All of this raises more than a few questions.

Putting aside the actual committee creation process for a moment, what exactly is the point of having a committee in a state legislature to address federal immigration policy? I know we have our disagreements with the GA from time to time, but surely they understand the difference between federal and state law. It has been clearly stated over and over again that immigration is a federal issue, not a state issue.

Secondly, why was the creation of this committee not publicly announced? Legislators usually love to announce the creation of committees – it’s kind of what they do. Select committees are usually created by each body, in this case, the House, to address specific issues and report their findings and any recommendations to the full body. Upon the completion of its specified tasks, a select committee is discharged from its duties and dissolved by the presiding officer of the parent body.

So, for example, if the House would like a committee to address the weight limits on our state’s roads, it may create within the House a select committee on state roads’ weight limits. Upon that committee’s report of its findings and recommendations, the House speaker would then disband the committee.

Given that select committees are expressly created to report back, exactly what does this committee think they are going to say to the full House? Somehow we doubt it will be “Immigration is a federal issue and the State has no role in crafting it.”

That is exactly what legislatures don’t do, so we’re eager to find out what is going on here – more to come.

One would think that our elected representatives would be clamoring over ways to aid their constituents facing foreclosure or those long-term unemployed who just can’t seem to catch a break, many of whom are occupying a city center in angry protest. If not for their innate sense of human decency, at least for their crass political gain, you would expect political posturing and empty gestures to help them out. But instead, a certain junior senator from our very own state is trying to give billions of tax breaks to corporations. That’s right – tax breaks to corporations.

I swear, I’m not making this up.

First, let me quote you the opening paragraph from Senator Hagan’s press release:

U.S. Senators Kay R. Hagan (D-NC) and John McCain (R-AZ) today introduced the bipartisan Foreign Earnings Reinvestment Act to help reinvigorate the American economy. The bill would trigger the flow of a trillion dollars back into the American economy by temporarily allowing companies to return profits earned overseas to the U.S. at a temporarily reduced tax rate.

That may sounds reasonable, if not politically tone-deaf, and might almost be a worth a shot if we didn’t already try the idea eight years ago, with horrible results. The Homeland Investment Act provided for a one-time tax holiday on the repatriation of foreign earnings by U.S.-based multinational companies. When it was passed in 2004 as part of the American Jobs Creation Act, Members of Congress argued that it would create more than 500,000 jobs over 2 years by raising investment in the United States. This, however, is what actually happened, courtesy of a report on the subject issues by the Harvard Business School:

Repatriations did not lead to an increase in domestic investment, domestic employment or R&D—even for the firms that appeared to be financially constrained or lobbied for the holiday. Instead, estimates indicate that a $1 increase in repatriations was associated with a $0.60-$0.92 increase in payouts to shareholders—despite regulations stating that such expenditures were not a permitted use of repatriations qualifying for the tax holiday. The results indicate that U.S. multinationals were not financially constrained and were reasonably well-governed. The fungibility of money appears to have undermined the effectiveness of the regulations.

Call us crazy Liberals, but when Harvard, not to mention the Congressional Research Service, say the same economic policy failed to work last time, why would you try to implement it again? According to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, another tax holiday at would increase the deficit by between $42 and $80 billion over 10 years, depending on the percentage of the rate cut, and absurd sum to simply give away in a time of such drastic austerity and budget-cutting.

Perhaps Senator Hagan is confusing people, the conventional kind, with corporations. It’s easy to do, as flesh and blood humans look so similar to hulking skyscrapers and corporate by-laws. Politicians seem to have a difficult time differentiating the two these days, especially when it comes to campaign contributions.

As the New York Times concluded on Sunday, “A corporate tax holiday won’t create more jobs. What it will do is raise the deficit.” Please, Senator Hagan, let’s start addressing the real needs of people in North Carolina – the flesh and blood kind. You know… the kind that vote.

So, let’s say someone punches you in the arm again. And then again. And then again. Each time, they punch you a bit harder than the time before, causing the pain to increase incrementally. What do you do now? You have time to think about your response, but it doesn’t make the decision any easier. You brain is telling you to punch this idiot in the face and run in the other direction, but there is a police officer standing right down the street and you’re afraid you’ll get in trouble if you do. So you take it. And take it. And take it.

Until you can’t take it anymore.

