August 14, 2008
ALONG THE AXIS:
Poland, US Reach Preliminary Deal on Missile Shield (VOA News, 14 August 2008)
U.S. and Polish negotiators have reached a preliminary agreement on deploying a proposed U.S. missile defense system in eastern Europe.Poland's Under-Secretary of State Andrzej Kremer and U.S. chief negotiator, John Rood, initialed the deal in Warsaw Thursday. [...]
[Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk] said the United States had agreed to Polish demands for greater military cooperation.
AT LEAST THEY KNOW WHO HE NEEDS TO PASS AS:
The Obama Tax Plan (JASON FURMAN and AUSTAN GOOLSBEE, August 14, 2008, Wall Street Journal)
They said President Clinton's 1993 deficit-reduction plan would wreck the economy. Eight years and 23 million new jobs later, the economy proved them wrong. Now they are making the same claims about Sen. Obama's tax plan, which has even lower taxes than prevailed in the 1990s -- including lower taxes on middle-class families, lower taxes for capital gains, and lower taxes for dividends.Overall, Sen. Obama's middle-class tax cuts are larger than his partial rollbacks for families earning over $250,000, making the proposal as a whole a net tax cut and reducing revenues to less than 18.2% of GDP -- the level of taxes that prevailed under President Reagan.
The claim to be Bill Clinton/Ronald Reagan, though risible, is necessary.
BETTER TO MOUTH PLATITUDES AND BE THOUGHT A BIMBO...:
Barack Obama's Lost Years: The senator's tenure as a state legislator reveals him to be an old-fashioned, big government, race-conscious liberal. (Stanley Kurtz, 08/11/2008, Weekly Standard)
Barack Obama's neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, has a longstanding tradition of opening its pages to elected officials-from Chicago aldermen to state legislators to U.S. senators. Obama himself, as a state senator, wrote more than 40 columns for the Herald, under the title "Springfield Report," between 1996 and 2004. Read in isolation, Obama's columns from the state capital tell us little. Placed in the context of political and policy battles then raging in Illinois, however, the young legislator's dispatches powerfully illuminate his political beliefs. Even more revealing are hundreds of articles chronicling Obama's early political and legislative activities in the pages not only of the Hyde Park Herald, but also of another South Side fixture, the Chicago Defender.Obama moved to Chicago in order to place himself in what he understood to be the de facto "capital" of black America. For well over 100 years, the Chicago Defender has been the voice of that capital, and therefore a paper of national significance for African Americans. Early on in his political career, Obama complained of being slighted by major media, like the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Yet extensive and continuous coverage in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald presents a remarkable resource for understanding who Obama is. Reportage in these two papers is particularly significant because Obama's early political career-the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004-can fairly be called the "lost years," the period Obama seems least eager to talk about, in contrast to his formative years in Hawaii, California, and New York or his days as a community organizer, both of which are recounted in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. The pages of the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender thus offer entrée into Obama's heretofore hidden world.
What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. As details of Obama's early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It's no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.
...than to explain your views and be recognized a Northern liberal.
THE PLAYER WHO WAS TRADED FOR HIMSELF:
Paul Byrd move a cash-only transaction (Tony Massarotti, 8/14/08, Boston Herald)
When you get right down to it, there will be no “player to be named” in the trade that brought Paul Byrd to Boston.Unless, of course, you consider Benjamin Franklin to be a prospect.
According to a source familiar with the trade talks between the Red Sox [team stats] and Cleveland Indians, the Red Sox have agreed to pick up all of Byrd’s remaining salary this season, an amount equal to about $2 million. The inclusion of any “player to be named” is nothing more than a procedural matter, and there was indication yesterday that there will, in fact, be no player at all.
TO HIS CREDIT...:
Obama's Abortion Distortion: The senator's excuses for opposing the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act don't withstand scrutiny. (Kevin Vance, 08/13/2008, Weekly Standard)
IN MARCH 2003, registered nurse Jill Stanek submitted a statement to the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services committee in which she reported that infants who survived abortions at her Oak Lawn hospital were sometimes "taken to the Soiled Utility Room and left alone to die." Stanek was lobbying the committee to approve the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002, which would have recognized any infant born alive after an abortion as a human being deserving legal protection. Barack Obama, then the committee chairman, defeated the bill with his fellow Democrats in a 6-4 party-line vote.Obama's campaign website offers two reasons why the senator opposed the bill in 2003. First, the website claims that Obama did not support the state legislation because it lacked language "clarifying that the act would not be used to undermine Roe vs. Wade." The website cites Obama's assertion that he would have supported the similar federal born-alive bill, which included language clarifying that it would not undermine Roe v. Wade when it unanimously passed the Senate in 2001.
