Kevin Drum's Shrill Morning Rant

He is fed up with L.J. Williamson:

The Washington Monthly: MORNING RANT....In the LA Times today, L.J. Williamson is upset that part-time cafeteria workers in Los Angeles schools want the district to provide them with healthcare benefits:

Part-time food service employees are seeking the same health benefits — including coverage for their families — that their full-time counterparts enjoy. Extending these benefits to cafeteria staff who currently work only three hours a day would cost an estimated $40 million a year, according to school board calculations.... This is fat that the food service's too-lean budget simply doesn't have. If health benefits were extended to these part-time workers, the CFPA estimates it would mean that the per-plate meal budget would be reduced from 85 cents to 49 cents. Making healthy food available for that amount would take a miracle of biblical proportions. So we'd be improving the healthcare of nearly 2,000 part-time workers at the expense of the 500,000 children who eat in public school cafeterias every day.

I would happily pay for universal healthcare just so I never had to read an op-ed like this again. It's not that Williamson doesn't have a point, it's just that this beggar-thy-neighbor attitude is enough to make me retch, and I see it all the time. I don't get dental coverage, so why should grocery workers? My copay went up last year, so why shouldn't everyone else's? I don't pay for healthcare for my housecleaners, so why should I pay it for school cafeteria workers? Our wretched private healthcare system has turned us into a nation of spiteful and small-minded misanthropes...

Comments

[Faisal N. Jawdat]

On L.J. Williamson's planet, school kids never catch communicable diseases from food prepared by sick cafeteria workers, and network externalizes is defined to mean "people outside my LinkedIn network."

[Matt]

Kevin would institute the final solution in medicine just because he is irritated?

[James Killus]

I don't think that L. J. Williamson has been "turned" into anything. If the world were better, he'd be trying to make it worse, just so he'd have the feeling that he was improving, relatively speaking.

[Ponzi Q. Globalization]

It's a shame that such work can't just be offshore outsourced. Then a corp can treat their employees like dog poo and not have people like Drum bitch about it.

After all, if the only alternative is eternal immiseration, to be exploited for a decade or so is a gift.

[ergastoplasm]

Agree with you that this is a destructive sentiment, but I think that the causality runs the other way. We have a nasty and divisive health care system because our culture teaches us to maximize our personal wealth and deny any obligation to help others- what if they turned out to be illegal immigrants?
That’s why we have so many hyper libertarians- our society has no right to tax us unless it/they guarantees that every single penny will be efficiently used. Society can’t deny my right to drive over desert dunes or drive a Hummer.

[Charles]

This is the Republican version of "Think of the children!" In that version, everyone has to be greedy so that the children don't suffer.

BTW, off-topic, there is a pretty credible report from Dan Plesch and Martin Butcher of the University of London that we are basically at war with Iran, with the pyrotechnics to follow soon after Sept. 11. There's more from Barnett Rubin.

URLS are

www.rawstory.com/images/other/IranStudy082807a.pdf and

icga.blogspot.com/2007/08/post-labor-day-product-rollout-war-with.html

[Sam Taylor]

"Our wretched private healthcare system has turned us into a nation of spiteful and small-minded misanthropes..."

Great phrase, Brad.

Perhaps it has legs. Could one run a campaign against "spiteful and small-minded misanthropes"?

[Matt McIrvin]

I've even seen that as an argument against gay marriage--oh no, same-sex spouses ("with HIV" sometimes being the spoken or unspoken modifier) of people on my plan will get health benefits, and my premiums will go up! The meanness of it boggles me.

[christofay]

The Pleisch/Butcher report:

British military sources stated on condition of anonymity, that "the US military switched its whole focus to Iran" from March 2003. It continued this focus even though it had infantry bogged down in fighting the insurgency in Iraq

So as soon as we bogged down in Iraq, the planning emphasis was switched to Iran? And the Democratic presidential on the whole support this craziness? At least I think Clinton will support a war on Iran.

