More on GOP intolerance

One of Ezra Klein's weekend guest bloggers writes something similar to what I was trying to say in this post, only more eloquently.

“Learn how to speak English!”—a contemptuous shorthand for only English-speakers are real Americans—has been screamed at immigrants for decades by nationalistic tools. Malkin and her cohorts gussy it up a bit, and frame it as a “national security” and “economic” issue associated with undocumented (mostly Hispanic) workers. Bush and Co. turn it into a policy issue. Suddenly, my grumpy old neighbor’s muttered “Damn furners!” has become the basis for a federal initiative. It’s not that there aren’t legitimate security concerns to be considered, for example, but the real impetus of the policy is turning out the base vote by appealing to prejudice.

More:

When we read that nearly 20% of American high school students experience physical assault on the basis of sexual orientation, and a doctor who performs abortions—and was already shot by a radical anti-choicer—has become the target of a campaign to hold him “accountable for his actions that have caused untold misery and loss of life,” and a Hispanic teen is beaten and raped within an inch of his life by two white teens as they hurled racial epithets at him, we must necessarily consider what forces legitimize such actions in the minds of the perpetrators. And we need look no further than the GOP and their ever-so-helpful message enablers, as each incident is representative of one of their key wedge issues: gay marriage, abortion, and immigration.

When real people are used as fodder to garner votes born of bias, those real people are inevitably endangered. Politicians and their well-paid water carriers cannot continually demonize a group of people and then claim naivety that the fuckwit homophobes, radical anti-choicers, and racists on whose votes they are dependent for their continued supremacy actually treat those groups as demons, monsters under the bed who threaten our very way of life. We should expect nothing less for a disingenuous wedge issue designed by the likes of Karl Rove to exploit the prejudices of the GOP base to translate into action that leaves victims of policy also victims of violence.

I implore you to read it all. It's terrific. 

Debunking myths about universal health care

I missed this during my move out frenzy this week, but Kate Steadman has a great post that takes a look at the popular myth that Canadians frequently seek treatment at American hospitals due to suposedly horrendous waiting lists. It's a pretty ridiculous argument that always gets thrown at me anecdotal evidence. A glance at the numbers renders it laughable.

A 2002 Health Affairs paper examined hospitals near the border, as well as national surveys to tease out how many Canadians actually visit the U.S. to receive elective procedures.

In terms of hospitals along the border offering advanced treatments or special diagnostic technology (i.e. CT scans and MRIs), about 640 Canadians were seen, along with 270 for procedures like cataract surgery. They compare this to about 375,000 and 44,000 similar procedures in the region of Quebec alone during the same period. If you divide the total number of Canadians seeking those treatments in the US, divided by the number in Quebec alone that's about 0.09%.  Not even a tenth of a percent.

But the most striking stats come from the Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS).  From the article:

Only 90 of 18,000 respondents to the 1996 Canadian NPHS indicated that they had received care in the United States during the previous twelve months, and only twenty had indicated that they had gone to the United States expressly for the purpose of getting that care.

Only 20 of 18,000 sought care in the United States.  I can't believe how many people are coming over here!  Their system but be truly awful.

Read the rest here.

Neil Young – Living With War

So I think Neil heard me when I said, "You know, this Prairie Wind and Heart of Gold stuff is pretty cute, but you need to kick some ass again."

Following the release of Heart of Gold in theaters (which is great, by the way), Neil went into the studio and recorded a protest album about President Bush and the war, conveniently titled Living With War. He recorded it in an absurdly short period of time and promised that it would rock. And we're talking a span of weeks here. I, a Neil obsessive, only heard about this a few weeks ago.

Today the entire album was made available to stream from Neil's website. AND IT IS AWESOME. It's a return to the pure noise and distortion of Ragged Glory. Yeah, the lyrics are a little corny, but these days you have to judge his output on how badass it sounds, and this is a perfect 10.0.

And as much as people want to crack jokes about it, pretty much everything he's singing about it right…

Listen to it here.