In fact, the federal legislation and the final version of the Illinois senate bill were essentially the same. On Monday, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) released documents that showed that the Illinois senate committee unanimously approved an amendment that made the state legislation almost identical to the federal legislation. The amendment provided that the act should not be "construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being 'born alive'". This was the precise language of the federal bill Obama thought to be a sufficient protection of Roe v. Wade.
...Senator Obama recognizes that the law does undermine Roe.
HOW THE THIRD WAY ENDED SS'S REPUTATION AS A THIRD RAIL:
Balances Down, but Savings Up in 401(k) Plans (Katy Marquardt, August 14, 2008, US News)
Despite the ailing economy, 401(k) investors are saving more, according to a new study from Fidelity, which analyzed the 11.5 million participants it administers. In the first half of the year, investors who participated in the same plan both this year and last set $3,512 aside, on average, from their pretax earnings, up 7 percent from $3,283 in the first half of 2007.Fidelity says the average retirement plan account balance dropped 7.5 percent in the first half of 2008, to $64,000, down from $69,200 in the first half of 2007. By comparison, Standard & Poor's 500 stock index dropped nearly 15 percent in the first half of this year. Surprisingly, the average balance for employees who stayed in their plans for both years fell less than 1 percent in the first half of 2008. Translation: 401(k) investors are diversifying!
Our experiences refute the Left's Second Way rhetoric.
IT'S QUITE A DELICIOUS PARADOX...:
The Wrong Force for the ‘Right War’ (BARTLE BREESE BULL, 8/14/08, NY Times)
Denying sanctuary to terrorists — in Afghanistan and everywhere else — is undoubtedly an American interest of the first order. Accomplishing it, however, requires neither the conquest of large swathes of Afghan territory nor a troop surge there — nor even maintaining the number of troops NATO has in Afghanistan today. Counterterrorism is not about occupation. It centers on combining intelligence with specialized military capabilities.While the Taliban is certainly regaining strength, it could provide Al Qaeda with a true safe harbor only if its troops retake Kabul. But they have little hope of returning to power as long as we train the Afghan Army, support an Afghan state generously in other ways and maintain our intelligence and surgical strike capacities.
Besides, even if the Taliban were to return to power and give Al Qaeda the sorts of safe havens it enjoyed in Afghanistan in 2001, this would probably make little difference in America’s security. Rory Stewart, a former British foreign ministry official in Afghanistan and Iraq who now manages a nongovernmental group in Kabul, argues that the existence there of “Quantico-style” terrorist facilities teaching primitive insurgency infantry tactics had little to do with 9/11. “You don’t need to go to Afghanistan to learn how to use a box cutter,” Stewart has told me. “And Afghanistan is not a good place for flight school.”
One could argue that the key Al Qaeda training for 9/11 occurred not in the Taliban’s Afghanistan but in Jeb Bush’s Florida. And in terms of terrorist planning, 9/11 would have been better avoided with an occupation of Hamburg, where most of the essential plotting for the attack occurred.
In any case, American counterterrorism interests in Afghanistan appear to argue for something far more restrained than our current commitment there, maybe 20,000 Western troops maximum. In the long run, it needs to be seen as the remote, poor and ungovernable country it is, albeit one with a history of ties to Al Qaeda and located next door to Osama bin Laden’s current base of operations, Pakistan. Still, a very light American presence operating through embassies and aid organizations should be able to collect the intelligence needed to allow special forces to eliminate terrorist threats as they appear.
...when we get to determine where al Qaeda can find sanctuary they don't have one.
LAWRENCE TAYLOR'S ONLY COMP FOR BEST FOOTBALL PLAYER OF THE MODERN ERA:
Kellen Winslow Sr. new athletic director at Central (Associated Press, August 14, 2008)
Central State University has hired pro football hall-of-famer Kellen Winslow Sr. is the school's new athletic director.Winslow, father of the Cleveland Browns' Pro Bowl tight end, was introduced today during a news conference at the southwest Ohio school. Fundraising will be among Winslow's duties as the university moves into full NCAA Division II membership this fall.
He and LT were the two players who could have started at every position on the field.
