Solidarity with Striking Oklahoma Teachers [feedly]

Solidarity with Striking Oklahoma Teachers
https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/solidarity-with-striking-oklahoma-teachers/

Austin Democratic Socialists of America Statement of Solidarity

With Striking Oklahoma Teachers

As history has taught us, collective action is imperative in the fight to win a better world for working class people. For the last four decades, labor power has been on the decline as its strength has been continually eroded by capitalist interests. The current wave of teacher strikes is a reminder that even with unions weakened under Right To Work laws and a multitude of other attacks, we can win when we organize and fight in solidarity.

In light of this, Austin DSA fully supports the Oklahoma teacher and school staff shutdown of public schools. Teachers and education employees are standing together in unprecedented numbers to demand improvements in worker pay. They are also demanding additional investments for public education for their students.

The Oklahoma Legislature has failed to invest in teachers and in student learning. This disinvestment has created a crisis in the public schools in Oklahoma.  Due to lack of funds,schools in 91 districts are only open 4 days a week—a 20% reduction in classroom learning every week. Administrators from superintendents to principals have joined teachers and school employees in over 100 school districts to shut down the schools and head to the Capitol to demand change.

Oklahoma teachers have not had a raise in 20 years.  Oklahoma is ranked 50th in teacher pay. The abandonment of the public schools has been led by Republican majorities in the Legislature and the Governor's mansion. But it is not just a Republican problem.  Democrats have failed to exercise leadership on progressive tax plans and haven't been up to the task of addressing the growing education funding crisis in Oklahoma.

This disinvestment is similar to the conditions that led to the historic teacher strike in West Virginia in February.  Oklahomans are inspired by the lessons of the massive uprising, uniting teachers, school employees, parents,and the broader Oklahoma community. West Virginia teachers and their allies  demanded and won badly needed investments in public education in teacher/staff salary and in relief from skyrocketing healthcare costs. But it wasn't just teachers out for themselves; West Virginia teachers demanded, and won, raises for every state worker in West Virginia

We support the OK teachers' just demands for decent raises, not just for the current year, but the coming 3 years as well. The legislature needs to do more to invest in student learning, technology, and school facilities. To address critical levels of teacher turnover, teachers deserve a long-term commitment to fair pay.  A one year raise does not make up for 20 years of neglect. To pay for this investment we urge Democrats to work with unions and the rank and file teacher movement to raise revenue not through regressive taxation but through progressive taxes on the wealthy, increased taxes on the oil and gas industry, and the closing of business tax loopholes as well.

Finally, we believe that this is an important battle in the fight for labor rights, equitable quality education, and health justice more broadly.  This is a crisis in West Virginia and Oklahoma, but it's also a crisis in Texas as well. In fact, it's a crisis in the entire United States, and only by standing together in the face of capitalist disinvestment can we overcome the broader assault on workers.. DSA believes that pay raises aren't enough, and pledge to work towards a broader solution including broad union rights, expanded access to quality public education, and a Medicare For All system in which everyone is provided the highest quality healthcare, free at the point of service.

– Austin DSA Co-Chairs Glenn Scott and Dave Pinkham

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The hidden crisis on college campuses: 36 percent of students don’t have enough to eat [feedly]

The hidden crisis on college campuses: 36 percent of students don't have enough to eat
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/03/the-hidden-crisis-on-college-campuses-36-percent-of-students-dont-have-enough-to-eat/

Caleb Torres, a George Washington University student, regularly skipped meals his freshman year because he didn't have enough money to buy food. (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

Caleb Torres lost seven pounds his freshman year of college — and not because he didn't like the food in the dining hall. A first-generation college student, barely covering tuition, Torres ran out of grocery money halfway through the year and began skipping meals as a result.

He'd stretch a can of SpaghettiOs over an entire day. Or he'd scout George Washington University campus for events that promised free lunch or snacks. Torres told no one what he was going through, least of all his single mom.

"She had enough things to worry about," he said.

Now a senior and living off-campus, in a housing situation that supplies most of his meals, Torres is finally talking about his experience with the hunger problem on America's college campuses: a quiet, insidious epidemic that researchers say threatens millions of students every year.