Both political parties are pro-war parties. Few of the elites have their children on the ground. Money is free.

[bigTom]

Well, from the standpoint of the school, or anyone in the position of being able to offer part-time low wage employment, the requirement to pay the full-healthcare costs of these employees would be overwhelming. Trying to increase insurance coverage by mandating employer's pay has some serious drawbacks -especially considering the wage competitiveness of low skilled labor in the US versus other countries which have sensible universal coverage. We see it being proposed, because it follows the path of least (political) resistance.

[garhane]

This attitude shows up brutally (and just a little comically) when Municipal Taxes are debated on the issue of introducing user pay for water, and then for....everything. One old fellow explained that his children were grown up, he does a lot less shopping than once, and he has sold his car. He does not really need the front street, the lane or a lot of other stuff so why should he not get a cut on his property tax.
A lot of people agreed with him, or, at least, jumped in to talk about all the services they did not need, or not as much or some one else was using too much....and so on.All of this is started by ignorant and very selfish people who are studying economics, or by their instructors, but it leads very quickly to the breakdown of municipal society.

[garhane]

This attitude shows up brutally (and just a little comically) when Municipal Taxes are debated on the issue of introducing user pay for water, and then for....everything. One old fellow explained that his children were grown up, he does a lot less shopping than once, and he has sold his car. He does not really need the front street, the lane or a lot of other stuff so why should he not get a cut on his property tax.
A lot of people agreed with him, or, at least, jumped in to talk about all the services they did not need, or not as much or some one else was using too much....and so on.All of this is started by ignorant and very selfish people who are studying economics, or by their instructors, but it leads very quickly to the breakdown of municipal society.

[anne]

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/08/paul-krugman-ka.html

August 31, 2007

Paul Krugman: Katrina All the Time
Edited by Mark Thoma

Paul Krugman says the administrations may find success through its failures:

NY Times: Two years ago today, Americans watched in horror as a great city drowned, and wondered what had happened to their country. Where was FEMA? Where was the National Guard? Why wasn't the government of the world's richest, most powerful nation coming to the aid of its own citizens?

What we mostly saw on TV was the nightmarish scene at the Superdome, but things were even worse at the New Orleans convention center, where thousands were stranded without food or water. The levees were breached Monday morning — but as late as Thursday evening, The Washington Post reported, the convention center "still had no visible government presence," while "corpses lay out in the open among wailing babies and other refugees."

Meanwhile, federal officials were oblivious. "We are extremely pleased with the response ... to this terrible tragedy," declared Michael Chertoff, the secretary for Homeland Security, on Wednesday. When asked the next day about the situation at the convention center, he dismissed the reports as "a rumor" or "someone's anecdotal version."

Today, much of the Gulf Coast remains in ruins. Less than half the federal money set aside for rebuilding ... has actually been spent... On the other hand, generous investment tax breaks, supposedly designed to spur recovery in the disaster area, have been used to build luxury condominiums near the University of Alabama's football stadium..., 200 miles inland.

But why should we be surprised by any of this? The Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina — the mixture of neglect of those in need, obliviousness to their plight, and self-congratulation in the face of abject failure — has become standard operating procedure. These days, it's Katrina all the time.

Consider the White House reaction to new Census data on income, poverty and health insurance. By any normal standard, this week's report was a devastating indictment of the administration's policies. ... What the data show ... is that 2006, while a good year for the wealthy, brought only a slight decline in the poverty rate and a modest rise in median income, with most Americans still considerably worse off than they were before President Bush took office.

Most disturbing of all, the number of Americans without health insurance jumped. ... Yet the White House ... declared that President Bush was "pleased" with the new numbers. Heckuva job, economy! ...

The question is whether any of this will change when Mr. Bush leaves office.

There's a powerful political faction in this country that's determined to draw exactly the wrong lesson from the Katrina debacle — namely, that the government always fails when it attempts to help people..., as if the Bush administration's practice of appointing incompetent cronies to key positions and refusing to hold them accountable no matter how badly they perform — did I mention that Mr. Chertoff still has his job? — were the way government always works.

