I am a New York Times junkie (I received a discounted rate which has never expired). The articles are first rate, but sometimes the reader comments are more interesting than the actual articles.
COMMENT 1: By the end of the main article, I had tears in my eyes. My 88 year old aunt was audited by the IRS because she reported the redemption of a small municipal bond (or something like that) in the wrong year, and had to pay a penalty and was harassed by the IRS. But they turn a blind eye to the vastly undervalued appraisals in the Trump tax returns for the gift and estate taxes. I had to worry about filing the returns and the forms for foreign accounts for my deceased mother two years after she died because it took time for the bank to divide the remaining few thousand dollars between me and my brother – after all, I want to do everything as required by law, even though we owed no tax on those small amounts. I feel so betrayed. Not by the Trumps – they are crooks and there will always be crooks. I feel betrayed by the government and its IRS that are supposed to protect me from the crooks. That are supposed to uphold the idea that all are equal before the law. It is not because of the understaffing of the IRS – they would benefit the most by going after people like the Trumps. They choose not to.
Comment 2: Auditing a poor family.
In the 80’s, I was audited by the IRS. At the time, I was living hand to mouth, my meager salary unable to meet the costs of daycare for my three young children, rent, and the most basic of living expenses. Our apartment had no heat, save for one small gas-fired heater. I cooked meals on a hotplate; I had no stove or oven. We spent winters in our coats, huddled around that little stove. At Christmas, we received a turkey from the Salvation Army, but had no way of cooking it – and our pipes were frozen. There were no presents. I spent my last few bucks on a tree and with scissors, crayons, and some ribbon, we made decorations. We all dressed up in our finest and pretended to have an elegant, candle-lit dinner.
I brought a shoebox of papers (including proof that my children were actually living with me) to the IRS meeting. They went through my finances and found a ten dollar error in my tax form, which I had to pay. The agent apologized for their bringing me in and said that the IRS had audited me because they hadn’t thought it was possible to raise three children on the amount of money I was making.
I read this article about the Trump’s obfuscations and fraud and find it difficult to understand that an IRS that was so doggedly determined to catch a poor person like me could not have seen the unbelievably huge elephant in their “room.”
And BTW, I have used some of those decorations on my trees ever since!
Here’s another comment by an affluent (but not superrich) person:
Echoing the other individual stories. My life was turned upside down by having to pay $1Million in taxes over a four year period from 2002 to 2006 on short term capital gains. It was a million I did not have at the time. I basically worked for nothing for four years. The IRS was all over me for those four years, and then a few years later tried to claim I still owed $50,000+. Fortunately, I saved all my records and receipts. But then I read this report and I feel only anger towards the Treasury Department for not enforcing our laws, and at Congress for saying the wealthy are paying too much in taxes and passing the latest tax cut bill which has resulted in tremendous shortfalls in our federal budget. Remind me once again why we should pay federal taxes if our leaders are not paying taxes, please.
Another one:
After carefully digesting this incredible fact-finding journalism, new headline suggestion: Donald Trump is a shyster, criminal, tax-evading fraud.
What I don’t understand is how the trump family has evaded serious investigation by the IRS — for decades! There truly are different rules for the wealthy vs the rest of us tax-paying peons.
I’m self-employed and diligently pay my quarterly taxes, as required by law. Yesterday, I received a letter from the IRS detailing my 2017 payments and saying I still owed nearly $7000 plus penalties and interest. Problem is, 2 of my payments were not reflected in the letter. I jumped online to my bank and found the 2 payments and dates they were cashed by IRS (complete with photos of checks, front and back). Nearly 2 hours on the phone with IRS to learn they mistakenly applied those payments to 2018, not 2017, although checks clearly indicated 2017 and were accompanied by official IRS payment paperwork. IRS employee says “will take up to 6 weeks to make correction & I still need to pay interest for late payment” –even though payments were made on time!
It baffles me how the IRS will jump on the “little guy” like me, yet millions owed by the likes of trump are ignored. The system IS rigged towards the “wealthy” & against the rest of us. Sickening!
The 2017 tax cut has received pretty bad press, and rightly so. Its proponents made big promises about soaring investment and wages, and also assured everyone that it would pay for itself; none of that has happened.
Yet coverage actually hasn’t been negative enough. The story you mostly read runs something like this: The tax cut has caused corporations to bring some money home, but they’ve used it for stock buybacks rather than to raise wages, and the boost to growth has been modest. That doesn’t sound great, but it’s still better than the reality: No money has, in fact, been brought home, and the tax cut has probably reduced national income. Indeed, at least 90 percent of Americans will end up poorer thanks to that cut.
Even more interesting were the anecdotes from commenters about their estimated tax bills. Here’s a sample from a New Yorker:
I bought this year’s Turbo Tax 2018 and plugged my 2018 numbers in. I also plugged my 2018 numbers into last year’s Turbo Tax 2017, just to see what happens. Because I’m a modest earner with hefty real-estate taxes living in a state with a high income tax, my total federal income tax on my 2018 earnings was a full 75% higher (yes, that says 75% higher) under the 2018 rules than it would have been under the 2017 rules. Again, I’m squarely middle-class, with relatively simple taxes except that I itemize my deductions. So can we please stop talking about Trump’s tax cuts? Perhaps Trump got a tax cut, but many of us got exactly the opposite.
Actually I have commented several times on NYT articles. But I used a pseudonym, so you’ll never know it’s me!
Friday, you said on the floor of the US Senate: “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters and name-calling by the mob.”
To my knowledge, it is not illegal for people to be paid to protest. I know that lobbyists are paid to make their opinion known to you. I know that political organizations provide grants and scholarships for research and opinion pieces. I also know that the overwhelming majority of people who participate in rallies are doing it not primarily for financial reasons but to express their political values. I’m generally fine with that. I know many people who protest without receiving any form of compensation. I also know that political activism is often organized by political groups, which requires some expenses (for signs, etc.) From my limited experience, I know that large donors have deep pockets, while the smaller organizations they support are often run on very little money. And the volunteers they solicit are certainly not paid at all (except through T-shirts and buttons and that sort of thing).
Referring specifically to the Kavanaugh protests, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of protesters were not paid in any fashion. I have googled around and I have seen no supporting information about this claim (except for a gofundme set up to help defray Ms. Blasey Ford’s expenses — which seems reasonable under the circumstances).
Yet you feel comfortable making this poisonous claim without evidence.
Recently, I saw the above photo which is hilarious/disturbing on so many levels.
First, the men outnumber the women here! Second, these signs weren’t hand made; somebody paid for the t-shirts, signs and even the bus. Update: The 501(c)(3) “Concerned Women For America” which has a 2 score on Charity Navigator, is funded by the Koch Brothers network including Freedom Partners, the Center To Protect Patient Rights, Tc4 Trust, and DonorsTrust. (Source).
Personally, I’m more bothered by these polite but well-funded activists funded by fossil fuel billionaires than the rowdy people who probably had minimal access to this kind of funding.
I have never voted for you, but it so happens that you and I both graduated from Trinity University (which I was able to attend only because of an academic scholarship).
In early 2004, after a Republican Administration supported by you launched a needless war in Iraq on the flimsiest of evidence, there was a Trinity alumni event which both you and I attended. It was an event intended to help new alumni to do job networking. Your appearance was added to the agenda at the last minute.
I’m guessing that at least half of the Trinity alumns attending had no idea that you were coming — much less who you were. Yet I certainly looked forward to the opportunity to shake your hand and express in a minute or so my concerns about what the US was doing in Iraq.
As you know, some Trinity alumni are politically-minded, but we are generally middle of the road and follow a certain decorum at alumni functions. It was extremely unlikely for anyone to turn it into a protest or shouting match.
To my dismay, when you showed up at the event (where 100 alumni already were present at), you promptly moved to a part of the house which prevented people from talking to you. Talking to you was not the MAIN reason I was there, but I kept an eye out for an opportunity to have a minute of your time. This event was for job networking — talking to strangers for 1 or 2 minutes was PRECISELY THE POINT of this event.
As far as I know, during that event, you talked to NOBODY. You didn’t shake hands with anyone but the event’s organizer; all you did was come up to the front when you were introduced.
At that point, you talked for 4-5 minutes about returning from a trip you had just made to Iraq and what great things the US government was doing there. You talked about how proud we should be of US soldiers in Iraq. At that point, you left.
Your hasty departure left me speechless. Was the whole point of your visit to lecture Trinity alumni about how great the war effort was?
Perhaps on that particular day you were feeling unwell, or had personal business to attend to. But I was always struck by your rushed exit. You didn’t even make a minimal effort to meet with and talk to people who basically had no axe to grind or message to deliver. Trinity alumni are not necessarily representative of Texas demographics; to be frank, many are affluent and Republican-leaning. Yet I was a loss to understand why you were so unwilling to talk to any of them. Do you treat your constituents merely as people to lecture at rather than to listen to?
Personally I’m outraged about the Kavanaugh hearings for a variety of reasons.
First, on substantive grounds I thought Kavanaugh’s rulings on environmental cases was crazy and dangerous. I was concerned that Kavanaugh was involved in numerous partisan activities that was unbecoming for a judge.
Second, I think the Senate and White House blocked the releases of a lot of records related to Kavanaugh’s past.
Third, I thought Kavanaugh’s testimony about the accusations was belligerent and immoderate; some of his answers bordered on the risible. This is not the desired temperament for a Supreme Court justice.
Fourth, the way the Senate and White House attacked the accusers was pretty awful. I thought Ms. Swetnick’s claims were very credible. Even if they didn’t implicate Kavanaugh directly, they came from one of many eyewitnesses who say that Mr. Kavanaugh engaged in a considerable amount of drinking and boorish behavior in high school and college. They suggest a pattern of youthful behavior which I found disturbing. I am Kavanaugh’s age and like him attended an all-boys Jesuit high school — and yet I never drank. Most of the smart and responsible people I knew at Strake Jesuit in Houston rarely or never drank. As much as I would like to say that people outgrow their excesses of high school and college, I have to wonder whether Mr. Kavanaugh has properly owned up to his past and whether other judges with less excessive pasts are out there.
Fifth, I was really disturbed by the way Senate Republicans released sensitive sexual history information of Ms. Swetnick, a witness who made a very serious claim about Kavanaugh’s behavior in high school. The National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic violence condemned this practice:
We are appalled and outraged that the Senate Judiciary Committee leadership has released a statement about comments of a sexual nature allegedly made by Julie Swetnick. Such a statement is unacceptable in all events, but particularly because it attempts to smear someone who has not had the opportunity to be interviewed by the FBI. The release of this statement violates the intent of the Rape Shield Rule drafted by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 and voted into law by Congress in the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994. This federal rule is meant to safeguard the victim against the invasion of privacy, potential embarrassment and sexual stereotyping that is associated with public disclosure of intimate sexual details and the infusion of sexual innuendo into the factfinding process. The Senate Judiciary Committee has posted this statement on its website, in violation of the spirit of its own Rule.
In a sworn statement, Ms. Swetnick states she was sexually assaulted. Yet to date, she has not been interviewed by the FBI. Nevertheless, Senate leadership has engaged in a no-holds-barred personal attack on her. It is not unusual for a survivor to describe an experience of sexual violence in ways that do not reveal the full reality of the experience or to try and normalize the experience. However, even aside from these very common reactions, it is unthinkable that the Senate Judiciary Committee would have released this statement publicly and attacked her in this way.
I have written you in the past about climate change and health care and possibly other issues. In general, your position have upheld corporate interests and showed a lack of concern for the underclass.
Perhaps you have been listening to the wrong kinds of people.
Robert Nagle is a Houston writer and blogger who dreams one day of being paid to protest — or being paid in general. He runs the ebook press, Personville Press.
(A few months ago I wrote this response to the Netflix documentary, Making a Murderer and forgot to post it).
Some random thoughts:
Family members were the stars of this series. We saw so much of them! They were strange to look at, and not particularly interesting. Like mole people. Nice but dull.
The series could have been half the size. Lots of shots of empty rooms, witnesses grabbing plants from the ground, tracking shots of the sunset, the highway, that damn junkyard!
I’m not giving anything away by saying that there were two separate but related cases. I pretty much agreed with the court decisions on both of them although one of them has an issue which seemed significant enough to seem to merit reconsideration (Update: Apparently a higher court agreed last week!)
I think the main message of the movie is to show how much of a spectacle a big money trial is and how easy it is for the defendant to believe in the rightness of his opinion (and convince onlookers and family members to invest money in legal fees).
Mistakes were mistake. Aside from one whopper of a mistake, none of them seemed to be committed out of malice. It’s just that people screw up, and courts have to deal with imperfect evidence.
I totally believe the directors in the PBS interview that they had no horse in this game, that they were just here to record the workings of the justice system. There is inherent value in that. But there is also inherent value in doing a documentary about Nazis and getting them to record their inner thoughts and dreams. I’m not being coy here. A film that purports to objectively get into the minds of Nazis or SS would be enormously interesting. But at some point you have to say: Is the underreported story really to hear the overpaid defense lawyers gloat at holes they have “found” in the evidence? Also to ask: what efforts did the filmmakers make to get thoughts from the family of the victims or other bystanders? Why were they unwilling or unable to get this perspective?
The primary thing this film demonstrated is that when money is no object, lawyers can dig up all sorts of defenses. And pontificate about these things ad nauseum…
There is a shocking piece of evidence in the middle of the series, and I’m glad the directors (and lawyers) circled back to it near the end.