According to a first-of-its-kind survey released Tuesday by researchers at Temple University and the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, 36 percent of students on U.S. college campuses do not get enough to eat, and a similar number lack a secure place to live. The report, which is the first to include students from two-year, four-year, private and public universities, including GWU, found that nearly 1 in 10 community college students have gone a whole day without eating in the past month. That number was 6 percent among university students.

Researchers blame ballooning college costs, inadequate aid packages and growing enrollment among low-income students — as well as some colleges' unwillingness to admit they have a hunger problem. College hunger is not a new issue, researchers caution. But it appears to be growing worse, and not merely because college is getting more expensive.

"Prices have gone up over time," said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher education policy at Temple and the lead author of the report. "But the rising price is just a piece. This is a systemic problem." 

Goldrick-Rab's report is based on data from 43,000 students at 66 schools and used the Department of Agriculture's assessment for measuring hunger. That means the thousands of students it classifies as having "low food security" aren't merely avoiding the dining hall or saving lunch money for beer: They're skipping meals, or eating smaller meals, because they don't have enough money for food.

On top of that, the report found, 46 percent of community college students and 36 percent of university students struggle to pay for housing and utilities. In the past year, 12 percent of community college students and 9 percent of university students have slept in shelters or in places not intended as housing, or did not know from one day to the next where they would sleep.

Measuring college hunger and homelessness is difficult. Researchers depend on universities to distribute the surveys and on a self-selecting group of students to fill them out.

But the numbers align with other recent surveys on the issue. The University of California has found that 40 percent of its students suffer food insecurity. At four state universities in Illinois, that number is 35 percent.

"Not a single university administrator wanted to acknowledge this was an issue five years ago," said Rachel Sumekh, the chief executive of Swipe Out Hunger, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit. "But the numbers are amazing. It helps us make the case to universities that they need to do something about this."

Experts say the factors underlying campus hunger are complex.  More low-income students are enrolling in college, thanks to expanded needs-based scholarship and grant programs, a move away from standardized test scores as part of the application process, and other initiatives designed to recruit more diverse students.

But once they get on campus, low-income students often find that the patchwork of grants and scholarships they've assembled are not enough to cover all of their expenses.

"There has been an uptick in low-income students on campus, but there hasn't been a corresponding change in university policy to welcome and prepare for these students," said Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

In the 2013-2014 academic year, room and board for the average undergraduate totaled $9,929, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a 50 percent increase over 20 years prior.

Those figures are higher for private and four-year colleges. And they don't include incidental expenses, from printing and laundry fees to nightly room charges assessed against students who can't leave for spring break or summer vacation.

On top of that, students have fewer ways to provide for themselves: Competition for low-wage jobs has increased, and strict work requirements for food stamp recipients mean that many cannot rely on the federal safety net. Even higher income students who don't have their parents' full financial support can find themselves facing difficult choices.

"We know for some students, even one small financial problem can throw them off course," said Tim Miller, the associate dean of students in the Division of Student Affairs at George Washington, where Torres is a senior. "That is serious. We want to help students overcome those issues."

With a 2017-2018 tuition of more than $53,000, and a brand-new food court hawking poke bowls and yogurt topped with rose petals, GWU does not outwardly look like a place where students encounter hunger.

But mixed in among the Canada Goose-clad undergrads are students such as Torres and Emma Montero, a sophomore, who are struggling. Montero works three jobs, including a federal work-study gig designed to help low-income students cover expenses, but neither her wages nor a series of grants, scholarships and low-interest loans have made ends meet, she said.

"I'm not going hungry per se, but there are days I'm just not going to eat," she said. "Today, I am kind of hesitant to buy food, because I have less than $100 and I need to do laundry. Do I want to do my laundry or do I want to eat today? That is the kind of question I'm dealing with."

To alleviate these issues, GW opened a food pantry in 2016, stocked with canned goods, produce and day-old bagels, tucked behind an unmarked door in the same food court where students flock for poke. Hundreds of schools have recently launched these sorts of pantries: Membership in the College and University Food Bank Alliance has swelled from 15 in 2012 to more than 600 today.

