110th Congress under Democrats: Not business as usual

First we had Nancy Pelosi's bold 100 hours agenda, and a promise to get to work on the people's business right away in January instead of the traditional wait-until-after-the-State-of-the-Union approach. Then we had Harry Reid's promise that the Senate would stay open in January, too, and that Senators might be expected to work more than two days a week.

Now comes word that Democrats will not only finish the unfinished mess the Republicans are leaving behind, they will do it without any of those pesky earmarks:

House and Senate Democrats have decided to complete this year’s unfinished appropriations process with a joint resolution keeping the government funded until the new fiscal year starts in October, vowing to ban all earmarks from the measure.

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), the incoming Appropriations Committee chairmen, issued a statement yesterday laying blame at the feet of departing GOP leaders for failing to pass nine of the 11 fiscal year 2007 appropriations bills, a criticism leveled by several Republicans in the waning days of the lame-duck session. [. . .]

Democrats had faced mounting pressure to forge a plan for completing the outstanding appropriations bills quickly, with several appropriators appearing inclined toward an omnibus that would combine versions of the spending bills already approved in committee. Yet members of the new majority acknowledged the difficult task of crafting an earmark-free omnibus that would avoid potential objections from conservatives and GOP appropriators. [. . .]

Byrd and Obey, in their statement, promised to work on a bipartisan basis to secure passage for the coming spending resolution. Earmarks in this year’s appropriations bills will be candidates for inclusion during the 2008 process, they said, “subject to new standards for transparency and accountability.”

Way to go, Obey!

This is the kind of move that establishes, in a major, major way to anyone watching and to anyone with their hands out hoping for special treatment, that the Democrats will not be pursuing business as usual. And it's the kind of move that's earning praise from both sides of the Cheddarsphere. Liberal Corey Liebmann is just one of the happy bloggers on my side; more surprising is conservative Jenna Pryor:

But when the party supposed to be the fiscally prudent party fails to do this for years, despite numerous pushes from the party faithful, and the Democrats manage to handle it (somewhat) almost immediately...it is more than a little disheartening.

Jenna has, basically, never known anything besides Republican rule in Washington; some of us are old enough to remember that Democrats used to get stuff done, like balance the budget and finish spending bills without having to shut down the federal government. Come on over to the light, Jenna.

In the meantime, despite the re-election of Democrat William "I always have $90,000 in my freezer!" Jefferson in Louisiana over the weekend, Democrats are showing some spine on ethics. Cheddarspherean DICTA points out that Nancy Pelosi has booted Jefferson from the influential Ways and Means Committee until he's either cleared or convicted. No "DeLay Rule" for us!

McIlheran Watch: Stroking his Dictator

The regular semi-regular feature of this blog (given that I've started a new feature) is the McIlheran Watch, wherein I examine what ridiculous ideas spring from the keyboard of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's conservative affirmative action recipient, the now-begoateed Patrick McIlheran. (I'm waiting for jsonline to update its picture of him, so to the right (hah!) there is the proverbial "artist's conception.")

The Brawler, who also takes great pleasure in dissecting McIlheran's pithed frog, has already gotten the ball rolling on the latest of McIlheran's abominations. And no, I'm not talking about McIlheran's repeat belief that Ward Churchill (whom no one had heard of until the right-wing echo chamber essentially created him) is a liberal icon. I'm talking about P-Mac's lionizing yesterday of brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died over the weekend, at 91--an age many times that which his opponents ever lived to see.

(And what's the deal with this? McIlheran won't even link to the Associated Press story on Pinochet's death that ran in the newspaper he works for, choosing instead to link to the very same AP story in the conservative Washington Times. The Times is a loss-leader for Rev. Sun Myong Moon; is P-Mac that desperate to help the Moonies over the people who sign his paycheck? Maybe it's just some kind of passive-aggressive thing he's doing in his position as union steward, since management is squeezing employees. Either way, it's weird.)