About the only thing I rooted for were the public defenders in the latter part of the trials. Lacking the resources to counter the state’s case, they nonetheless seemed cogent and well done3.
It’s funny how my opinions changed over the course of the series. Near the start, I felt I needed to have an open mind. Also, I needed to keep in mind that certain pieces of evidence smelled funny.
I’m going to reveal my cards here and say that when you are the last person to see a victim and the victim’s car is on your property and the charred remains are found near your trailer, and you were seen burning a fire on the night in question and no one else on the property has anything remotely suggestive of criminal tendencies, that creates an overwhelming burden of you to show how and why someone other could have been the perpetrator. Leaving aside ALL of the forensic evidence and ALL OF THE COERCED TESTIMONY of his cousin, you still have to present an alternate theory which is convincing enough to override the presumption here. The defense attorneys suggested malice by the sheriff and DA; fair enough, but malice doesn’t imply ability or even the desire to take action. I may want to murder somebody badly; I might even have the opportunity; but that does not mean I act on my impulses.
Recently I was watching “Mud,” a well done movie about the South. It featured quirky characters, regional color, dangerous problems and loss of innocence. Good old-fashioned Americana. On an isolated island, two teenage boys stumble upon a stranger who turns out to be a fugitive. But the stranger is not really a bad guy, just someone wounded by romantic delusions. The details of this stranger’s alleged crime are muddled by the fact that the man the stranger killed probably deserved to die anyway and the bounty hunters now chasing the stranger down are probably bad guys too. Suddenly the boys realize that the issues aren’t so black and white.
All in all, a fine movie, and I enjoyed it.
But the ending really botched things. I don’t think I’m spoiling things too much to say that there’s a gun-induced bloodbath at the climax. Sigh. Everything was going so well up to that point. I expected the end to have some kind of showdown, but I didn’t expect it to be as extreme as the movie portrayed it. I don’t watch violent movies often (not even movies with the cartoon kind), but when I do, I find myself asking, “Would this movie or TV show have still worked with only 50% of the gunshots?” Actually, a single bullet is enough to make a tragedy. I once was robbed at gunpoint, and I remember thinking that this idiot who was holding me up had only to fire one bullet to change the nature of the crime.
In this movie, guns precipitate the conflict, aggravate the conflict and end the conflict (in a ridiculously violent way). Guns in movies leak bullets as promiscuously as tears.
I shoot people; therefore I am achieving justice. Justice is the end, and guns are the primary way to achieve this end (and so justice without the presence of guns must be flimsy and worthless). Guns fire up the audience’s emotions; guns coerce one person’s conception of justice; never mind that there is always the risk of blowback or friendly fire losses. Guns elevate subjective wishy-washy feelings to the exclusion of everything else; it doesn’t matter if the person standing before me is actually a threat. What matters is that I feel it’s a threat. Where I live, it’s reasonably certain that a police officer would arrive at my car within 5-10 minutes of a 911 phone call. Yet, for the gun-anxious Texan, that is simply inadequate. Many Texans believe themselves to be seconds away from annihilation. Quite apart from the policy question, I don’t see how Houstonians can live with that constant kind of stress. How on earth do paranoid gun-owning people have the mental composure to let themselves take the occasional nap?
I don’t deny that using guns has a certain romanticism to it, the romanticism of desiccated limbs, punctured internal organs and collapsed breaths. There is virtually no stigma associated with firing a gun because society has generally accepted that individuals who feel threatened will occasionally require the right to extinguish the life of another. Never mind that firing a gun at someone is usually a serious felony – the threat of unseen marauders is so real-seeming that some people cannot imagine life without it. Many of my friends have guns — not for any practical reason, but just the vague emotional sense that “I want it to be there when I really need it.”
In movie reality, the main adrenalin pusher seems to be guns and people who possess them and threaten you. You have the cops and robbers of course, but of course the true protagonist is the cache of guns. Guns remain the true heroes; humans are simply pawns of the inevitable storms of violence.
Nonlethal weapons like tasers might be an alternative – except it actually involves touching the perpetrator. That of course is absurd. Americans overwhelmingly prefer to shoot humans as they shoot photographs – far away enough to take in the spectacular view. Not only do Americans enjoy the thrill of being able to point at objects and fire, they also revel in the loud sounds of shots and agonized cries as body parts are ripped apart. If I were to suggest a nonlethal alternative, I would devise some kind of melodramatic vomit spray — accompanied by noisy pop pop pops of firecrackers (to notify and impress the neighbors).
The problem with gun ownership (in movies or life) is that it never really partakes of consequences. We never read of hospital costs or orphaned parents or the constant guilt that snuffing the life of another inevitably entails. We never speak of the psychological intimidation or the accidental casualties (be it suicide or simply the innocent result of kids playing around with guns they shouldn’t be handling).
The Hilarity of Law Enforcement
Today I watched a clever and hilarious movie “The Heat” which sticks to the “police buddy” formula, but with female buddies out to nab an evil drug lord. Predictable plot, punchy dialogue and stupid male cops getting in the way. Unsurprisingly there are gun battles and constant waving around of guns.
The first problem I have of course is plausibility. Do cops and FBI agents wave their guns around so often on a typical workday? Last I read, FBI spends most of their time investigating white collar crime, so they probably just spend most of their time looking at a computer screen and interviewing people. In one funny scene, the first female cop showing off to the second her private weapon cache which she stores in the refrigerator.
I guess I accept the premise that female cops would find showing off one’s gun arsenal to a partner to be a bonding experience. In movies, the primary determinant in who prevails in which side has the best cache of guns. But wait — as soon as you let your guard down, another man with a gun has snuck up behind you — defeating your short-lived tactical advantage.
Police in these movies are always grasping their guns — stumbling into confrontations which seem to be won or lost by which side has the biggest firepower. Nobody likes violence in movies; of course not. But dangerous criminals in movies always seem to be armed and making threats; it is inconceivable that a person with a gun could be shopping for groceries or waiting. Conversely movie expectations dictate that bad guys will all have guns and be willing to use one as cold-heartedly as possible.
When apprehending dangerous criminals, I suspect the hardest part will not be winning the gunfight but simply figuring out the perpetrator’s whereabouts and the optimal time to confront him. Police officers, I suspect, are trained very well on these things. A gun might be helpful in establishing authority initially, but it is not the key element. If the criminal is rational, he will give up when faced with an officer who has both initiative and backup. If the criminal is not-rational, then maybe the criminal would start firing (assuming that his gun is within arm’s reach). But then a real-life police officer probably selected a context for confrontation to minimize this possibility.
Movie criminals are more typically portrayed as loud and confrontational, rarely worrying about being caught and always ready to use their guns. Conveniently, in these movies, a villain’s henchman have a tendency to magically appear behind anyone who tries to arrest the villian. But real criminals probably worry a lot about being caught. They try hard to blend in with normal life. They go to the supermarket, buy gas, eat at a restaurant, go to the concert or sports game. These are public outings where there they can easily be surrounded and overcome. So there really isn’t a need for police officers to go creeping around empty warehouses with guns in hand. All the police officer needs to do is to wait for the criminal to pump his gas. ****
Portraying movie criminals unrealistically also means that you portray police unrealistically as well. Everyone is on hair-trigger alert; even the slightest sound causes movie police to grab their guns. For the viewer, the inevitable gun battle becomes a source of suspense and indeed, the climax of the movie; guns become the building blocks for great dramas filled with great men. And great man are those brave enough to use deadly force to stop the violent rampage of lawless people. In other words, because bad guys use guns to commit their crimes, good guys must use guns to commit their good deeds.
Who is the good guy?
When we watch movies laced with violence, we are left thanking goodness that real life is not so violent — never pausing to wonder whether the criminals in real life are really like that. One underlying theme in these violence-prone movies is that — heck, some days you just can’t avoid shooting up a few people. Drats that the criminals have to die — obviously! — but killings in movies are a shortcut for restoring the moral balance to the world — even if our gun-toting hero does it in the heat of the moment or without legal sanction. As long as this balance is restored in the movie, the viewer expects that the sympathetic protagonist will win some kind of reprieve. Sure, the good gun-toting protagonist may eventually have to face the wrath of the law, but a good person’s good motives will be an exonerating factor.
Over the years I’ve grown intolerant about narratives which attempt to legitimate the use of deadly force against people who you believe have wronged you. These cinematic narratives can seem to quench your emotional desire for justice, but then, in the realm of true crime, we are presented with more ambiguous events. The man in the movie theatre was threatening me….or maybe he was just throwing popcorn. The cops barge into a house and shoot dead a drug dealer who fires at them … or is the man an armed and respected veteran who kept the safety lock on? A man follows a teenager around believing him to be a criminal and fires at him at close range when the teen resists. Or is the teenager just picking up candy at the store and scared by a stalker? Sometimes it’s hard to tell in real life who is the bad guy and who is the good guy. In retrospect, the violent response against these “bad guys” never was so clear. Instead we have weeping mothers, astronomical medical bills, people in shock and lives ruined. I genuinely feel sorry for George Zimmerman for killing innocent teenager Trayvon Martin. In Zimmerman’s limited and almost paranoid vision of the world, teenagers who loiter pose a threat, so it’s best to have your gun ready. Although eventually acquitted because of Florida’s lax gun laws, Zimmerman has to pay a price of personal guilt for the rest of his life. Similarly, certain gun owners must feel the guilt of the deaths or suicides committed by family members who used the gun without permission. Police officers must live with the guilt of killing bystanders or even the perpetrator who nonetheless didn’t deserve to die but was the victim of an officer’s faulty calculation.
Some people may feel genuinely threatened by the world around them. Sometimes a specific individual may know of a potential threat by a specific person, and for the short term at least, it might make sense to keep a gun. But it does not follow that owning a gun makes that individual safer. Even law-abiding and otherwise rational gun owners have unrealistic expectations about whether gun ownership reduces crime and threats. They trust their crappy intuition, and that is the tragedy. Once you buy a gun, you have invested in a gun’s talismanic ability to ward off threats. Also, the act of buying or owning a gun is long-term. Few people buy a gun, keep it for a few years and then get rid of it. Like getting married and being Christian, owning a gun is a long term commitment. To actually reap the safety advantage, you always need to keep the gun within reach. You not only need to be on the lookout for crime-fighting situations, you always need to keep an eye out for your gun — must not lose it! Keeping that gun around exerts a steady burden on the psychic life of a person. Perhaps for actual crime victims, it is reassuring to have some weapon around while recovering from a recent trauma. But why not just take a pill instead?
Guns vs. Swimming Pools
A common refrain from enthuasiastic gun owners is that swimming pools kill more kids each year than guns do; But because it is ludicrous for someone to suggest abolishing swimming pools, it is also ludicrous to abolish guns.
I’m afraid it misses the point. Nobody is suggesting abolishing anything. Instead, I ask: are you protecting your kids better by owning a gun or by not owning a gun? While I’m at it, I might also wonder aloud whether a parent protects a child better by having a backyard swimming pool than by not having one?(See Note at bottom **)
Victims ages 15 to 19 made up 84% of the children brought to the hospital with gunshot wounds, and two-thirds of those injuries were attributed to assault. Among these older children, roughly 24% of the cases were considered unintentional. Suicide attempts accounted for 239 of 4,143 of those firearm-related hospitalizations.
Among younger children, accidental firearm injuries were most common. Of the 378 children under 10 brought to the hospital in connection with a firearm injury, roughly three-quarters were considered victims of an accidental or unintended shooting. Thirty-one children younger than 5 and 47 ages 5 to 9 were injured in gun-related assaults in 2009.
Among Latino youths, firearm-related injuries were three times higher than among white children, the data show. And African American girls were more than six times as likely as their white counterparts to be injured by gunfire.
Unfortunately this raw data doesn’t tell us much. Who is assaulting children and teens? Where are children being assaulted? My guess it that they are being assaulted on the way home from school or at social outings — certainly not at home, where a gun may safely be kept. Just as avoiding swimming pools is a way to avoid being drowned, teens have some ability to limit risk by staying away from dangerous places. But children are not going to stop swimming, and we can’t expect teens to avoid all social situations where they could be assaulted. But would gun ownership protect teens? If these assaults happen outside their residence, having a gun at home won’t matter. Should teenagers be allowed to keep guns? Many parents would say that teens can’t be relied upon to use guns effectively or responsibly. Teenagers are ruled by emotions and hormones; they blow things out of proportion and assert themselves too much. Also, they have more time than adults to loiter and socialize. Giving more guns to minors seems a recipe for certain disaster; is it desirable for a parent or a society to take steps to limit teenager’s access to guns? Does possession of a gun in the house make it easier for irresponsible teens to use them?
Some teenagers are assaulted. That is a sad part of growing up. Teens start out feeling invulnerable and then they realize how powerless they really are. This realization is powerful (and traumatic!) and yet essential for mental and emotional growth. What is the best way for teenagers to make this realization? Is it by giving them a gun to carry around or teaching them to avoid risky situations and people?
The Great Thing about Being a Chicken
The great thing about being a chicken is that people laugh at you and maybe pick on you — but rarely kill you — especially if you run away fast enough. Give a teenager a gun and then you provide him with a combination of security and power — better reason to stick around and fight. Fighting — that’s what the real tough guys do — and that’s how you resist bullies, but it’s also very risky. Taking the law into your own hands carries the risk that after later people will fail to understand or appreciate why you felt compelled to respond with deadly force.