Colleges are taking other steps as well. Some have altered their dining plans to cover more meals or to offer more low-cost options, or have begun distributing free dining hall vouchers to students who need them. Others have partnered with nonprofits to redistribute unused meals to hungry students.

Michigan State University, the first school to establish an on-campus pantry, has begun screening students for food insecurity during routine visits to its campus health center. In New York, St. John's University has started advertising an emergency fund that disburses small, one-time grants to students with unexpected expenses.

"This is top-of-mind right now on many campuses," said Amelia Parnell, the vice president for research and policy at the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. "When we think about reasons students drop out, financial issues — like the ability to pay for food and housing — are one of them."

But advocates say higher education is still not doing enough to solve student hunger. There is persistent skepticism about the depth of the problem at some institutions. Others have proven skittish about opening a food pantry or even surveying students, concerned with the message it will send prospective students and donors.

"All the great hunger efforts underway are not even half a drop in an empty bucket given the scale of this crisis," said Wick Sloane, a writing professor at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston who has advocated for low-income students. "All of us in higher ed know this."

Sloane and other advocates have called on the federal government to provide free or reduced-cost meals at colleges, as is already done in primary and secondary schools. This fall, the federal Government Accountability Office is scheduled to release a study on the extent of college hunger, which gives advocates hope that lawmakers are paying attention to the issue.

Advocates would like to see changes to the food stamp program to make it more available to college students. There are also calls to reevaluate the financial aid process, with particular attention to how the government assesses "need."

But unfortunately, those changes will come too late for many. Torres will graduate from GW in May. With little initial support at school, Torres moved off-campus sophomore year on the advice of a friend, renting a room in the home of a middle-aged couple known for helping down-on-their-luck students.

Torres says he hasn't worried about food since then — and that he feels "blessed every day." But he hopes future college students will have other, more institutional support to keep them from going hungry.

"We're in a time where there is going to be a lot of change," he said. "And I'm pleased with where I see it going."

Read more:

For the poor in the Ivy League, a full ride isn't always what they imagined

Dozens more selective colleges join pledge to add lower-income students

Study: Food stamp benefits are already too low in 99 percent of U.S. counties

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

What’s the Matter With Trumpland? [feedly]

What's the Matter With Trumpland?

Paul Krugman

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/opinion/trumpland-economy-polarization.html

These days almost everyone has the (justified) sense that America is coming apart at the seams. But this isn't a new story, or just about politics. Things have been falling apart on multiple fronts since the 1970s: Political polarization has marched side by side with economic polarization, as income inequality has soared.

And both political and economic polarization have a strong geographic dimension. On the economic side, some parts of America, mainly big coastal cities, have been getting much richer, but other parts have been left behind. On the political side, the thriving regions by and large voted for Hillary Clinton, while the lagging regions voted for Donald Trump.

I'm not saying that everything is great in coastal cities: Many people remain economically stranded even within metropolitan areas that look successful in the aggregate. And soaring housing costs, thanks in large part to Nimbyism, are a real and growing problem. Still, regional economic divergence is real and correlates closely, though not perfectly, with political divergence.

But what's behind this divergence? What's the matter with Trumpland?

Regional disparities aren't a new phenomenon in America. Indeed, before World War II the world's richest, most productive nation was also a nation with millions of dirt-poor farmers, many of whom didn't even have electricity or indoor plumbing. But until the 1970s those disparities were rapidly narrowing.

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Take, for example, the case of Mississippi, America's poorest state. In the 1930s, per-capita income in Mississippi was only 30 percent as high as per-capita income in Massachusetts. By the late 1970s, however, that figure was almost 70 percent — and most people probably expected this process of convergence to continue.

But the process went into reverse instead: These days, Mississippi is back down to only about 55 percent of Massachusetts income. To put this in international perspective, Mississippi now is about as poor relative to the coastal states as Sicily is relative to northern Italy.

Mississippi isn't an isolated case. As a new paper by Austin, Glaeser and Summers documents, regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems: a rising share of prime-aged men not working, rising mortality, high levels of opioid consumption.