McIlheran, I guess, kind of liked Pinochet. See, I thought uncontrollable nausea at the thought of herding human beings into soccer stadiums to torture and kill them was what separated us from the animals. McIlheran's standards are, apparently, lower:

Pinochet took power to overthrow an elected president that, he and others suspected, would drag Chile into Marxism. [. . .] Pinochet, for all his evil repression, liberated Chile’s economy, and now that he’s been out of power, Chile’s got a free, prosperous economy, generating about $11,900 of wealth per person in 2005. [. . .]

So, doubtless, we’ll hear again the wrong that Pinochet did. He did wrong. He was a bad man, a dictator. But he gave up power.

I ellipsized the parts where McIlheran speaks ill of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, not because I'm trying to gloss over the evils that Castro has done, but because I don't believe in playing, as McIlheran does, the Special Dictator Edition of Relativistic Pursuit. Rather, just consider what McIlheran has said about Pinochet; while qualified with an unavoidable "yeah, he did bad things," this is praise, people, praise for a man who led a coup against Salvadore Allende, the democratically elected leader, and who slaughtered thousands of his opponents in nearly twenty years of iron fisted rule. The U.S. has invaded to liberate other countries I could name for less heinous crimes.

The Brawler tells us that whatever boon Chile's economy may be seeing is due to Allende's having nationalized the copper industry, a slice of Marxism Pinochet never undid. This is assuming you give Pinochet any credit at all for how successful Chile is doing 16 years after he left office.

And McIlheran's pat-on-the-back to the guy because "he gave up power" is roughly like feeling relief that the Death Star is only half-built. Nearly two decades after he siezed power, Pinochet wrote a new constitution that set a date for an election eight years from its ratification, and left himself two years after that until he stepped down. Upon leaving the presidency, Pinochet assumed the title "Senator for Life," a position he created for himself in the constitution he wrote that guaranteed him immunity from investigation or prosecution for his crimes. That constitution passed a referendum under incredibly suspicious circumstances in 1980, and Pinochet was never indicted in Chile for any of his crimes until a couple of weeks ago, when, almost literally on his deathbed, he admitted that, yeah, he hadn't been a saint.

Way to go, man! You "gave up power"!

Perhaps McIlheran is building up the "it's okay to torture people if you aren't a communist" defense for President Bush. Or perhaps he's merely trying to cover for his occasional (example) attempts at rehabiltating Richard Nixon, who detested Allende and whose spooks fomented the 1973 coup that killed him. This country's long history of South American interventionism against people we don't like, elected or not, goes back to Wilson, and runs right up through recent history. I've been having some odd déjà vu of late knowing that Nicaragua just re-elected Daniel Ortega, and the US Senate just confirmed as Secretary of State one of the Reagan Administration's leading proponents of bombing Ortega's first administration back to the stone age. I want my MTV.

I'll end by noting that there must have been a memo going around that McIlheran got his hands on. As Matt Yglesias notes, the Washington Post ran an editorial today making many of the same points, including the favorable comparison of Pinochet to Castro. Googling up Pinochet on the blogs finds many conservatives taking the same line, as well. McIlheran himself claims inspiration from the conservative New York Sun.

Me? Yeah, I'm liberal. But it hardly seems a matter of liberal or conservative to say of Pinochet, as we will of Castro, as we do of Pol Pot and Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin, that there is nothing to praise about a brutal dictator. Nothing.

The Real Debate Wisconsin Money Quote

As long as we're blaming Mike Mathias for things, I've decided I want to start a new feature. Mathias has the "Boots and Sabers Money Quote" (most recent edition here), which he describes as "an occasional feature of Pundit Nation highlighting the high-minded intellectualism among the visitors leaving comments at" the conservative Wisconsin blog Boots and Sabers.

Knowing, of course, that good writers borrow while great writers steal, I decided to steal the idea and inaugurate my series in the same vein with the conservative Wisconsin blog Real Debate Wisconsin (there are two things wrong with that name; any guesses?). Just to be clear, I'm not nutpicking. I will be fully identifying who actually said it, rather than blaming the blog's proprietor for the vacuity of his commenters.

That is, unless the comment in question was left by the proprietor himself. Our first RDWMQ:

realdebate said...
Keep drawing lines boys.

