The Dish

Alex Rogers summarizes it:

He outlined two major changes. One would move most of America’s existing federal anti-poverty funding into one single agency, which would administer a “revenue neutral flex fund” and dole out grants to states. The other major change would be to replace the earned income tax credit with a federal wage enhancement that would be “highly  targeted” to avoid fraud or abuse. Rubio also mentioned “bolstering” the nation’s existing job-training system and addressing the shortage in skilled labor through encouraging alternatives to the traditionally accredited college degree. Alex Conant, Rubio’s press secretary, said to expect legislation “sometime in the coming weeks,” but with a Senate Democratic majority, it’s highly unlikely that anything will come of it.

Drum has low expectations:

It’s a shame that Rubio is almost certainly not serious about genuinely fighting poverty. Because these aren’t impossible ideas.

The first one is basically the usual conservative dream of block granting everything and then dumping the whole load onto the states, something that liberals are quite reasonably skeptical about. After all, virtually every state controlled by Republicans is currently refusing to expand Medicaid coverage even though it’s nearly 100 percent paid for by the federal government. This gives everyone a pretty good idea of just how eager red states are to help the poor.

And that’s a shame, because Rubio is right when he says that state experimentation, a la welfare reform in the early 90s, could be pretty valuable. If states were truly serious about finding answers, and if each of the various state policies were rigorously studied, it could provide some genuine insights into how best to fight poverty. But what are the odds of that?

Yuval Levin likes the policies Rubio touted. A caveat:

We shouldn’t overestimate the potential of state experimentation. States are laboratories of corruption and waste as much as they are laboratories of innovation and creative policymaking. But the substantive argument for federalism or subsidiarity is particularly strong in the case of helping the poor.

Allahpundit wonders whether the Rubio should focus instead on the middle class:

In a sense, this is the perfect topic for him. His message since day one has been full-throated celebration of the American dream, using himself as Exhibit A in what a man from a humble background can achieve here. An obvious corollary to that is how to extend the dream to those whose background is way south of humble, and the corollary becomes even more obvious on the 50th anniversary of LBJ declaring a war on poverty. In another sense, though, this is an odd subject for the GOP generally and Rubio specifically to be tackling. Like Byron York says, the party’s big headache, and big opportunity, is with the middle class. All the anti-poverty speeches in the world aren’t going to convince impoverished voters that the GOP will be better for them than welfare-state Democrats will.

Douthat sees that as a false choice:

If you were to build a rhetorical frame around some of the better policy ideas floating around on the right-of-center these days — from Mike Lee’s family-friendly tax plan to the James Capretta Obamacare alternative to the kind of unemployment-fighting agenda A.E.I.’s Michael Strain outlines in the latest issue of National Affairs — it probably wouldn’t be neatly divided into a “message on poverty” and a “message for the middle class.” Instead, it would talk about how this new right-of-center agenda would offer the same kind of thing to Americans below the poverty line as it does to Americans anxiously holding on to their place in the middle class: Not a conservatism of “compassion” (that Bush-era frame was always a mistake, even when the substance was decent), but a conservatism of respect, in which benefits and tax credits are tied to effort, responsibility, family, work, in ways that apply up and down the income ladder.

Cohn’s bottom line:

There are plenty of reasons to be cynical about Rubio’s motives. And who knows what his actual legislation will include when, and if, he ever introduces it. But on Wednesday, Rubio engaged in a conversation Republicans have shunned for too long. That’s progress.

Amid a lively debate about exploitation in academia, McArdle suggests a simple solution: “If we want the job market to get better for academics, then graduate programs have to admit fewer students”:

The “tournament model” of employment, in which a lucky few win the lottery while most people scrape by on very little, is a cruel and unattractive way to run a business. But it is cruelest in glamour industries such as the arts. Growing up on the Upper West Side, before it became the exclusive province of the wealthy, I inevitably met a lot of the people this model destroyed. The worst off were the folks who’d kept getting just a taste of success – a minor part in a Broadway show, a critically acclaimed performance at a second-tier festival. Those folks kept waiting until their late 30s or early 40s for success and security that never arrived. By the time it was clear it never would, they were broke, and trying to start another career at a time when most people are heading into their peak earnings years. And the slow crushing of hope over a process of decades often did something tragic to their souls.