To understand the value of guns, you need to understand the criminal mind. The criminal typically wants the transgression to be as quick and smooth a transaction as possible. Criminals mostly want to dominate the situation to get what they want and get the hell out of there. Some criminals have defective (and even sadistic) personalities, but for the most part shooting someone messes up the criminal transaction. The criminal doesn’t want his actions to make the evening news, and shooting someone virtually assures it. Criminals may forget these concerns in the heat of the moment, but the individual crime victim needs to weigh the potential risks of assuming the worst in the criminal vs. the risks of leaving the criminal no choice but to use deadly force. It sounds superficially appealing to say you want to “prepare for the worst,” but nobody can plan for everything. Sometimes, in fact, overpreparing fuels a counterproductive paranoia.
Watching the movie Boyz ‘n the Hood, I am reminded of how guns can be used in social situations for illicit purposes. These situations are about dominance — not merely committing a crime. The two gangs in Boyz n the Hood weren’t killing one another because they were robbing people. They were just trying to intimidate. How do you intimidate? With guns. The proposed response to gun threats — to bring your own gun — doesn’t address whether this strategy actually works. Will the presence of another gun lead to a friendly stalemate? Or will it aggravate tensions and cause one side to make a pre-emptive move? With Boyz in the Hood gang violence, whipping out a gun to respond to a threat doesn’t eliminate the threat; it merely continues the cycle of violence and intimidation. The central theme of the movie (“At what point do you walk away?”) depends primarily on the level of economic and social desperation. The protagonist can walk away because he has something to live for — a good home life, economic opportunity, a general optimism — while the unemployed brother Dough Boy lacks the social anchors to restrain his desire for retribution.
But Boyz n the Hood presents false choices here. If police are always ruthless and incompetent and if teenagers are unwilling to go to them, of course gun-equipped young people will take the law into their own hands. But even in the Compton ghettoes, it seems unlikely that angry teenagers would spurn police if they could identify the people who committed the blow-by shooting. Perhaps these witnesses have a legitimate fear of retribution or legitimately believe that the police are ineffectual. But all police departments have anonymous tip hotlines. It just doesn’t make sense to me that in gang-related violence, the victimized gang wouldn’t let the police do their thing if there is plenty of evidence to convict somebody.
Perhaps I am naive. Or perhaps movies are just dramatized revenge fantasies (for which police are just an unfortunate prop). All this is fine, but how does it influence the individual’s decision to own or use a gun? Movies evince a self-justifying mythology for buying and using a gun. Of course our mundane lives aren’t replete with armed threats (or pretty female sidekicks). Crime is less ostentatious; it may pounce on you when you least expect it — and then it’s gone before you knew what hit you. Most of the time it is completely invisible – siphoning money from your bank accounts, stealing your car when you’re asleep, grabbing your purse when you’re not looking. For those things guns are completely useless. People who buy guns entertain grand notions of being able to fight back, but after it becomes clear it is mostly useless for doing that, it begins to dawn on the gun owner that the only things guns are good for are threatening family members and blowing one’s own brains out.
FBI and CDC data on people who used a firearm to kill themselves or to kill a felon (Olga Khazan )
To Be Raped or Not to be Raped
I remain surprised at how many liberal-minded females in Texas nonetheless own guns. Often they are single and concerned about their personal safety. By that, I mean they worry about being raped. A rape scenario seems to be a clear case where a brandishing of a gun would seem to be a legitimate use of force. Sexual violence is terrifying to contemplate — with one of the worst parts being this feeling of helplessness while it takes place.
But let’s consider this topic for a moment — despite the unpleasantness.
Let’s make a list of rape scenarios involving strangers: being jumped on in a park, in a parking lot, in one’s own apartment, while walking home, being carjacked, in one’s dorm. Try to imagine how a gun might be used to avert these scenarios. [See end note] In many of these cases, the stranger has jumped you and caught you by surprise. Would you really have enough time and composure to gather a weapon to scare off the perpetrator off? Maybe if you were taking a long walk home and were gripping your gun tightly all the while, it might be effective (but so would mace). Suppose somebody were barging in on you, assuming you had 10-15 seconds to react, owning a gun might make a difference. But how many rape scenarios give you that much time?
But what if there were two perpetrators? That decreases even further the likelihood that your gun could ward off an attack. What if one perpetrator already had a gun? If you owned a gun too, that might even up the score, but how do we know that this will bring a stalemate and not an escalation of violence? I can think of scenarios where having a gun would actually avert a rape, but I can think of many more stranger scenarios where the gun is inaccessible or improperly used or just not an effective response. It’s true that when you hold a gun in your hand, for a few moments at least guns can make you feel invulnerable to any attacker. But it is not a permanent or lasting solution.
Up to now we have been talking about rapists who are strangers. But what about the familiar rapist — the angry spouse or ex, the frat boy? This constitutes about 2/3 of all rapes The situations where these might take place would be ones where one might normally not have a gun. For many of these situations having a gun is unlikely to help, and in fact, batterers have shown a tendency to own more guns than non-batterers. Finally, there are many risk avoidance strategies you can take that can be just as effective if not more. This doesn’t prevent every single scenario, and I’m not suggesting that guns are bad for every person in every scenario. But getting a gun just doesn’t seem to make anybody’s Top 10 list of risk mitigation strategies.
Better than Guns: Ordinary Prudent Measures
A secret: up until recently I have never locked my doors in my apartment when I am at home. I sometimes would forget my car doors too. It seemed silly or pointless. Since writing this essay, I have changed my mind. Many burglaries occur in late morning, and that typically is when I am home. I wouldn’t want anybody barging accidentally into my house and feeling compelled to dominate the confrontation. Many burglars knock on the door before they break into your house. A locked door won’t prevent all wrongdoing, but it poses an initial obstacle — and often that is enough.
When I was robbed at gunpoint a few years ago, I realized that I was living in a dangerous apartment complex and wouldn’t be able to move away soon. So I had to cope with the risk. I avoided taking out the trash late at night. I minimized driving at night, and I was much more aware of my surroundings on the nights I arrived home late. It’s true that I still had to walk my dog — and that was a risk, but often when you are walking on familiar territory you can anticipate risk and even see it ahead of you.
I’m not saying that I avoid strangers, but I avoid situations with strangers where I am isolated and don’t have the ability to extricate myself easily. All of these things sound so easy and obvious; why not just do it? These measures can’t work miracles, but they are relatively cheap and pain-free and don’t impose unnecessary risks. An individual could also resort to countermeasures ranging from cheap to very expensive: security systems, nonlethal weapons and noisemakers. If you are genuinely interested in reducing risk (instead of simply asserting power), you would probably find that defensive nonlethal countermeasures are cheaper, more effective and offer more peace of mind.
Should you own a gun? In some few cases, the answer to that question of wisdom is probably yes.
But most of the time, gun owners are frightening themselves irrationally. They have conjured in their own imaginations a much more terrifying environment than genuinely exists — and they are living a fantasy about the security their guns will bestow. And to the extent that they are right — to the extent that the American environment is indeed more dangerous than the Australian or Canadian or German or French environment — the dangers gun owners face are traceable to the prevalence of the very guns from which they so tragically mistakenly expect to gain safety.
What force on earth could convince Americans that down is up? The most powerful force of all: television.
TV news — and especially local TV news — is dominated by news of violent crime, the more spectacular and murderous the better. TV news creates a false picture of a country under attack by rampaging criminals, and especially nonwhite criminals. The people who watch the most TV news, Americans older than 50, also happen to be the group most likely to own a gun.
Only one-fifth of young Americans own a gun; one-third of over-50 Americans do. Republicans are twice as likely to own a gun as Democrats. Maybe not so coincidentally, Republicans are more likely to watch the scariest news channel of them all: Fox. Whites are twice as likely to own a gun as nonwhites…
Proponents of gun control are baffled that horrific massacres such as the one in Aurora, Colorado, do not lead to stricter gun control. They have their causation backward.
The more terrifyingly criminal the world looks, the more ineffective law enforcement seems, the more Americans demand the right to deadly weapons with which to defend themselves. It is local TV programming directors, not the National Rifle Association, who are tirelessly persuading Americans that they need to strap a gun to their legs before heading to the mall.
And what will change those attitudes is not more atrocity stories, but instead the reassuring truth: The United States is safe and getting safer, safer than ever before in its history.
The police can protect you, and will, and do. And a gun in the house is not a guarantee of personal security — it is instead a standing invitation to family tragedy. The cold dead hands from which they pry the gun are very unlikely to be the hands of a heroic minuteman defending home and hearth against intruders. They are much more likely to be the hands of a troubled adolescent or a clumsy child.
Amen to everything Frum says here, but I have to wonder if the condensed and visually-oriented format of local news is the only thing contributing to this overemphasis of grotesque crime. Also, TV and movie depictions of crimes and violence may be more fantasy than reality, but we have to ask ourselves why guns-and-violence seems to be such a successful and profitable Hollywood formula. Instead of ritualistic and cathartic bloodletting onscreen, what ever happened to movies depicting an ordinary American’s hopes and dreams?
I can’t point to any unique historical trend here — except that perhaps the general magnitude of Hollywood violence tends to track the trend towards greater budgets. Shoot-em-up videos have been popular from the very beginning; at the same time murder rates and rapes have trended downward as porn and violent movies proliferate. Sticking with onscreen violence for a moment, perhaps formula movies and shows just have more sex and violence than “ordinary” movies and shows. Maybe when we bemoan too much sex and violence on TV we are simply bemoaning the increase of cookie-cutter cultural products.
Social forces may be indirectly contributing to the problem. In America, people are less likely to know their neighbors, more likely to be single and less likely to have an extended network of friends and family nearby. Maybe it’s just that cities contain more people and hence more strangers, contributing to this unease. Cars may aggravate this situation, enabling cities to be more spread out, making an individual’s “neighborhood” encompass a wider swath of people than in previous times. Perhaps the visible and vocal presence of (potentially threatening) gun-owners contribute to this uneasy need to “keep up with the Joneses.” Or perhaps the advancing power and reach of mass media make it easier for ordinary people to hear about grisly crimes several time zones away. Decades ago, people bought guns to protect themselves from crazy people in the neighborhood, but now perhaps they do it to protect themselves from the crazy axe-murderer in Florida (who — let’s face it — could simply hop in a car, drive 70 mph and be on our doorsteps within 24 hours).
Perhaps the real enemy is not guns but the federal highway system.
**One critic pointed out the difference here. Kids usually spend much longer amounts of time at the swimming pool than they do handling guns. You can be sure that if kids spent as much time handling guns as they did swimming, the casualty numbers would be different.
*** Rereading my essay, I realize that I have forgotten a very common scenario: being inside your home in the middle of the night and using a gun to prevent someone from entering the front door. I admit that I had not appreciated the risk of opening the door late at night or even engaging with someone knocking on the door through a chain lock. In that scenario, you are aware of the risk and have reasonable control over admittance. You are also wide awake and aware of the stranger. It actually can be comforting to know that a gun (or at least the brandishing of one) can dissuade a known aggressor. This, I concede. But so can a locked door — which even if it doesn’t deter in all cases, can still prevent many surprise intrusions. But ultimately an aggressor can bring a gun and cancel your advantage somewhat (forcing you into the unenviable position of having to be the first to fire). Ultimately, there will always be periods where you put your guard down or make yourself vulnerable; perhaps a gun or a door lock will reduce these periods, and contribute to a sense of personal security. On the other hand, unless you leave the gun by the door, you will never feel truly safe. When are you most vulnerable? Probably when you are away from home or transitioning from work to home or home to shopping parking lot. Are you comfortable carrying the gun in these situations? How would you respond if you are carrying grocery bags from your car? What about putting the trash out? What about being in a strange parking lot at night? Perhaps access to guns might help in these situations, but my guess is that it is mostly useless. When I was robbed at gunpoint a few years ago, I was carrying groceries from my car in the parking lot. I was caught totally offguard by two punks. I was in a crime-prone neighborhood, My solution in that case was to avoid walking to and from car after 9:00 PM and to avoid taking out the trash after hours. When I needed to do so, I took a more careful inventory of my surroundings before moving.
**** After having pondered this sentence a good bit, I’ve decided that pumping one’s gas is not the most opportune time to confront a criminal (after all gasoline is potentially deadly, and cars are both useful for escape and running over people). After the criminal has left his car and started walking to the store, parking lots seem to be great places to arrest people; not many innocent bystanders, and lots of places for them to duck and hide. Indeed, the best scenario seems to be after the criminal has paid for his groceries and is pushing his cart towards his car. CCTV can identify and track suspects inside the supermarket; a police officer can wait at the checkout posing as a security guard, and outdoor police can provide support and backup.
The flaw of libertarian economics is that it overlooks or discounts the predatory aspects of power. You can say that we should get government off our backs or that taxation is an unjust burden or that the free market provides an optimal creation of wealth. But without oversight or interference, more powerful businesses can easily avoid compliance with contracts and avoid compensating people who have been harmed by their behaviour. Libertarians refer to the court system as correcting major injustices and disparities between parties, but it ignores the fact that justice is often very slow and many victims are rewarded only after considerable waiting (and suffering). A few months ago I complained that it took the multi-billion dollar company Comcast more than four months to refund me $20 which it already admitted that it owed me. Comcast, like many Fortune 500 companies, has the legal infrastructure to fend off legal claims about such malfeasance, allowing it to nickel and dime the American consumer to death with impunity. A well-crafted regulation, if applied uniformly with adequate phase-in time, can be easy and inexpensive for companies to implement; it can also correct injustices promptly and minimize drawn out court battles between parties with unequal power. I understand that unchecked public agencies can sometimes handicap legitimate business activity without good reason, but at least they are accountable to public pressure.