You say it is bad that we look in on people who want to kill us, and make excuses for llistening into a foriegn Princess.

I don't care about the law, I'm talking right and wrong.

You guys will go to any legth to defend your boy and ignore reality.

11:00 AM

"realdebate" is the blog's owner and lead writer, Fred Dooley. Fred, it is good to finally learn, doesn't care about the law. Who's ignoring reality?

To be fair, I have a second-place finisher among the high-minded comments from RDW. The "Miss Congeniality," if you will, of our first RDWMQ:

RoseIndigo said...
We went after Saddam because he was the weakest link in the chain in that part of the world. And everyone seems to forget that Gulf War I never did have an end. There was simply a cease fire with conditions that Saddam was to have met, and which he never did meet and defied for 12 years. He was given plenty of time. Instead he played his cards like a bully, and so Bush Jr. simply finished the war his father had not finished because his father had promised the U.N. to leave as soon as Saddam was out of Kuwait. Bush Sr. kept his word. That's what one gets for listening to the U.N. Everyone knew it had to be finished sooner or later anyway.

Terrorism would have grown with or without this war, because the militant Islamic world is on a roll what with their oil prices and the fact that they never did get over getting kicked out of Europe in the middle ages. They are fanatics and will continue to test us. The only response is one I've said should have been done from the very beginning.

TURN THE WHOLE AREA INTO A SHEET OF GLASS!!! Mr. Bush began with the right intentions, but he was sidelined by the politically correct elements in this country, and that is no way to win a war. Until we do what we need to do we will have trouble in that part of the world which will lead to WWIII, sure as the sun will rise tomorrow.

This is all a repeat of the time before WWII when everyone thought appeasement was the way to go. All appeasement does is encourage the enemy to become worse, because tyranny works like that. It always has, always will.

2:09 PM

I quoted the whole thing because it left me speechless. Just . . . speechless.

Until next time.

It's worse!

Vikki Ortiz has now become Jackie Harvey. (I blame Mike Mathias. I didn't used to care.)

Cell Phones in School

This will be an interesting change of pace from the previous unofficial policy:

Milwaukee schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos says the school system must come up with a way to deal with the heavy use of cell phones when trouble breaks out at a school, an innovation that has increased the severity of incidents such as a fight Monday morning at Bradley Tech High School. [. . .]

The cell phone phenomenon has shown up in other schools in MPS, in the suburbs and nationwide: When trouble breaks out, students reach for the phones, and within moments, other youths are on their way to the scene, sometimes literally from miles around. [. . .]

Although use of cell phones is generally banned in schools, both in Milwaukee and the suburbs, it is obvious to anyone around a high school or middle school--and sometimes even elementaries--that a vast majority of students carry them and use them frequently. Sometimes when schools have tried to crack down on the phones, parents have been the ones to object the most, saying they want their children to be able to reach them during school hours.

For several years, MPS principals have been told--at least, they've told me they've been told--that there is little the district will do to back them up on any kind of large-scale cell phone enforcement policy, in part because of their ubiquity and in part because of parents' insistence that their children have them.

When I first started teaching in MPS, only a handful of students carried cell phones, and they were the ones who used them principally for their, um, business activities. You could find them, isolate them, confiscate them, and generally deal with the problem on that scale. But now, literally almost every student is carrying a phone--and all of them much nicer than the crappy little phone I have. It would take all day to get every phone and then the better part of a month dealing with parents to return them.

I generally subscribe to the "out of sight, out of mind" philosphy: Only when the phone comes out during class does it becomes a problem--even when, as is often the case, it's parents calling during the school day. (The occasional chat I get to have with a parent on these phones is always a bonus. "No," I say, "you can't call this number during school. Please call the school and we'll pass along any messages . . .")

So I'm curious to see what kind of new policy will come down. Officials quoted in the article talk wistfully of cell-phone jammers, but those puppies are both illegal and kind of expensive if you want to jam an entire school (I've looked into it). Reinforcing the phones' inappropriateness with parents doesn't seem to help, either in official school communications or in conversations in person, since the frequency with which we see them doesn't change no matter what we say. I'm not sure what else, outside of patting down every student every morning to collect them, we can do.

