Six on "our" Economy: Free College, Strings Attached; The Philanthropy Con; Pork industry soon will have more power over meat
panaritisp
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The Philanthropy Con: "Charity fosters hierarchy, empowers the wealthy, and undermines democracy."
"Last September Jeff Bezos announced that he would devote a small portion of his vastly undertaxed wealth—$2 billion of a fortune well over $100 billion—to start schools where “the child will be the customer.” One could hardly ask for a more illustrative example of how elite philanthropy undermines public institutions, provides cover for extractive capitalism, and enshrines a neoliberal vision of the world in which even childhood is understood as a commodity. But this analysis does not go far enough, because it does not make the positive case. Leftists need to be comfortable saying it: In a democracy, taxes are better than charity.
In principle, this is easy enough. Taxes are the currency of democracy, the only resources in our economy that are supposed to be dedicated to the public good, as determined by a democratic process. Taxation can undermine oligarchy; it is no coincidence that top-heavy tax cuts have become the perpetual legislative priority of the right. And taxes raise money on an order charity cannot, lifting millions of Americans out of poverty.
-- If you read one story today: “The Trump administration plans to shift much of the power and responsibility for food safety inspections in hog plants to the pork industry as early as May, cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40 percent and replacing them with plant employees,” Kimberly Kindy reports. “Under the proposed new inspection system, the responsibility for identifying diseased and contaminated pork would be shared with plant employees, whose training would be at the discretion of plant owners. There would be no limits on slaughter-line speeds. The new pork inspection system would accelerate the federal government’s move toward delegating inspections to the livestock industry. The administration also is working to shift inspection of beef to plant owners. … These proposals, part of the administration’s broader effort to reduce regulations, come as the federal government is under fire for delegating some of its aircraft safety oversight responsibilities to Boeing …
“Pat Basu, the chief veterinarian with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service from 2016 to 2018, refused to sign off on the new pork system because of concerns about safety for consumers and livestock. The USDA sent the proposed regulations to the Federal Register about a week after Basu left. ‘Look at the FAA. It took a year or so before the crashes happened,’ Basu said. ‘This could pass, and everything could be okay for a while, until some disease is missed, and we have an outbreak all over the country. It would be an economic disaster that would be very hard to recover from.’"
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"How can the U.S. solve the problem of lasting poverty? For some, the answer starts with education. Many studies show that young people who go to college earn more than their non-college peers, and that teenagers from poor families that attend selective schools especially benefit. While the country’s neighborhoods may be stratified, and its boardrooms may be biased, at least the nation’s best universities can help students from poor families become thriving workers.
Right?
Kind of. In a fascinating new paper published this summer, five economists, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, call into question higher education’s role in promoting upward mobility. The centerpiece of the paper is “mobility report cards” for each college in America. The researchers considered 30 million students between 1999 and 2014 and compared their parents’ incomes to their own post-college earnings, by school. With this data, they could see exactly which colleges helped the most students rise from the bottom of the earnings ladder to the top.
They found that America’s top universities are largely closed to the poor, merely helping well-off students remain well-off. The best schools for helping low-income students become high-income graduates are accepting fewer and fewer kids from poor families.
- This study doesn’t just challenge one big myth about American universities and poor students. It combats several popular myths among both liberals and conservatives. Let’s go through three."
"Leo’s Tool & Die, 1950
In the early morning before the shop
opens, men standing out in the yard
on pine planks over the umber mud.
The oil drum, squat, brooding, brimmed
with metal scraps, three-armed crosses,
silver shavings whitened with milky oil,
drill bits bitten off. The light diamonds
last night’s rain; inside a buzzer purrs.
The overhead door stammers upward
to reveal the scene of our day.
We sit
for lunch on crates before the open door.
Bobeck, the boss’s nephew, squats to hug
the overflowing drum, gasps and lifts. Rain
comes down in sheets staining his gun-metal
covert suit. A stake truck sloshes off
as the sun returns through a low sky.
By four the office help has driven off. We
sweep, wash up, punch out, collect outside
for a final smoke. The great door crashes
down at last.
In the darkness the scents
of mint, apples, asters. In the darkness
this could be a Carthaginian outpost sent
to guard the waters of the West, those mounds
could be elephants at rest, the acrid half light
the haze of stars striking armor if stars were out.
On the galvanized tin roof the tunes of sudden rain.
The slow light of Friday morning in Michigan,
the one we waited for, shows seven hills
of scraped earth topped with crab grass,
weeds, a black oil drum empty, glistening
at the exact center of the modern world.""How can the U.S. solve the problem of lasting poverty? For some, the answer starts with education. Many studies show that young people who go to college earn more than their non-college peers, and that teenagers from poor families that attend selective schools especially benefit. While the country’s neighborhoods may be stratified, and its boardrooms may be biased, at least the nation’s best universities can help students from poor families become thriving workers.
Right?
Kind of. In a fascinating new paper published this summer, five economists, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, call into question higher education’s role in promoting upward mobility. The centerpiece of the paper is “mobility report cards” for each college in America. The researchers considered 30 million students between 1999 and 2014 and compared their parents’ incomes to their own post-college earnings, by school. With this data, they could see exactly which colleges helped the most students rise from the bottom of the earnings ladder to the top.
They found that America’s top universities are largely closed to the poor, merely helping well-off students remain well-off. The best schools for helping low-income students become high-income graduates are accepting fewer and fewer kids from poor families.
- This study doesn’t just challenge one big myth about American universities and poor students. It combats several popular myths among both liberals and conservatives. Let’s go through three."
