Veteran is Concerned by Use of Signal by Leaders

 An issue I have heard about a lot in the news lately has been the text chains that were sent out with sensitive information about our military plans, and accidentally adding a journalist to the text that they did not mean to add. This is pretty ridiculous when you consider the type of conversation that they were having. You would think that before you discuss F-18s dropping bombs on an enemy that you would at least check who is on the text chain before you send this kind of information out. But of course, this was downplayed by the Trump administration as not that big of a deal. They wrote it off as a simple mistake, but Trump based the whole 2016 election on Hillary Clinton’s emails, and said she was not fit, and degraded her in every way possible and said she should be in jail. Now that it is his guys, he is trying to act like it is no big deal. 

As a former service member, this is upsetting to me that they would put our military members’ lives in jeopardy and then try and lie about the conversation. Pete Hegseth, a former combat veteran, then lied about this conversation. He tried to distance himself as much as possible and when interviewed, he said it was a “hoax”. Of course, he would use that word, just like his daddy, Donald Trump. I don’t understand how this happened, but someone should take full responsibility for it, and disciplinary action should be taken to prevent anything like this from ever happening again. I know some people do not think it is that big of a deal, including our president apparently, but it is a very big deal and could put people's lives at risk. The Vice President was a Marine as well, you would think this would be upsetting to him that somehow, they put these pilots' lives in danger, but he has not done anything to address this. It just goes to show the lack of humanity with some of these guys, if that was me in that text chain I would be apologizing like crazy to the pilots and to everyone else for making such a stupid rookie mistake. 

But when Pete Hegseth was getting sworn in to be the secretary of defense, this was most people’s issue with him is that he was not qualified to do this job, and it definitely shows. I just think how funny and two-sided everything is. In 2016, they wanted to throw Clinton in jail for her whole e-mail scandal, but it’s okay when they do something that stupid. I really wish Trump had never been elected into office in the first place because since 2016, it has been nothing but issues with him; he lives for chaos. Our nation was not even close to being as divided as it is today. I wish it was not the way it is and I am not sure what it is going to take to get everything back on track after he leaves office. 

These themes in your reaction relate to some universal themes.

First, there is the issue of partisanship and cognitive bias and cognitive dissonance. Persons who feel a partisan alignment are likely to perceive the world through a cognitive bias filter where every error committed by their political opponents will look more dramatic, sinister, malevolent, and egregious, whereas every error committed by someone from their side will look excusable, mild, inadvertent, innocent, and harmless. The more partisan someone is, the more this is so.  As persons who are highly partisan are more likely to have this partisan bias, and simultaneously likely to believe in the virtue and goodness of their side and the malevolence and ill-intentions of the other side, any evidence that they are being hypocritical or biased would threaten their self-concepts of their virtue, and any evidence that the “other side” is being fair and honest whereas their partisan side is being dishonest or unreasonable would threaten their world view, and they would take such evidence or arguments as threats to their very being (their ego or psychological being).  It seems to me, as a non-partisan outsider who has a radical-to-liberal pragmatic inclination, that the Republicans tend to be more hyper-partisan than the Democrats, although these problems of cognitive bias afflict people on all sides of the political world. And, with hyper-partisanship comes increasing blindness to their own thought-distortions and irrational thinking.   

Second, there is the issue of the general incompetence or mismanagement of the federal government executive and legislative branches under the leadership of Donald Trump, John Thune, and Mike Johnson. And in particular, the cabinet-level officials who have been using social media to discuss secret government operations is one egregious example of incompetence and lack of seriousness. Of course, one always expects a certain level of mistakes, bad decisions, lack of wisdom, or foolishness from any human being, and political leaders are not exempt from human foibles, but at the level of persons confirmed to run government agencies at the level of the President's cabinet, one expects better.

