Archives for category: Economy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

A Dialogue About Taxing the Rich

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2012 //
36

I received a comment this morning from a reader who explained why she was voting for Romney. Here is her comment and my response.

I love reading your blog Ms. Ravitch, but I totally disagree with this post. This teacher will vote for Romney because I do not believe in the re-distribution of wealth. I do believe that if you can’t produce an ID at the voting booth, you should not be allowed to vote. I believe that taxing the rich heavily will mean less hiring. I actually believe in one flat tax for all. As a woman, I believe that if you can’t afford birth control, then don’t have sex. Additionally, if birth control for women is to be paid for by the government, then condoms should be paid for too for men. As a Catholic, I am offended that Obama would try to dictate the availability of birth control to Catholic employers for their employees–don’t take the job with the Catholic organization if you don’t like their terms. I believe it is unconstitutional for the government to require people to buy health insurance. I believe both political parties will make education worse in America with their devotion to standardized testing and love affair with charter schools, so I can’t take sides on education issues.

I grew up poor. Neither one of my parents graduated from high school because their fathers died when they were young and both had to go out to work. They struggled at every financial turn. We got one present each for Christmas and a new outfit for school for our birthdays. Yet, through hard work and perseverance, they put four kids through college–one teacher, one engineer, and two accountants. They never accepted food stamps or welfare even though they qualified for it. They were too proud and embarrassed to take it, so they dug in and took any jobs they could find. My father worked several low paying jobs seven days per week. My mother took any work she could find too. They knew education was the ticket out of poverty, so they were militant about our doing well in school. So I don’t want to hear about redistributing the wealth after you have worked hard for it. If you want to be charitable, it is your choice to make donations to the less fortunate, but I believe the government should not dictate it. Hence, this 25 year veteran teacher will be voting for Romney.

And here is my response:

I don’t question anyone’s decision to vote for the candidate of their choice.

What I do question, however, is the idea that taxing the rich means redistributing the wealth and killing jobs.

Our nation has nearly 25% of its families living in poverty. Many don’t have enough money to eat or pay rent or see a doctor.

At the other end of the spectrum are people who are obscenely rich. They have enough money to have several vacation homes with many servants. They own more luxury cars than there are adults in the family. They go to fabulous restaurants in big cities where a single meal costs nearly $1,000. They don’t think twice about buying a bottle of wine that costs $500.

Now maybe they are providing jobs for the people who build their private jets and yachts; for the servants in their homes; and for the waiters and chefs in their fancy restaurants.

But these are people who could pay higher taxes and it would have no impact whatever on their lifestyle. It would not stop them from creating jobs, if that is what they do. Some of those who work on Wall Street don’t employ anyone except the people who serve them. They don’t create jobs. They make money by speculation, by betting on which stock will go up and which will go down. It is a form of poker that creates no jobs.

I say, raise their taxes. During the Eisenhower years, when this country had a Republican president, taxes on the rich were far higher than they are today. They can afford to pay more. They should help to reduce the suffering of others, not by creating foundations but by shouldering their responsibility to pay a fair share of their income to pay the costs of essential public services, like education and healthcare.

Categories Economy, Education Reform

A College Graduate and Among the Working Poor

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2012 //
11

A reader comments:

As the first woman in my family to graduate from college, I am still the working poor, with no health insurance (and several physical ailments) and no pension. It is extremely stressful and disconcerting to have multiple college degrees and still be in poverty. I’m in my 60s and I will never be able to afford to retire, so I have no choice but to work until I die.

Categories Economy, Poverty

To Be Poor in America

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2012 //
7

Yesterday, I posted an article about growing income inequality in New York City. This morning, I posted an editorial from Bloomberg News claiming that the Census Bureau was overstating the extent of poverty by not counting transfers like food stamps.

A reader sent this story, which should remind us that it is no picnic to be poor in America.

Let me add a personal note. I am not poor. I have never been poor. But I hope I never reach a point when I stop caring about others less fortunate than I. I hope I never become so hard-hearted that I say, like some others do now, that the poor don’t know how lucky they are, or that poverty is just an excuse for bad teachers, or that fixing schools (by privatizing them or firing their teachers) will fix poverty. Or that we don’t know how to end poverty so we shouldn’t do anything about it.

I think it is shameful that so many people live in desperate poverty in the richest nation in the world. I think it is shameful that so many children come to school hungry and so many families are homeless. I think it is shameful that we have so many billionaires. I don’t know how to reorganize the tax code. It doesn’t seem fair if it produces the society we have now, where some people struggle to survive while others count their yachts and helicopters. Something’s wrong with that.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Economy, Education Reform, Poverty

The Good News About Poverty

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2012 //
22

Remember the story in yesterday’s New York Times that described the increase in income inequality in New York City? That’s the one that said that the gap between the richest quintile and the poorest quintile has not only grown but is one of the largest in the world, putting us in the same league as countries like Namibia.