So I'll ask for the collected wisdom of the Cheddarsphere, here: What solutions do you have hiding in your pocket? How can we stop the cell phones?

Collective Sigh

Not only that Mandy Jenkins is back and posting, but that she survived the wrong-sided streets of London, shopping bags and smooth, smug syle intact.

Welcome home, homegirl!

Once more, with feeling

In comments to the post directly below this one, and elsewhere around the blogs (no offense, Game, but yours is just the most recent one of seen, though by no means the only one), I'm seeing confusion: People don't know the difference between public, charter, voucher, and private schools here in Wisconsin. (One commenter of mine even seems to think, despite the clear mention of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, I live in Michigan.) So, for the benefit of everyone--and not for the first time--I will do the list.

Schools in Wisconsin come in four basic flavors. Please don't confuse or conflate them.

1. Public schools. The public schools are required to have fully licensed ("highly qualified" is the No Child Left Behind terminology) teachers, assistants, and administrators. The public schools must administer standardized tests in grades three through eight, plus ten, and publish the results along with other NCLB-demanded data, such as attendance, graduation, and retention rates, and oodles of demographic data. The schools are fully funded through taxpayers' money (except for all the bake sales and fundraisers they have to hold to fill in the gaps). They are required by law to provide services to special education students, and students who are English language learners, regardless of cost. They are operated by about 420 districts throughout the state as mandated by Article X of the state Constitution, under various parts of state statutes 115-121.
   
   
2. Charter Schools. Charter schools are also public (and non-religious) schools. Really. Like public schools, they must have fully licensed professional staff, and they must administer the same tests and publish the same data as the traditional public schools. They are also fully funded by taxpayer dollars and authorized under state statute 118. The difference between charters and the traditional schools is who runs them: Charters are operated by independent, authorized groups who contract--or charter--with the local school district, currently only Milwaukee or Racine. (The Milwaukee Public Schools sometimes charters with itself to run its schools as charters; these are called instrumentality charter schools, as opposed to the non-instrumentality charters run by other groups.) The independence from districts theoretically allow charters to innovate and move more quickly in response to demands from parents. Read more on charters at the DPI.
   
   
3. Private Schools. These are schools, also covered by section 118, that get no (or almost no) taxpayer money at all. They can be established by pretty much anyone, can be staffed by pretty much anyone, can teach pretty much anything, and have only to meet minimum requirements to be allowed to function. They can admit whom they want, and are not required to admit or provide services to special-needs students. They don't have to give any tests at all or publish the results, or any other data about the school. Many private schools, though, choose to employ licensed teachers, teach special-education students, and to give standardized tests. See the DPI's page on private schools for more.
   
   
4. Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (Voucher) Schools. These are private schools, mostly religious in nature. These schools set a tuition rate, and can pick and choose who attends among the paying customers. They can also, if they appy to the DPI, accept students who meet certain economic criteria and receive a voucher to cover their tuition, currently $6,501 (or less if tuition is lower than that). The voucher program is limited only to schools in the city of Milwaukee, and schools that accept voucher students face a few more hurdles than the private schools described above. They still don't need licensed staff, and still are not required to give any particluar tests (though they must adminsiter something) or publish any data about themselves beyond the attendance data submitted to DPI as a prerequisite for getting their voucher payments. They are required to admit voucher students based on a lottery, rather than any selection criteria, but are not required to provide any special education (or other) services to students they admit who might need them. And they must prove to DPI by later this month that they either have accreditation, or are working on it. The DPI has a section on voucher schools, too. (Updated 12/12 for accuracy on the testing part.)

It's confusing, I know. But it is important that you don't--as some people have today and recently--mix up the different kinds of schools. Hope this helps.

No teaching license? No problem!

No driver's license? Shut the school down!