Professional sports also runs on the tournament model, but with one key difference: athletes find out pretty early that they’re not going to make it – early enough to still have a basically normal life doing something else. As the time it takes to get a PhD has stretched out, academia is looking less and less like athletics, and more and more like the theater. The students would be much better off if they were weeded out earlier, in the application process for PhD programs. A substantial fraction – maybe the majority – of PhD programs really shouldn’t exist.

Caplan is supportive. Freddie, not so much:

If there’s one group that shouldn’t throw stones about job prospects, I’d say journalists applies. I still marvel at the way people throw shade at grad students while their career To Do List reads “become big-time successful writer!”

McArdle waxes sympathetic for all of us saps in the academic game, pointing out that the academy is a tournament-style employment field where many take risky gambles but few succeed. She does this from her position in political punditry. I can only assume she’s aware that there’s several thousand desperate youngsters trying to be journalists and bloggers and pundits for every one spot among the elect, so I’m not sure why she doesn’t similarly indict her own profession. I mean, if I was going to decry winner-take-all lottery style employment, I likely wouldn’t do it from the vantage of writing for Bloomberg, you know what I mean?

Megan responds:

[M]ost people don’t spend five or six or eight years just preparing to be eligible to get a job in journalism, and an additional four years or so cycling through post-docs before it becomes clear that that journalism job isn’t going to happen. Nor, when they are six years into their first permanent job, do they have a committee that meets to decide whether to fire them and put them back on the job market, quite possibly with very poor prospects. They don’t have to move to towns in the middle of nowhere or give up relationships because their partners will never be able to find work in the Ozarks. Female journalists do not have to put off starting a family until they’re pushing 40 because it would be insane to reproduce before the tenure committee approves them. The opportunity costs of trying to become a journalist are quite a bit lower than the opportunity costs of trying to become an academic.

(Graph via Jordan Weissmann)

The latest numbers:

A record 42% of people consider themselves Independent, compared to Democrat (31%) or Republican (25%). That’s a huge shift from just a decade ago, when affiliations were divided around a third for each. The chart below shows how Americans’ dissatisfaction with the parties is nothing new. (Note the surge in independents around the time of Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign.) The spike in Independents is eating more into the GOP, which has seen party moderates sidelined by extremists. The data suggest that there may be a place for a Bloomberg presidential bid after all.

Alan Abramowitz disagrees with that final sentence:

Despite Gallup’s findings, you won’t see a large number of successful independent candidates next November, nor will many Democratic or Republican candidates distance themselves from their own party on major issues. That’s because, despite the apparent rise in independent identification, Americans are actually becoming more rather than less partisan in their behavior. Yes, even “independents.”

What I see is a bunch of formerly Republican voters/leaners being too embarrassed to admit it any more. Sides digs into the data:

Most self-described “independents” do lean toward a party. This other graph by Gallup is really the more important one:

Why is it more important? Because independents who lean toward a party — or “independent leaners” —  behave like partisans, on average. They tend to be loyal to their party’s candidate in elections.  They tend to have favorable views of many political figures in their party. They are not much more likely to identify as ideologically moderate. To be sure, independent leaners are not as partisan as the strongest partisans. But they resemble weaker partisans much more than they do real independents. In actuality, real independents make up just over 10 percent of Americans, and a small fraction of Americans who actually vote.

Matt Welch has a different perspective:

[A]s Nick Gillespie and I argue in The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America (a distillation of which you can read in the August 2011 issue of Reason), the economy/society-wide loss of brand loyalty and gain of individualized, tech-fueled disruption will hit politics and especially governance last, because of government’s guaranteed revenue streams and party-rigged insulation from competition. But just because it will happen last, doesn’t mean it isn’t already beginning to happen.

Finally, Drum thinks the poll “goes a long way toward explaining that Pew survey last week, which found that belief in evolution had plummeted from 54 percent to 43 percent among Republicans over the past four years”:

If you dig into the details of that poll, the decline is actually a little more moderate than it seems, and it’s probably explained mostly by the fact that so many moderate Republicans have left the party. When you remove a big chunk of people who believe in evolution, the group that’s left will have a higher percentage of deniers even though no one’s beliefs have actually changed.