WE'D LIKE TO MEET UP WITH THESE REDESIGNERS IN THE STUDY WITH A HORSEWHIP:
Cluedo stars killed in makeover (BBC, 8/14/08)
Classic murder-solving board game Cluedo has been given a facelift which has killed off its famous characters.Old characters like Colonel Mustard and Professor Plum have been replaced by football pundit Jack Mustard and video game billionaire Victor Plum.
The house has been renovated from a stately home into a modern mansion complete with a theatre and spa rather than library and ballroom.
There are also new murder weapons, including a dumbbell and baseball bat.
Miss Scarlet is now movie star Kasandra Scarlet, cook Mrs White is now child star Diane White and Reverend Green is now Jacob Green, "the man on the scene with all the ins".
WHICH IS THE POINT OF PUTTING IT IN A BOOK:
'Hope' Lacks Heft (JOHN McWHORTER, August 14, 2008, NY Sun)
Then there are those who don't have a sense of what Mr. Obama is about. These are people who are not especially intrigued by his multicultural biography. They just want to know what he has to offer.On this topic, we hear this week that the Obama folks are about to put out a book summarizing his policy proposals and reprinting some of his speeches. "A" for effort, but this won't do it.
For one thing, a book is not the best way to get your message out when the people who need to hear it tend to have a less intimate relationship with the printed page than Obama fans who subscribe to the Atlantic. My wife and I spent part of our vacation in a working-class seaside town, and the used bookstores there were bursting with paperback fiction and children's books. Nonfiction stuff was on the margins, mostly biographies and books about the movies.
These days even erstwhile pageaholics such as Nicholas Carr, in the Atlantic, are admitting that they barely make it through nonfiction books anymore and are more inclined to scoot around online. Beyond self-help books and other utilitarian tomes, most people do not read nonfiction books and never have.
If the Unicorn Rider's policies would help him with the electorate he'd mention them in speeches. They don't, so you point at the book, say your substance is right there, and then continue spooning out pabulum in Baptist cadences.
IT'S HARDLY A CRITICISM OF ESCAPIST ENTERTAINMENT...:
Image via Wikipedia
In “Burn Notice,” Jeffrey Donovan stars as Michael Westen, a suddenly former spy—“burn notice” is the term used in spy circles when an agent is terminated. Westen has been burned for reasons he doesn’t know; one moment he’s in a market in Nigeria, and the next he’s being packed onto a plane and sent off to a place not of his choosing, which happens to be Miami, where his mother, Madeline (Sharon Gless), lives. But he’s not out of danger—his own people, whoever they are (we’re never told which government agency Westen was connected with, or even if he was formally connected with one at all), may be after him, and so may the people he was after. Miami, with its heat, intrigue, flow of shady capital, and fabled glamour, is a good spot for “Burn Notice”; it’s both Hollywood and Casablanca. (The show’s creator, Matt Nix, originally set it in Newark but was, shall we say, gently persuaded by USA to move it to Miami.)While Westen is trying to figure out who burned him, and how he can regain his job, he lends a helping hand to his mother’s friends, and to other locals who have found themselves on the wrong side of thugs, assassins, and blackmailers. At the same time, he has to protect his mother, who, by virtue of being related to him, is always a potential target for no-goodniks. Michael has a complicated relationship with his mother, who is a less blowsy and flamboyant version of the mother Gless played in “Queer as Folk,” combined with some of Mama Rose’s will. She’s pushy, she chain-smokes, and she wears the kind of big, colorful earrings that say “Florida retiree with pizzazz.” Michael resents her for not having been the best mother and for having turned a blind eye to his father’s failings—his father was an irresponsible, absent type, and it’s clear that that neglect has something to do with Michael’s escape into another life. Upon his return to Miami, his mother says, “You missed your father’s funeral. By eight years.” Michael’s ambivalence toward his mother is already getting old, partly because his character is not deepening as the series goes on. Donovan has a hard, closed face, and he deploys a broad, deliberately insincere grin that conveys Westen’s bitterness and cynicism, but not much else. It is not a terrible thing that Donovan strongly resembles the actor James Franco, but it is unfortunate that his steely glint, his wiry frame, and his often inappropriate smile call up Frank Gorshin’s Riddler in the old “Batman” series.