Okay, I'm exaggerating a little: Elijah's Brook God's Nation Children School was kicked out of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program technically for a lack of insurance. But the incident that led to the removal--a bus crash involving an unlicensed bus drivier--helps to illustrate one of the most frustrating things, for me, about the MPCP. The driver, had he been licensed, would have held more certification from the state to do his job than any other person associated with the school was required to. Running the school takes no license, and a search of the DPI's database this morning confirms the administrator doesn't have even an expired license. Of the other employees named in the stories about the bus crash, one seems to have a license, but she quit the school citing

high turnover in the teaching staff since the school year began, and that the school had almost no academic plan, curriculum, textbooks or other educational materials when the school year started. [. . .] She said she saw situations that concerned her, such as fifth- and sixth-grade students taking care of children in a day care center adjacent to the school during the school day.

The MPCP is just not working. Not all the schools in it are as bad as the one in question here, of course. And not all Milwaukee Public Schools are models of excellence. But people with experience in the schools--even die-hard conservative Republicans--recognize the futility of the program. The blogger I just linked to has the same complaints I do about the program, though we disagree on virtually everything else. But note what he says in the comments: "I have proof when I get kids from these schools and they are behind even the MPS kids and tell me they had no books or book that another school threw out, or that they watched movies all the time, or that I knew teachers that taught at those schools and were ALWAYS either the only one who had a teaching licence or one of two..." I could have written those words--have written words like them on these pages before.

Do you think any of the children from Elijah's Brook--now thrown into MPS with no additional funding--will be at the level of their new classmates? Do you think the fifth- and sixth-graders who used to spend their days watching toddlers in day care will be ready for fractions and geography?

And the only reason this school closed is because it lacked insurance!

***
Don't forget: We here at folkbum's rambles and rants are holding a virtual town hall meeting, asking everyone who comes by to help shape the MPS strategic plan. Follow that link and add your thoughts.

Worst President Ever? Or Merely Mediocre?

Yesterday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Crossroads" section featured a series of op-eds that originally ran in the Washington Post the week before, by five historians trying to guage, three-qaurters of the way through, where George W. Bush falls when you rank the presidents.

Eric Foner says Worst. President. Ever. Douglas Brinkley says bad, but not a true villain. David Greenberg says he'll never be as bad as Nixon. Michael Lind puts him fifth from the bottom. And Vincent Cannato, fairly sensibly, argues that without the distance and perspective of time and history, it's really hard to judge. As an example, Cannato cites Harry S Truman, who was not well liked at the time but has gotten his props in more recent times.

(Bush must have taken Cannato's words to heart, as he tried to claim kinship with Truman this week--though forgetting that what he's done and what Truman did are nothing alike. He got kind of petulant when someone pointed that out to him. I don't think Truman was such a big baby, either.)

There's a lot more to say about all of those essays--you should read them all, of course--but I won't say it. Instead, I'll defer to the infinitely wiser Barbara O'Brien, who wrote about them when they appeared in the WaPo last week. Check out her take both on the Foner "Worst President Ever" piece and the other four. When what I want to say has already been said, may as well save us all the trouble, eh?

Oh, and for the record, I mostly agree with Cannato: It's too early to judge. However, Cannato seems optimistic that time will brighten Bush's star; I doubt that. Bush's star was never too bright to begin with.

Rahm Emanuel must go

There are so many reasons not to like Rahm Emanuel. Among the biggest is his refusal to buy into the 50-state strategy that won Democrats so many seats in the House last month--and the man was our elections chair. He wanted to sink a ton of money into just 20 or so seats, hoping to pick up the 15 we needed. Luckily, we ignored him, and won without him. Almost literally--he sank $6 million into the campaigns of two of his hand-selected candidates (people who ran in lieu of netroots favorites) that could have gone into a half-dozen other close races and won them handily.

He made who knows how much money teaming up with Bruce Reed to write The Plan, a book which, apparently offers no plan and is generally designed to distance himself from the party he's supposed to be a leader of.

Now comes word, through Congress's investigation of itself, that Emanuel knew of Mark Foley's emails in 2005, about the same time as Speaker Hastert and others. When asked about his knowledge of these emails, Emanuel repeatedly and forcefully lied to Democrats and the American people. There is no way around it. His choices in 2005, when he learned of the emails, included things like going to the FBI, or demanding a House investigation then into the matter. He didn't do those things; he leaked word of the emails to the Florida press, who refused to run the story.