The laissez faire policies advocated by libertarians enable the private exploitation of public resources with the potential to cause pernicious effects. Libertarians often paint the struggle as government agents encroaching on the house and property rights of an individual, but the more common scenario is a giant company whose injuries to others avoid public scrutiny by virtue of its economic might, with government agents (woefully outmatched and underfunded) unable to figure out if the company has done anything wrong.
Mexican poet Octavio Paz once wrote that capitalism is efficient at creating wealth but wretched at assigning it a purpose. Wealth creation for its own sake is not really a public good if citizens fear for their safety and economic well-being and if investment in “social capital” and public resources is minimal. It is not enough for Chevron to pay to build a public park or Walmart to support food kitchens. There needs to be an entity committed to managing this “social capital” at all times regardless of whether it helps a company’s bottom line at a particular moment. This entity needs to be accountable to all Americans and needs to have an organizational framework dedicated to treating all people equally and fairly. This entity is called a government.
Related: see my piece on libertarianism and the health care system (which touches upon a lot of general issues about how to measure libertarianism as a philosophy) and an excellent book which argues for “soft paternalism”: Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (See the Nudges blog).
Postscript: Here’s an interesting question to pose to libertarians: “do private contracts always take precedence over liberties?” Can a prostitute sell her obedience for a price? Can an intern enter a contractual arrangement where he or she receives no compensation but has to follow the contract’s obligations? If I bought a piece of property with the intent to exploit its mineral rights, are those mineral rights unrestricted and perpetual regardless of what any later government decides and regardless of any later safety findings? Libertarians believe that the ability to make contracts is a sign of liberty, but at some point, this contract can threaten the liberty of one of the parties (or even a third party, as with the case of environmental harms). By their philosophy, the liberty claims can be pursued only after the damage or taking has taken place, making redress impossible for the aggrieved party. You can’t on the one hand grant one party the right to damage another’s life or liberty and at the same time admit that it is impossible for the damaged party to seek redress. That is tantamount to admitting that one party has the absolute right to deprive the party of liberty. The success of the free libertarian state depends on the ability for weaker parties to receive protection from stronger parties. But if you admit that no such protection exists, you are admitting that liberty no longer is an absolute right in your system.
For better or worse, the Affordable Care Act (the new health care reform law) has been dubbed “Obamacare.”
Here’s another neologism: Perrycare. It is is defined as health care inside a state which has refused Medicaid expansion despite generous financial incentives to do so. It is characterized by skyrocketing health care premiums and overall costs for individuals who fall below 138% of the federal poverty line. Named after Texas Republican governor Rick Perry.
Here are some other characteristics:
The population between 19-26 have the highest level of poverty. On the other hand, they are still eligible to be on their parents’ plan (that is, if their parents have a plan!). In general, people in this age range are healthy and would require care mainly for emergencies (or giving birth).
The population between 26 and 30 have high rates of poverty. They are no longer on their parents’ plan; on the other hand, it is assumed that their income will have risen a bit depending on how long they have been in the workforce. Females are particularly at risk here because these are generally the child-bearing years.
The population between 30-65. More likely to have savings, but on the other hand, more likely to have serious conditions and require several visits.
The Kaiser Foundation has prepared a health care rate calculator. Note that it provides two estimates: the estimate under Obamacare and Perrycare. According to the site’s FAQ, “The federal poverty level varies by family size. In 2013, it is $11,490 for a single adult and $23,550 for a family of 4. The poverty level is estimated for 2014 based on Congressional Budget Office projections of inflation.”
On a positive note, medical underwriting will be prohibited on Jan 1 2014 under Obamacare, so very low-income individuals will be able to purchase a plan without having to go through underwriting; they just won’t be able to afford it!
Update: Here’s a cost estimate from Kaiser about just how much money Texas is not going to spend and not going to receive:
TEXAS (population: 26 million)
Without Medicaid expansion, between 2013-2022, feds would spend 228 billion and TX state would spend 159 billion on Medicaid for Texans.
With Medicaid expansion for 2013-2022, feds would spend 305 billion and TX state would spend 168 billion on Medicaid for Texans.
In other words, spending 9 billion dollars more on Medicaid in Texas will prompt the feds to spend 77 billion more dollars on health care for Texans over the next decade.
New York (population 19 million)
Without Medicaid expansion for 2013-2022, fed pays 468 billion, and NY state pays 451 billion for New Yorkers.
With Medicaid expansion for the same time period, feds pay 553 billion, NY state pays 433 billion for New Yorkers.
In other words, because NY already pays a greater amount into Medicaid, Obamacare will cause New York to spend 18 billion dollars less on Medicaid, while the feds will spend 85 billion dollars more on health care for Medicaid in New York.
A Rand analysis estimates other effects from deciding to opt out of Medicaid expansion.
If 14 states decide not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act as intended by their governors, those state governments collectively will spend $1 billion more on uncompensated care in 2016 than they would if Medicaid is expanded. … In addition, those 14 state governments would forgo $8.4 billion annually in federal payments and an additional 3.6 million people will be left uninsured… “State policymakers should be aware that if they do not expand Medicaid, fewer people will have health insurance, and that will trigger higher state and local spending for uncompensated medical care,” Price said. “Choosing to not expand Medicaid may turn out to be the more-costly path for state and local governments.”…
…
Researchers also outline how failing to expand Medicaid could have more than financial consequences. Based on earlier research showing that past expansions of Medicaid has led to decreases in deaths, the study estimates that an additional 19,000 deaths could occur annually if the 14 states studied do not expand Medicaid.
My rough ballpark estimate is that Texas accounts for a third of the population of those states opting out of Exchanges and Medicaid expansion. Therefore, applying the Rand’s data to Texas, we could say that Perry’s decision not to expand Medicaid will cost Texans somewhere in the range of $300 million and result in 6000 more deaths.
I am linking to it casually (and making only superficial comments), but this professional code of ethics I have developed about working for the energy industry is one of my most important (and most expensive personally).
I live in Houston, which is basically the center of many energy companies, most of which deal with fossil fuels. I would estimate that 80% of the technical job opportunities in my field (Technical Writing and Instructional Design) are in the oil and gas field. I have turned them down without exception – no matter how lucrative or promising. I generally have to explain myself to HR people and recruiters; usually people’s response to my declaration that I could not work for any oil and gas companies is absolute amazement – and almost hilarity. “Is this guy crazy?” they must think.
I would love to remain in Houston, but it’s becoming harder to make a living here and stay true to these core ethical principles I have articulated on that page. The irony is that I genuinely enjoy the field of technical writing – plus I think I am really good at it, but if most of the jobs in your city are in an industry you find abhorrent, then what does it matter that a particular type of work is interesting or well-paying?
I have been working on a much longer blog post about the ethical question, “Is it ethical to work for an oil and gas company?” Stay tuned!
Progressives in Texas may already know about how Houston climate change activists are protesting the XL Keystone Pipeline with a hunger strike. But do most Houstonians know?
A hunger strike is a blatant attempt to manipulate public opinion by staging a public act of self-denial. The thinking goes, if the activist demonstrates that his willpower is stronger than his oppressors, that has enormous persuasive value. These things can be very annoying for public officials who for one reason or another find themselves on the opposite side of the policy question.
That is not a trivial amount of time, and the issues behind this strike are not trivial either. Diane Wilson and Bob Lindsey broke the law by locking themselves to Valero tanker trucks in November. Valero is likely to benefit from the XL pipeline, and local environmentalists accuse Valero and other companies of poisoning the area around the refinery. The protest website states,
Valero Energy Corp’s refinery emits life threatening poisons and pollutants that directly impact Manchester residents. Valero fills the air, water, and land in and around the community with toxic chemicals linked to terrible rates of cancers, asthma, and lung and skin ailments, with the full knowledge that the impacts of its pollutants will disproportionately affect the people of Manchester. With a nearly 90% Latino population, this is an obvious example of environmental racism.
Manchester is completely surrounded by industry. To the north and east is the Valero refinery with the Lyondell-Bassal refinery to the southeast, Texas Petro-Chemicals plant to the south, a Rhodia chemical plant and a trash shredding facility to the west, a wastewater treatment facility to the east, a Goodyear Tire plant to the southeast, along with the Interstate 610 overpass bisecting the community and an industrial rail yard forming the community’s southern perimeter.
I once visited this area for a tour organized by the Sierra Club. It’s about 30 minutes away from where I live. It is a heinous place to be; no person would want to live anywhere close to this hell hole. Yet the place is inhabited by a lot of lower-income people and families. There is a school a few miles away that because of its proximity was once labeled the most dangerous school in America.
Even if fewer people lived there, the place would be a nasty eye sore and a potential hazard for Houstonians. Even if we didn’t have to worry about climate change, the place would still be a bad source of carcinogens and a possible source of dangerous accidents.
The two people who were arrested were seasoned activists. Bob Lindsey had a father and cousin whose deaths can be traced to toxic chemicals released into the Gulf; his sister developed cancer which can also be tied to the petrochemical industry. Diane Wilson, a 4th generation shrimper in the Gulf Coast, has continuously petitioned the Courts and lawmakers to prevent chemical companies from polluting the bays where her family and friends went fishing. Diane has used hunger strikes before, and both are serious committed people.
I suppose I could talk about the reasons why the Keystone pipeline are to be opposed, but they have been adequately covered in many places. Honest people could disagree both about their tactics and the policy they are protesting. Why then has the Houston Chronicle provided so little coverage of the hunger strikes? Googling a bit, I see that almost 3 weeks ago the FuelFix energy reporter wrote a “he said, she said” article about their arrest. Not a bad article considering, but the Chronicle has never followed up on it. And certainly the subject bears revisiting — 18 days is a long time to wait before writing the follow up on a hunger strike article. Do these nonviolent activists have to go on a killing spree to awaken any media interest?
Shouldn’t a city newspaper report on such events? Or should it instead provide reports about the zoo’s cheetahs, a winning football team, or Christmas decorating tips? I can’t explain the Chronicle’s avoidance of this current event. Is it just lack of resources? Or does the Chronicle have a policy against covering hunger strikes? Googling a bit, I see that a week ago the Chronicle published a news service report about Iranian hunger strikers and has even figured out a way to “monetize” site visitors looking for news about hunger strikes.
I have a unique perspective on the issue because in fact some of my college students in Albania participated in hunger strikes against their government. A few days before it happened, the US embassy had already brought me to the capitol city of Tirana, but when I heard about what the students had done, I predicted (correctly as it turned out), that it would cause all the schools in the country to shut down. True, Albania is a much smaller media market country, and in this case there were 60 students protesting, but the issues are no less important in Houston. The fate of the planet is at stake.
In Albania, the hunger strikers precipitated a series of unfortunate events. The Berisha government declared the hunger strikes illegal because the students hadn’t received the proper license (apparently it is illegal to have any strike without obtaining the proper license). That caused the police to sneak into the university building to arrest the students, causing a fierce gun battle which cost lives. It was a tragedy for all, and that action triggered lots of violence and civic unrest (which eventually caused Peace Corps to send us home).
When these events happened in Albania, emotions were strong on all sides. But it would have been unthinkable NOT to cover the hunger strikes. Even the state-run Albanian TV covered the hunger strikes. To contrast, there is practically no coverage in any mainstream outlets of the Pipeline hunger strikers (except Channel 39) and skimpy coverage even by progressive media.
I’d almost prefer to think that there was some conspiracy not to cover this event in the mainstream media. Instead, it’s more likely that mainstream media is too busy with other things (some important, some not-so-important). I really don’t have a problem with general news site providing news about entertainment, sports and technology. These things are certainly important in their own way. But if the bigger news sites focus too much on these things, the burden of reporting these things falls on unpaid bloggers and Facebook groups.
Bloggers can certainly do a good job of reporting (see here ) , and Facebook groups like this and this can provide you with interesting news (and that not just about consciousness-raising/media manipulation events like hunger strikes). Both bloggers and Facebook groups provide incomplete versions of what’s happening. But does that mean mainstream news is better? In many ways, these mainstream news sources are much much worse because they provide the illusion that they are covering all the news that ought to be covered.
The sad fact is: if I want to find out what’s going on in Houston, reading my city paper is probably the least helpful thing to do. That’s very sad.
P. S. Both individuals are my heroes.
Update #1. The hunger strike has now lasted 29 days. The Houston Chronicle still not deigned to provide any coverage of it. As I write this, the top story on the web edition of chron.com is (I kid you not!) Best Lines of Ron Paul’s Career.
Incentives and sanctions will not work, but air strikes could degrade and deter Iran’s bomb program at relatively little cost or risk, and therefore are worth a try. They should be precision attacks, aimed only at nuclear facilities, to remind Iran of the many other valuable sites that could be bombed if it were foolish enough to retaliate.
Duss comments:
Ah, yes, “precision attacks” that wonderful salve for the modern, sophisticated warmonger’s conscience. This paragraph, by itself, should have disqualified Kuperman’s op-ed from running in any serious publication. The amount of work that “relatively” is doing is here is pretty staggering. One can argue that the benefits of a strike outweigh the risks and costs. I think that’s clearly wrong, but one could argue it. But stating that those costs and risks would be “little” — even “relatively” — is a flat out, bald-faced admission that you just haven’t bothered to do the work.