What little emotional life Michael has is with a weapons expert, Fiona Glenanne (Gabrielle Anwar), who works with him and is a sometime flame; but if there’s lingering feeling between them in the script, it’s not on the screen. Fiona’s value is comic; she’s a pretty Irish lass, who happens to be turned on by violence, and who gets pouty when she has to hold her fire. The best character in “Burn Notice” is an old colleague of Westen’s, Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell), who left the world of espionage for the girls, the bars, and the ease of Miami; he’s a happy bachelor, if slightly harried by his (offscreen, and funnier for it) girlfriend, and despite the fact that he has been secretly reporting to government agents on his old pal Michael and is a little torn about that. Campbell, a square-jawed, solidly built, handsome actor with a resonant, announcer’s voice, became famous in the eighties for his appearances in the “Evil Dead” movies (he wrote a book called “If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor”). His suburban-dad looks have given way to a warm, scruffy bearishness, and he ambles through “Burn Notice” as if he were having the time of his life.
...to note that the main players pull it off without seeming like they're trying very hard.
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AND WHAT RUSSELL KIRK, ROE V. WADE, JERRY FALWELL, AND RONALD REAGAN DID...:
Conflict of Interests: Does the wrangling of interest groups corrupt politics—or constitute it? (Nicholas Lemann August 11, 2008, The New Yorker)
[Arthur Bentley's] “The Process of Government” is a hedgehog of a book. Its point—relentlessly hammered home—can be stated quite simply: All politics and all government are the result of the activities of groups. Any other attempt to explain politics and government is doomed to failure. It was, in his day as in ours, a wildly contrarian position. Bentley was writing “The Process of Government” at the height of the Progressive Era, when educated, prosperous, high-minded people believed overwhelmingly in “reform” and “good government,” and took interest groups to be the enemy of these goals. The more populist Progressives liked having the people as a whole decide things by direct vote; the more élitist Progressives wanted to give authority to experts. But Bentley, who seems to have shared the Progressives’ goal of using government to curb the power of big business, rejected such procedural tenets. In Chicago terms, Bentley was the rare Progressive intellectual who believed, in effect, that the machine had a more accurate understanding of how politics worked—how it always and necessarily worked—than the lakefront liberals did.Bentley’s reputation soared in the years after the Second World War, and there’s a reason. His presentation of politics as a never-ending, small-bore struggle for advantage among constantly shifting coalitions of interest groups, which appalled the Progressives, was appealing in the wake of Hitler and Stalin. Big ideas about the collective good had come to seem scary—the prelude to mass murder. Bentley spent the last years of his life being honored. Students of American politics read “The Process of Government” alongside Tocqueville and the Federalist Papers.
But pluralism—the name for Bentley’s theory of politics—has always been good for starting an argument. The standard objections are that pluralism gives too little weight to the power of ideas and of social and economic forces, and that it leaves no room for morality. (Pluralism’s equivalent in foreign relations is realism, which strikes people who don’t like it as having the same flaws.) What if there actually is such a thing as a policy that’s right on the merits? Shouldn’t we find a way to make sure that it’s enacted, instead of having to trust in the messy workings of the political marketplace? If politics worked the way Bentley thought it did, wouldn’t the richer interest groups buy themselves disproportionate political power? To a lot of people, pluralism sounded like pessimism. It was during the nineteen-sixties, when reform was again in the air and impatience with traditional forms of politics was on the rise, that “The Process of Government” began to fall out of favor.
...was remind the faithful that we too are an interest group, indeed, the biggest one. What Bentley got wrong is that what holds a group together can be shared ideas.
WHAT MAKES HER AN ULTIMATELY MORE SIGNIFICANT FIGURE THAN THE GIPPER...:
The plot against liberal America: In its pursuit of a free-market utopia, the US right tried to crush unions, the legal profession and all the pillars of the left. It will not stop there (Thomas Frank, 14 August 2008, New Statesman)
The most cherished dream of conservative Washington is that liberalism can somehow be defeated, finally and irreversibly, in the way that armies are beaten and pests are exterminated. Electoral victories by Republicans are just part of the story. The larger vision is of a future in which liberalism is physically barred from the control room - of an "end of history" in which taxes and onerous regulation will never be allowed to threaten the fortunes private individuals make for themselves. This is the longing behind the former White House aide Karl Rove's talk of "permanent majority" and, 20 years previously, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's declaration to the Republican convention that it's "the job of all revolutions to make permanent their gains".When I first moved to contemplate this peculiar utopian vision, I was struck by its apparent futility. What I did not understand was that beating liberal ideas was not the goal. The Washington conservatives aim to make liberalism irrelevant not by debating, but by erasing it. Building a majority coalition has always been a part of the programme, and conservatives have enjoyed remarkable success at it for more than 30 years. But winning elections was not a bid for permanence by itself. It was only a means.