MSU mechanical engineering professor shows why he’s not at Michigan

Via a friend who goes to Michigan State, this email sent from a mechanical engineering to the university's Muslim Student Association:

Dear Moslem Association:

As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intened to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by
more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey!), burnings of Christian chirches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavain girls and women (called "whores" in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France. This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many, many of my colleagues. I counsul you dissatisfied, agressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as
you proceed with your infantile "protests." If you do not like the values of the West–see the 1st Ammendment–you are free to leave. I hope for God's sake that most of you choose that option. Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.

Cordially Dr. Indrek S. Wichman, Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Yes, those spelling mistakes are real.

This letter is really something. If I were a Muslim, I would have put a fist through my monitor at the sight of it. Obviously this bizarro Ward Churchill can say whatever he wants, but that doesn't excuse using his position as a mechanical engineering professor as a pulpit to preach hateful, misguided, and deeply insulting generalizations about his students.

Light posting lately

Sorry for the lack of updates this week. I'm knee deep in finals and trying to move out of my dorm. Hopefully I'll have some more time in a few days.

Nuclear energy

I'd like to join the chorus of people who seem to think that this piece by Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore calling for a new era of nuclear power is a good thing (you might need to register for free to read it). I don't necessarily like the idea of nuclear power, but I like it a whole hell of a lot more than fossil fuels. He makes a good case and it's well worth the read.

I still think that not enough attention is being paid to wind power though. 

Republican hypocrisy on immigration

There's a great article in today's New York Times about the economic impact of illegal immigrants, a subject that is open to debate. One of the statistics that frequently gets brought up in defense of the recent immigration bill passed by the House is that illegal immigrants lower the wages of native high school dropouts. The beginning of the article puts that in perspective:

CALIFORNIA may seem the best place to study the impact of illegal immigration on the prospects of American workers. Hordes of immigrants rushed into the state in the last 25 years, competing for jobs with the least educated among the native population. The wages of high school dropouts in California fell 17 percent from 1980 to 2004.

But before concluding that immigrants are undercutting the wages of the least fortunate Americans, perhaps one should consider Ohio. Unlike California, Ohio remains mostly free of illegal immigrants. And what happened to the wages of Ohio's high school dropouts from 1980 to 2004? They fell 31 percent.

Later in the article:

At first blush, the preoccupation over immigration seems reasonable. Since 1980, eight million illegal immigrants have entered the work force. Two-thirds of them never completed high school. It is sensible to expect that, because they were willing to work for low wages, they would undercut the position in the labor market of American high school dropouts.

This common sense, however, ignores half the picture. Over the last quarter-century, the number of people without any college education, including high school dropouts, has fallen sharply. This has reduced the pool of workers who are most vulnerable to competition from illegal immigrants.

This may sound sort of un-liberal of me, but I can't help myself from not really giving a damn about Americans who dropped out of high school. We have a good public education system, it's free, and there are precious few legitimate reasons not to finish high school. If these people want to go it on their own, then I don't have much sympathy if they find themselves competing for jobs with immigrants. So what I'm saying is that the "lower wage for high school dropouts" didn't carry any weight with me in the first place. And even if it did, this new study appears to at least put it in context.

Anyways, what strikes me about this whole debate is the rather reprehensible flip flopping of the GOP. The champion fiscal policy that has quite clearly had a less than optimal impact on the working poor (at least opposed to how great it has been for the richest Americans, but let's not get into a tax debate), they want to dismantle the safety net of Social Security, and abhor the minimum wage. Yet all of the sudden, Republicans are sticking up for the high school dropout's interests! They are willing to contradict their free market worshiping ways on a whim.

What disgusts me about it are the not so subtle racist overtones. Opponents of illegal immigration are not going to give a damn about economics if they hate Mexicans, and I think the GOP is trying to tap into that hatred.

This is an important debate, but it seems like it's becoming yet one more instance of Republican pandering.

