How Small Annual Payments Made a Huge Difference for Kids' Development

Greater economic stability helps families, and children, thrive / Photo: Mike Keran, CC BY 2.0

A study newly released by the National Bureau for Economic Research has HUGE implications for US social policy.  And it's all thanks to an accidental natural experiment. 

Four years into a ten-year study of 1,430 rural kids' mental health in North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokees built a casino.  A quarter of the children being studied were affiliated with the tribe, which decided to distribute at least some casino profits as annual per capita payments.  The tribe paid out about $4,000 per person per year, or $16,000/yr for a family with four enrolled tribal members.  The per capitas boosted the families' incomes by just under 20% on average.

The impact on these children's mental health and their development of pro-social personality traits was substantial.  The stabilizing effect of the payments helped reduce family discord, promoted marital cohesion, and resulted in reduced alcohol abuse rates among parents receiving the boost in income, all of which made positive, lasting impacts on the kids.  And the children who'd been struggling the most benefited the most.

Can Bristol Palin Improve Racial Harmony, Bridge the Partisan Divide, AND Lower Abortion Rates?

Bristol Palin at 2011 book signing for Not Afraid of Life / Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0

Could Bristol Palin's second pregnancy outside of wedlock actually result in more than yet another eruption of culture-warring partisan snarkery?  Maybe.

I'm not interested in ranting about conservative Christian hypocrisy.  Plenty of other folks are already doing that, with the predictable churning up of noisy angst on all sides of the debate.

But it seems to me that this turn of events may actually provide an opportunity for some growth and healing across racial, religious, and political lines.  Heck, it could even get us one teeny step closer to an even more precipitous decline in the abortion rate than we're already experiencing. 

How the Two Major Parties Differ, and Why Who Appoints Fed Judges Matters, Exhibit 8,502:

"Supreme Court upholds housing discrimination law"  (USA Today)

No doubt the predictable howling erupted in right-wing media today over the Supreme Court's Inclusive Communities Project decision.  So I'll just note that, (1) the decision is in accordance with decades of Supreme Court precedent, and (2) the disparate impact claim is an important tool in combating housing discrimination.  As a practical matter, unless an individual defendant, an agent of a defendant entity, or a local lawmaker debating a challenged policy pulls a Donald Sterling and says a bunch of nonsense while being (lawfully) recorded - which rarely happens - intent can be *extremely* difficult to prove.  

Morgan Williams, General Counsel to the National Housing Law Forum, does a great job of explaining the decision - and its basis - here.  NAACP Legal Defense Fund Special Counsel John Paul Schnapper-Casteras also provides informative insights.  If you'd like to better understand the decision, give 'em a read - while both authors are intimately familiar with fair housing law, the pieces avoid the abundance of jargon that helps attorneys sound like they possess a special, magical sort of knowledge far beyond the reach of mere mortals.  

Note: some of the other commentators on SCOTUS-blog read Justice Kennedy (who authored the majority opinion) as worrying that the decision could be interpreted to place developers or public housing agencies in a damned if you do, damned if you don't type of double-bind.  But he's quite explicit in stating that neither the FHA nor this decision have that effect:  

How the Two Parties Differ, and Why Who Appoints Fed Judges Matters, Exhibit 8,501:

Supreme Court approves Obamacare subsidies on HealthCare.gov (CNBC)

Fed-up Houston mom has a good point, but it’s not the one right-wingers are trumpeting

Bernadette Lancelin’s “epic rant” against the federal government spending billions of dollars to address the so-called “border crisis" is spreading like wildfire across right-wing talk radio and blogosphere.  See Top Right News, Mediaite, The Blaze, Real Clear Politics, Rush Limbaugh, Rush again, Herman Cain on facebook, the CainTV site, Larry Elder … etc.

A local TV reporter solicited Lancelin’s comments as part of a piece on Homeland Security touring a closed neighborhood middle school.  DHS was considering the site for temporary housing for some of the incoming aliens while their refugee petitions are processed.

Here's the video with a transcript of Lancelin's comments.  The reporter’s lead-in provided important context: “[O]ne resident who said her kids have gone without nothing, they have had nothing for years, she says she is furious.”

Top Right News notes that Terrell Middle School “had been closed due to ‘funding issues,’” but doesn't mention that the "issues" and closure happened in 2001, in the first year of the Bush presidency, after several years of his governorship. 

Herman Cain’s spin on his radio show this morning belongs in the “Are you frigging kiddin’ me?!?” Hall of Fame.  Here's how he phrased it on Facebook: 

“Bernadette Lancelin is sick of watching money go to illegals while American families struggle in poverty.  Like I always say, black voters who support Dems need to wake up and realize they're being played by this President and his party...”  

Really? I’d say it’s you, Mr. Cain, who’s attempting to play black voters (and anyone else who will listen.)

Good Intentions Gone Wrong - Low-Income Housing Edition

Demolition of Chicago's Cabrini Green public housing / Senor Codo CC BY-SA 2.0

The Atlantic posted a story today about a documentary that commenced in 2007 and aims to examine what's happened to poor folks in Atlanta, particularly former housing project residents, in the wake of all of the city's public housing units being torn down over the last 20 years. 

The story's conclusion makes a powerful point:
"The phrase 'The Atlanta Way' was used throughout the 20th century to describe the processes of compromise between black and white elites, a negotiation strategy that prevented both total chaos and real progress for the city during the civil rights era. Williams heard this phrase over and over again from displaced residents, and he's come to think of the process of demolition and revitalization as one defined by this top-down strategy. 'It's the idea of the gentry, the landowning class, or the higher ups making decisions which affect the lower ends,' he says. 'That's what's happening in Atlanta.'"

No doubt.  That's what's happening all over the country, probably since its founding (but with less racial diversity among "the elite" in most places.)  The move away from public housing "projects" and toward subsidizing private development, in particular, is a story of well-meaning elites making serious policy reforms with little to no real understanding (or perhaps care) for how those policies will actually impact the population they're ostensibly trying to help.  

Economy sucks? Don't worry about it - worry about THOSE people instead!

In late 1991 or early 1992, the GOP's politics of hate led me to become a Democrat.* Little has changed on that front. Krugman calls out US Rep Paul Ryan's race-baiting: http://nyti.ms/1qJUMFX


* After a few years of indecision, a parade of GOP US Senate hopefuls gleefully trying to outdo one another in gay-bashing during a primary debate in my college's chapel - including US Rep Sonny Bono, father of then-out-lesbian Chaz Bono - clinched my decision. Even though I was far from a gay rights activist - I was still "uncomfortable" with homosexuality at that time because of my partly-evangelical upbringing - I "knew" that demonizing people and fostering hatred and division to score political points was decidedly un-Godly behavior.

Happy St. Paddy's Day, You Defective Bastards!

This St. Paddy's Day, we 35 million Irish-Americans (Rep. Paul Ryan included) would do well to recall that we supposedly came from a "defective culture." http://nyti.ms/1e4BhCC

Heck, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Catholic Americans of ANY ethnicity - we've all been slapped with this label at one time or another by "the protectors of the culture."  I suspect if you tallied us all up, we'd be the vast majority of Americans at this point.

Apparently the only culture worth celebrating in these folks' books is one where you hoard everything you can get your mitts on for yourself, and squelch the nagging conscience that tells you that greed is a deadly sin by assuring yourself that:
1. you're morally superior and deserve everything you've got,
2. poor people are morally corrupt and deserving of their lot, and
3. your material success is all God's will and evidence of His special love for, and approval of, you (nice appropriation of the historical notion of the Divine Right of Kings, there, by the way!)