It was only a year later, when additional emails were leaked to ABC news--by a Republican this time, remember--that any news organizations went after the truth of the matter, and we found that Hastert and other Republican leaders both knew of Foley's problems and helped to cover them up.

But Emanuel's conduct, both in 2005 and in lying to us this year, demands action. He should resign, and, failing that, he should be removed from the Democratic caucus. Should he be expelled? Maybe so. His actions are exactly the oppositie of the kind of leadership Democrats need to provide for the next year or so, the only time we'll have to establish ourselves as the party that can fulfill our promises. We promised no more corruption, voters supported that, and now it's time to be serious.

While we're at it, Democrats should kick the just re-elected William Jefferson out of the caucus, too.

They say not to speak ill of the dead.

So I won't.






















Pinochet is dead.

Subject to Podcast

in a wide-ranging conversation, I mopped the floor with Aaron and Jenna on everything form stem-cell research to the ISG report. The only question I flubbed was Aaron's first one, misunderstanding it and explaining the derivation of my blogonym rather than talking about myself. Anyway, you can find the podcast at the podcast home, or download it directly here.

Friday Random Ten

The brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Edition

1. "Road Buddy" Dar Williams from End of the Summer
2. "This Train Revised" Indigo Girls from 1200 Curfews
3. "Even Better Than the Real Thing" U2 from Achtung Baby
4. "Long Way Down" Luce from Live at the World Cafe
5. "Every Day I Write the Book" Elvis Costello from Punch the Clock
6. "On a Bad Day" Kasey Chambers from Barricades and Brick Walls
7. "Evening's Curtain" Mark Erelli from Hope & Other Casualties
8. "Weightless" Old 97s from Satellite Rides
9. "Move Over Mr. Gaugin" Michael Smith from Such Things are Finely Done
10. "The Beast in Me" Martin Sexton from The American

Mike Mathias is going to plotz

It seems that Vikki Ortiz has become--it was probably inevitable--Mandy Jenkins. You know what they say: Resistance is futile.

Falk Families Fund

This is the news I was waiting for before writing about the tragedy at the Falk complex yesterday:

Rexnord Corp., the parent company of Falk Corp., today announced that a support fund has been established for the families of the three Falk employees who died in the explosion Wednesday at its Milwaukee facility. The company is making an initial $100,000 contribution to the fund. [. . .]

Those interested in making contributions to the support fund can drop off donations at any M&I Branch or can send donations to: Rexnord Corp., Attention: Treasurer, 4701 W. Greenfield Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53214. Checks should me made out to: Falk Families Survivor Fund. Donations to this fund are not [tax] deductible.

Beyond that, there's little to say that hasn't been said already.

And the Republicans?

Big article in the paper today: "Wisconsin Democrats split on assessment of Iraq war: Some say it's more of the same; others applaud findings." The story details how different people have different reactions to the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group's report. That, of course, means a "split."

Because, apparently, nothing makes for a good story quite so much as the "Democrats are in disarray" storyline, and its corollary, "Democrats have no plan." See, for example, every news story about Democrats for the last, oh, six years. The crap in the press lately about Nancy Pelosi, in particular, is symptomatic of exactly that frame of mind. (Read Greenwald.)

So my question: What about the Republicans? Where's our news story on them, and their reactions? I mean, I realize that starting next month, the Wisconsin Republican delegation will be a mere three (compared to Dems' seven), but they're not invisible or in hiding. Wouldn't we all like to know whether they agree with the panel's findings that the current situation in Iraq is grim, or with any of the panel's bazillion recommendations, or even with each other? Or is a story about possible dissent in the ranks of Republicans not newsworthy? Even raising the question about why none of those three Republicans have even issued statements at all (as of this morning) would be better than nothing.

Relatedly, Russ Feingold's not running for president, and it breaks my heart. Tell me how he's wrong in his assessment of both Iraq and the ISG.