Then, there is the problem of intelligence and expertise.  Some of the people in government may be competent and capable of able management, but they may not be geniuses or they may be operating in an area which lies outside their expertise. President Trump seems to have assigned a reasonably intelligent Florida real estate businessman (Steve Witkoff) to run several of his highest priority diplomatic efforts, and Witkoff evidently went to meet with Putin and other Russian leaders without even bringing along an interpreter, deciding he could do this negotiation without any help from an expert diplomat from the State Department or a US Government translator. Trump has assigned Pete Hegseth, a man who has a proven record of being a good communicator to audiences who watch FOX News even on weekends when most people are out doing activities and not sitting somewhere watching television propaganda, but he has no expertise in running large organizations, holding command in the military, or communicating with people who aren't avid FOX network viewers. The President seems to care more about loyalty and voices who will be respected within the right-wing MAGA echo chamber, and less about competence, expertise, and intelligence. This will be frustrating to people who want to see brilliant people running the government. Those of us who want government leaders with awe-inspiring expertise doing things within their realms of expertise that the rest of us could not possibly do are naturally irked when people are given leadership mainly because of their loyalty to the President or their willingness to obey anything Trump tells them to do.

All these issues are relevant in the issue of the signal chat about the attack on the Houthis, but these same issues are also relevant to people who are dismayed or disgusted by how the White House and Congress are operating these days. There are consistent patterns of activity that alarm many people, and that is why you see large demonstrations two or three times each month where thousands of people, even in a small city like Springfield, come out on an afternoon to wave signs, listen to speeches, chant slogans, and shout out against what is going on.    

Student Reaction Essay Deplores Trump Administration's Handling of Poverty

I have several concerns with social policies—or the lack thereof—in our world today. My main thought concerns our approach to poverty. I have heard the age old phrase “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” I never understood this until I got older and started consuming media. The rich are rich. Rich enough, unfortunately, to buy multi million dollar corporations without the bat of an eyelash, or persuade young teens that money is all you need and you have to do whatever you can to make as much as you can. Tossing all morals out of the window for money. Disgusting. How rich exactly are the rich? Lets look, a quick google search told me the richest man in the world currently is Elon Musk, with a net worth of approximately 421.6 billion dollars. Now let us not forget his recent display of a fascist symbol that ended the lives of around six MILLION people.  But it’s okay because he’s rich. Apparently. Unfortunately. 

You seem to be raising three issues. First, you’re noticing the issue that small inequalities tend to grow into larger inequalities over time.  People with wealth tend to become wealthier. Second, you seem concerned with a materialistic view that replaces traditional values, where wealth and the pursuit of wealth is highly valued over more traditional values. Third, you are concerned with the tremendous power that goes along with extreme wealth, and the suspect ideologies of some of the wealthy persons.  You might be interested in connections between the American Liberty League, the Du Pont family, Robert A. Taft, the National Association of Manufacturers, Ayn Rand,  Robert W. Welch Jr., the John Birch  Society, Charles Koch, Robert G. Grant, Tim Dunn, Farris Wilks, Murray Rothbard, William F. Buckley Jr.,  The America First Policy Institute, Paul Dans, the Heritage Foundation, and so forth. The fabric of American conservative political thinking includes a fair share of upper-class and wealthy enthusiasts.

Now understandably the one reason people gave me for voting for Trump this term was his promise on cheaper groceries. With his tariffs to be able to make his pockets warm, this is far from happening. They say he is a “businessman” and although this may be true, he is a businessman for himself not for you. See businessmen are the worst people to leave in charge of your country. They always say when you're buying a car that the businessmen are only focused on selling to you to ensure they leave with thick pockets, that’s all they care about. When you put a “businessman” in charge of your country alongside a fascist as his right hand man, you may as well set fire to your assets yourself. 

There are many different sorts of business leaders. My own understanding of family-owned businesses is that they take on a different character compared to firms that are publicly traded where stockholders can demand ever-increasing profits and sales growth. No doubt idiots can be cruel dictators in family-owned firms, but some families seem to be more concerned with long-term sustainability, creating loyal and well-compensated workforces, and benevolently running their firms for idealistic aims in terms of serving their customers and employees while maintaining their own wealth. There are brilliant and well-rounded business executives or investors who are probably highly capable in running government agencies, and of course there are investors and business executives who are terrible and incompetent when it comes to government service or public administration. I personally like life-career civil servants who are promoted to the top because of their competence and good leadership skills, or clever academics with some practical experience, and prefer these types to business types, but I know that people with business, military, legal, artistic, and scientific careers might be good, depending upon their character and competence. 