Perhaps the point is not worth belaboring, but surgical strikes and precision bombing fail an awful lot. When they fail, people get hurt, and that undermines the rationale behind it. This BBC article on NATO blunders during the Kosovo conflict reveals the full extent of it. One of its most bizarre episodes was a NATO bomb intended for Serbia that fell in a suburb of Sophia, Bulgaria (about 50 kilometers away from the Yugoslav border). Luckily, no one was seriously hurt (and it was reported nowhere in the American press – though it was reported in Eastern Europe).
I generally supported the NATO action on Kosovo, though the conflict made clear how empty were the claims that modern weaponry could avoid civilian casualties. I’d actually been fooled by articles about the Gulf War which claimed that bombs would focus on one building and ignore the rest.
I’m sure that modern guidance systems have improved considerably over time but doubt that they have made a difference about human casualties. Why?
All machines & software have glitches and do not function as planned. I’ve worked a bit in software testing, and let me say that even for official software, there are always bugs and unexpected behavior. Developers can only work at suppressing the most egregious.
A weapon interacts with other military systems, sometimes with systems of the opposition. True, US guided missiles might be able to outmaneuver other radar systems better, but that does not mean that an interaction between these two systems can’t have unpredictable consequences.
Failures of human intelligence. Often the technology can work perfectly fine, but the military intelligence over what the function of a building is can be wrong or outdated. That was what happened with the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, an accident with disastrous consequences.
Incompetent/Malicious soldiers. Planners assume that all soldiers are basically competent and sane and that weapons systems are failsafe. We cannot know that. (Perhaps they were talking on a cell phone to their commander when they accidentally pushed a button?)
The natural tendency to make weapons more lethal over time offsets any overall gains in precision. If a bomb had the power of a single bullet and could be guided to blast through a window and assassinate a single leader, that would be precision bombing. Even though GPS may provide a predictable path to the target, it would be ridiculous to award this intelligence to a single bullet; it just isn’t lethal enough; that would have to be a helluva expensive bullet. I once visited a burger place where they had three sizes of milkshakes: medium, large and extra-large. The medium was 16 ounces, the large was 24 ounces and the extra large was 32 ounces. A 16 ounce milkshake already has 423 calories (i.e., 2 candy bars). Even if you order the medium, you are still ordering more calories than what you really needed. Sure, the military can create a “medium-sized” bomb, but by definition it is going to be more destructive than what was really necessary. The use of such costly bombs don’t make sense unless it can cause a significant amount of damage.
Lack of real time information. You may know for a fact that Osama bin Laden will be in a certain room at a certain time, but you may not know the people around him or not have a way of knowing whether he was delayed somewhere. A related problem is the unexpected arrival of people who weren’t supposed to be there. NATO et al can always claim that they assumed they were bombing a target at a time when the target was isolated or unmanned, but it’s hard or time-consuming to anticipate what kind of people are around or inside a building at any particular moment.
Failure to predict direction of debris. You may know Osama bin Laden is in a certain room at a certain time, but it’s hard to predict how the bomb would explode or where the debris will fly.
Unless the US can voluntarily agree to voluntarily downgrade the lethality of its weapons, it seems unlikely that precision bombing can actually be achieved despite its repeated use in opinion pieces. Generally, military people have accepted this inevitability. (“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.” ) But when you use the language of “surgical strikes” and “precision bombing” you are hoping the unsuspecting reader will believe this nonsense and start to believe that the phrase itself protects you from a messy uncertainty.
But far more often, these boasting claims regarding a controversial U.S. air attack or missile strike turn out to be completely false. It’s painfully obvious that these assertions are made to overwhelm, distort and suppress any discussions of the actual effects of the attack — who the strike really killed, whether it was justified, legal or wise, whether we should continue to drop bombs in more and more Muslim countries. Yet no matter how many times these claims prove to be false, American media outlets not only dutifully and mindlessly print them without challenge or skepticism, but also allow these claims to dictate their headlines and the overwhelming focus of their “reporting” on the attacks (U.S. Air Strike Said to Kill Top Al Qaeda Leaders). As a result, Americans are innundated with false claims about things that never actually happened — pure myths and falsehoods — while the actual consequences of our actions (the corpses of innocent Muslim men, women and children being pulled from the rubble) are widely disseminated in the Muslim world, yet are barely mentioned by our media. And then we walk around, confounded and confused, about how there could be such a grave disparity in perception among our rational, free and well-informed selves versus those irrational, mislead, paranoid, and primitive Muslims.
By stark contrast, the American public is, as Stelter notes, almost completely ignorant of what our government has done in this regard. And why is that? Because the same media that fixates endlessly on the imprisonment of American journalists by other countries all but blacked out any reporting on what we did to al-Hajj (again, other than columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is commendably as concerned by the American imprisonment of foreign journalists as he is when other governments do it to ours). As I documented back in May, a Nexis search of media outlets finds that "Roxana Saberi" — the American journalist detained for three months by Iran and then quickly given a trial and appeal — was mentioned 2,201 times during the first two months of her ordeal alone; by contrast "Sami al-Haj" was mentioned a grand total of 101 times during the first six years of his lawless detention at Guantanamo. The short imprisonment of an American journalist by a hated nation merits a full-on media blitz from the American press; the imprisonment of a foreign journalist by the U.S. Government merits almost nothing.
…
So just consider the record here. The New York Times will frequently label what other governments do as "torture" but steadfastly refuses to use that term for what the American government did. It promiscuously accuses foreign countries of "human rights atrocities" but self-righteously objects when that term is applied to our own government even after it abducts, disappears, lawlessly imprisons, and tortures people even to the point of death. It accords extreme deference and respect to the claims of government officials even when those claims are patently false. In other words, The New York Times‘ journalistic practices create — either by design or effect — the false impression that torture and human rights abuses are things that other governments do, but not our own. Who is it exactly, then, who is departing from "journalistic objectivity"?
Let me say that Gleenwald is being a tad unfair. Saberi was an attractive young women – an easy and appealing journalistic subject with numerous ties in the US. Al-Hajj was from a distant land. Also, I think Stelter does a good job of acknowledging the double standards at work here and finally writing the article which should have been written years ago. The real problem is that journalists didn’t try hard enough to gain information about Gitmo prisoners.
The solution, I’m afraid, is for NY publishers to publish tell-all books by these prisoners and then arrange for these “political prisoners/celebrities” to be invited on Larry King/Oprah/60 Minutes. The only way the media can acknowledge the injustice is if a monied interest is cajoling them for coverage. If Larry King had a regular feature called “Interview with the Falsely Imprisoned Foreigner”, you better believe that the US government would stop the practice.
Alternate solution: Require that all overseas people imprisoned by the US military to receive mandatory English lessons (plus access to literary agents and PR agents). I’m only being slightly nonserious.
Interviewer: There’s an Epicurean doctrine regarding death which finds perhaps its fullest exposition in Latin in the work of Lucretius. It goes like this, ‘It is irrational to fear that which we will not experience, death being non-existent, cannot in the nature of things be experienced, therefore it is irrational to fear death.’ I have to ask, is this really therapeutic? Are we really meant to be comforted by this?
Martha Nussbaum: You know, the first thing that Lucretius felt he had to do before he could comfort you, is to prove that there’s no afterlife. So before we get to the argument you’re talking about, there’s a whole long series of proofs of the mortality of the soul, because he thought that what most people are afraid of is being tormented in the afterlife. And so then once we get rid of the afterlife, then we still have people thinking that they fear death, and he thinks he can convince them that this fear is based on an irrational imagining that you are surviving yourself. So he thinks you’re standing there in your mind, watching the dead you and thinking ‘Oh, poor dead you, you’re missing all the good things of life.’ And so he thinks that if you can point out to the person it’s quite irrational, there’s no spectators gonna be there, there’s just nothing at all, then that will take away the fear.
At that time, people were just as divided as they are now and I’ve had a terrific argument about that recently in our law school at the University of Chicago, because I had a new paper on that topic. And you know, you can see that some people find this argument very appealing. If there’s nothing at all, well then it would be quite irrational to think that that’s a bad that’s happened to you. But because there’s no you there for whom something bad could happen.
Other people think differently and at the time people thought differently and at the time, people thought differently. Plutarch wrote a whole treatise talking about how bad this argument was. And I think to me, the way of attacking the argument has to be to think about what makes life worthwhile, and I think what makes life worthwhile are activities that have a structure, that persist through time, that go on into the future. And what death does is, it cuts off those activities and so it changes their shape so to speak, it’s like making them empty and vain because they never reach a completion, and it’s for that reason that even though there’s no you, it changes what you were in your life, if you see what I mean.
That is, suppose you’re in the middle of trying to build some elaborate structure that you attack great importance to you, and then put all your energy into that and put your time into that, you get your friends to help you, and in the middle of that before your thing is complete, you die, well then it’s not just the time after death that’s the bad thing, it’s what it’s done to the life, it cuts it off in the middle. Now I think what that shows is not that every death is bad, but that death would be bad whenever it does that, whenever it cuts off activities that are in the middle and people are still attaching value to their completion.
Here’s a terrific book review essay Nussbaum wrote about a book on romantic love and sexual politics. (The book being reviewed was Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century By Cristina Nehring). Let me say that this is one of the most thoughtful (yet devastating ) reviews of a nonfiction title I have ever read. Here’s the meat of her philosophical disagreement (pardon the length):
But, says Nehring, love thrives on inequality. Here, of course, we have the two-theses problem. The first says, wisely, that real love should be prepared to overcome inequalities of power, class, and station. (That is the plot of more or less every Victorian novel.) The second says, foolishly, that real love requires inequality of power, class, and station. So confused is Nehring at this point that she interprets Pride and Prejudice as confirmation of her second thesis rather than her first: it shows, she says, that people always eroticize class difference and would never love people of similar station. What a trivialization of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy! Their deep moral and intellectual affinity, and their strong romantic attraction, gradually manage to surmount the obstacles imposed by rigid social norms and the internal dispositions (prejudice and pride) that they engender. It is true that there would be no novel without the distance: after all, there has to be a plot. It seems obviously untrue, however, that there would be no love without the distance. Far from social distance being eroticized, it is, until late in the novel, a source of erotic blindness. At this point Nehring’s argument loses all clarity, as, seeking confirmation for her anti-feminist thesis, she begins to treat any qualitative difference at all as “inequality”: the very fact of heterosexuality, she now says, shows that sexual desire thrives on inequality.
But does passion even require qualitative difference? Here Nehring appears to endorse a view of sexual attraction that Roger Scruton popularized some time ago in his book Sexual Desire. Really valuable sexual passion, Scruton said, requires qualitative differences between the parties, because sexual love, when valuable, involves a kind of risky exploration of strange terrain, and we should think less well of those who stick to the familiar. Scruton could not advance this claim as a descriptive thesis about sexual choices, for nothing is more obvious than that people tend to choose people close to themselves in all sorts of ways–religion, class, education. But he did put it forward as a normative claim, and he used it to argue that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality, because it involves greater adventure and risk. Something like this is probably what Nehring has in mind, although she has no disdain for same-sex passion.
What should we think of this? Do people who choose qualitatively similar partners really lack courage? The most obvious problem with Scruton’s thesis was that it was capriciously and inconstantly applied: to sexual orientation, but not to romances between adults and children, between Protestants and Catholics, between the virtuous and the immoral. A more subtle problem with his argument is that it is not even clear how it could be assessed: for, as the philosopher Nelson Goodman showed in his great essay “Seven Strictures on Similarity,” the concept of similarity is so slippery that it has basically no content. Any two things are similar and dissimilar to one another in manifold respects.
But the real problem with Scruton–and Nehring, who speaks, Scruton-like, of the “enigmatic Other”–is that they both mislocate erotic risk. What is risky is not getting in touch with some trait that is dissimilar to some trait of one’s own. It is the whole idea of becoming vulnerable to an inner life that one cannot see and can never control. It is not qualitative difference, but the sheer separateness of the other person, the idea of an independent source of vision and will, that makes real love an adventure in generosity–or, if one is like Proust’s narrator, a source of mad jealousy and destructive projects of domination and control. And this has nothing at all to do with class difference, or gender difference, or even temperamental difference. It has to do only with the fact of human individuation–that minds and bodies never merge, that intimacy is not a fusion but a conversation.
There is a grain of truth in Nehring’s thesis about personal qualities: it is at least plausible to maintain that loving someone who is complicated, opaque, and in some respects concealed can be of particular interest or value. At any rate, we often think less well of people who are willing to love only people who are altogether obvious and lacking in complexity. Rightly or wrongly, we think that such lovers are refusing some challenge, or lacking in curiosity. And yet an erotic attraction to psychological complexity does not require pursuing class difference, career difference, power difference, or some other obvious kind of difference. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how one could ever pursue a relationship with persons as complicated as some of the artists and writers adduced by Nehring without a context of shared activities, commitments, or aspirations that would generate the kind of friendship and openness that make insight into another person’s complexities possible. The way she tells the stories of those complicated artists and writers, they understood this well.
As an aside, let me say that Nussbaum’s tone throughout the essay is a tad condescending but still respectful. She seems to be criticizing the author’s naiveté rather than the ideas themselves (as though Nussbaum herself had considered most of those ideas already, but had discarded them.