I'm Podcastic

Despite my general belief that I have a voice made for blogging, tonight I'll be losing my podcast virginity, recording a show with Aaron and Jenna. There is no set agenda, though, so I ask you now: What do you want me to talk about? What subjects and issues, oh loyal readers, are you dying to hear me prattle on about? Leave your suggestions in the comments, please. Then watch this space for a link to the podcast once Aaron's got it processed.

McIlheran Watch: Tears for those poor, poor rich people

Oh, how I've missed my BFF Patrick McIlheran, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's conservative typist. He's back from vacation, and today's column is a doozy, a classic, a gem in P-Mac's crown of jewely brilliance. I'll spare you the foreplay and just give you the really shiny parts:

Perhaps [those bothered by displays of extravagance] should mind their own business instead of mapping someone else's budget. Maybe we all should. We'd be happier. That isn't the spirit of the moment, unfortunately. Obsessing about inequality is.

Debate over taxes illustrates this. Resurgent, Democrats say they'll let President Bush's tax cuts expire. Not all of them, though: They'll keep some breaks, they say, that help the meritoriously unrich. It may surprise you that there were any, since the left's unrelenting line has been that the cuts shafted the middle class.

They didn't. The non-partisan Tax Foundation reports that in 2000, people earning more than $200,000 a year, roughly the top 2%, paid 47% of all federal income taxes, including those on dividends and capital gains. In 2004, after the Bush cuts, those making over $200,000 paid 50% of federal income taxes. [. . .]

Nor is this a momentary quirk. In 1980, the top 5% of earners paid 37% of federal income taxes. In 2004, those in the top 5% paid 57% of the nation's income taxes. [. . .] These trends have run almost uninterrupted since then.

Excuse me for a minute while I get out my hanky. This is truly heartbreaking news, sadder than anything I've ever read that didn't involve orphan puppies with their big tearful puppy dog eyes. It almost makes me want to start up a telethon, right now, to raise money to help all those poor rich people pay their taxes.

What? Not buying it? Of course you're not; the other 95% of us are having a hard time, I imagine, summoning much sympathy for the top 5%--people with annual income in the $150,000+ range.

No, I'm not an economist, and I don't usually even play one on the internet. But I am a skeptical fellow, and I always ask--as I try to teach my students to ask--about the context. What else might be happening as the rich people's share of income taxes has increased over the last quarter-century or so?

One answer, which explains everything quite neatly, is that the wealthy have not only seen their share of taxes increase, but they've seen their share of all income rising as well. From the folks at The Economist earlier this year:

The figures are startling. According to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the share of aggregate income going to the highest-earning 1% of Americans has doubled from 8% in 1980 to over 16% in 2004. That going to the top tenth of 1% has tripled from 2% in 1980 to 7% today. And that going to the top one-hundredth of 1%--the 14,000 taxpayers at the very top of the income ladder--has quadrupled from 0.65% in 1980 to 2.87% in 2004.

Okay, now their numbers are for the top 1%, not the top 5%, as McIlheran uses. But in the same timeframe he employs, the data show that those top 1% have seen their share of national income more than double. Using P-Mac's own figures, the top 5%'s share of taxes has risen barely 1.5 times. In other words, their share of income is increasing faster than their share of taxes.

This next one seems to be from a pro-labor group, so take with whatever salt makes you happy:

In 1970 the richest 1% had incomes 100 times that of the average working American; today the richest 1% enjoy an income 560 times that of the average working class taxpayer in the U.S.--about equivalent to the share they enjoyed in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression.

Again, that's about 1%, not 5%. Still, that's the kind of stuff that does little to soften your heart to the complaints of all those rich people paying all those taxes.

Here, at long last, is something concerning the top 5%. Mark Thoma at Economist's view cites the New York Times last week:

Over all, average incomes rose 27 percent in real terms over the quarter-century from 1979 through 2004. But the gains were narrowly concentrated at the top and offset by losses for the bottom 60 percent of Americans, those making less than $38,761 in 2004. [. . .] Only those in the top 5 percent had significant gains. The average income of those on the 95th to 99th rungs of the income ladder rose by 53 percent, almost twice the average rate.