An aside: One implication of these developments is that William Julius Wilson was right. Wilson famously argued that the social ills of the nonwhite inner-city poor had their origin not in some mysterious flaws of African-American culture but in economic factors — specifically, the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs. Sure enough, when rural whites faced a similar loss of economic opportunity, they experienced a similar social unraveling.

So what is the matter with Trumpland?

For the most part I'm in agreement with Berkeley's Enrico Moretti, whose 2012 book, "The New Geography of Jobs," is must reading for anyone trying to understand the state of America. Moretti argues that structural changes in the economy have favored industries that employ highly educated workers — and that these industries do best in locations where there are already a lot of these workers. As a result, these regions are experiencing a virtuous circle of growth: Their knowledge-intensive industries prosper, drawing in even more educated workers, which reinforces their advantage.


And at the same time, regions that started with a poorly educated work force are in a downward spiral, both because they're stuck with the wrong industries and because they're experiencing what amounts to a brain drain.

While these structural factors are surely the main story, however, I think we have to acknowledge the role of self-destructive politics.

That new Austin et al. paper makes the case for a national policy of aiding lagging regions. But we already have programs that would aid these regions — but which they won't accept. Many of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the great bulk of the bill — and would create jobs in the process — are also among America's poorest.

Or consider how some states, like Kansas and Oklahoma — both of which were relatively affluent in the 1970s, but have now fallen far behind — have gone in for radical tax cuts, and ended up savaging their education systems. External forces have put them in a hole, but they're digging it deeper.

And when it comes to national politics, let's face it: Trumpland is in effect voting for its own impoverishment. New Deal programs and public investment played a significant role in the great postwar convergence; conservative efforts to downsize government will hurt people all across America, but it will disproportionately hurt the very regions that put the G.O.P. in power.

The truth is that doing something about America's growing regional divide would be hard even with smart policies. The divide will only get worse under the policies we're actually likely to get.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Looming China Trade Action Divides Industry and Roils Markets [feedly]

Looming China Trade Action Divides Industry and Roils Markets
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/business/china-us-trade-action-markets.html

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Jared Bernstein: Enough already with GDP growth… [feedly]

More and better measurements, for sure. But I recall a tension between quantum mechanics and relativity theory, or results, wherein, if 'you look too close' --  the "measurer" or "observer" becomes an active agent affecting the character and attributes of phenomenon observed.

There are several widely used indexes of well-being. They are given more weight and credibility in EU social

Enough already with GDP growth…
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/enough-already-with-gdp-growth/

Readers know I've long been noodling over measurement issues, whether it's accurately measuring the economy's capacity–and admitting we don't have reliable, policy relevant gauges of potential GDP or a "natural rate" of unemployment–or maybe most importantly, measuring well-being versus growth. See this in today's WaPo.

Like David Pilling, whose book The Growth Delusion I highly recommend in this space, the idea is not to toss GDP growth rates and other aggregate measures. It's to put them in perspective, and critically: be aware of what they leave out. In that regard, I think one of the most important points in the WaPo piece is the need to net out environmental degradation (which, as I point out, includes adding back in some positive developments, like less use of coal, more use of renewables).

Source: WSJ

The WaPo piece barely scratches the surface of this conversation, of course. The punchline–it takes a village of metrics to begin to characterize the well-being of a populace–invokes the need to evaluate many more metrics, including:

–Are people meeting their basic needs (housing, food, child and health care, etc.); do their incomes come close to what's needed given the cost of living where they live? Such data exist.

–How can we best net out environmental degradation and any progress we've made against it?

–How valid/useful are existing well-being measures, like the Happiness Index in the WaPo piece, the Genuine Progress Indicator, Bhutan's Gross National Happiness, etc.?

All fodder for future work in this space. Perhaps we can tap this disconnected moment (between growth and well-being) and elevate the need to get away from the usual GDP/stock market etc. and take these measurement challenges much more seriously.

One other point which have space to get into in the piece. This disconnect has obvious political implications. Here's a figure showing the gap between Trump's approval and the unemployment rate–he's uniquely far from the best-fit line. True, LBJ was too, but that was Vietnam (though Trump/war anxiety looms very large for many of us, I'm sure).

Source: Nat Cohn, NYT

Sometimes it's a lot more than the economy, stupid.

Much more to come on this…

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Should-Read : A few comments: (1) Ken, Trump or Trump's advisors have been reading John Cochrane—that is where "6% grow...

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Should-Read : A few comments: (1) Ken, Trump or Trump's advisors have been reading John Cochrane—that is where "6% grow... // Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/03/should-read-a-few-comments-1-ken-trump-or-trumps-advisors-have-been-reading-john-cochranethat-is-where-6-growt.html

Should-Read: A few comments: (1) Ken, Trump or Trump's advisors have been reading John Cochrane—that is where "6% growth" is getting into the Republican intellectual swamp. (2) True "AI"—the science fiction kind—is still as far off as ever: "AI" today is (a) hype to remove investors from their money, (b) pattern recognition, and (c) voice interfaces for database search where it is no longer jarring for humans to deal with them as if they understood what was being asked of them, and that works only as long as they remain in their very restricted domain. (b) and (c) are not and will not be for the next decade at least things that show themselves in the aggregate productivity statistics. Those of us who know the economic history well know that the technology leads the leading firms that apply it by a generation, and the leading firms lead the macro impact by a generation. And technology "demonstrations" are not technology: Hiero of Alexandria's second-century aeropile was not a useful steam engine: Kenneth Rogoff: Economists vs. Scientists on Long-Term Growth: "Most economic forecasters have largely shrugged off recent advances in artificial intelligence...

...If supply-side pessimism is appropriate, the recent massive tax and spending packages in the United States will likely do much more to raise inflation than to boost investment. There are plenty of reasons to object to recent US fiscal policy.... We live in an era of rising inequality and falling income shares for labor relative to capital. Governments need to do more, not less, to redistribute income and wealth.

It is hard to know what US President Donald Trump is thinking when he boasts that his policies will deliver up to 6% growth....

Economists' pessimism... is underpinned by the belief that advanced economies cannot hope to repeat the dynamism that the US enjoyed from 1995-2005 (and other advanced economies a bit later), much less the salad days of the 1950s and 1960s. But the doubters ought to consider the fact that many scientists, across many disciplines, see things differently. Young researchers, in particular, believe that advances in basic knowledge are coming as fast as ever, even if practical applications are taking a long time to develop.... Perhaps we should be far more worried about the ethical and social implications of material growth that is faster than humans can spiritually absorb. The angst over AI mostly focuses on inequality and the future of work. But as science fiction writers have long warned us, the potential threats arising from the birth of silicon-based "life" forms are truly frightening....

The influx of women into the labor force played a major role in boosting growth in the latter part of the twentieth century. But now that has largely played out.... Similarly, global investment has collapsed since the 2008 financial crisis.... And measured productivity growth has declined everywhere....

Still, the best bet is that AI and other new technologies will eventually come to have a much larger impact on growth than they have up to now.... With the after-effects of the financial crisis fading, and AI perhaps starting to gain traction, trend US output growth can easily stay strong for the next several years.... The likely corresponding rise in real global interest rates will be tricky for central bankers to navigate. In the best case, they will be able to "ride the wave," as Alan Greenspan famously did in the 1990s, though more inflation is likely this time. The bottom line is that neither policymakers nor markets should be betting on the slow growth of the past decade carrying over...


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Voters' Belief in Fairness Will Toss Republicans from Office [feedly]

Voters' Belief in Fairness Will Toss Republicans from Office
http://prospect.org/article/voters-belief-fairness-will-toss-republicans-office

(Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

House Speaker Paul Ryan leaves the podium after a press conference on March 14, 2018.

In a well-known experiment involving capuchin monkeys, researchers set up a scenario in which some of the moneys were treated unfairly—getting mundane cucumber slices as a reward while another monkey received a delicious grape—and found that the unfairness caused a rebellion. "Monkeys refused to participate if they witnessed [another monkey] obtain a more attractive reward for equal effort," they wrote, "an effect amplified if the partner received such a reward without any effort at all."