Well, there is good news from Mayor Bloomberg’s own publishing house. Poverty is really not so bad in the U.S. because the Census Bureau didn’t count all the benefits and transfers that the poor get. So when you read that someone is subsisting on $8,844 a year, don’t forget that they get food stamps! And an earned income tax credit. And so many other freebies. Don’t you feel better already?

Just by coincidence, Forbes published its annual listing of the richest people in the world. It is here: http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/#p_1_s_a0_All%20industries_All%20countries_All%20states_

Mayor Bloomberg is not all that rich. He is #20 on the list with $22 billion.

Everything is relative.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Economy, Education Reform, NYC, Poverty

The Not-So-Hidden Crisis

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2012 //
8

While the billionaires and multi-millionaires wring their hands over the public schools and promise to end poverty by testing kids and their teachers, there is a back story.

The back story is that income inequality is growing worse in America. And nowhere is it more blatant and more outrageous than in New York City, the very epicenter of faux education reform.

While the mayor and his three chancellors have expanded the number of charter schools, increased testing and demanded value-added assessment of teachers and waged war against tenure and seniority, the income gap between the rich and poor has become a wide chasm.

An article in the New York Times today says that the poverty rate is at its highest point in a decade.

And get this:

“Median income for the lowest fifth was $8,844, down $463 from 2010. For the highest, it was $223,285, up $1,919.

“In Manhattan, the disparity was even starker. The lowest fifth made $9,681, while the highest took home $391,022. The wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites made more than 40 times what the lowest fifth reported, a widening gap (it was 38 times, the year before) surpassed by only a few developing countries, including Namibia and Sierra Leone.”

Do the reformers still believe that we can fix the schools first, then turn our attention to poverty? Or that if we fix the schools, then poverty will take care of itself? Yes, they do. Do they have any evidence that any of this will happen? No.

The economic policies of the past decade have been very very good for the very very rich. Not good at all for the other end of the spectrum.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Economy, Education Reform, Poverty

Texas Workforce Commissioner Says NCLB Fails: UPDATE,

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2012 //
9

Sorry, once again, I forgot to add the link to the article. It’s here now. Please read it.

Tom Pauken is not only the Texas Workforce Commissioner, he is a prominent member of the Texas Republican party.

Read what he says about NCLB.

He says that labeling schools by test scores based on formulas written in Washington, D.C., and Austin is a sort of “abstract intellectualism” that doesn’t work.

He says there are lots of good jobs that go begging because young people aren’t prepared for them.

Here is his testimony to the state legislature.

His only error is in assuming that the demand for high-stakes testing prepares students for college.

It doesn’t. To prepare well for college, you need far more than the ability to answer bubble-test questions. You need to be well read, able to write well, able to think for yourself, able to figure out complex problems, know a goodly amount of history.

None of these things matter for NCLB–or for that matter, for the Race to the Top.

Both NCLB and RTTT are “abstract intellectualism” at their worst.

Categories Accountability, Economy, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Tennessee, Testing, Texas

Killing Unions Hurts the Middle Class

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2012 //
11

I link two different articles here, each of them explaining the dilemma in which we find out society today.

On the one hand, there is the potential strike of the Chicago Teachers Union. This situation pits a Democratic mayor against the city’s public school teachers, who stand united (98% voted to authorize a strike). They should have been his allies. President Obama will need their votes in two months.

On the other, there is a growing realization that the new jobs created since the recession of 2008 are low-wage jobs. The middle class is losing ground. Many new college graduates find themselves working at a fast-food chain or in retail sales, not making enough to pay off their student loans. The jobs they expected to get have disappeared.

What is happening to our country? The middle class is shrinking. The rich are getting richer. Income inequality is growing. The ranks of the poor and the near-poor are expanding. There is a full-court press to eliminate collective bargaining or reduce the power of unions, rendering them toothless.

The attack on unions is an attack on the middle class. It is an attack on an institution that builds a middle class. Unions were an essential part of the movement to create a middle class, allowing poor people to find jobs with a pension, health benefits and a decent wage. As unions wither, the middle class will shrivel even more.

Unions were an important ally in the civil rights movement and they have been fundamental in promoting the economic progress of black and Hispanic workers.

Consider this guest post on the Shanker Blog by Norm and Velma Hill, veterans of the civil rights movement and the union movement:

With a lot of prodding from [A. Philip] Randolph, the AFL-CIO… came to recognize the deep connection between labor rights and civil rights. The civil rights movement has moved the same way, acknowledging organized labor as by far its strongest ally. In a 1961 speech, Dr. King spoke to this, declaring that “Negroes are almost entirely a working people. Our needs are identical with labor’s needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education and respect in their community. That is why blacks support labor’s demands and fight laws that curb labor.”