And I'm not sure that faction is losing the argument. The thing about conservative governance is that it can succeed by failing: when conservative politicians mess up, they foster a cynicism about government that may actually help their cause.

Future historians will, without doubt, see Katrina as a turning point. The question is whether it will be seen as the moment when America remembered the importance of good government, or the moment when neglect and obliviousness to the needs of others became the new American way.

[anne]

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/08/paul-krugman--2.html

August 27, 2007

Paul Krugman: A Socialist Plot
Edited by Mark Thoma

Paul Krugman attempts to "dispel the fog of obfuscation right-wingers use to obscure the true nature of their position on children’s health":

NY Times: Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free government-run education.

They’d have a point: many American families with middle-class incomes do send their kids to school at public expense, so taxpayers without school-age children subsidize families that do. And the effect is to displace the private sector: if public schools weren’t available, many families would pay for private schools instead.

So let’s end this un-American system and make education what it should be — a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn’t have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America’s education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models.

O.K., in case you’re wondering, I haven’t lost my mind, I’m drawing an analogy. The real Heritage press release, titled “The Middle-Class Welfare Kid Next Door,” is an attack on proposals to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. ... And Rudy Giuliani’s call for “free-market solutions, not socialist models” was about health care, not education...

The truth is that there’s no difference in principle between saying that every American child is entitled to an education and saying that every American child is entitled to adequate health care. It’s just a matter of historical accident that we think of access to free K-12 education as a basic right, but consider having the government pay children’s medical bills “welfare,“ with all the negative connotations that go with that term.

And conservative opposition to giving every child in this country access to health care is, in a fundamental sense, un-American.

Here’s what I mean: The great majority of Americans believe that everyone is entitled to a chance to make the most of his or her life. Even conservatives usually claim to believe that...

But a child who doesn’t receive adequate health care, like a child who doesn’t receive an adequate education, doesn’t have the same ... chances in life as children who get both these things. And insurance is crucial to receiving adequate health care...

So how can conservatives defend the indefensible, and oppose giving children the health care they need? By trying the old welfare queen in her Cadillac strategy (albeit without the racial innuendo that made it so effective when Reagan used it). That is, to divert public sympathy from people who really need help, they’re trying to change the subject to the supposedly undeserving recipients of government aid. Hence the emphasis on the evils of “middle-class welfare.”

Proponents of an expansion of children’s health care have, as they should, responded to this strategy with facts and figures. Congressional Budget Office estimates show that S-chip expansion would, in fact, primarily benefit those who need it most: the great majority of children receiving coverage under an expanded program would otherwise have been uninsured.

But the more fundamental response should be, so what?

We offer free education, and don’t worry about middle-class families getting benefits they don’t need, because that’s the only way to ensure that every child gets an education — and giving every child a fair chance is the American way. And we should guarantee health care to every child, for the same reason.

[anne]

"The thing about conservative governance is that it can succeed by failing: when conservative politicians mess up, they foster a cynicism about government that may actually help their cause.

"Future historians will, without doubt, see Katrina as a turning point. The question is whether it will be seen as the moment when America remembered the importance of good government, or the moment when neglect and obliviousness to the needs of others became the new American way."

Immensely important and poignant and worrisome. Thank you, Dear Paul Krugman.

[christofay]

Goalline stance

[christofay]

An oxymoron, Bush speaks to calm the markets.

[ahab]

Thanks Anne for posting the latest Krugman Column. The implication or rather the idea that New Orleans has been basically allowed to collapse to prove the point that government is ineffective ( with Republican Missisippi as "collateral" damage? ) is staggering in it's calculated cynicism.

Let's also be very clear about Katrina and New Orleans. The actual direct impact of Katrina did minimal damage to New Orleans ( not so on the Missisippi Gulf Coast! ) it was the "backwash" or what they call in the Great Lakes region the Slush ( there's also a french term that escapes me; doubtless originating from the days of the Voyageurs"
That caused the direly neglected infrastructure of the levees to fail after the storm proper had passed.