Confirmation: These people saw a doubling of their incomes. But it says nothing about their share of overall income.

Let's try one more, this time with graphs:

This graph can be a little tricky to read, I have the top income receiver at the bottom and the bottom at the top.  I did that so that you can more easily read the percentage of income received by the top receivers.  The blue, green, and red series together make up the top 10%, red and green comprise the top 5% and so on.  The bottom half of income receivers are represented by the aqua color, and as you can see they receive close to only 10% of the total National Income.  The graph shows which segments of the income receivers have been gaining and loosing share.  As you can see, the top 50% accounts for more income today than they did in 1980, but that does not mean that every segment of the top 50% has gained  a share of income.  In fact the only segments to actually have gained in share of national income are members of the top 5%.  This can more easily be seen in the summary table below the graph.

Share of National AGI by Percentile
	Top 1%	95 to 99	90 to 94	75 to 89	50 to 74	Bottom 49%
1980	8.46%	12.55%	11.12%	24.57%	25.62%	17.68%
2000	20.81%	14.49%	10.71%	21.14%	19.86%	12.99%
Share of National AGI by Group
	Top 1%	Top 5%	Top 10%	Top 25%	Top 50%	Bottom 49%
1980	8.46%	20.01%	32.13%	56.70%	82.32%	17.68%
2000	20.81%	35.30%	46.01%	67.15%	87.01%	12.99%

The two graphs below represent the data in the Share of National AGI [Adjusted Gross Income] by Percentile table above.  Although not completely useful in themselves, as a comparison between 1980 and 2000 the contrast becomes striking. 

No, this doesn't get us quite to the present, but the trends are startling: Over 20 years, the share of income earned by the top 5% grew tremendously. The question seems reasonable, then: Is it so surprising that as the wealthiest people earned a greater share of all income they paid a greater share of all taxes? And I think the answer has to be no, it isn't surprising. Nor is it so heartbreaking that McIlheran needs to devote a Wednesday column to it, or that any of the rest of us should feel even the tiniest bit sorry for these people who are making out far better than we.

Of course, the recognition that the distribution of all our national income is so top-heavy--and getting top-heavier--raises all sorts of other questions, but that should wait for another day. In the meantime, just remember this the next time the wealthy come begging for sympathy over how horrible it is to be them and to pay their taxes: They are the ones seeing the big boost from the modern economy; they can afford it. Just dig out that tiny violin and play them a tune as you walk away.

Update: Googling different search terms dug up a different page that has all of these data. You can see the growth in both share of AGI and share of taxes paid in tables 5 and 6 at this page from the Tax Foundation. It's clear that the share of taxes paid by the top 5% has increased at about the same rate as their share of income.

He Will Communicate in Code by Blinking

Can somebody please explain to me again why Ann Althouse is Wisconsin's most widely read blogger?

A few quick notes

Congrats to Scott on achieving his black belt. That's cool, and a Big Deal.

Yesterday, the American Federation of Teachers released a study (.pdf) on the sorry state of American public education infrastructure--the sad state our school buildings are in. I was supposed to blog it, and blog about my own school, but I didn't have time. However, my friend Ken Bernstein did over at the Daily Kos: Read it (and the report) and weep.

Anybody know what your score is? Anybody think a program like this is a good use of taxpayers' money?

And as long as I'm linking to Digby's blog, here is probably the most concise version of the How We Lost Iraq story I've read to date. If you read nothing else I link to this week, read it.

Have you added your ideas to the MPS strategic plan process, yet? Please, please do so.

Well, duh:

Your 'Do You Want the Terrorists to Win' Score: 100%

 

You are a terrorist-loving, Bush-bashing, "blame America first"-crowd traitor. You are in league with evil-doers who hate our freedoms. By all counts you are a liberal, and as such cleary desire the terrorists to succeed and impose their harsh theocratic restrictions on us all. You are fit to be hung for treason! Luckily George Bush is tapping your internet connection and is now aware of your thought-crime. Have a nice day.... in Guantanamo!

Do You Want the Terrorists to Win?
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(Via Nick)