The end was capturing the state, and using it to destroy liberalism as a practical alternative. The pattern was set by Margaret Thatcher, who used state power of the heaviest-handed sort to implant permanently the anti-state ideology.
"Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul," she said, echoing Stalin. In the 34 years before she became prime minister, Britain rode a see-saw of nationalisation, privatisation and renationalisation; Thatcher set out to end the game for good. Her plan for privatising council housing was designed not only to enthrone the market, but to encourage an ownership mentality and "change the soul" of an entire class of voters. When she sold off nationally owned industries, she took steps to ensure that workers received shares at below-market rates, leading hopefully to the same soul transformation. Her brutal suppression of the miners' strike in 1984 showed what now awaited those who resisted the new order. As a Business Week reporter summarised it in 1987: "She sees her mission as nothing less than eradicating Labour Party socialism as a political alternative."
...is that she succeeded. Even a cipher like David Cameron has a cakewalk to power because Gordon Brown has deviated from Thatcherism/Blairism. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton lost because she began her campaign eschewing Clintonism/Thatcherism and Barack Obama has had to pretend not to believe in anything (besides his own ambition) because he can't risk being seen as outside the Thatcherite/New Democrat/Compassionate Conservative mainstream.
LONG STORY, SHORT:
Friends speak of Elizabeth Edwards (Jenny Booth, 8/14/08, Times of London)
Privately he confessed the affair to his wife in 2006, he says, and ended the entanglement, but the admission came at a critical juncture in Elizabeth Edwards' life. Some weeks later she learned that her breast cancer had returned, had spread to her bones and was now incurable.In the circumstances, she was left with a stark choice about the future of her marriage as she did not know how long she had left to live, said Mrs Edwards' friend Hargrave McElroy, in an interview with People magazine.
This is supposed to make us feel sympathy, but isn't the take away pretty basic: She was lying to his supporters and party too.
FIRST WE BLOODY THE BEAR'S NOSE...:
Politics Is Local: Warlordism in Georgia again. (Dodge Billingsley, 8/14/08, National Review)
[W]hen the Georgian armed forces embarked on a military campaign to regain control of separatist-minded Abkhazia, the conflict lasted from mid-1992 to September 2003, and was an unmitigated disaster. Both sides committed atrocities, and Georgian discipline was terrible — fighters coming and going as they pleased, in many cases after they had filled their cars with Abkhazian loot. Command and control was virtually non-existent. It was a rout at the hands of Abkhazian militiamen and Chechen volunteers, with minimal assistance from Russian federal forces.Eventually Georgia dissolved the Military Council, and Kitovani immigrated to Moscow. Ioseliani served prison time before going into retirement. Shevardnadze’s standing in the West, as one of the architects of the end of the Cold War, brought substantial assistance to Georgia, and eventually military support from the U.S. The bottom line: The military that President Saakashvili inherited was a lot better, at least on paper.
Which makes last week’s assault on South Ossetia more curious. Georgia’s own military past should have served as a how-not-to guide for conducting military operations. It is astonishing that Georgia seemed intent to encircle and bombard the South Ossetian capital, full of civilians. It is as if the Georgian armed forces learned nothing from the military adventurism of a decade and a half ago.
Half a strategist would have told the Georgian planners that rather than strike at civilian centers, thus hardening Ossetian resolve, it would have been better to bypass Tskinvali and secure the only road from the border with Russia to South Ossetia — the logical ingress route for the Russian 58th Army out of North Ossetia — in case Russia responded with force. The road to the border is also ideally fit for guerilla warfare, the type the Chechens employed to stymie the Russian military in Chechnya for years. RPG and sniper teams well-placed along the route could have crippled the Russian assault before it even got started.
Apparently, U.S. military training and assistance to Georgia did not take into account the stigma the Georgian military had earned vis-à-vis Abkhazia and South Ossetia, instead concentrating on hardware and unit tactics. We may have forgotten Georgia’s past, and we may associate Georgia with the Rose Revolution, but local memory is deeper.
...then we recognize the nations of Chechnya, Abkhazia and S. Ossetia.