This is the analogy I use to describe how the Occupy Wall Street protestors, and those occupying cities all over the country, are feeling. This is not a protest against a monolithic, overpowering entity as were the great civil rights protests of the ’60′s, or the protests over dictatorial and abusive governments we’ve seen throughout the “Arab Spring“. These occupy protests are about many smaller, more innocuous problems which, when added together, are far more oppressive than the sum of their parts.

Unemployment, triggered by insanely irresponsible lending practices, layered on top of a decade of decreasing real income, placed precariously on top of declining home prices, set upon rapidly rising healthcare costs, have  created the most destructive game of Jenga since the great depression. It has simply pushed too many too far.

Until they couldn’t take it anymore.

Can you blame them? The only wrinkle here is that “them” are “us”. The 99% of us who have seen our incomes fall, our housing values implode, our household debt soar, all while the richest 1% have become richer. They are us, whether you support them or not. They are us, whether you understand them or not.

They are us, whether you choose to believe it or not.

You wonder whey they can’t articulate a demand or a grievance? If you bully is punching you in the arm, and the police officer sees it, you don’t have to come up with an articulate policy message, or show a bullet-pointed presentation about your demands- he knows you want the bully to stop punching you. So why must these protests have more than their grievances? Is anyone seriously arguing that the demise of the American Dream is an insufficient reason to protest?

And so we return to your bully, punching you in the arm. What do you do? Do you punch him and run? Do you let him keep going, clobbering you until you can’t walk? Or do you yell as loud and as long as you can, telling him you’ve had enough, until that police office comes over and takes care of that problem for you?

I think we’ve all had enough – it’s time to start yelling. All of us.

Guy Fawkes was an Englishman who conspired to blow-up the British parliament in November of 1605, believing it was his duty to restore the government to Catholic control. He was caught, imprisoned, tortured, and eventually executed for his crime, along with his conspirators, not many days later.

Mr. Fawkes would be just another footnote to history if not for the quirky English sensibilities. Ever year, on November 5th, otherwise known as Guy Fawkes Night, fireworks erupt all around England to commemorate this failed plot to overthrow the government.

Fast forward to the 19080′s comic book series V for Vendetta, and subsequent film remake in 2006, that introduced the masses outside of England to the idea of Guy Fawkes as an anti-government hero.

And there you have it – a sixteenth-century terrorist becomes the poster child for anti-authoritarian sentiment in a mere 400 years. Luckily for us, Mr. Fawkes sported some very distinctive facial hair, which makes for an enjoyable mask in his image.

Let’s be thankful to Mr. Fawkes – we could all be wearing this instead.

Oh well – it’s not our problem, right? I mean really, if the public schools fail, we can just invoke the magic of the private sector and fix all of the government problems.  Private schools are always better than those dirty public ones anyway, right? In fact, let’s privatize everything!

No. Let’s not. I’ll let Ananya Roy, professor of city and regional planning at the University of California-Berkeley, tell you why:

The “financial Katrina” that recently swept through the country only compounded the country’s economic inequality. Wall Street was bailed out, while Main Street was left to fend for itself. My colleague, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, has rightly called this “socialized capitalism,” one in which the profits are enjoyed by the wealthy few, but the losses are borne by the rest. Public education is one of the most important ways in which such disadvantage can be mitigated. It democratizes opportunity in a socioeconomic order that can otherwise concentrate advantage at the very top.

The crisis of public education threatens the democratization of opportunity in America. The betrayal of opportunity is a generalized condition of vulnerability and exclusion, one facing a wide swath of Americans. The anchors of what once defined the American middle class: home ownership, stable jobs, and public education, are quickly eroding. Opportunity has become the privilege of the 1 percent, rather than a widely held right.

Equally important is the future of American democracy. Here it is worth emphasizing the word “education” in the phrase “public education.” Public education already makes the best of scarce resources, doing more with less. But education cannot be delivered through models of discount chain stores or fast-food franchises. Education cannot be nurtured through virtual learning portals.

Perhaps more now than in any recent memory, we are bombarded with the most negative images of government. “Big government” is always squeezing the small business owner, taking too much of your hard-earned money, and generally telling us what to think and what to do.  And since their only solution to big government is small government, they want to starve the bloated beast until it slims down to a more manageable size.

Case in point, NC-Pre K, the program formally known as “More at Four”. No matter what you call the program, it helps at-risk children get a sound educational foundation before being kicked into the larger school system. It has been a national model for what public education can do right… and it was gutted in the recent budget.

There have been lawsuits, court orders, and much political hay made of the decision to re-name and slash the program, but at the end of the day, students will loose. And as a result, we will loose. More children will enter Kindergarten and First Grade behind their peers, and most will never catch up. All for a few hundred million buck a year, or roughly $.17 per NC resident, per year.

Are you seriously telling me that you don’t have $.17 to spare? Is the future of our state economy, which will consist of these children in twenty or so years, not that important? Are we willing to accept the economic fate of Alabama or Louisiana (both which are predicted to spend more per student than NC will next year) or are we willing to do something now to save our public education system?

We all pay for public education because we all benefit collectively from an educated populous. We all needed it when we were young, and future generations will need it even more than we did. Let’s just stop and think the next time we further reduce education opportunity for our young people. After all, these are the kids that will grow up and eventually run the world you will be living in – don’t you want them to do it well?

If you needed another reason to not live in Alabama, here it is – they will kill you for missing a deadline. A bit of background, lest you not fully embrace the stupidity of the situation or think I’m exaggerating. I’ll let Dahlia Lithwick of Slate.com summarize:

In all likelihood, the Supreme Court will find a way to intervene in this case, but that really isn’t the point. The real question is why Alabama is attempting to pursue this conviction as it currently stands. A state-level appeals court could just as easily find a reason to extend another chance to Mr. Maples as SCOTUS can, yet they refuse to do so.

It says an awful lot about the Alabama capital justice system that it is willing to put to death a man who—for all intents and purposes—had no legal representation. Today the court is clearly more horrified by Alabama’s willingness to press forward on that technicality than by any of the foul-ups that comprise these facts. That’s too bad because those screw-ups are depressingly common in death penalty cases. Not even Scalia denies that fact.

Not even Scalia – those are not words you hear every day.

And your logical decision is… C! Yes, of course – poor people are all druggies anyway, right? The public will totally support this decision.

Sady, I am not making this up. This law was actually passed earlier this year in Florida, the only one of its kind in the nation.

But here’s the real kicker: preliminary figures show that TANIF recipients are less likely than other people to use drugs, not more.

Preliminary figures show that about 2.5 percent of up to 2,000 applicants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families have tested positive since the law went into effect in July.

The Justice Department estimates that 6 percent of Americans 12 and older use illegal drugs. [emphasis added]

So, statistically speaking, your average Florida legislator is almost 3 times more likely to be using illegal drugs than your average Florida TANIF recipient.

Go figure.

If you listen to conservatives in the 26 states that are suing to have the law overturned on Constitutional grounds, the law is an unconstitutional encroachment on the civil liberties of Americans.

If you listen to the 32 million previously un-insured citizens that this law will help cover by the time it it fully implemented in 2014, it is one of the most important pieces of legislation passed in the past 100 years.  It is also the same law that prevents insurers from not covering your pre-existing condition right now.

Yea, that law.

The rub, to conservatives, is that beginning in 2014, the ACA requires that nearly all U.S. citizens either purchase health insurance or pay a penalty.  Opponents of the law argue that the decision not to purchase health insurance violates the Constitution. In its deliberations, Congress expressly found that the ACA’s requirement that insurers may not deny coverage or charge more to individuals with pre-existing medical conditions could not function effectively without the minimum coverage requirement.

So far, five District Court decisions have been appealed to various U.S. Courts of Appeals.

The states and NFIB won their challenge in the 11th Circuit last month, leaving the Obama Administration with two options: file for a full review, or en banc, of the case (this means that most or all of the 11th Circuit judges review the ruling) or appeal directly to the Supreme Court. In the end, DOJ decided to bypass the en banc process. Alternatively, the full review request would have stalled the momentum toward the Supreme Court and potentially moved any court hearing into a post-election environment.

The high court would have a menu of options for resolving a case. A majority could uphold the law, strike down only the mandate or void other parts of the measure as well. The justices could also adopt the approach taken by one of the appeals courts and conclude that judges shouldn’t review the law until 2015, when the first penalties are assessed.