I like the idea that thinkers like Scruton and Nussbaum are able to write so generally. Of course, they rest at comfortable academic positions, and that must certainly help. But even tenured professors tend to write about their niche without addressing the world at large. I guess philosophers by definition need to be relevant and comprehensible (and so do writers). It always is interesting when an academic type tries his hand at a book in a totally different field. With a complex subject like climate change, a generalist approach can render your arguments laughable, but in other fields. the cross-pollination is fruitful. What if a priest wrote a treatise on prestidigitation? Or a surgeon wrote a book about classical dance? Or a comedian wrote about Civil War slave owners? The outsider can uncover assumptions which were never questioned by those in the field. I think I shall write a book about musicology.
Now it appears that Rick Perry has failed to reappoint some key officials on a science review panel, derailing their report until after the primaries. Grits for Breakfast gives a rundown and so does Chuck Kuffner here and here.
Here is a report from arson expert Craig Beylor (PDF, p52)
The investigations of the Willis and Willingham fires did not comport with either the modern standard of care expressed by NFPA 921, or the standard of care expressed by fire investigation texts and papers in the period 1980–1992. The investigators had poor understandings of fire science and failed to acknowledge or apply the contemporaneous understanding of the limitations of fire indicators. Their methodologies did not comport with the scientific method or the process of elimination. A finding of arson could not be sustained based upon the standard of care expressed by NFPA 921, or the standard of care expressed by fire investigation texts and papers in the period 1980–1992.
I realize that this story is tangled up with Rick Perry’s incompetent leadership, but this mishap only underscores how state criminal systems cannot be trusted to handle capitol murder cases.
The most amazing thing is that the Board of Pardon and Parole and the governor’s office had received a considerable refutation by a national expert of the arson testimony before the execution was to take place, and yet they turned a blind eye to it.
Nicholas Kristof on how a system based on private health insurance frequently results in spouse impoverishment, sometimes leading to fake divorces. Here are reader comments about the article which turn out to be more interesting than the original article. This argument has not frequently been cited, but it shows how the health care debate has far reaching implications on society. It has already been shown to reduce employer competitiveness, but wrong decisions about health care can also be catastrophic to the financial lives of a person. Health care reform will introduce its own problems to the system, but it will also limit overall risk and provide a system of public accountability for health care providers and insurers. Let me say now that these organizations already use discretion to decide how much charity care and discounting to provide to individuals. The people who run these organizations are not beasts. At the same time, we have no guarantees that these organizations will act compassionately or in the public interest. We just don’t know.
Kristof’s later piece shows that Medicare and VA have generally received passing marks on delivering quality health care. (Comments here). (Update: The point about VA providing superior care seems to have been debunked). By the way, health care reform is a great issue where anecdotes matter (perhaps even more than economic analyses). You really need to read the comment thread on these articles to appreciate the problem. Anecdotes don’t help you to understand the magnitude of the problem, but they help you to understand the nature of it.
A 60-year-old woman is diagnosed with gallstones by her HMO plan doctor. That doctor asks the insurance company to approve a specialist, and the insurance company does so. The specialist wants to use shock-wave therapy to break up the gallstones, because it’s far less invasive and dangerous than surgery. The insurance company refuses to cover the procedure, calling it “experimental,” despite the fact that it’s been in use for almost 20 years, and has become a standard procedure when treating kidney stones. She appeals the decision by the insurance company, but during the appeal, she has a gall bladder attack. She lives nowhere near a hospital, so her husband drives her 40 miles and she undergoes emergency surgery to remove the stones and repair her gall bladder. The surgeon who performed the surgery made a mistake, however, which led to a second surgery to repair the damage from the first surgery.
Two years later, the same woman was diagnosed with cancer. Her physician proceeded to scare the hell out of her, and he told her things about the cancer that were patently untrue. She requested a change of physicians, to someone who actually knew about her cancer, and her insurance company refused. They advised her that she could change her primary care physician during open enrollment, but most of them were full, and that once they assigned a specialist to her case, she was pretty much stuck with that specialist.
He concludes by attacking the freedom argument used by libertarians to justify the private health insurance plan:
How free is a society, when an ever-increasing segment of its people can be ruined, financially and otherwise, by illness or injury? How free is a society when health care is seen as a privilege, reserved for those with the cash on hand to pay a doctor? How free is a society in which those who want to start businesses can’t do so, because they can’t afford to pay for its workers’ health insurance, and therefore can’t afford to hire the best workers? How free is a society in which a worker is forced to stay at his current job to keep his current health plan in force, because a change of jobs puts his coverage at risk? And how free is a society in which a person can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars into the health insurance system over the course of 30 years, lose a job, get sick or injured a month later, and be forced into bankruptcy court? How free is a society in which that same worker can continue working, but be denied coverage, should the insurance company decide they don’t wish to continue coverage?
Shook has correctly identified the problem with the libertarian objection. Even the libertarian has to concede that there is a hierarchy of needs which at some point trumps freedom. Can a completely private system address this? Here’s how we can counter the libertarian argument.
present cases where individuals are constrained by the current system, showing that the argument for more freedom does not imply keeping the status quo.
present evidence about how bad choices of certain individuals ends up hurting all participants in the overall system. (i.e., emergency room visits, vs. prevention)
compare dollars and cents. You can say you oppose higher taxes, but if reform results in lower costs, will the libertarian objection to it disappear? Suppose I presented a plan where health care costs would rise 1% per year rather than the current 10% but with comparable success outcomes. (Comparable, but not superior). If this plan imposed certain limits on freedom (say, limiting the doctors you use), but still had comparable outcomes, I doubt most people would oppose it (never mind the libertarian purists).
Compulsion works if it results in minimal intrusion on people’s lives and applies to everybody. Look at two examples. Requiring that people wear seatbelts and requiring that people buy auto insurance. The true libertarian would object to both proposals. But the seatbelt rule just doesn’t intrude on people’s lives that much, and it has an obvious social purpose. The auto insurance is different because you are dealing with finances and also the liability risk for harming someone else. One can argue that society has an interest in making sure that all individuals are prepared for handling liability, so that scofflaws don’t get away with murder. When another person is compelled to buy auto insurance, I benefit because it reduces the possibility that I will have my car damaged without the other driver paying for my harms. Everybody benefits as a result. These are simple cases and health care reform affects many decisions; my point is merely to show that compulsory measures can receive public acceptance if the public regards the intrusion as minimal and beneficial.
The religious/values argument. Religion can be a bipartisan phenomenon, and very persuasive to members of the Republican Party. Many religious people don’t care about the nuts and bolts of health care reform; they focus more on moral issues of tangential relevance (like abortion treatments). The Bible teaches compassion and helping your fellow man – a completely different system of values from the freedom-loving individual who wants government off his back. Opposition to health care reform is not inherently Republican (especially to a “Values Republican”). The real opponents are the “free market Republicans” who believe the private system works better than a public system over the long run.
The When will you compromise argument? Libertarians often adopt an absolutist position which admits no exceptions. You have to be that way, or else you are not being consistent. (Libertarianism is concerned with methods, while paternalism/utilitarian is concerned with outcomes). The problem is that humans are used to making decisions about individual people where exceptions are frequently made. The libertarian argument says, sure, anyone can freely choose to buy additional care for those who cannot afford it. But is that the way most people think about social issues? Ordinarily we like to look at individual cases and then designate one party to provide a solution. That is paternalism…no doubt about it. Take the case of a homeless man with a life-threatening illness (and receiving no medical care). The libertarian would say that if individuals or groups become aware of this injustice, they are always free to be part of the solution. But there are no guarantees. But we will never have absolute certainty that these individuals will intervene (or more importantly, to intervene soon enough).
How can you be sure that sufficient information exists for individuals to make intelligent decisions? In the case of the homeless man with the medical problem, perhaps a charitable person exists….but how will the homeless man locate him? Libertarian solutions depends on the needy individual being able to find assistance during times of need. It also depends on humans finding good information about the consequences of their action and knowing how to make good decisions? This kind of information and cognitive skill may not exist; it may never exist. To use a trivial example: last month, I realized that my health care provider did not cover 100% of my dentist’s services. It shocked me because I thought I read the insurance policy carefully. It turns out that the health care policy claimed to cover 100% of certain costs for out-of-network dentists, but that 100% only applied for certain procedures. This was not obvious information to me; and I am the kind to be careful about insurance. Just think what would happen if 200 million people had to make financial decisions on the basis of their understanding of health insurance. You’d have miscalculations galore, many of them with serious and devastating consequences. For the system to work, each individuals would need to hire an independent agent to counsel the individual about how to make health care decisions. But that is just saying: “I don’t trust a group of bureaucrat to make a bunch of decisions on my behalf; therefore I will hire an individual who can make a bunch of decisions of my behalf.” Those opposed to paternalism may find that individuals will need to rely on advisors to make decisions on their behalf. In my mind that is not much better than paternalism. (I write about this issue in greater depth in my Free Market Can Be a Time Sink essay).
The 75,000 deaths argument. I’ve seen statistics quoted estimating that 75,000 additional people die each year as a result of no health care reform. Maybe that figure is an exaggeration, I don’t know. But if a libertarian points to the economic superiority of the private insurance system, all you have to do is to trot out the 20,000 deaths. Most people would say preventing premature deaths is a more persuasive argument than maintaining the efficiency of an economic arrangement.
March 2010 Update. Matt Yglesias points out the amazing fact that libertarian economist Friedrich von Hayek actually supported government intervention in health insurance. Here’s the money quote:
Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance, where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks, the case for the state helping to organise a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supersede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.
Quote #2:
Once it becomes the recognized duty of the public to provide for the extreme needs of old age, unemployment, sickness, etc., irrespective of whether the individuals could and ought to have made provision themselves and particularly once help is assured to such an extent that it is apt to reduce individuals’ efforts, it seems an obvious corollary to compel them to insure (or otherwise provide) against those common hazards of life. The justification in this case is not that people should be coerced to do what is in their individual interest but that, by neglecting to make provision, they would become a charge to the public. Similarly, we require motorists to insure against third-party risks, not in their interest but in the interest of others who might be harmed by their action.
Finally, once the state requires everybody to make provisions of a kind which only some had made before, it seems reasonable enough that the state should also assist in the development of appropriate institutions . . .
Up to this point the justification for the whole apparatus of “social security” can probably be accepted by the most consistent defenders of liberty. Though many may think it unwise to go so far, it cannot be said that this would be in conflict with the principles we have stated . . . It is only when the proponents of “social security” go a step further that the crucial issues arise. Even at the beginning state of “social insurance” in Germany in the 1880’s, individuals were not merely required to make provision against those risks which, if they did not, the state would have to provide for, but were compelled to obtain this protection through a unitary organization run by the government.
The concept of amenable mortality was developed in the 1970s to assess the quality and performance of health systems and to track changes over time. For this study, the researchers used data from the World Health Organization on deaths from conditions considered amenable to health care, such as treatable cancers, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
Between 1997–98 and 2002–03, amenable mortality fell by an average of 16 percent in all countries except the U.S., where the decline was only 4 percent. In 1997–98, the U.S. ranked 15th out of the 19 countries on this measure—ahead of only Finland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Ireland—with a rate of 114.7 deaths per 100,000 people. By 2002–03, the U.S. fell to last place, with 109.7 per 100,000. In the leading countries, mortality rates per 100,000 people were 64.8 in France, 71.2 in Japan, and 71.3 in Australia.
The largest reductions in amenable mortality were seen in countries with the highest initial levels, including Portugal, Finland, Ireland, and the U.K, but also in some higher-performing countries, like Australia and Italy. In contrast, the U.S. started from a relatively high level of amenable mortality but experienced smaller reductions.
The researchers estimated the number of lives that could have been saved in 2002 if the U.S. had achieved either the average of all countries analyzed (except the U.S.) or the average of the three top-performing countries. Using this formula, the authors estimated that approximately 75,000 to 101,00 preventable deaths could be averted in the U.S. "[E]ven the more conservative estimate of 75,000 deaths is almost twice the Institute of Medicine’s (lower) estimate of the number of deaths attributable to medical errors in the United States each year," the authors say.
To restate: everybody’s amenable mortality rate has improved, but USA’s rate of improvement is so small that USA is now dead last in it.
My puzzlement is complete and my question is simple: what insurance do these people have and where can the rest of us sign? What the hell is this fantasy world in which medical decisions are “between patients and doctors” without the interference of panels of dour bean-counters, a labyrinthine and faceless bureaucracy, and actuarial tables? These columnists, screaming protesters, and talk radio audiences apparently live in 1923. Their doctor makes housecalls with his leather bag of Olde Tyme medical instruments and is paid for his services in cash or To Kill a Mockingbird style with bags of apples left on his porch. Or if they do have health insurance, it is a silent and unobtrusive entity that lingers in the background for the sole purpose of shelling out money without question for whatever procedure Chuck Norris desires.
This isn’t remotely about patients’ rights or the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. It is, as wingnuts so often fail to grasp, about preferences. A panel of government bureaucrats denying coverage for a procedure deemed experimental is an image worthy of pant-shitting rage; a panel of “reviewers” at Cigna or Aetna doing the same is fine. Having to ask an Obama-appointed bureaucrat for permission to recieve certain procedures is unthinkable; that we routinely do the same thing with our HMOs and PPOs is irrelevant. The mental gymnastics of defending the status quo require either dubious reasoning about why Aetna red tape is better than Uncle Sam red tape or, as is the case with so many demagogues, fabrication of their own curious reality in which we are infinitely free to do as we please and in total control of decisions which affect our lives
Gin and Tacos really nails it about the problem with libertarian philosophy: it depends on reliable information being distributed equally.
