8/28/20 by NPR
Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/111727959
Episode: https://play.podtrac.com/npr-510289/edge1.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/pmoney/2020/08/20200828_pmoney_brokenrules_fm_maybe_1.mp3
When the pandemic hit, the old rules went out the window. What rules will stay broken when things go back to normal?
Social security is an important program that is funded via a regressive tax that is most acutely felt by the working poor and the lower middle class. For many low end earners, the FICA is the biggest tax they’ll pay out of their paycheck.
That’s seen as tolerable of funding these programs as it means that the important program of social security and Medicare will be funded. Social security is meant to provide about a third of retirement income for most adults – but for some of bad fortune or lack of savings it’s a vital tool against extreme poverty in old age. But the regressive nature of taxes funding it are bad for the working poor.
In times of a weak economy, suspending the FICA tax would provide a modest boost to the wages of workers, but I think they’re should be something to back fill the loss of revenue to government. Maybe borrowing and bonds are appropiate but that’s just kicking the cab down the road. It risks creating an unfunded liability that could encourage politicians who oppose the social safety net and taxes to cut social security and Medicare in future years.
There is a lot attraction on the surface to making Medicare and Social Security look like programs that you pay into today for benefits tomorrow. Even if that’s not how the programs work in reality – they’re mostly pay as you go – with a promise to future generations to continue. But it’s not a great way to fund them as it puts a big tax burden on the working poor who disproportionately pay the FICA tax even if they have the most to gain from it.
I would much rather see the FICA tax replaced with progressive taxation and fees on vices and institutions that cause real harm like the fossil fuel industry. Maybe a carbon tax could be part of the solution. But I also think corporations and the wealthy should pay more in taxes to fund Medicare and Social Security and take more of it off the backs of workers.
Thirty-six years later, Democrats are still fretting about women and electability — not to mention ambition.
"I remember when Geraldine Ferraro was nominated, and it was exciting," said Karen Finney, spokesperson for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. "But our country is in a different place, even though some of those same sexist and racist tropes remain."
It's true that a lot has changed.
For starters, Biden announced months ahead of time that he'd pick a woman, and there's a deeper bench of women for him to pick from. In addition, several women of color are contenders for that spot.
Richard Nixon called police forces “the real front-line soldiers in the war on crime.” Bill Clinton, in his signing ceremony for the 1994 crime bill, called them “the brave men and women who put their lives on the line for us every day.” In 2018, Donald Trump described their job as follows: “Every day, our police officers race into darkened alleys and deserted streets, and onto the doorsteps of the most hardened criminals … the worst of humanity.”
For decades, the warrior cop has been the popular image of police in America, reinforced by TV shows, movies, media, police recruitment videos, police leaders, and public officials.
This image is largely misleading. Police do fight crime, to be sure — but they are mainly called upon to be social workers, conflict mediators, traffic directors, mental health counselors, detailed report writers, neighborhood patrollers, and low-level law enforcers, sometimes all in the span of a single shift. In fact, the overwhelming majority of officers spend only a small fraction of their time responding to violent crime.
However, the institution of policing in America does not reflect that reality. We prepare police officers for a job we imagine them to have rather than the role they actually perform. Police are hired disproportionately from the military, trained in military-style academies that focus largely on the deployment of force and law, and equipped with lethal weapons at all times, and they operate within a culture that takes pride in warriorship, combat, and violence.
Aspects of our modern politics reminded University of California San Diego historian Edward Watts of the last century of the Roman Republic, roughly 130 B.C. to 27 B.C. That’s why he took a fresh look at the period in his 2018 book Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny. Watts chronicles the ways the republic, with a population once devoted to national service and personal honor, was torn to shreds by growing wealth inequality, partisan gridlock, political violence and pandering politicians, and argues that the people of Rome chose to let their democracy die by not protecting their political institutions, eventually turning to the perceived stability of an emperor instead of facing the continued violence of an unstable and degraded republic. Political messaging during the 2018 midterm elections hinged on many of these exact topics.
Though he does not directly compare and contrast Rome with the United States, Watts says that what took place in Rome is a lesson for all modern republics. “Above all else, the Roman Republic teaches the citizens of its modern descendants the incredible dangers that come along with condoning political obstruction and courting political violence,” he writes. “Roman history could not more clearly show that, when citizens look away as their leaders engage in these corrosive behaviors, their republic is in mortal danger.”
The vast majority of the American police state remains firmly within the public sector. But this does not mean the criminal justice buildup has nothing to do with capitalism. At its heart, the new American repression is very much about the restoration and maintenance of ruling class power.
American society and economy have from the start evolved through forms of racialized violence, but criminal justice was not always so politically central. For the better part of a century after the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the national incarceration rate hovered at around 100 to 110 per 100,000. But then, in the early 1970s, the incarceration rate began a precipitous and continual climb upward.
7/16/2020 by NPR
Web player: https://podplayer.net/?id=109796543
Episode: https://play.podtrac.com/npr-381444908/edge1.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/npr/fa/2020/07/20200716_fa_fapodthurs_1-85b1613d-0413-4683-8c20-f23ae7e99d3c.mp3?awCollectionId=381444908&awEpisodeId=891869209&orgId=1&d=2888&p=381444908&story=891869209&t=podcast&e=891869209&size=46104645&ft=pod&f=381444908
Dr. Christine Montross says in the U.S., people with serious mental illnesses are far more likely to be incarcerated than to be treated in a psychiatric hospital. Montross studied systemic change in the Norwegian prison system, and what the U.S. might learn from it. Her new book is ‘Waiting for an Echo.’
This is a very interesting and though provoking half hour. I heard it live on NPR and ended up listening to the whole episode. Some counties – namely Sweeden are doing better and so should we.