You may think well surely they are doing something to help lower the poverty rate right? The sentiment is adorable but it’s quite the opposite. Trump’s idea to cut federal funding includes but certainly isn’t limited to affordable section eight housing, LINK and EBT cards, homeless shelters, etc. Trying to use the defense that it will force people to better themselves and their lives rather than leech off the government. He only says that with a green cast and dollar signs in his sights. Less federal funding is more money staying in the government, more money in the government is more money to use to his advantage. He doesn’t care about you, he doesn't care about me, he doesn’t care about the nation's children. HE. DOESN’T. CARE. 

Yes, the budget proposed by President Trump was astonishing in its sadistic torments for low-income Americans.  I think Trump’s cognitive decline has brought him to a point that he is almost entirely out-of-touch with what is going on, and his budget is probably the product of some lackey or henchman such as Stephen Miller or Paul Dans.  

Have I seen cases where people continue to willingly live on the government so they don’t have to go back to work? Actually no, I haven't.  As a child I had friends that were on different forms of welfare. Mom was kept at home because of an injury or having to care for young children due to not being able to afford childcare, and Dad was either getting settled with a new family or missing and strung out. People don’t willingly fall on hard times. People don’t want to stay in hard times, taking tennis shoes from the street so their children can have a pair for school, selling their deceased mother’s jewelry to afford even one gift for Christmas, giving their food to their children because they’re “so full and need help finishing it all.” We need to be there for each other, damnit, we can do as much as we want from the bottom but if the top turns their back on us we ALL need to stay together. These are frightening and exhausting times to be living in. This is not how I imagined to spend my 20s. Never forget what they say, but be sure to watch what they do. 

I like how you wrote this as a sort of stream-of-consciousness reaction to events.  Your writing is full of emotion and it is a deeply personal reaction to current events.  I use the reaction essay assignments to give students a chance to write in this style, and sometimes I'm a little saddened when students write more traditional academic essays for their reaction essays. 

A Student Despairs that Partisan Politics Block Good Policies

 

For this free writing assignment, I chose to write about and focus on how politics influence policies made. In today’s society I think that politics influence a lot of things that they shouldn’t, but it is just how the world seems to function. When it comes to making policies regarding social work, mental health, homelessness, or anything related, it should have nothing to do with politics, but rather the best interest of the people. The world is in the biggest and worst mental health crisis that it ever has been, but instead of focusing on that, we focus on whether or not it fits into a left or right leaning stance. Personally, I find that ridiculous because it should be about these people who are struggling with their mental health each and every day. Some of these people cannot get out of bed in the morning, cannot feed their kids, cannot get a job, or maybe can’t even get a roof over their head, but instead we focus on who is “right.” When neither is right. The only right is fixing the problem these people face. Bringing politics into the mix completely throws the human right purpose out the window because it brings in nothing but selfishness. If we left politics out of making policies, I believe that the world would be a better place. We could solve issues much easier and without so much hate and discrimination. Homeless people would not be homeless, mentally ill people would have the help they need, and the social workers would make the money they deserve to make without working well beyond their hours.  

This is a persistent problem.  According to some perspectives, conservative voices ought to be offering cautious perspectives, eager to find the way of accomplishing social welfare and domestic tranquility with minimal regulation, most efficient (requiring the lowest possible taxes and spending) policies and services that remain effective, and respect for historical precedent and experience. Along this line, the liberal voices ought to be more interested in innovative or transformative perspectives, seeking similar effective policies with similar goals, but more willing to tolerate regulation, and more willing to redistribute resources through more generous public spending.  In essence, conservatives would prefer a society where the welfare system and all the other things the government does would take up about 25% to 35% of the economy, while liberals would prefer about 35% to 45% of the economy to be in the public realm, and radicals would perhaps prefer 45% to 55% of personal income to end up in public projects and the welfare system. If people saw things this way, would they really hate someone for thinking the governments at various level needed to control 40% of the economy when they personally preferred a figure of 30%?  But instead, tribal cliques form and partisan loyalties and power-seeking block good policies. Since all social policies and government programs are vast and complex, and will always contain errors, gaps, and imperfections, the tribes of political parties seek out only those flaws when the policies or services are recommended by the other tribe, and deny or hide all the flaws when the policies or services “belong” to their own tribe. 

