Month: October 2011

Tracy Clark-Flory compares adolescent male bonding on both sides of the Pond:

"It is normal in the United Kingdom for young straight boys to sleep in the same bed, frequently, and to cuddle," says [Eric Anderson, an American sociologist], who has primarily focused his research on white males living above the poverty line. In a recent study, he found that 90 percent of heterosexual undergraduate men in the U.K. had at least once kissed a straight male friend on the lips. Things are not so fluid in the U.S. — he found 7 percent of heterosexual college guys had smooched a straight male pal — but his in-depth studies of American jocks and frat boys, those expected to be the most homophobic, have revealed them to be increasingly comfortable with same-sex physical and emotional intimacy, he says.

Not when I was growing up.

Tim Noah is struck by the latest WaPo-Bloomberg poll which found that "68 percent of all voters and 54 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters favored raising taxes on incomes above $250,000 (i.e., the Obama plan) to tackle the deficit":

To whom, exactly, do Republican officeholders and candidates think they're pandering? The Tea Party? Evidence has begun to trickle in that even the Tea Party isn't as anti-tax as Republican party leaders. On Aug. 1 the New York Times ran a Page One story by Kate Zernike … that said "the power of the Tea Party as a singular force may be more phantom than reality." Zernike then went on to report: "When Tea Party supporters were asked if the debt-ceiling agreement should include only tax increases, only spending cuts, or a combination of both, the majority — 53 percent — said that it should include a combination. Forty-five percent preferred only spending cuts." 

A reader combined three Dish themes from the week:

A reader writes:

I generally agree with your assessment of the economy and the various Occupy protests happening right now, but I have to take exception to something you wrote:

Shit is fucked up and bullshit all right. Except that this isn't a conspiracy. It's a function of choices we made as a democracy: to defeat Soviet and Chinese communism; to ramp up private and public debt in good times rather than tackle deeper problems in education and infrastructure; to enlarge the global economy; to foster innovation. We are, in this sense, a victim of our own success.

Who is the "we" you refer to? Many people who are adults today had no say in any of those choices and have not profited from them. I was born in 1985, too late to vote against Reagan or Bush Senior. I was raised by a single mother who worked as a house cleaner and landscaper. She never used a credit card because she believed (and still believes) that it was irresponsible to spend money she didn't have. As a teenager and young adult I watched the insanity of the financial markets (the tech bubble, and later, the housing bubble) incredulously. How could anyone believe that it was a good idea to invest in companies that did nothing useful or build homes that no one actually wanted to live in?

As an adult, I've followed my mother's example, avoiding credit and trying to live within my means, but I now find myself with $1000 of medical debt (despite having health insurance) and no income. Meanwhile, I'm trying to decide whether I should take out a student loan to continue my education when my financial aid runs out. Will there be a decent job waiting for me if I pursue a degree, or will I just get stuck with more debt?

From where I'm standing, it looks to me like I'm a victim of other people's success. And I'm not alone. If you look at the protest crowds, you'll notice that many of the protesters are about my age. We've all come to the same realization: while our elders were mortgaging their future, they mortgaged our present. The economic injustice in this country is not just a result of collusion by the rich against the poor, it's also a result of collusion by the old against the young. That may not be a conspiracy, per se, but it still feels like a swindle.

I'm with you mostly. But you're not a victim of someone else's success. The economy is not a zero-sum game. You're a victim of collective decisions made by majorities in the last three decades, and especially the last catastrophic one. I too saved for retirement, never took on credit card debt, diligently paid off mortgages within my financial reach … and I landed in the top 5 percent. To do all that and end up in the bottom 20 percent and see reckless bankers destroy the economy and still give themselves massive bonuses … well, I sure understand the anger nonetheless. Niall Ferguson blames the boomers here. To have been the wealthiest generation ever … only now to bankrupt the rest of us through Medicare, while the young have so few jobs and often no health insurance: it does anger up the blood.

So my collective "we" is not meant literally. But it does mean that all of us who have participated in the polity for the past thirty years are not blameless. We lived beyond our means; and created bubbles we really should have known to avoid. We bought houses we couldn't afford, leveraged by financial instruments no one understood. And we expected it to go on for ever. Yeah, some financiers committed crimes of recklessness and greed. But our elected officials changed the rules to help them. And we voted for them.

Contra George Will, who accuses Warren of advocating "collectivism," William Galston makes the case: 

Warren is saying … that (to quote a thinker with whom Will has more than a passing acquaintance), "Society is indeed a contract … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." Warren’s homely phrase, "pay forward," captures the moral bond that connects this generation with the next. If we don’t adequately provide for their future, we are breaking that bond. A decent political community has the right—indeed the obligation—to honor that bond—if necessary, by compelling individuals who refuse to look beyond their own immediate concerns to contribute their share to the common future.

Scott Galupo dusts off Will's own words from 1983 to reinforce the point. Will was once a Tory:

Biologically, we are directed toward culture; we are pointed beyond our individual existences, toward our species, in the form of our community and progeny. Politically, we should be led up from individualism.

Siding with Galston, Dreher adds:

As the Catholic writer Mark Shea points out, you don’t have to embrace the Occupy Wall Street crowd to grasp that they are onto something, that there’s something truly disordered about our society’s economic arrangements. Seriously, could Burke even get a hearing among American conservatives today? Or is he to be seen as some sort of proto-commie?

Can we not just be adults and recognize that society exists and that it empowers the individual and that the individual therefore owes something to the society at large – and our arguments are about the size and shape of that relationship through time in different circumstances. Or would that mean we couldn't yell at each other quite so much?

Is underwhelming:

That Cain doesn’t have a lot of specifics to back up the slogans shouldn’t be all that surprising. While he loves to mention the plan during his media appearances, he is far less willing to share any of the details behind the plan, such as the backup for his assertion that the plan is revenue neutral, or the even who has helped him come up with the plan. That’s not surprising, though, once you realize that the plan’s chief architect, Rich Lowrie, isn’t an economist at all and is in fact a Wells Fargo Branch employee working outside of Cleveland, Ohio whose highest educational degree is a apparently a B.S. in Accounting from Case Western Reserve University.