Which is why Republicans are going to lose the 2018 midterm elections.

Well, that's not the only reason. But the thing that Republicans hoped would save them from a shattering defeat this November—their tax cut bill—is not going to have anything like the effect they hoped it would have in mitigating the losses they are likely to suffer. That's because fairness is such a powerful idea, for people as well as capuchin monkeys. Our primate cousins aren't the only ones driven to distraction by unfairness; an enormous number of studies have documented how people will turn down free money if they feel it isn't being distributed fairly.

Republicans seem to understand the power of fairness perfectly well, since they use arguments about it to target safety net programs, claiming that lazy moochers are suckling at the federal teat while hardworking folks like you have to fend for yourselves. But when they set out to design their tax cut, they seemed to forget how much ideas about fairness would determine how voters judged it.

Or perhaps they just cared much more about slashing the corporate rate and assembling a package of individual cuts that would primarily benefit the wealthy. But mindful that such a bill could run up against significant public opposition, they followed a model that had been used in the past: make sure just about everyone got some kind of tax cut, at least in the short term. It might not be much for many people, but how could they object if their paychecks got bigger, even if the fat cats got fatter? House Speaker Paul Ryan even celebrated a school secretary noting that she was getting an extra $1.50 a week.

But as time has passed, the universal affection for the tax bill they were counting on has failed to arrive. A recent CNBC poll found that only 32 percent of people said they have noticed a change in their take-home pay. There could be multiple reasons—health insurance premium increases eating up whatever tax cut they got, or the amounts just being too small to begin with when spread across 26 biweekly pay periods, for instance—but whatever the cause, Republicans hoped the number would have been far higher.

At this point, it's unlikely to change. People are already getting whatever tax cut they're going to get, and it's hard to imagine that six months from now many workers will say, "Wait a minute—I am getting more take-home pay! Thanks, Republicans!" Not only that, recent polling shows the tax bill to be a wash at best, with about the same number of people saying they approve of it as disapprove of it, with more usually in the latter camp.

Even if you do approve of it, are you going to rush to the polls to express your gratitude to President Trump and the Republican Congress? If you're getting another 20 bucks a week, it seems unlikely, especially if you know how much corporations and the wealthy got.

That isn't to say that the alternative to this bill wouldn't have been worse for the GOP. When it passed, they breathed a gigantic sigh of relief, knowing that despite the chaos of the Trump presidency and their lack of meaningful accomplishments in this period of one-party rule, at least they could go home to the voters and tell them that they got somethingdone.

But it's hard to convince people that you just changed their lives for the better with a tax cut if they aren't seeing the rewards—and they know who is. According to a new reportfrom the Tax Policy Center, people in the lowest income quintile will average a $40 tax cut from the law, or $1.54 per two-week pay period, just like Paul Ryan's lucky secretary. Those in the middle quintile will average $800, or about $30 per paycheck. And those in the top 1 percent? Their average cut is almost $33,000.

Which is about what everyone expects from a Republican tax plan. And when you play right into people's expectations, it doesn't take much to convince them that you have in fact done exactly what they expected you to.

That's not to mention the fact that if they were looking to win people's approval for a change to the tax system, they would have done exactly the opposite of what they did. For years, polls have consistently found that what bothered people the most isn't the amount they have to pay in taxes, even if everyone might like to pay less. The chief complaintvoters have long had is that the corporations and the wealthy don't pay their fair share. So Republicans lowered taxes on corporations and the wealthy, making the system even less fair than it was before.

They were always going to face a fundamental problem in this year's elections: Especially in midterms, anger at politicians is a much stronger motivation than approval of what they've done with their time in power. But if they were going to pick one thing to run on, this tax bill shouldn't have been it. Of course, they did it because cutting taxes is the one thing they believe most fervently in, and no matter what else they failed to achieve, they were going to get that bill through. It may mean they lose their congressional majorities, though—and there's nothing unfair about that. 

 -- via my feedly newsfeed