If a good policy is recommended, and it would be efficient, highly effective, fair, and provide huge improvements compared to the costs associated with it, we professionals would hope that all politicians would take it seriously and support the policy if no better (more effective or more efficient) policy was available or feasible. Instead, we see that when a policy is supported by Democratic Part members, many Republicans will be biased against it, and if Republicans like a policy, Democrats will probably reject it. Many Democrats will insist on superior policies according to their ideology, even when there is no feasible way those policies can be enacted, given political realities, and they will fight against half-way measures; and we see the same thing among many Republicans, who demand policies or actions that have no chance of passage, and will reject any compromises. 

The key to policy practice for social workers is to try to frame issues in a way that will appeal in a non-partisan way to any politicians who care about solving problems and putting forth some effort to enact laws that will improve a situation. There are members of both parties who do care, and will listen, and will try to work to get good legislation passed.  There are also members of both parties who don’t really care much, who will be willfully ignorant, and who care mainly about their power or their appearance, and not so much about what they actually do.

Reviewing all the welfare spending.

I’ve been reading an interesting report on means-tested welfare spending put out by Robert Rector and some friends at the Heritage Foundation back in September of 2009. Although the report has some very misleading language and some unfair presentation of a numbers game, it does indeed provide some very good observations and suggestions. The most fundamental problem with the whole report is that it seems to take a position that America has two classes: the low-income persons who tend to be unmarried and irresponsible and lack a strong work-ethic, who receive hundreds of billions of dollars in welfare; and the taxpayers who work and earn an income and pay taxes to support the low-income class. The flaw with this whole framing of the issue is that about 70% of the low-income class that receives means-tested benefits is in fact destined to become part of the taxpaying, income-earning class. That is, most people who are poor and receive means-tested benefits are only doing so for a few years while they are children or young parents, and after a few years in poverty they transition out of poverty and generally stay out of poverty unless they go through a life-changing thing like a divorce or an injury or illness, and even then they tend to bounce back out of poverty again. Of the remaining 30% or so who spend more years in poverty you have about half who are on the upper end of the low-income spectrum, and they tend to be low-skilled persons whose incomes bounce around between 50% of poverty and 200% of poverty, depending on life events or labor market conditions. The small percent of the population that spends almost their whole lives in poverty include those who have chronic illnesses, disabilities, developmental disabilities, chronic mental illness, personality disorders, or substance dependence problems. There just aren’t many able-bodied persons in good mental health who are free of addictions and remain poor, receiving means-tested benefits for decades.

One of the best points made by the Heritage Foundation report is that if you combine all the means-tested welfare spending and divide it by the number of persons who live in households earning under 200% of the poverty line, the benefits would equal about $7,000 per person. For a family of four that would equal $28,000, and would bring the family over the poverty threshold (which for a family of four is under $23,000). So, with all this spending on means-tested benefits, we taxpayers ought to expect that after tax and after benefit incomes in the USA would leave no one in poverty. At least, this is what an efficient welfare system would do.


By my calculations, all the benefits and means-tested programs bring the poverty rate from 13.2% (the pre-tax, pre-transfer poverty rate in 2008) down to about 5%-6%. This means that after taxes and transfers and benefits we still have about 5% to 6% of Americans consuming housing, food, energy, medicine, clothing, and such necessities at a level below the poverty threshold. We still have, for example, about 3% or 4% of the population experiencing significant food insecurity (skipping meals, or making choices between eating, paying for housing, purchasing medicine, or heating/cooling their homes). Each year over 100,000 Americans die from medical problems because they can’t afford medicines or medical treatment (see the old 2003 study in the New England Journal of Medicine by David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler). That’s obscene, but it’s about what you would expect if about 4% of Americans were still poor even after taxes and income transfers and benefits, and if the Americans who were poorest were also the Americans with the most health problems who needed more medical care. So, I think the Heritage Foundation does make a good case for re-thinking how we do our means-tested welfare system so that our fairly generous benefits (and I’ve lived in poor neighborhoods within poor nations, so I’m going to admit that American benefits to the poor are often generous) were more efficiently distributed to really eliminate poverty.


