Matt Yglesias

What Children Need

Apropos of this post this morning, Sara showed me the Department of Agriculture’s annual study on what people spend on children. There are a lot of difference ins-and-outs of these factors, but to make a long story short, a typical two-parent, two-child middle class family spends between $20,000-$25,000 per year on their minor children. This table sums up some of the estimates:

By contrast, a family of four living at the poverty line has a total income of $21,200 a year which, as you can see, is more than what you need to spend to give middle class kids what they need. And that’s not just a trivia fact — sixteen percent of American children live in households that are below the poverty line. A single-mom working full-time at a job that pays $7.25 (what the minimum wage will be after recent increases full phase-in) earns just $15,080 in a year and conservatives think that’s too much money. Unless we manage to, yes, spread some of the wealth around so that these kids can have their needs met, the idea that we’re going to substitute equal opportunity for worrying about the income distribution is a joke.

The Smokescreen

Steve Benen asks the question that’s occurred to every progressive over the years — what if liberal politicians lied and smeared as shamelessly as conservative ones do? Or, to put it another way, why don’t liberal politicians lie and smear that shamelessly. There are a lot of answers to that question, but one thing worth observing is that the process of turning politics into a senseless screaming match about bullshit is not an ideologically neutral development.

The default state of things in the world is for the levers of state to be dominated by the people who already possess social and economic power in order to protect and expand their sphere of privilege. The contention of progressive political reform is that it’s possible to organize, educate, and mobilize sufficient quantities of people to overcome the power of the few and instead implement policies that benefit the many. Clearly, a well-timed or well-placed smear or deception can serve those ends effectively. But a politics that’s dominated by bullshit and bullshit artists is, ultimately, not going to be conducive to progressive ends even if some folks with progressive instincts get really really good at flinging the BS.

Which is to say that of course effective progressive political leaders need to be — and, historically, have been — good at “playing the game” but they’ve also been good at cutting through the smokescreen and refocusing attention. That’s how Bill Clinton managed to survive and even thrive during impeachment. But though I wouldn’t have believed it at the time, the quality of the media ecosphere has actually gotten radically worse in the interim, such that prominent media figures now openly brag about how uninterested they are informing the public and how exciting they find it to wield arbitrary power in capricious and senseless ways. Which, I suppose, is to be expected. On an optimistic view, there’s be a pendulum that swings back from “terrible” to “good.” But more likely it’s a cycle — only a sociopath would look at campaign reporting as done from 1998-2002 and say to themselves “that’s a line of work I’d like to get into!” And so you get what we have.

Lilly Ledbetter

I’m not sure I’ve blogged about Lilly Ledbetter’s case before, and if I have I haven’t done so very much, but watching her convention talk was a stark reminder of exactly how absurd the Supreme Court ruling that made her famous was. If you didn’t hear her talk, the point is that she worked for many years at Goodyear Tire. One day, she found persuasive evidence that she’d been the victim of illegal wage discrimination on account of being a woman. She sued. She won before a jury. But after a series of appeals a 5-4 Supreme Court decision let Goodyear off the hook on the theory that her suit had been filed too late — she needed, they said, to have filed her claim within 180 days of the first instance of illegal discrimination even though she wasn’t aware that it was occurring at the time. As The Los Angeles Times editorialized back in April:

As a narrow reading of the law, that’s all well and good. But as a prescription for redressing harm — the intent, after all, of anti-discrimination law — the court’s approach is impossibly binding. Most cases of discrimination, including the one before the court in Ledbetter, are difficult to discern at once, for the simple reason that most discrimination is covert. In the case of Lilly Ledbetter, a jury found that her employers had unfairly paid her less than male colleagues over a period of years. When Ledbetter discovered the disparity, she sued, but it was years after the initial discrimination, so five justices of the Supreme Court stood on a sterile legal principle in order to deny justice.

At any rate, even if you accept the conservative justices’ theory that their perverse reading of the existing law is correct, that points to the need to change the law. Which is exactly what their was a move to do in congress, but it’s been filibustered by the Senate Republicans and so, basically, if you want to get away with illegal discrimination you just need to make sure you can cover it up for at least 180 days.

Ledbetter’s not a political professional, but her story’s pretty compelling and important and one kind of wonders why so many Senate Republicans think it’s so important to help companies get away with illegal discrimination. Or as Jonah Goldberg put it:

Wow, she was even worse than Sebelius. Tootsie with a southern accent. I burst into laughter when they started playing “I’m so excited” after she finished.

I like that stuff so much better than Bill Kristol’s fake feminism.