The good libertarian relies on the free market to solve problems on its own. Take a couple of hamburger chains, for instance. The one that makes bad food will go out of business. Customers won’t eat there! Thus the market, left alone, will punish those who fail to provide what people want. How cute. Let’s leave the airline industry alone – bust the unions, abandon all regulation, let the market set whatever wage it will, let the pilots be on for 36 hours at a crack – and let the same process go to work. Markets will force airlines to keep their planes safe, otherwise no one will pay to fly with them!
In order for the market to punish the backsliders, consumers must be made aware that Airline X is unsafe. Since we don’t have regulations and inspections, how will we know? Well, look up. We will know which airlines shirk on maintenance and safety when we see their planes plunging out of the sky. Here’s where my Mises Institute friends come in.
As market acolytes, I believe that they should volunteer to be on the plane(s) that serve the purpose of communicating this essential information to all of us. In the airline industry, the market’s way of telling us who is inferior involves a lot of people dying. The system works really well – let airlines be, see who fails, and punish them with one’s wallet – for everyone except the people on the plane.
Perhaps I’ve never been a full-fledged libertarian, but I’ve always been a free market enthusiast in general. But the last year has really shaken my political beliefs. Namely:
The financial crisis of 2008 shows the extent to which major lenders will game the political system to extract political concessions. (This may not be a criticism of libertarianism per se, but some might say that more aggressive legislation might have prevented the catastrophe).
The science for global warming is established and growing more urgent, and yet a significant portion of the population doesn’t want to face this fact. The problem with libertarianism here is that a)people don’t see proof of climate warning until the effects are upon us, and 2)private lawsuits intended to recoup damages from global warming are unlikely to happen soon enough (especially if it wreaks permanent damage on your habitat).
In health care reform, libertarians refuse to provide a workable alternative to solve the free rider problem and the fact that certain individuals will be discriminated against because of their health condition.
The American media landscape gives a lot of power to certain political viewpoints which are friendly to advertising. I see more similarities than differences between CNN and Fox. He-said/she-said journalism makes it easy for corporations to drown out negative news stories….so much that it begins to seem that a captive audience is more likely to see a Swift Boat attack than a news story debunking it.
More importantly, how much ability do corporations (and their mouthpieces) have to motivate individuals to become politically active? Bernard Chazelle believes that in the “A empowers B to elect C to serve A” paradigm, A= corporations, B=individual voters and C=politicians. Even if this is reductive analysis, I can think of many cases where this paradigm did play out; can individuals be persuaded to act on behalf of the corporation’s self-interest even if it goes against their own? At some point, will this misguided passion turn against the corporations that engendered it? If astroturf campaigns are effective sometimes, does this imply that democracy itself is fundamentally a sham?
Karen de Sa reports a heartbreaking story of parental abuse and murder. The criminal father of a young girl received full custody during a divorce and ended up killing her. The method was particularly nefarious. Not only did he sexually abuse her, but he told everyone that the girl had run away. The mother disagreed and thought something funny was going on, but she was unable to convince the police to investigate. Eventually, they did, and they later found the girl’s body in the backyard.
Here are some infuriating things about this story:
the fact that a convicted & violent criminal would gain full custody seems very scary. I realize that some divorce/custody hearings leave no good options, but this seemed to be a situation that begged for strict oversight.
Economic disparities played a role. “Allen, a former assembly worker now working for a restaurant, was deemed unfit by the court. She had made a frank admission to feeling depressed after what she described as years of persecution by her children’s father. Prior to Chiarello’s decision, records show, Allen told the court she had fled multiple states to get away from Mesiti and even to Canada, where she and the children stayed in battered women’s shelters." But while Mesiti’s court filings were formal, typed responses from his private attorney, Allen’s pleading letters to judges were hand-written. She reluctantly agreed to sign off on the custody order —in large part, she says, because she could not afford to raise the children without the child support payments Mesiti had been ordered to make.
Lack of follow through about runaways. Apparently this was considered a cold case. The murderer/father claimed he received calls from the girl. (But did anyone look at phone records?). In this day and age, it would seem easier to verify someone’s existence. Just keep in contact with her 20 best friend on a monthly basis. For heaven’s sake, she had a myspace page. It doesn’t add up that a young person like that would just stop communicating with anybody and never be seen. Everyone at some time or another is going to use a cell phone. That should make it easier to trace “legitimate runaways” and make it easier it identify the truly missing.
Lack of neighbor involvement. From a discussion board:"(The residents in the neighborhood) didn’t even know a girl was missing," Charlton said Friday. That is unsurprising given that the father was allegedly the murderer. But why not have a rule: if a person is missing in a neighborhood, all people in a 1 mile square radius should be notified?
The ex-wife and mother notified the police repeatedly that the story was fishy. “When Alycia disappeared in 2006, Allen said she never believed the girl had simply run off. "I knew in my heart of hearts that she was gone, but no one would listen to me. I was fighting with police, saying ‘She’s not a runaway, she’s a missing person!’" Allen recalled. "But the police stopped taking my calls. They said, ‘She’ll come home, she’ll come home…’"
Mark Mesiti was awarded unsupervised custody in 2005, even though he had a lengthy criminal history including a domestic violence conviction. He violated his probation and was sent to prison. For the seven years previous to gaining custody of his daughter, he amassed a variety of charges. All were red flags. Welfare professionals and Alycia’s mother raised them during the custody battle.
The father was given custody after it was found that the mother was depressed — often the effect of battering — and therefore unfit to care for her daughter. As an alternative to this deadly decision, couldn’t we have wrapped the mom and her kids in supportive services and allowed them to heal together? Abuse is treatable. Homicide is not. Now healing will never happen for the remainder of this family.
I’ve worked with domestic violence for 25 years, and I understand the complexity of family law cases. But the errors in this case are too obvious to use complexity as an excuse.
Victims of domestic violence in family court often present their case without representation, while perpetrators often bring attorneys. The imbalance of power the perpetrators use at home to control the victims follows them into family court. When this imbalance exists, victims may not be able to effectively voice their concerns and articulate their needs. Often we don’t believe them. The myth that they are lying about their abuse to gain the upper hand continues to haunt the system.
This story is both shocking and outrageous. I don’t want to sound too mad at the social services people; it’s way too easy to second-guess their decisions after the fact. However, is our society so callous that the disappearance of a young teenager no longer sets off alarm bells?
Thankfully, here’s a site called Help Find the Missing that serves as a discussion board for missing people. If you go to the home page, you can see the current cold cases for your state (here is Texas). The problem with these cases is that the most vulnerable don’t get much media coverage unless there is something unusual about it. People die and disappear every day; so what! The people running this site are amateur sleuths, but it serves a purpose of making it easy for strangers to find out information about this people and cases quickly. In some cases, a missing person may simply have decided to disappear or leave the country. It’s not impossible that the missing person himself or herself could be following the thread to see what the reaction is! Each case reads like a mystery; unfortunately, the Alycia Mesiti story has a tragic ending. Before the net, it was next to impossible to follow these cold cases; now though a thread can lie dormant for weeks or months and suddenly become active. It’s reassuring to know that for many of the “solved mysteries,” the last page will contain the answer (good or bad).
On the other hand, there are dangers running such a site. Privacy concerns. It’s easy for outsiders to point the finger at obvious suspect without appreciating the complexity of the cases. (But making guesses in public can be fruitful). Also once these bulletin boards attract the interest of the concerned party, it can start containing leads and nonpublic information (and perhaps even misleading lies)..
I encourage people to follow missing person reports for their state. I looked at the faces on the Texas page and feel spooked (but glad someone is keeping track of them). You can look at the pages of “found safe” people and memorials, The most frightening thing about the Karen De Sa story was how traces of the dead person have disappeared:
Mesiti was in jail when his daughter’s memorial was held last month in a Cupertino chapel. During the service, a lifetime of classic childhood moments beamed from photos spanning her short decade-and-a-half: Alycia mugging in an oversized T-shirt, stirring a pot of macaroni and cheese and hugging a Snoopy doll. In the last photos, she posed for her 8th grade prom, a fleeting brush with adolescence.
For her part, Allen tosses endlessly most nights. She tries to stay focused on her last day with Alycia, when she and her daughter ate tuna sandwiches and splashed in a downtown San Jose fountain.
Their next encounter would be three years later at the Stanislaus County coroner’s office.
"I couldn’t even pick up her personal effects," Allen lamented. "There was nothing. There’s just nothing left of her.”
About 15 years ago I was active in my Catholic church on social issues. I served on AIDS care teams, a homeless shelter and issue advocacy. One thing I did was to start a petition drive at my church to support universal health care. It was an issue where Catholic views of charity coincided with my interest in social issues. Among the people in my committee, everyone supported the petition, but when we set up tables after church service, I was surprised about the hostility of reactions from some parishioners. Actually, I had drawn up a petition to reaffirm a set of core principles which I thought were uncontroversial and grounded in church teaching. Even so, I could at least respect the opinions of economists and business analysts who disagreed with the solutions or endorsed free market solutions (by the way, living in ex-communist states for 3 years made me skeptical of all government-run programs). I might disagree with the businessmen who endorsed a laissez faire health care system, but at least I could understand their point of view.
But these were not the kind of people who opposed my small petition. The ones who did were focused on one issue: abortion. They thought the Clinton health care plan would pay directly for abortions. I can’t remember the details of their argument; there was a grain of truth to their point (and something I had not considered). But it seemed like a minor side issue and one that would easily be addressed by including a clause about accommodating worker consciences. But judging from the opponents I talked to, you would think that the Clinton health plan were simply an elaborate ruse designed to increase the number of abortions in the country. Nobody was forcing them to sign my petition, but I would at least hope that people who did not would actually have substantive (rather than symbolic) disagreements. But those who brought up the abortion thing tended to have little knowledge about (or even interest in ) insurance rates or incentives; they simply applied a “purity test” to the health plan and found it deficient.
Abortion and pregnancy—two major American obsessions. The more people I talk to, the less I comprehend.
A few years later, I talked to a young woman from a communist country. She was single and independent; I mentioned how a mutual friend of ours (who was single) had become pregnant by accident. Our mutual friend was slightly irresponsible; certainly we didn’t think she would be a good parent. “Why doesn’t she have an abortion and be done with it?” my friend said to me. I was shocked because my friend was being perfectly serious. In communist countries, abortion was viewed as an acceptable form of birth control; there was no stigma attached to it, and certainly there was no Catholic church to voice its disapproval. I did not condemn my friend’s attitude because I knew they were shaped by the atheistic viewpoints of the country she was born in. It seemed heartless, but my friend was certainly not a heartless person.
A few years later, I talked to a married woman in her thirties, a committed Catholic. She was pregnant and had received disturbing test results about the health of her future baby. There was a very good chance that he might have a severe birth defect; she told me she was seriously considering having an abortion. Frankly, I was stunned. Even though I couldn’t conceive of a situation where I would opt for an abortion, the fact that this person (whom I generally respected) was considering it made me reexamine my own convictions. I didn’t condemn her choice, but at the same time, I made my opinions known to her. I also tried to make her aware of the medical help which would be available to her. As it turns out, the test was repeated, and the probability of birth defects was substantially reduced from before. The woman had the baby (a healthy boy), and everyone was happy.
In my thirties, I knew a lot of women who were obsessed with giving birth. Some were unmarried and wanted to get impregnated by any means necessary (including artificial insemination). Two married couples I knew were undergoing expensive fertility treatments …neither with success. It was sad; both would have made excellent parents; one couple already had a child and wanted a second; the other couple had to look into international adoption. On the other hand, they were throwing away valuable time and money on fertility treatments with marginal success rates. I understand the desire to raise children; but I couldn’t understand why these people didn’t channel their parenting energies elsewhere. It is a pity that some people resort to expensive procedures to have children and other people give away life so thoughtlessly. If only the interests of the people desperate for children and those who resort to abortions could be aligned.
A few months ago I had a vigorous debate with an upstanding Catholic about politics. My friend was a teacher and did not keep up with politics. She said she voted McCain because of his stance on abortion. I was floored by that. I spent the rest of the evening trying to argue with her.
But not everyone in our society agrees with me and Matilda (Cuomo’s wife). And those who don’t — those who endorse legalized abortions — aren’t a ruthless, callous alliance of anti-Christians determined to overthrow our moral standards. In many cases, the proponents of legal abortion are the very people who have worked with Catholics to realize the goals of social justice set out by popes in encyclicals: the American Lutheran Church, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, B’nai B’rith Women, the Women of the Episcopal Church. And these are just a few of the religious organizations that don’t share the Catholic Church’s position on abortion.
Now, certainly, we should not be forced to mold Catholic morality to conform to disagreement by non-Catholics, however sincere they are, however severe their disagreement. Our bishops should be teachers, not pollsters. They should not change what we Catholics believe in order to ease our consciences or please our friends or protect the Church from criticism. But if the breadth and intensity and sincerity of opposition to Church teaching shouldn’t be allowed to shape our Catholic morality, it can’t help but determine our ability — our realistic, political ability — to translate our Catholic morality into civil law, a law not for the believers who don’t need it but for the disbelievers who reject it.
And it’s here, in our attempt to find a political answer to abortion — an answer beyond our private observance of Catholic morality — that we encounter controversy within and without the Church over how and in what degree to press the case that our morality should be everybody else’s morality. I repeat, there is no Church teaching that mandates the best political course for making our belief everyone’s rule, for spreading this part of our Catholicism. There is neither an encyclical nor a catechism that spells out a political strategy for achieving legislative goals. And so the Catholic trying to make moral and prudent judgments in the political realm must discern which, if any, of the actions one could take would be best.
