often a tendency to systematically underrate the extent to which it’s possible to change minds over time. That’s one reason I was so interested in Anthony Appiah’s book on moral revolutions. Public opinion about civil rights legislation changed a lot between 1915 and 1965 and a lot more between 1965 and 2005. Attitudes toward war have evolved considerably since Vietnam, and attitudes toward gays and lesbians have been completely revolutionized over the past 20 years.

None of that is to deny that there’s a place in the world for concessions to political reality and for practical-minded people. But I think that as a society we’re actually under-invested in discussions of impractical schemes and public efforts to remediate widespread intellectual errors. The course of the future is very uncertain. Three years ago, I would have agreed with the consensus that a cap-and-trade bill with side-deals was much more likely than a carbon tax. Today that now looks wrong to me and carbon tax as part of a long-term deficit reduction bill seems like the most likely (albeit not very likely) path to meaningful carbon pricing. In retrospect, we can see that George Allen’s “macaca moment” led to a massive overhaul of American health care policy. Under the circumstances, the best thing for people knowledgeable about policy-relevant subject matter to do is to share what they know with as many people as possible and worry less about pre-trimming ideas to conform to guesstimates about what’s possible/relevant/effective.

Most of all, people should think more about the long-term. Ask yourself what it was “feasible” to do to public opinion or public policy in 1811. And yet somehow things are better. And I’m optimistic we’ll improve in the next 200 years.

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