Blessed Are the Assault Rifles

March 24, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Righteous Slaughter” was the title I gave a post (here) about the ideas of some people on the gunslinging right. It referred to their glorification of killing so long as the killing could be justified. At the time, I thought that “righteous” might be stretching it just a little since the term implies that the slaughter has a holy, Biblical inspiration and benediction.

Silly me.  Fox News today set me straight.



As the spineless lefties at the Daily News were quick to point out in their lede, the prize this house of worship was offering was

 a high-powered assault rifle similar to the one used to slaughter 26 innocent people at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Nor is this upstate New York church unique. While it was raffling off one piddling assault rifle, Lone Oak First Baptist Church in Kentucky was doing 25 times that amount of God’s work.

roughly 1,300 people crammed into the church hall for a steak dinner and pep talk by gun expert Chuck McAlister, who was hired by Kentucky’s Southern Baptists to grow membership. Twenty-five guns were raffled off during the dinner

The New York church is trying its best to catch up – as the headline says, another church-sanctified AR-15 will go to some lucky Christian tonight.

John 11:35

Families for Deceptive Statistics

March 22, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you live in New York City and have a working television set, you’ve seen those heart-wrenching ads accusing Mayor DeBlasio of “taking away the hopes and dreams” of 194 middle school children.  The meanie mayor did this by allowing 14 of 17 charter schools to get free space in public schools.  Unfortunately, at least one of the three that didn’t meet the criteria* is run by Eva Moskowitz, who is closely connected with some heavy hitters.** Hence the multi-million dollar saturation ad campaign.

The ads come from an organization called Families for Excellent Schools. It was bad enough that they took over my television. Now they’ve turned up, unbidden and unfollowed, in my Twitter feed. 

Wow – 79% want to “protect or expand.”  Looks like four out of five New Yorkers are strongly pro-charter.  But just to be sure, I followed the link and arrived at a Quinnipiac poll (here).  It’s Quinnipiac, so I assume that the sampling and questions are OK.  Here’s the relevant item:

30. As you may know, charter schools are operated by private or non-profit organizations. The schools are paid for with public funds and do not charge tuition. Do you think the mayor should increase the number of charter schools, decrease the number of charter schools, or keep the number of charter schools the same?

And here are the results (I’ve left out the demographic breakdowns which you can find by following the link above).

	Total	Kid in PS
Increase	40	45
Decrease	14	14
Keep the same	39	35
DK/NA	7	6

Notice that the word in the tweet, “protect,” was not one of the choices. The trick is obvious: lump the 39% who said “Keep the same” with the 40% who said the 39% who said “Increase,” and voila – 79%.  But the trick works both ways.  Using the same logic, charter opponents could add the “Keep the same” group to the 14% “Decrease” group and say

Poll finds majority of New Yorkers wants to halt growth of charter schools, 53 - 40.   Among those with kids in public school, they outnumber proponents of charter expansion 49 - 45.

Would that be deceptive? Maybe, but certainly no more so than “protect or expand.”

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* Diane Ravitch (here) has more on the criteria for “co-location” of charters in public schools.

** “Jeremiah Kittredge, the executive director of Families for Excellent Schools, said the strength of the movement comes from the bottom.” (From a story on WNYC radio.) Hmm. Do you pay for a multi-million dollar TV ad campaign with money from the bottom?  It turns out that Families for Excellent schools gets its money from ordinary bottom folks like the Walton family and probably a bunch of billionaire hedge-funders and CEOs, though we can’t be sure: “Kittredge declined to discuss his organization’s funding.”

Less for Your Money

March 21, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

What to do about snow days? That was one of the last items on the agenda at the half-day-long meeting of all department chairs. In coming semesters, we’ll probably get more weird weather, so what kind of advance arrangements should make?  Schedule more pre-exam-period reading days that can be converted to class days? Have teachers tockpile a few online classes?

“I don’t know about anyone else,” said one chair, trying to sound puzzled, “but so far none of my students have complained about the two missed classes.”  (OK, it was me.) There was laughter, though not an entirely easy laughter.

I continued:

I had two immediate mental associations when the topic came up. One was my brother. Long ago, I was talking to him about this problem or something similar He took out a blank piece of paper.  “Suppose this is your field, sociology.” Then he drew a square that took up less than half the page.. “And this is how much you know.”

“And this,” he drew a smaller square inside that one, “is what you can cover in a semester.”  It was beginning to look like an Albers print but without color.

“And this,” a still smaller square “is what your students can learn.”

I didn’t have to state the obvious implication:  as long as the what-they-can-learn square was considerably smaller than the what-you-can-cover square, what difference would a couple of snow days make?

“My other association,” I said, “was to Father Guido Sarducci.”

I was surprised by the number of people who seemed to get the reference.* At least they laughed.  And one woman I spoke with later (chair of Nutrition Sciences) did a very credible version of Fr. Sarducci’s accent.  She added that our business was one of the very few where the customers often wanted less for their money.

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* The bit became famous after Don Novello did it on SNL in the early 1970s. This version is from 1980, still early enough that the audience gets the Mickey Mouse Club reference.

 

Motivation and Incentives - Are the Rich and Poor Different?

March 19, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Economic policies often rest on assumptions about human motivation. 

Rep. Ryan (Republican of Wisconsin): 

The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity — of self-determination.

Fox News has been hitting the theme of “Entitlement Nation” lately. The Conservative case against things like Food Stamps, Medicare, welfare, unemployment benefits, etc. rests on some easily understood principles of motivation and economics.

1.    Giving money or things to a person creates dependency and saps the desire to work. That’s bad for the person and bad for the country
2.    A person working for money is good for the person and the country.
3.    We want to encourage work
4.    We do not want to encourage dependency
5.    Taxing something discourages it. 

Now that you’ve mastered these, here’s the test question:

1. According to Conservatives, which should be taxed more heavily:
    a.    money a person earns by working
    b.    money a person receives without working, for example because someone else died and left it in their will

If you said “b,” you’d better go back to Conservative class. A good Conservative believes that the money a person gets without working for it should not be taxed at all.*  

Not all such money, of course.  Lottery tickets are bought disproportionately by lower-income people.  If a person gets income by winning the PowerBall or some other lottery, the Federal government taxes the money as income. Conservatives do not object.  But if a person gets income by winning the rich-parent lottery, Conservatives think he or she should not pay any taxes.

What Conservatives are saying to you is this: working for your money is not as good as  inheriting it.** This message seems to contradict the principles listed above. But, as Jon Stewart recently pointed out (here), Conservatives apply those principles of economics and motivational psychology only to the poor, not to wealthy individuals or corporations.

Me, I’m with Rep. Ryan on this one. I think that the children of the wealthy would not at all mind paying considerable taxes on their inheritance. What abolishing inheritance taxes offers people is a full stomach (not to mention a full bank account, stock portfolio, a full house or two, etc.) but an empty soul. To repeat the Wisdom from Wisconsin: “People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity — of self-determination.”

Unfortunately, Conservatives want to take away that dignity and self-determination
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* Conservatives like to call the inheritance tax the “death tax” as though a person is being taxed for dying. But it’s not the deceased who is being taxed. It’s the lucky people who are given the money.

** Conservatives also favor lower taxes on other ways of getting money that are available mostly the wealthy and involve little or no work – gambling on stocks and more complicated derivatives for example.