Update: Kevin Drum agrees and offers a similar take.

The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting

Via Greg Mankiw, a study of the effects of Fox News on voters between 1996 and 2000 from a couple of Berkeley economists. Here is the abstract:

Does media bias affect voting? We address this question by looking at the entry of Fox News in cable markets and its impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000, the conservative Fox News Channel was introduced in the cable programming of 20 percent of US towns. Fox News availability in 2000 appears to be largely idiosyncratic. Using a data set of voting data for 9,256 towns, we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox News entered the cable market by the year 2000. We find a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gain 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns which broadcast Fox News. The results are robust to town-level controls, district and county fixed effects, and alternative specifications. We also find a significant effect of Fox News on Senate vote share and on voter turnout. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican. We interpret the results in light of a simple model of voter learning about media bias and about politician quality. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for voters subject to non-rational persuasion.

You can download the paper here. 

The numbers aren't exactly huge so I'd take it more as food for thought than something to contend. If anything, this lends credence to the popular conservative talking point that the "liberal" media changes voter opinion (more on the liberal part in a moment). I think it's pretty clear that the media can affect public attitudes. It's a simple examble, but how is a sensationalistic cable news network trumpeting a political ideology any different than MTV hawking a Britney Spears single? Both are media conglomerates run by people who probably have a vested interest in the product selling well. Britney Spears will sell more records because of MTV, so doesn't it follow that people might vote Republican because of Fox News? The question to me is whether or not we can judge the overall bias of the media as "liberal", despite the fact that conservatives consider it cut and dried. Since when is reporting the facts about, say, Patrick Fitzgerald's court filings way out in left field? It's the truth! But because it casts the administration in an unequivocally negative light, it is derided as liberal nonsense.

One could go on and on, I suppose.

Greg Mankiw starts to blog

Greg Mankiw, Harvard economist, chairman President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, and textbook author extraordinaire, has finally launched a blog…and it's fantastic. I am, of course, in no position to evaluate the merits of his work, even if some of his work on the CEA is a little dubious and many economists express some mild disdain with his supposed partisanship. However, his blog is written solely from the point of view of an economics professor trying to broaden his undergraduate students' horizons. He mostly leaves politics at the door and instead focuses on delivering analysis that is someone without a Ph.D can understand and enjoy. Check it out.

The internet is a bargain

Brad DeLong links to this recent paper from Stanford and University of Chicago economists that attempts to determine the price elasticity of internet access by valuing the time people spend using it versus their wages, reasoning that the time spent internet constitutes an opportunity cost for high-wage earners. Here is the abstract:

For some goods, the main cost of buying the product is not the price but rather the time it takes to use them. Only about 0.2% of consumer spending in the U.S., for example, went for Internet access in 2004 yet time use data indicates that people spend around 10% of their entire leisure time going online. For such goods, estimating price elasticities with expenditure data can be difficult, and, therefore, estimated welfare gains highly uncertain. We show that for time-intensive goods like the Internet, a simple model in which both expenditure and time contribute to consumption can be used to estimate the consumer gains from a good using just the data on time use and the opportunity cost of people's time (i.e., the wage). The theory predicts that higher wage internet subscribers should spend less time online (for non-work reasons) and the degree to which that is true identifies the elasticity of demand. Based on expenditure and time use data and our elasticity estimate, we calculate that consumer surplus from the Internet may be around 2% of full-income, or several thousand dollars per user. This is an order of magnitude larger than what one obtains from a back-ofthe-envelope calculation using data from expenditures.

You can download the PDF of the whole report here.

The details are probably a little over my head, but without reading the paper yet, the bit about the eye-popping consumer surplus basically confirms what I've been thinking all along. I've been fortunate enough to have my parents pay for my internet access for my whole life, whether through the cable bill at home or footing the bill for my dorm room, but if they didn't, I'd be willing to shell out on the order of a few hundred bucks a month, if that's what it would take.