I think Robert Rector and the Heritage Foundation may suppose that many taxpayers will feel outraged by average transfers of income from us to our fellow Americans who earn only 200% of poverty or less. For example, my household is solid middle class with a gross pre-tax income of about 236% of poverty, and in 2008 about 14.4% of our income went to all forms of taxes (about $7,500). If we earned $10,500 less than we do, we would be earning 190% of the poverty threshold, and according to the Heritage report, the average benefits to persons in households earning under 200% of poverty is $7,000. That makes it sound as if taxpayers like my family are being brought down from $236% of poverty to 204% of poverty by taxes in order to raise up families earning, for example, 120% of poverty (about $26,500 for a family of four) to 247% of poverty. In other words, means-tested benefits would be adding $7,000 in means-tested benefits per person in the four person household to raise their post-tax post-transfer income (actually a consumption level rather than an income) to $54,500, a couple thousand more than we earned before taxes, and more than $10,000 more than we consumed after taxes and transfers.

Indeed, if things really worked that way, we would have middle-class persons paying $7,500 in taxes so that families making around half of what we do before taxes and benefits could end up living lives at higher consumption levels than we do. You see this perception informally when people at lower-middle-class incomes and working-class incomes, say $30,000 to $40,000, complain about persons with SNAP benefits purchasing better food at the grocery store or driving better cars or living in better houses than they can afford.

Since the American Gross Domestic Product per capita is about $48,000, it seems reasonable to me that we would be transferring $6,000 to $7,000 per capita to the Americans who have incomes under 200% of the poverty level. After all, American spending on medical care, when divided by the population, equals about $7,000 to $8,000 per capita, so I’d think that the poor and near-poor would get income transfers at a level similar at least to this level.

The odd thing is that my household, which is right near the middle of household income distribution in my state (slightly under it), earns only about 27% of what we would if the American GDP was spread equally over everyone (so that each of the four of us had $48,000 per year). Shouldn’t middle-class Americans near the middle of the income distribution be earning more like 40% of what the GDP per capita would be for their household? Why doesn’t the Heritage Foundation publish a paper that looks at that issue of unequal distribution and how the households making over $100,000 are screwing all of us in the middle class who work our 1,900 to 2,000 hours per year for a mere $30,000 to $75,000?

Another thing I love about this Heritage Foundation report is that it puts all the welfare policies together in one place, so you can get an idea of the scope of each type of welfare. I’ll run through them here, sharing my notes.

Medical care. Medicaid. Maternal and Child Health Block Grant. S-CHIP.
Combined state and federal spending was $372.1 billion in FY-2008.
This was 52% of the public effort toward the general welfare through means-tested programs.

Cash Aid. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC). Note that the EITC and ACTC are tax expenditures, so they don’t show up as government spending in the budget. They just show up as less revenue taken in by the IRS (and the IRS actually has the treasury send money back out to people with the EITC and ACTC - a refundable tax credit). According to the Heritage Foundation, total State and Federal spending on the means-tested cash aid was $153.8 billion in FY 2008. Hmm, the TANF budget for FY 2010 is supposed to be $18.6 billion. The EITC was recently still paying out, I think, less than $50 billion. I believe even now SSI is paying out slightly over $50 billion. Many states have EITC, which must explain why this number is so much higher than the federal government's estimate of its spending. I guess maybe if the ACTC is running at about $18 billion and state-run EITC programs pay out $17 billion, the Heritage Foundation numbers are probably about right.

