Category: National/International

The Monkey Cage is a political science blog. One of the topics this week is “makers vs. takers” in the USA.

Creating a working definition of takers is tricky. A core conceptual problem is that making versus taking is a matter of degree…nearly all of us are takers to some extent. And nearly everyone contributes to government through taxes of some sort at the national, state, or local level.

I’m quite interested in this subject because some days I feel surrounded by folks who feel that half the country are deadbeats.

It used to be that I was surrounded by people with disabilities, who received government benefits like SSDI but who would have given a whole lot to be “normal,” the definition of which was a couple more residential options, a family and a job.

If I knew of someone who was a “welfare cheat” I would turn him/her in immediately, because allowing fraud to go on adds to the “deadbeat” stories and in the end would hurt some of the best people I know.

Pro Publica: How Democrats Fooled California’s Redistricting Commission.

Previous redistrictings had been executed by political pros with intimate knowledge of California’s sprawling political geography. The commissioners had little of that expertise — and one of their first acts was to deprive themselves of the data that might have helped them spot partisan manipulation.

The law creating the commission barred it from considering incumbents’ addresses, and instructed it not to draw districts for partisan reasons.

The commissioners decided to go further, agreeing not to even look at data that would tell them how prospective maps affected the fortunes of Democrats or Republicans. This left the commissioners effectively blind to the sort of influence the Democrats were planning.

The commissioners were “civilian” volunteers who were holding down day jobs. They had neither the know-how nor the resources to winnow the wheat from the chaff, and in defensive attempts to limit input ended up shutting down legitimate citizen participation as well.

Reaction to the report, unsurprisingly, depended upon party affiliation.

RRStar.com/AP: “Anonymous donors pay off KMart layaway accounts”

The benefactors generally ask to help families who are squirreling away items for young children. They often pay a portion of the balance, usually all but a few dollars or cents so the layaway order stays in the store’s system.

The phenomenon seems to have begun in Michigan before spreading, Kmart executives said.
[…]
The good Samaritans seem to be visiting mainly Kmart stores, though a Wal-Mart spokesman said a few of his stores in Joplin, Mo., and Chicago have also seen some layaway accounts paid off.

At least one beneficiary is “paying it forward,” too. A real upper of a story.

In this age when lies and prejudices masquerade as truth as never before, it can be very difficult to figure out what’s factual, and which sources to trust.

Nowhere is this more the case than in macroeconomics, yet we must decide upon which economic policies and legislation to support — soon.

One of my sources is Paul Krugman, because of what he’s demonstrably gotten right over the past four years. Krugman was one of the people to call the housing bubble a bubble, when other leading economists were claiming that the age of bubbles was past. He was able to explain to me, a child of the 70s, why hyperinflation was not going to happen this time. He correctly predicted where the stimulus would be found wanting, and that austerity measures at the federal level would lead to continued high unemployment.

Today in his blog, Krugman warns that the situation appears to be taking a turn that would make climbing out of the hole harder. Continue reading Doing Nothing is Unacceptable