The destruction of New Orleans was caused by the failure of neglected infrastructure. Let them eat cake.

[anne]

Ahab:

"Let's also be very clear about Katrina and New Orleans. The actual direct impact of Katrina did minimal damage to New Orleans ( not so on the Missisippi Gulf Coast! ) it was the 'backwash' or what they call in the Great Lakes region the Slush ( there's also a French term that escapes me; doubtless originating from the days of the Voyageurs."

"That caused the direly neglected infrastructure of the levees to fail after the storm proper had passed."

This has been my understanding; and I have been continually displeased with the responses since.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/us/nationalspecial/12exile.html?hp

July 12, 2007

Road to New Life After Katrina Is Closed to Many
By SHAILA DEWAN

CONVENT, La. — This was not how Cindy Cole pictured her life at 26: living in a mobile home park called Sugar Hill, wedged amid the refineries and cane fields of tiny St. James Parish, 18 miles from the nearest supermarket. Sustaining three small children on nothing but food stamps, with no playground, no security guards and nowhere to go.

No, Ms. Cole was supposed to be paying $275 a month for a two-bedroom house in the Lower Ninth Ward — next door to her mother, across the street from her aunt, with a child care network that extended the length and breadth of her large New Orleans family. With her house destroyed and no job or savings, however, her chances of recreating that old reality are slim.

For thousands of evacuees like Ms. Cole, going home to New Orleans has become a vague and receding dream. Living in bleak circumstances, they cannot afford to go back, or have nothing to go back to. Over the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, the shock of evacuation has hardened into the grim limbo of exile.

"We in storage," said Ann Picard, 49, cocking her arm toward the blind white cracker box of a house she shares with Ms. Cole, her niece, and Ms. Cole's three children. "We just in storage."

Their options whittled away by government inaction....

As of late May, however, there were still more than 30,000 families displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita spread across the country in apartments paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and another 13,000 families, down from a peak of nearly 18,000, marooned in trailer or mobile home parks, where hunger is so prevalent that lines form when the truck from the food bank appears....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/us/24orleans.html?hp

July 24, 2007

Shuttered Hospitals Ensure Slow Recovery in New Orleans
By LESLIE EATON

NEW ORLEANS — At the tip of Bayou St. John in the Mid-City neighborhood here, the brown and white bulk of Lindy Boggs Medical Center looms behind a chain-link fence. Nineteen people died at the medical center after Hurricane Katrina, and now the hospital itself is dead, sold to developers who plan to replace it with a shopping mall.

On the surrounding streets — Bienville and Canal and Jefferson Davis — lies the wreckage of a once-bustling medical corridor. Doctors' offices sit empty behind five-foot-high water marks, and nearby clinics wait to be demolished. In back of one medical building, a gaping refrigerator still holds jars of mayonnaise and Mt. Olive Dill Relish.

Harder to see, but just as tangible, people here say, are the other ripple effects of the flood and the closed hospital: workers displaced, houses for sale and, of course, patients forced to seek health care many miles away. If they have returned to New Orleans at all, that is, given the grave wounds to the health care system.

"I've been telling people, don't bring your parents back if they are sick," said Dr. David A. Myers, an internist who lived and worked in Mid-City before the flood and has moved his home and practice to the suburbs.

Of all the factors blocking the economic revival of New Orleans, the shattered health care system may be the most important — and perhaps the most intractable.

Except for tourism and retailing, health care was the city's biggest private employer, and it paid much higher wages than hotels or stores. But there are now 16,800 fewer medical jobs than before the storm, down 27 percent, in part because nurses and other workers are in short supply.

Only one of the city's seven general hospitals is operating at its pre-hurricane level; two more are partially open, and four remain closed. The number of hospital beds in New Orleans has dropped by two-thirds. In the suburbs, half a dozen hospitals in adjacent Jefferson Parish are open — but are packed....