WHAT IF THE WIZARD ISN'T A HOAX?:
What's the Matter With Thomas Frank? (CHRISTOPHER WILLCOX | August 12, 2008, NY Sun)
The author, who created a minor sensation with his best-selling "What's the Matter With Kansas?" is a trained historian with a pronounced affinity for the Frankfurt School and its neo-Marxist "critical theory" approach to culture and politics. But he writes like a muckraking journalist, and the average reader would have no idea whatsoever that down-to-earth Tom Frank from Mission Hills, Kan., has such a distinguished, if slightly exotic, intellectual pedigree.Mr. Frank's point about contemporary conservative politics is straightforward and dogmatic: It lives and breathes to support American plutocracy. The so-called Reagan coalition — including traditional Republicans, Cold Warrior liberals, social conservatives, libertarians, and Carterphobes — was and is merely a carefully calculated narrative designed to win elections:
In America, conservatism has always been an expression of business. Absorbing this fact is a condition to understanding the movement; it is anterior to everything else conservatism has been over the years. To try to understand conservatism without taking into account its grounding in business thought — to depict it as, say, the political style of an unusually pious nation or an extreme dedication to the principle of freedom — is like setting off to war with maps of the wrong country.
That Mr. Frank is setting off to war is an understatement. It would be hard to imagine a more scorched-earth approach to political science. Conservatives are not only wrongheaded, he tells us, but evil manipulators of those poor proles in Kansas who refuse to vote their own economic interests because they insist on honoring their personal values.
The problem for Mr. Frank is that even if we were to suppose that the sole interest of the GOP was to improve business/economic conditions, we'd have to note that it has succeeded and, thereby, benefitted Kansans massively, How Are We Doing? (W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, July/August 2008, The American)
Income and wages are often used as gauges of progress, but consumption is the best measure of rising living standards. Products that began as luxuries only the rich could afford in time came within the means of just about all U.S. households (Fig. 1). In previous generations, telephones, cars, electricity, household appliances, and televisions made life better for the average American. In our times it has been computers, cell phones, Internet access, VCR/ DVD players, digital cameras, and more.All segments of society have shared in the material progress. Over the past two decades, ownership of cars, color televisions, and household appliances has risen among poor households (Fig. 2). A quarter of poor households have computers. Two in five own their homes. For many goods, ownership rates are higher for today’s poor households than for the general population of the early 1970s.
As Americans know, today’s rising food and energy prices are crimping household budgets. But there are other ways to understand the relative size of the rise of food and energy costs. For example, in terms of time worked at the average pay rate, the real cost of a 12-item basket of basic foods has hardly budged. And while the work-time price of gasoline doubled in recent years, a gallon of gasoline still goes for less than 11 minutes of work (Fig. 3). At 20 miles per gallon, an hour of work will get you 110 miles down the road; at 30 mpg, you can go 165 miles.
When it comes to how hard we have to work for food and fuel, we still face far lower burdens than our grandparents did. Living standards rise on the ability to use productive resources to churn out more goods and services—that is, to advance productivity. As the economy has become more productive decade by decade, Americans have reaped the gains, first and foremost by consuming more.
There’s more to the good life than goods and services, however, and we’ve taken some of our added productivity in other ways. We’ve gained more leisure time, improved our working conditions, enhanced safety and security, and added variety to our choice set. All of these benefits become increasingly important as we climb up the income ladder.
The lament-filled anecdotes about long hours and low pay just don’t stand up to the test of hard data. Real total compensation—wages plus fringe benefits, both adjusted for inflation—has been rising steadily for several generations (Fig. 4). Over time, the fringes have become a larger share of the rewards for work, dampening the statistics on wage increases. At the same time, we’re spending less time at work. An average workweek has fallen from 39.8 hours in 1950 to 36.9 hours in 1973 to 33.8 hours today.
Fig 8- Safer at Work and Home-final.jpgNot all those hours are spent on actual work. Human resources experts estimate that 1.6 hours a day go to non-work activities; employees themselves say it’s more than two hours. What are workers doing? Most of them are using the Internet for personal business or socializing with coworkers (Fig. 5). It’s no coincidence that the busiest times for online auctions come during the hours when most Americans are supposed to be hard at work (Fig. 6).
We’re not only working less on the job. We’re also taking less time for household chores. Since 1950, the annual hours devoted to work at home has fallen from 1,544 to 1,278. Working less means we have more time for ourselves. The hustle and bustle of everyday life conceals the fact that a typical American has more free time than ever.
As it turns out, those Kansans haven't been hoodwinked at all. If we look at the effect of their vote only through the lens of economic self-interest we find that they've utilized their franchise quite sensibly.