I mentioned some of Kristof’s articles about how many Bush policies have led to an increase in abortions worldwide. (He later corrected his statement by saying that abortion rates fell much faster under the Clinton Administration than in the Bush administration). To Catholics, this may sound counterintuitive—until you remember that evangelicals and Catholics generally oppose “abstinence plus” sex education because they allegedly sanction premarital sex. Kristof writes:
The evidence is solid about how to reduce abortions: promote contraception and comprehensive sex education (rather than “abstinence only” programs). California has led the country in these areas, and as a result it cut teenage pregnancy rates by 39 percent over eight years.
Western Europe and Canada both emphasize sex education and family planning programs. The result is that American women are almost three times as likely to get abortions as women in Belgium or Germany. Or take Canada. Among women and girls aged 15 to 19, Americans are 38 percent more likely to get abortions than Canadians. And American teenagers, both boys and girls, are nearly 10 times as likely to catch gonorrhea.
The Bush administration says it took this action because Marie Stopes International works with the U.N. Population Fund in China. President Bush has cut all financing for the population fund on the — false — basis that it supports China’s family-planning program.
It’s true that China’s one-child policy sometimes includes forced abortion, and when traveling in rural China, I still come across peasants whose homes have been knocked down as punishment for an unauthorized child. But the U.N. fund has been the most powerful force in moderating China’s policy, and a State Department team itself found no evidence of any U.N. involvement in the coercion.
…
“The irony and hypocrisy of it is that this is a bone to the self-described ‘pro-life’ movement, but it will result in deaths to women who just want to space their births,” said Dana Hovig, the chief executive of Marie Stopes International. The organization estimates that the result will be at least 157,000 additional unwanted pregnancies per year, leading to 62,000 additional abortions and 660 women dying in childbirth.
While I never would have had an abortion myself if I had had an unwanted pregnancy, I find that a lot of the “pro-life” people are really anti-sexuality. Some of the older “pro-life” women in particular, see pregnancy as a just punishment for non-marital sex. These same women are often very pro-war, so I think that the ultimate motivation for their “pro-life” stance is not pity for the fetuses but a basic authoritarianism. I can respect someone who is anti-abortion and who works to make abortion unnecessary, through advocacy of birth control and helping women who seek abortions for economic reasons, as well as someone who extends the “pro-life” ethos to include pacifism, opposition to capital punishment, and support for healthy, stable families. But I’m sorry, the types who are against abortion and contraception and sex education and every form of sexuality that isn’t conventional marriage–they’re warped and obsessive, especially the one-issue voters, who would probably vote for Kim Jong-il if he made a statement against abortion.
Now let’s come to the present day, a few days after the alleged controversy about Obama’s speech at Notre Dame. Several individuals and student groups launched a protest against Obama because he is “pro-abortion,” and Big Media, lapdogs to anything that smells of trivial controversy, gave them as much TV exposure as they wanted.
First, let’s be clear about a few things.
Despite the few visible protests, Obama’s politics is wildly popular among students at Notre Dame. For good reason; he took action to get out of Iraq, took initial steps to close Gitmo and fight global warming and access to health care. These are major accomplishments.
There really is no social campaign to promote the use of abortions as a birth control option. Maybe there never really was. Before the 1970s, there were a lot of poor and desperate women who resorted to dangerous methods to induce abortion (with often tragic results). Roe v. Wade allowed concerned organizations to help these desperate women. But a lot has changed since the 1970s. Smaller families, lots of single parent households and a falling fertility rate (although nowhere near as low as Europe). I think feminists recognize that the right to have an abortion is no longer critical to the feminist social movement (instead they focus on civil rights, anti-discrimination and better funding for social programs that help families). Take child care and maternity leave as examples. Those are vitally important for women raising children (regardless of whether the woman is single or married).
An article I once read said that people who have abortions are of two types. The first type is young, poor and irresponsible, perhaps even mentally ill. She is always living dangerously. The second type is a woman (single or married, but usually single) who is poor but otherwise a rational decision-maker. That second type is poor and often comes from a single-parent household and may have been abandoned or abused. This person is not opposed to motherhood per se, but views it as an impossible burden under the current circumstances. This second type probably wants to be a mother at some point, but just can’t imagine being able to raise a child in her current predicament. (This is a failure of imagination, not an intrinsic love of abortion).
According to this article (sorry, I couldn’t find it), the more serious problem was the first type (the irresponsible and mentally ill). They tended to have multiple abortions. They don’t care about social norms and they don’t think straight enough to use contraceptives reliably or to make sensible choices regarding relationships. The second type was your typical woman who had fallen into a bad situation. Maybe she is a teenager who made a mistake or a young working adult not on good terms with her family. She will probably make the decision alone and after much reflection…and even experience regret later on. The second type is likely to face this situation exactly once.
The widely respected Guttmacher Institute provides more detail about who gets abortion and why. Here’s its July 2008 report:
At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and, at current rates, about one-third will have had an abortion
Women who have never married obtain two-thirds of all abortions.
…
The abortion rate among women living below the federal poverty level ($9,570 for a single woman with no children) is more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level (44 vs. 10 abortions per 1,000 women). This is partly because the rate of unintended pregnancies among poor women (below 100% of poverty) is nearly four times that of women above 200% of poverty* (112 vs. 29 per 1,000 women)
The reasons women give for having an abortion underscore their understanding of the responsibilities of parenthood and family life. Three-fourths of women cite concern for or responsibility to other individuals; three-fourths say they cannot afford a child; three-fourths say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for dependents; and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner.
So let’s analyze both types (the person who gets multiple abortions and the person who does only one time).
For the first type, making available effective and cheap contraception is the best solution (and also better access to drug treatment and mental health care).
For the second type, better access to health care and child care would be the best solution. This second type could definitely be persuaded to carry the child if she saw that getting childcare would not be a struggle.
These solutions sound simple and obvious. In fact, they are very hard. Contraceptive coverage is somewhat high, but it varies widely across states (see the chart below). Some states mandate coverage for contraception; others do not.
For the second type, you need to demonstrate to this woman that taking care of the child will not be impossibly hard. One way to do this to provide a reliable source of health care and a reliable source of child care. Obviously, this gets us to the issue of the European welfare state, but actually this is a debate I’d love to have. Here are some statistics from the recent OECD report (as cited by Bernard Chazelle in the Tiny Revolution blog).
Here are the US rankings out of the 30 OECD countries (1 is best; 30 is worst — worst as in Somalia-like). The names of the countries even more Somalian than the US appear in parens.
Infant Deaths: 28 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey).
Life Expectancy: 24 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Czech & Slovak Republics).
Health Expenditures: 1 out of 30.
Poverty Rates: 28 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey).
Child Poverty: 27 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Poland).
Income Inequality: 27 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Portugal).
Obesity: 30 out of 30.
Incarceration: 30 out of 30.
Work Hours (ranked in ascending order): 30 out of 30.
Height (women): 25 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Korea, Portugal, Japan).
Height (men): 24 out of 30 (Italy, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Korea, Japan).
OECD countries: Turkey, Mexico, Poland, USA, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Greece, Luxemburg, Australia, Netherlands, Slovakia, Korea, Czech Republic, UK, Belgium, Switzerland, Hungary, Iceland, France, Austria, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark.
What conclusions can be draw from this? Medical care for young American children is terrible! Child poverty rates for Americans is terrible! Parents work long hours, and that’s terrible! Health care spending is high, but the other statistics suggest that we are paying a lot and not getting much in return –that also is terrible! In other words, our crappy health care system is making it easy for the second type of woman to conclude that abortion is the only rational alternative. (note: see update at bottom).
Now I wish to talk partisan politics for a moment. Republicans, as a matter of core belief, oppose any kind of health care reform and show no signs of remorse at having a high percentage of uninsured Americans. Republicans, as a matter of core belief, oppose open discussion of contraception in schools (although to be fair, this is a political issue at the state – not the local level). In other words, Republicans say they oppose abortion, but they also oppose the very solutions that would reduce abortion here and worldwide.
Republicans treat the problem merely as a legality issue; all you have to do is forbid something, and it will be done. But you can’t coerce behavior. Prior generations have seen what happens when you try to. Perhaps historical analogies aren’t precise. For example, if abortions were banned in one state, they could be legal in another. Also, I suspect given the zeal of feminist organizations, if there were bans, underground networks would form which would provide abortion services much more safely than was done 50 years ago. Nonetheless, it’s a legitimate question to ask whether abortion services should be legal-and-monitored or whether they should be illegal-and-unmonitored.
Democrats treat the problem as a behavioural issue. How do you provide incentives for individuals never to be tempted to have an abortion? Interestingly, the Democratic point of view is more focused on policy questions rather than on legal ones. The problem with Republican Party solutions is that they do not involve sacrifices. It is amazingly easy for a pro-military, anti-health care reform and anti-sex Republican to adopt the anti-abortion stance. It is easy and painless; it requires no sacrifice or investment; it merely requires that you run around and tell people that they’re wrong.
That is the main reason why I care not one bit about this so-called controversy regarding Obama’s abortion views. Saying that you’re opposed to abortion is easy; it requires absolutely no moral courage to express an opinion about something which requires no action. It reminds me of the College Republicans who strongly supported our invasion of Iraq yet were unwilling to serve in the military themselves. Having a child is not easy; it requires effort and commitment and sacrifice. I applaud people who do it (and regret never having had the chance to do it myself). Having a solution to the abortion problem is not easy either; it requires effort and commitment and sacrifice. Unfortunately, the anti-abortionists are unwilling to step up to the plate.
June 1 Update: I found this surprising but logically consistent rebuttal from Right to Life about Country Comparison statistics. Parts of the rebuttal is easy to dismiss (but parts seem valid). I’m glad to see Right to Lifers at least acknowledging the logical inconsistencies of refusing to support health care reform.
WHO rankings give great weight to whether the evaluated health care system meets the organization’s ideological preferences. This is a bullshit answer—a groundless assertion. It is the job of Right to Life to demonstrate the validity of this assertion; they have not. Also, as I point out below, if single payer delivers better health care outcomes in other countries than in countries with private insurance systems, it seems reasonable to blame the system for the bad outcomes (even though it might not be relevant for a ranking of health outcomes).
Life Expectancy. “If you correct for two causes of death not directly related to health care—homicides and automobile accidents—the U.S. actually rises to the top of the list for life expectancy.” I haven’t verified this yet, but let me make the partisan point that Republicans have consistently lobbied against gun control and mass transit. Still, this is an interesting subject worth pursuing in greater depth. Update: This point about removing two causes of death is a fanciful argument, making it delightfully easy to manipulate rankings. Also, amenable mortality analysis shows significant differences between countries directly as a result of their health care systems (not some statistic idiosyncrasies).
Infant Mortality. the U.S. includes all deaths after “live birth” and defines births as live if newborns show any sign of life, regardless of prematurity. By contrast, Austria and Germany include only deaths of infants who weigh at least one pound at birth. In Belgium and France, the deaths of infants born after less than 26 weeks of pregnancy are not included. Moreover, many other countries do not reliably register babies who die soon after birth.This sounds like a valid criticism but I don’t have full access to OECD data. (Read a brief OECD analysis confirming the problems of cross-national comparisons of infant mortality data). See also this doctor’s restatement of the criticism. It wouldn’t surprise me if some attempt to standardize the data still shows disparities between US and other countries. For example, why do we have a lot of premies? Is it simply because our prenatal intervention is more developed? Or is it because expectant mothers are not in good health or at risk for many things? (For example, I read that fertility treatments result in a lot of premarital births). Could our health care for expectant mothers to blame?
Specific Diseases. When you compare the outcomes for specific diseases, the U.S. clearly outperforms the rest of the world. Cancer is used as an example. This is an answer that begs for the cherry picking of data. First, about cancer specifically, I’d like to make sure that the uninsured are properly diagnosed and counted with respect to their specific cancer. Second, I’ve read in several places that the cancer success rates in the US may be the result of intervention in cancer cases where the cancer was unlikely to have an effect on mortality (like prostate cancer intervention). Second, outcomes of the general population (without segmentation for specific diseases) are easier to compare. See this discussion about the dangers of cross-country comparisons on Factcheck.org.
Medical Innovation.Despite genuine problems of distribution and utilization of preventive care, overall, in comparison with other countries U.S. health care is faster, more effective, and more advanced. This is a big despite; if outcomes show us worse off, what does it matter that billionaires have the best possible treatment options? If the percentage of uninsured goes to 30-40%, you have people receiving emergency room treatment when it is too late and many going without treatment at all. The privatization of health care is a cherished Republican value; in fact, it is one of the core values which separates Republicans from Democrats.
we should make it really clear that we hate abortion, even if that doesn’t actually reduce abortions.
… What does it mean to be opposed to something, or committed to something? I’m like to think I’m committed to learning Spanish, but I haven’t actually done any of the things that would make my learning it more likely. So, am I committed to learning Spanish, or am I committed to my sense of my self as a person who is committed to it? If a person said they really wanted to save for retirement, but never engaged in the practices that would make that an outcome, you would say they aren’t actually all that committed to saving for retirement….
… So, let’s just be clear: the people who advocate banning abortion and don’t advocate the policies that would reduce abortion don’t actually prioritize reducing abortion. They prioritize their looking like they’re opposed to abortion more than they actually value reducing abortion.