Both the administration and challengers have said in court papers that a decision striking down the mandate would require the invalidation of provisions that make more people eligible for insurance, including the pre-existing condition rule. However, the Supreme Court wouldn’t necessarily have to follow that course. In declaring the mandate unconstitutional, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals left the rest of the law intact, including the pre-existing condition rule.

Such an outcome would be a blow to the insurance industry, which is counting on the mandate to ensure the participation of young, healthy subscribers who can offset the costs imposed by other parts of the law.

“The grave constitutional questions surrounding the ACA and its novel exercises of federal power will not subside until this Court resolves them,” the state attorneys general said in their petition. “Time is of the essence. States need to know whether they must adapt their policies to deal with the brave new world ushered in by the ACA.”

Whatever the outcome, we have some time before we have any certainty on the future of the ACA. “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable,” said Mark Twain. We’ll wait to see what SCOTUS has to say before we call the ACA dead and gone.

Fair enough. Red meat to the progressive base has been few and far between lately, and we finally have something to get excited about it. And let’s face it – the “Buffet plan”, or whatever this proposal will eventually be called- is great. We love it. Any proposal at this level that actually acknowledges the gross inequality in the current federal tax structure is, in our opinion, moving the converstaion in a positive direction.

The President explicitly stated “This is not class warfare — it’s math. The money has to come from some place,” he said. “If we’re not willing to ask those who’ve done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit… the math says everybody else has to do a whole lot more, we’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor.”

So, why the outcry from conservatives that this proposal is “class warfare” against the rich? It seems incredibly irresponsible to be crowing about “class warfare” when we are actively engaged in two real wars. You know, the ones where people die?  The ones the conservatives pushed so hard, and are, in no small part, a significant cause of our current fiscal position? Remember them?

But we use these ridiculous terms all the time and we scarcely think about them: the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Terror, or the War on Litter (ok, so I made that one up – kinda.) None of these “wars” have been terribly effective, so one might wonder why we continue to fight them, or why we continue to evoke the imagery of war in our peacetime pursuits.

If critics of the the President’s tax proposal were serious, they would have to acknowledge that the past twenty years have been a war on the low- and middle- class. For most of us, real household income stagnated (or actually decreased), tax rates increased, and living standards decreased, while the rich enjoyed unparalleled increases in wealth, reduced tax burdens, and the largest gap between rich and poor since before the Great Depression.

So, if the talking heads invoking the moniker of war were being truthful, they might be a bit more careful with their choice of fighting words, less we understand what they’re actually saying. Just some friendly advice guys – we’re starting to do the math and we don’t like what we’re finding.

The case for class warfare is beginning to look as flimsy as the case for war in Iraq. Have you noticed the common denominator between the two? The same people that called for our war in Iraq are crying class warfare now. Fool me once, shame on you – fool me twice…

]]> http://ncsjp.org/2011/09/21/maths-war/feed/ 0 http://ncsjp.org/2011/09/16/seasonal-adjustment/ http://ncsjp.org/2011/09/16/seasonal-adjustment/#comments Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:51:24 +0000 NCSJP http://ncsjp.org/?p=2714 Drama! Intrigue! Politics! No, we’re not talking about the newest blockbuster movie, but rather this week in North Carolina.

While we are still a few days away from the official start of Fall, we feel comfortable paraphrasing Shakespeare and saying, “Now is the Autum of our discontent.” And while King Richard was speaking about the end of his ordeal, it seems ours is only beginning. This week in particular has been very, very long, and I am very glad it is coming to a close.

We started on Monday with the General Assembly’s third trip to Raleigh, with this entire session dedicated to taking another step closer to writing discrimination into the state constitution. (They succeed, by the way.)

We end the week with new unemployment numbers out of the NC Empolyment Commission, showing yet another increase in our State’s unemployment.  (We’re now officially up to 10.4%, now more than 1% higher than the national average.)

Somewhere in the middle NC is ranked in the Top 10 of poorest states in the nation, and we find out that 1 in 4 North Carolina children go to bed hungry every night.

At the risk of repeating ourselves, perhaps our elected officials, who are coming back for an unprecedented fourth session in November, would do well to address the dire financial situation millions of North Carolinians are finding themselves in rather than spending time depressing economic development.

After all, Richard III is a tragedy – we would do well to avoid that particular ending if we can help it.