Means-tested food aid comes through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, which is still called “Food Stamps”), which in Illinois is delivered through a LINK card. The Women Infants and Children (WIC) program serves almost half the infants born in the USA (about 8.7 million each month in 2008), at a cost of $6.2 billion in the fiscal year 2008. In 2009 SNAP helped 33.7 million persons (summing up all persons living in households that received SNAP benefits), and the average amount received was about $125. In Illinois the maximum benefit for a family of four persons was $668. The program cost about $54 billion that year, at least from the federal level. State programs that administered SNAP added significantly to that level of aid. About 1.5 million persons in Illinois lived in households receiving SNAP benefits. There are also federal school lunch programs (low-cost or free lunches for 30 million children per day at a cost of $9.3 billion), school breakfast programs (breakfasts to 10.6 million children each school day at a cost of $2.4 billion), summer food service programs (meals to 2.1 million children in the summer at a cost of $0.33 billion).

Families following the USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan should be spending 40% to 50% of their food budget on fruits and vegetables, but spending behavior studies in both poor and wealthy families show that everyone tends to spend about 16% to 18% of their food budget on fruits and vegetables. The American Time Use Survey suggests “that low-income women who work full-time spend about 46 minutes per day on meal preparation,” but if people are buying cheaper whole foods rather than prepared and highly processed foods or restaurant foods, their time on food preparation probably ought to average closer to one hour per day on food preparation. Quite possibly some of the resentment against families using SNAP or WIC is because those families buy highly-processed foods and get lots of meat, when they (and all of us) should instead by getting lots of fresh produce instead.

The Heritage Foundation claims that if you combine federal and state spending on means-tested food aid the total cost was $62.8 billion in FY 2008. This is one Heritage figure that seems way too low. I estimate that in 2010 we'll be spending over $70 billion, and perhaps as much as $75 billion on means-tested food aid.

Housing and utility assistance is difficult to calculate at the federal, state, and local level, because it seems almost every power company district has a variety of local programs that get mixed in with the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). With housing the main programs are public housing and rental assistance (which is a diverse mix of programs, including the Section 8 Housing Voucher). The Heritage Foundation sums up LIHEAP and the HUD programs for means-tested housing assistance and comes up with a figure of $45.1 billion for Fiscal Year 2008 in housing and utility support. That seems pretty high, as the entire HUD budget in FY 2009 was only about $39 billion and LIHEAP gets between $3.5 and $5.5 billion in funding. I guess the Heritage Foundation must have calculated how much states spend on their state housing authorities and various state and local programs to end homelessness or provide affordable housing to persons with low incomes.

Social Services provided by federal and state governments to persons who qualify through an income test account for $11.6 billion (in FY 2008), according to the Heritage Foundation, and this includes the Social Service Block Grant (SSBG), some TANF funding (I’m assuming Heritage split TANF funding between their category of cash aid and this social service aid category), and Community Services Block Grants (CCDBG).


Child Development and Child Care programs that are means tested include Head Start and Child Care Development Block Grants (CCDBG). The Heritage Foundation says that federal and state funding for these programs was at least (and probably exceeded) $17.7 billion in FY 2008. Some of the means-tested cash aid and social services help was probably spent on child development and child care, so some estimates for those categories may be a bit high while the estimate for this category may be a bit low.

Jobs and job training are frequently available to people without any income test or qualification, but there are some means-tested jobs and job training programs, and the Heritage Foundation says these cost $6.3 billion in FY 2008. They are including stuff like the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) program for adults, Job Corps, Workforce Investment Act Opportunity Grants for Youth, and once again, TANF (which was counted already in cash aid and social services, and contributes to this category as well).

The Heritage Foundation also has a means-tested category for community development, in which they include the Community Development Block Grants (CDBG). These funds are supposed to be spent in areas with high concentrations of persons with low incomes, and much of the money actually goes to help middle-class people who improve infrastructure or offer services or open businesses in areas of concentrated poverty, but at merely $8.2 billion, it’s not worth debating whether CDBG are a means-tested program for the poor; as it certainly sends money into poor communities. I’m puzzled how HUD’s entire budget is under $40 billion, but the Heritage Foundation sums up housing assistance and low-income community grants to get a figure exceeding $53 billion (even subtracting $5 billion for LIHEAP, there still seems to be an extra $8 billion coming from state spending or matching grants, I guess).

The Heritage Foundation also created a category for means-tested educational spending. This is mainly made up with Pell grants and Title 1 Education grants going to low-income communities. By their estimate, this means-tested educational spending was $35.5 billion.
Welfare Programs that Are Not Means Tested

Those are the means-tested welfare benefits. The larger portion of public spending on the general welfare comes from public spending on medical help for persons injured on jobs, unemployment payments to temporarily unemployed persons while they move between jobs, benefits for disabled workers, retirement benefits and health benefits for retired persons, and public education. But I'm going to pretend education is it's own thing, apart from general welfare provision.

The mortgage interest deduction (interest you pay on a home loan for your primary residence is deducted from your taxable income). For example, our household makes a bit less than the median Illinois household income, and our home is valued just slightly under the median home value in Illinois, and we pay several thousands of dollars in mortgage interest each year, and this reduces our taxable income to a point where we end up paying about $450 less in federal income taxes. In other words, the federal government is helping our middle-class family pay for our median-value home to the tune of about $37 per month. If we lived in a real estate market where home costs were much higher, or if we were wealthier and could afford a much more valuable home, then this mortgage interest deduction might save us thousands of dollars in taxes rather than a few hundred dollars. This costs the federal government about $80 billion per year.

The government gave away $10 billion in tax revenue with the first time home buyer credit. But this was a part of the economic stimulus package to save us from the Great Recession becoming the Great Collapse.

The Heritage Foundation did not even mention the $16 billion in federal farm program payments that go out to about 2 million farmers or farms. Persons or farms with incomes over $2.5 million who derive less than 75% of their income from farming, ranching, or forestry aren’t supposed to qualify, but the GAO thinks nearly $50 million is paid out to such persons or farms each year. Anyway, I have family who farm, and since they mainly grow fruits and vegetables, they get hardly any subsidies at all. These subsidies go to cotton farmers and rice farmers and sugar farmers and corn or soybean farmers. They're a real mess, too.

Social Security is nearly $600 billion ($550 billion in FY 2009). for old age and survivors benefits.
Social Security Disability Insurance costs about $120 billion ($117 billion in FY 2009).
In Calendar Year 2009 Unemployment Insurance and various emergency unemployment benefits paid out about $130 billion in benefits. In normal years benefits from unemployment insurance and related programs usually $25 to $30 billion, and until the Great Recession the benefits would typically double over normal rates during a recession.

Medicare is about $450 billion.


So, with subsidies to home-buyers (generally not low-income), social security, Medicare, and unemployment, we are spending about $1.4 trillion in non-means-tested benefits, and about $0.7 trillion in means-tested benefits. So, it seems to me income transfers from the top 80% of the population back to the top 80% of the population must represent transfers at least double the level of transfers from the top 50% of the population to the bottom 20% of the population. Robert Rector seems really alarmed by this, and he wants people to pay more attention to the means-tested welfare programs. But to me, the spending seems reasonable.

A Dozen Organizing Websites

Here are some websites related to community organizing and policy analysis. Looking at these web sites and seeing what these groups do will help you have a better understanding of advocacy and community organizing.

1. For labor organizing, you can see what the AFL-CIO is saying and promoting.
2. On issues of racial justice the Applied Research Center can help through research, advocacy, and journalism.
3. The Center for Community Change tries to support leaders in grassroots community organizations in low-income or minority communities.
4. If you're interested in economic growth and methods of organizing centered on helping the manufacturing sector of a local economy you might find help from the Center for Labor and Community Research.
5. If you want to know who is donating what amounts of money to which political campaigns, you can find out by looking up public information about campaign contributions made available at the Open Secrets website from the Center for Responsive Politics.
   
6. Citizens for Tax Justice is an organization that says it is dedicated to fair taxation.
7. Families USA is a voice for health care consumers.
   
8. The Midwest Academy offers training for community organizers.
9. Boardsource is a group that tries to help non-profit corporations improve their advisory boards.
10. The National Organizers Alliance is a sort of professional organization for community organizers.
11. If you're interested in housing issues, you should be familiar with the National Housing Institute.
12. If you're concerned about wealth and income inequalities, you should be paying attention to UFE (United for a Fair Economy).
    

Where to find good information

When you try to find information about the economy or policy and you search on the Internet you'll need to be cautious about your sources.

Interest groups keep a strong presence on the internet. Interest groups usually have a strong bias, and they are good sources for one side of an argument or one particular view of an issue. One way to demonstrate the degree of bias in interest groups is to look at how candidates are rated by them on particular issues. In class this week we looked up Illinois Senator Dick Durbin in the non-partisan Project Vote Smart web page, and when we examined the interest group ratings we found that on some issues all the interest groups either give Durbin a 100% or a 0% rating. In family and children issues, for example, the Children's Defense Fund and the American Family Voices interest group recently gave him 100% ratings while the Family Research Council and the American Family Association gave him 0% ratings. Both sets of interest groups claim to be interested in children and families, but they have different ideologies, and this influences how they rate Durbin.

When it comes to "think-tanks" and scholarly institutes the bias isn't always so obvious as it can be with interest groups. In the 1980s and 1990s some wealthy conservatives decided they would support the creation of several think-tanks and scholarly institutes to give intellectual validity to various positions favored by the donors (e.g., that government should be small, taxes low, military spending with lucrative contracts for private industry should be high, Evangelical Christian understandings of the Bible should inform government policy, etc.) There are also think-tanks that have an openly liberal bias (favoring regulation of the economy, programs to transfer wealth from the wealthiest to the poorest, and so forth). Then there are think-tanks that try to be fairly neutral, and hire scholars of all ideological positions. It so happens that among scholars and technocrats there may be more of a tendency toward so-called "liberal" thinking (liberals may think this is because rational people who are well-informed and intelligent will converge with similar opinions that happen to be moderate-to-liberal), and so conservatives and conservative intellectuals point out liberal biase in the "neutral" think tanks. Radical intellectuals also attack the neutral think-tanks. So, even the think-tanks and scholarly institutes that try to reduce bias and provide information that is simply technically accurate still trigger dissatisfaction and complaint.

Here are some of the liberal think-tanks and interest groups:
The Economic Policy Institute.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The Center for Law and Social Policy.
The Century Foundation.
The Open Society Institute.

Here are some of the moderate or neutral think tanks and interest groups:
The Annie E. Casey Foundation.
The Rand Corporation.
The Brookings Institution.
The Pew Charitable Trusts ("the power of knowledge to solve today's most challening problems").
The Woodrow Wilson Center and its program and project publications.
The Center for International Policy.
The Council on Foreign Relations.
The World Policy Institute.

Here are some of the conservative and libertarian think tanks and interest groups:
The Hoover Institution (this could also be considered non-partisan)
The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (more moderate)
The Cato Institute.
The Heritage Foundation.
Atlas Economic Research Foundation.
The Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye Institute.
The New Coalition for Economic and Social Change.

Platforms

Yesterday was constitution day, and so our university had a panel discussion of the first amendment and freedom of the press. The experts discussed election coverage a bit, and this inspired me to consider how much I know about the platforms of the three major parties in the U.S. (The Green Party is a major party in Illinois, where they received over 10% of the vote for governor in the last election). From the media I know a great deal about campaign strategies and opinion polls and political advertising, but I don't know details about about what the candidates are actually proposing to do.

I look for about 20 minutes online to find basic summaries from neutral analysts, but I couldn't find any decent comparative coverage of actual positions on issues. It seems the candidates have not responded to the Project Vote Smart surveys, so that wasn't available.

I at last turned to the official websites of the campaigns. I've collected what the official websites say (and the Green Party shares a draft of their party platform, but not a final draft yet). I've put it all into a 29-page Microsoft Word document using a table with three columns, one for each party, and rows for each issue. I haven't done any editing, I've just copied and pasted what the parties say they want.

You can download the party platform information from this link to the paper [Word doc, 398 KB].