That is why the labor hater and the race baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature, spewing anti-black epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other. That is why, at the time of King’s assassination in 1968, he was preparing to lead a march in Memphis, Tennessee, in support of black sanitation workers who were striking for union recognition. And that is why, for generations of black Americans and other minorities, a “good” union job was understood to be a path to the middle-class.

Still today, the benefits of trade union membership for African Americans, women, and other minorities are clear. According to one recent estimate, the wages of black union members are 31 percent higher than the wages of African Americans who are not union members. The union wage advantage for women workers is 34 percent; for Latino workers, it’s a whopping 51 percent. That being true, the decline of the union movement should be of special concern. In the mid-1950s, about one-third of the workforce belonged to unions. Today the proportion is down to not much more than 10 percent.

Some black and Hispanic entrepreneurs have done well during this period of growing income inequality. But black and Hispanic poverty remains deep and entrenched. Destroying unions eliminates the good jobs where black and Hispanic workers earn more. Access to the middle class becomes harder when unions are eliminated.

As the non-union charter sector expands, teachers’ unions are weakened. 88% of charter schools are non-union. It is easier for them to fire expensive teachers or to fire teachers who don’t conform or to fire whistle-blowers. There is no evidence that non-union charter schools are systematically more successful than public schools with unions. Here and there, you will find a high-flying non-union charter school, but you can find many more high-flying unionized public schools. On average, charters do no better than public schools when they enroll the same students and have the same resources.

So, yes, we need a rebirth of unionism. Yes, working people need protection from predatory employers who care only for lowering costs, no matter what the human cost. This country must restore a balance and sanity to its policies, and that won’t happen as long as the most powerful figures are joined in an effort to destroy unions and to privatize public education.

P.S. A personal disclaimer: I do not belong to a union. I never have.

Categories Chicago, Economy, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Obama, Unions

Poverty in the U.S. Today

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2012 //
2

Teachers know more about increasing rates of poverty than most people.

Teachers see the children who come to school without decent clothes or shoes.

They know the children who are homeless.

They teach children who are sick but never get medical care.

Here is the documentation:

Poverty is worse in the U.S. than in other advanced nations.

Child poverty is about 23%, which makes the U.S. #1 in child poverty.

Teachers already knew it.

Categories Economy, Education Reform, Poverty

The Super-Rich Are Different from Us

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2012 //
12

This is an important article about our society today. It is titled “The Revolt of the Rich.” It is especially interesting that it appears in a conservative magazine. The author, Michael Lofgren, was a long-time Republican (now independent); his new book is called The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. Read Bill Moyers’ interview with him here. 

There is an apocryphal exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in which Fitzgerald allegedly said, “The rich are different from us,” and Hemingway allegedly answered, “Yes, they have more money.”

The article linked here says the super-rich are indeed different from the rest of us. They have no sense of place. As the article begins, the thesis unfolds:

It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens.”

That was only the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.

The author worries that the people who have disproportionate power in this country don’t care about anyone but themselves:

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

The super-rich, he says, have seceded from America. They have no regard for our public institutions. They are disconnected from the lives of ordinary people. They don’t even have a sense of noblesse oblige. This explains their contempt for public schools attended by other people’s children:

To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than $500 billion dollars in annual federal, state, and local education funding into private hands—meaning themselves and their friends. What Halliburton did for U.S. Army logistics, school privatizers will do for public education.

What is so astonishing these days is that the super-rich–call them not the 1% but the 1% of the 1%–have control of a large part of the mainstream media. They can afford to take out television advertising, even though their views are echoed on the news and opinion programs. And the American public, or a large part of it, is persuaded to vote against its own self-interest. A friend told me the other day that his brother, who barely subsists on social security, was worried that Obama might raise taxes on people making over $250,000. How can you explain his concern about raising taxes on those who can most afford it?

People like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton Family, and Michael Bloomberg have a disproportionate influence on our national politics. They have only one vote. But their money enables them to control the instruments of power and persuasion. Their money gives them a voice larger than anyone else’s. Governors, Senators, presidential candidates come calling, hoping to please them and win their support.

This is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Economy, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, US Education

Who Will Pay for the Economic Meltdown?

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2012 //
18

I read two items within the same hour that presented a stark contrast.

First was this blog post about the Michigan Legislature’s change in teachers’ pensions. Apparently there are many people who think that teachers’ benefits are way too generous and must be scaled back. Can’t afford them anymore. Tough times.

Then I read in the New York Times that investigators checking into the collapse of the MF Global fund decided there was no criminal liability. The fund somehow misplaced $1 billion of customer money. Just “sloppiness.” No one knows how. It just disappeared. Like that. nobody’s fault. Stuff happens.

The story says: “Just a few individuals–none of them top Wall Street players–have been prosecuted for the risky acts that led to recent failures and billions of dollars in losses.”

Teachers did not engage in risky acts. They didn’t cause millions of people to lose their homes and savings. But they will pay to right the economy.

Guess who won’t pay and won’t be held accountable?

Categories Economy, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »