As I walked out of chiropractor's torture room yesterday, the secretary and a woman in the other examinating room were talking about this week's referendum. The woman in a nasal voice shouted loudly, probably for my benefit, "Why should MY money go to THOSE children?"
Four local towns fund our regional high school. My town is taxed the lightest, but sends the most kids to the high school. The richer towns pay more and send less kids. The richer towns want to change the formula, so the average house in our town would have an $800 hike in taxes, while a house in the richer town would see a $1,000 decrease in taxes. The referendum itself won't change anything. The formula was based on a court decision years ago. The richer towns are gearing up for a big, expensive lawsuit, which they will surely lose, because the state is pushing all these small towns to regionalize further.
Local politics aside, let's just go back the shrill lady's comment, "Why should MY money go to THOSE children?"
I'm quite certain that this lady isn't happy than ANY of her money to going to ANY child. She doesn't understand that when you combine all sources of taxes, more money actually goes to people who are 65 or older. Between pensions, healthcare, and social security, most of my tax money is going to her.
Even if she was aware of this fact, I'm not sure she would care, because we don't have a consensus in this country that education is a good thing for our society. Not only is education a good thing for our particular children, it is good for all children. We're so stuck in the localism of schools that people are unwilling to spend money to help kids fifty yards from their own house. They don't understand that if we have a better educated workforce, we will be a more productive society that spends less on welfare and incarceration.
Until we build a consensus about education, we're not going to see any real changes.
Apt. 11d 
laura, you know it’s a sad state when one must blog the obvious: that there’s something to be gained from a high school education. It’s pathetic that individuals in a community don’t see that an elementary/middle/high school education helps create a literate and capable work force (helps create, given the importance of college these days).
So sorry you/we are surrounded by idiots. Although keep in mind during the low times, that NJ actually has a pretty decent school system. The American South matches that rhetoric with action: very low funding for public education.
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“Between pensions, healthcare, and social security, most of my tax money is going to her.”
This is the argument of the right… and not a terribly good one. All of her tax money probably went to your mother.
That’s not the point. The point is (and the point this lady missed) is that we’re all in this together, and there is no magic number where you suddenly have no responsibility to other members of your society… not in income, not in age.
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“I’m quite certain that this lady isn’t happy than ANY of her money to going to ANY child. She doesn’t understand that when you combine all sources of taxes, more money actually goes to people who are 65 or older. Between pensions, healthcare, and social security, most of my tax money is going to her.”
The system doesn’t seem to contribute to making everybody happy, generous, and Scandinavian. It seems more like it encourages everybody to stick their snout deeper in the trough, for fear that somebody else is getting more.
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A right-winger once tried to throw Winthrop at me. Like he’d ever read it. I threw back at him:
“Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.”
Beautiful piece of writing.
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It seems like such an embedded cultural artifact of the US – that rugged individualism. On the one hand, the illusion that “anyone can make it big”. And the dark flipside of that is the blaming “and if you don’t make it, it’s all your fault and don’t expect anyone to help you”. Add in a fear of any communal looking out for each other = communism and you have not a lot of mutual empathy.
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The system doesn’t seem to contribute to making everybody happy, generous, and Scandinavian. It seems more like it encourages everybody to stick their snout deeper in the trough, for fear that somebody else is getting more.
So the failure to engender a greater sense of community responsibility amongst the American people is to abandon efforts to take up the community responsibilities of the American people? Welfare and redistribution will always–especially in such a nominally (though not actually) individualistic society–create resents, but said resentments do not take the need for welfare and redistribution away.
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RAF,
I think there’s a problem of scale. If you and I go out to dinner together and split a check or treat each other, it can be pretty equitable, but it wouldn’t work as well if 50 people were involved–it’s too easy to take advantage and then make yourself scarce or to contribute the bare minimum when it’s your turn. When I was in Russia, my good friends and I had very close and complex economic ties, as was the local custom. There was a very delicate system of favors, loans and mutual aid that generally worked very well (and it had to, because many government workers could go half a year without seeing a paycheck). (I did once nearly get stiffed by a peripheral acquaintance who was not among my core friends.) Likewise, in my family, my dad and my grandpa and a cousin of my dad swap labor, tractors, other equipment, and various other services, and the thing works very well and reduces everybody’s costs and need for equipment and outside labor. The system (which is very informal, without explicit quid pro quo) runs very well and has done so for decades in some cases. However, in the family, there’s also a certain in-law who always has to come out on top on every single deal he’s party to. Over the years, there’s been an effort to integrate him into the family’s native system, but he just doesn’t fit. He has a very good work ethic, but he just doesn’t get the rhythm of informal exchange and he’s always trying to get more out of it than he puts in, which means that as time goes by, he gets less and less out of the family system and is more and more ticked off.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that all of these successful systems are very flexible and informal, with there always being the option of kicking somebody out of the exchange who is not contributing according to his ability. I think it is a very big mistake to think that a family or a friendship circle or a church community is a good model for the workings of a diverse, 300 million member modern democracy. We do not share the same values, we have not had the same upbringing, and we can’t just kick people out who are taking advantage, because without deep local knowledge, it’s impossible to know who is taking advantage.
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Amy, the challenge of size is one I take very seriously. This is one of the reasons I want to see, as much as possible, more localism, more federalism, more subsidiarity, more community in our lives, and what to see the sort of economic and democratic reforms that will make such possible. In other words, I think we need to seek after ways to replicate “flexible and informal” systems across the political units we operate within. You’re right that 300 million is, quite possibly, just way too many people, with way too many differences, for polices of distribution and welfare to create community-like conditions. I would note, though, that that same logic would argue that 300 millions people, with tens of thousands of separate localities, is much too diverse to be served by a single market…and yet, most of us seem to be completely nonplussed by the idea that a single economic system can incorporate all of them into one labor pool and production scheme. Those who make the (very legitimate) argument about the impossibility of striving for responsibility and trust in a society as large and as complex as ours, need to follow through on that same reasoning, and ask if they are similarly suspicious of chain stores, NAFTA, globalism, and all the rest. It seems to me that struggle and tension here is one and the same.
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RAF,
I don’t think you can really compare market and non-market transactions and how they exist in time, and how much they demand of the participants. When I go to Walmart and buy something, I need to immediately pay, just as when I sell stuff on Craigslist, I expect payment right away. There is no trust asked for, and none given in any particular transaction. Meanwhile, in the non-market sector, significant time may elapse between transactions, so there’s a lot more trust required. In my family, for instance, one of my uncles married a girl right out of high school when he himself was finishing up college. His parents helped put their young daughter-in-law through college, a move which makes no sense unless they expected that she would become a permanent part of the family. 30 years later, the young couple (now very well off) helped pay off their own daughter-in-law’s student loans after she joined the family. Of course, there’s much more room for betrayal and hurt feelings in the private sphere than there is in the marketplace.
I suppose trust does make an appearance in business in things like net thirty terms for retailers (a wholesaler might give a retailer with good credentials 30 days before merchandise needs to be paid for), but in general, business deals should be set up so that whatever happens, you’ll do well.
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It’s difficult to apportion fairly the costs of regional school districts, in any state. By the grace of Google, I found this on a law firm’s website: Taxpayers could be affected positively or negatively. Any plan presented to the voters must propose to apportion costs among constituent districts based on equalized valuation of property, pupil enrollment, or a combination of the two. Apportionments based on equalized valuation favor districts with low property values relative to those in other constituent districts; those based on pupil enrollment favor districts with relatively low populations. Until specific plans and configurations are proposed, it is impossible to predict the impact on taxpayers in any particular community, in the county or the state as a whole. http://www.riker.com/articles/index.php?id=11306
In our state, some regional school districts have run into immense problems, as funding agreements set up decades ago became inequitable as towns changed over time. There’s no reason an older suburb should pay more per student than a town which has changed from farmland to luxury developments.
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I have found that a lot of my friends and neighbors with Conservative/ Anti-Distributionist views generally have a story like Amy’s.
They come from a working class community where everyone worked their hardest to do their best — but then there was the guy down the street/ cousin on the next block/ old weird guy who was a complete free-loader. He knew how to double-up on food stamps/ collect disability payments even though he was completely healthy/ abuse the system to live rent-free, etc. And, as I press, I find that a significant percentage of the anti-distributionist feeling stems from the feeling, growing up, that this particular freeloader was taking advantage of the system, and we would all be better off if the system was gone so that this guy — who was otherwise just like us — would have to get off of his lazy ass and find a job.
And I wonder how much of my pro-distributionist feeling stems from not coming from that place. My childhood neighborhood was upper-middle-class enough that you really couldn’t “freeload” into it. (Unless you count trust funds as “freeloading.”) So, I see the people who are being distributed to as generally a lot more needy than I am, so don’t resent it.
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I wonder if my underlying slightly autistic nature affects my views; my feeling is I would never ask for help if I needed it, and I’d resent anyone asking me to justify myself because I would never ask for help unless I needed it. So when I see someone who is getting help, I figure he wouldn’t have asked for it unless he really needed it, and it’s none of my business why.
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Ragtime,
That’s basically right. When you live in the lower-middle class/middle class band or if you work in business and have to employ a lot of pretty marginal people, you wind up meeting a lot of people like the guy from “My Name is Earl” before his come-to-karma moment: the neighbor lady who keeps getting caught going through other people’s medicine cabinets, the kid who always shows up around dinner time and who bought an engagement ring with a store credit card and never made payments on it, the babysitter with the cocaine habit, the employee who was taking home stuff “to try on,” etc. These people can be quite nice, and they’re not making big bucks at any of their grifts, it’s just that they are totally untrustworthy.
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And I guess my biggest problem with the “Conservative Approach” to entitlements is their fascination with the marginal case. Of course, if you cut off unemployment benefits, that marginal freeloader who just isn’t trying is going to have to get a job — but the 95% of non-marginal people who are trying their hardest are going to get cut off. But, for some reason, the argument that “by itself it will cut unemployment from 9.7% to 9.3%” is convincing to many Republicans, and horrific (even if true) to me. The fact that 5% is fraud and waste is an argument to increase enforcement on fraud and waste — not to cut the program.
I think there may be some sort of availability heuristic going on where white working class neighborhoods tend to disproportionately know the “marginal case,” and disproportionately not interacting with the “truly needy” — because the working/lower middle class is just on this side of the line between “truly needy” and “able to pull yourself up by the bootstraps.”
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These people can be quite nice, and they’re not making big bucks at any of their grifts, it’s just that they are totally untrustworthy.
In my experience, these types are concentrated in the cousins and siblings of local political leaders.
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“And I guess my biggest problem with the “Conservative Approach” to entitlements is their fascination with the marginal case.”
And my problem with the “Liberal Approach” is that it encourages people to live miserable, disorganized, dependent, meaningless, dishonest lives with no dignity and no self-respect.
As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a young woman in my family who has made some big mistakes and had some bad luck. She was expensively brought up, had a bunch of college (no degree), but now has short-term memory loss caused by brain damage (thanks to super violent felon ex-boyfriend), plus ADHD. She’s clean and sober now, but she has a terrible time sticking to anything or keeping a job for more than a few days. She’s a cute 20-something and presents well, so it’s really easy for her to get entry-level jobs, it’s just she can’t hold on to anything, so she’s totally parent-funded. Anyway, I think her parents know that she needs more incentives to make something of her life, but they’re just so used to giving her stuff that they don’t remember to set up an appropriate quid pro quo (go to a class, go to therapy, go to work, etc.). It’s not clear what she’s capable of, but I would hate to see her go on disability at this point, because with the natural course of time, she is eventually going to be my and my husband’s responsibility. Even if she requires some sort of ongoing family subsidy, I want to see her on her feet and doing something, rather than wasting her whole life. I’d like to pay her for doing something (maybe doing some sort of income match), rather than paying her for doing nothing.
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And my problem with the “Liberal Approach” is that it encourages people to live miserable, disorganized, dependent, meaningless, dishonest lives with no dignity and no self-respect.
Right. It was my assumption that this was your basic argument when I made my post above. I simply find it morally bankrupt.
When I lost my job in 2003, I assiduously searched out a new job, drew down my savings somewhat, and started a new job three months later. In the meantime, I collected unemployment compensation, which meant that by the time I started working, our personal finances were slightly less wrecked than they otherwise would have been.
I assume most people treat government services the same way, and my evidence is that most people do not “live miserable, disorganized, dependent, meaningless, dishonest lives with no dignity and no self-respect.” Very few people do — and the number who do who would stop living such lives if government services were reduced or eliminated is even smaller.
And yet, despite all of the real suffering, the fear that someone, somewhere is getting something he does belong (a “welfare queen” or a “malingerer”) trumps the concern for the real harms. Better that 19 people starve rather than that the 20th get a meal he could have earned on his own.
It’s not even that the Conservative concern is wrong — it is likely true in many cases. But the solution is never “increase enforcement,” for which there could be grounds for compromise. It’s always “cut the benefits,” which I see as a severe moral failing.
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And yet, despite all of the real suffering, the fear that someone, somewhere is getting something he does belong (a “welfare queen” or a “malingerer”) trumps the concern for the real harms.
I don’t think that is the problem. I think the problem is so much of government activity consist of taking money from people and giving it back to the same people, minus administrative costs and plus a whole bunch of hassle and restrictions.
Most government transfer payments are not set up in anything like the way you would set them up to help people in need. The long-term needy people, if here legally and able to fill out forms, get something like $700/month, plus food stamps.
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“I think the problem is so much of government activity consist of taking money from people and giving it back to the same people, minus administrative costs and plus a whole bunch of hassle and restrictions.”
Right.
“The long-term needy people, if here legally and able to fill out forms, get something like $700/month, plus food stamps.”
My relative is not in the US, but I expect that’s roughly the deal where she is, also.
I should mention, though, that it’s quite possible to both collect disability and work (perhaps off the books). One of my relatives just laid off an employee on disability (the firing was for flakiness, theft, and insubordination, not the fraud). She really did have joint trouble, but it didn’t keep her from working. I suppose that sort of thing helps to keep labor costs down in some sectors of the economy.
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“Most government transfer payments are not set up in anything like the way you would set them up to help people in need. The long-term needy people, if here legally and able to fill out forms, get something like $700/month, plus food stamps.”
I’m confused. Are you commenting that’s not enough? Or that the complications of the forms exclude many of the needy? Or something else I don’t understand?
The difference between my adult flaming liberal self and my teenage flaming liberal self is that I now understand that social safety net programs will subsidize some undeserving folk. I used to be naive enough to believe that everyone would try their best to as useful to society as they could. I now understand that’s not true, but am comfortable with counting that as a cost of helping those who really need it. There’s no perfection in any human endeavor, and there certainly won’t be with trying to help someone who needs it, either.
To help me revise my opinion, folks would have to stop repeating anecdotes of someone they know who knows someone who didn’t really need help but lived off the government dime, and show me statistics that show that the cost of helping the un-needy is too much, compared to the cost of helping the needy 60-70-80-100% fraud rates might do it. I do believe this level of corruption exists in some foreign programs, but I don’t believe it exists in ours.
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Or something else I don’t understand?
My bad. I hadn’t spelled out my whole thought. I was trying to make the point that you can, because of the current set-up, support both a smaller government and more aid to the needy. The two are only related because most programs for those in need get political support by having the middle class by votes from itself with the same program.
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Back to Laura’s original anecdote, can we really blame the lady for not being excited about chipping in for $97,000 a year reading teachers who just sit there and have kids free-read? Why should she be thrilled about that?
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“Back to Laura’s original anecdote, can we really blame the lady for not being excited about chipping in for $97,000 a year reading teachers who just sit there and have kids free-read?”
Going back to the original anecdote, and parsing? Should that lady be upset about paying a teacher to teach “those kids”? Or should she be upset about paying a teacher 97K? Or should she be upset about paying a teacher 97K, when, according to Laura’s report, the teacher isn’t doing very much in the classroom?
(or any combination of the above?)
NJ teacher’s salaries are public information, and can be found at this .com site: http://php.app.com/edstaff/search.php (unfortunately I haven’t figured out how one could download the data base). 6.8% of NJ’s 3539 5-8 Language Arts teachers make over 90K. The parallel figure for elementary school teachers is 4.6% of 6766.
Are these teachers being overpaid for the work we’d like them to do? Or is the proposal that they’re being overpaid for the work they’re required to do? Alternatively, are they correctly paid for the work we’d *like* them to do (but not necessarily for the work they actually do)?
I am completely unfamiliar with New Jersey, but these “high” salaries are concentrated in a few counties (Bergen pops out, and Passaic, and Hudson).
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Good point, bj. Here’s a chart of housing prices in Bergen County: http://www.city-data.com/county/Bergen_County-NJ.html
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bj,
If a senior teacher were doing a super job, teaching big classes, doing afterschool clubs, maintaining good communications with parents, and also training a series of highly-skilled apprentices, I’d be happy with a high five-figure salary. Otherwise, why not replace the $97k reading teacher with three $20k aides who can sit there just as well? I’m quite happy with professional salaries for professional output.
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Another salary issue is that as housing prices continue to fall toward the historical norm, it should be possible to support the same lifestyle in New Jersey with a smaller salary. A smaller salary with a smaller mortgage might actually be preferable to the current larger salary with a current larger mortgage. It’s New Jersey, for heaven’s sake–it’s supposed to be cheap.
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To return to the original post, and “Why should my money go to THOSE kids?” Creating regional school districts is very tricky. Here in Massachusetts, one regional school district tried to force the poorest town of the 5 member towns to pay the most: http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ma-supreme-judicial-court/1005099.html. They didn’t succeed, but they did take it to court.
Another regional school district may deregionalize: http://tinyurl.com/2dulv9n.
Looking at other articles, it seems that Raynham objects to paying more of the regional system’s costs. On the other hand, Raynham voters want to support the school system at a higher financial level than Bridgewater voters. http://tinyurl.com/2a92pzv.
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I don’t think that is the problem. I think the problem is so much of government activity consist of taking money from people and giving it back to the same people, minus administrative costs and plus a whole bunch of hassle and restrictions.
This was Henderson’s central point, although the histrionic responses failed to do more than rage at a guy who makes more than them for daring to complain about anything. I think Annie Lowrey was the only one to even remotely tackle this, and even she just made an offhand comment about a study on what the “rich” do — cut savings or household labor? — when faced with an unexpected drop in income.
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This was Henderson’s central point,
By the way, this is where we are, too. We make roughly halfway between $250k and the Hendersons, and while that sounds like a lot of money, it’s still a point at which you have to work and plan towards life-long wealth. Despite all the claims that for people like us, tax cuts just get “wasted” on savings, it’s absolutely false. We have a savings target every year that we are going to hit no matter what. The first n dollars that we lose in income are absolutely going to come out of the roughly $10k we spend on optional household labor, not savings. Is it really better to cut back our house cleaner — who is desperate for the work? — to half as often so that we can give that money to the government? How much benefit will go to people like her, once the incredibly well-paid bureaucracy gets its cut and does its shuffling?
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“Despite all the claims that for people like us, tax cuts just get “wasted” on savings…”
There are so many things wrong with equating “savings” and “waste” that I can’t even begin to think about it right now.
By the way, Siobhan, am I right in thinking that a lot of deductions that the rest of us get fade out at your level?
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“This was Henderson’s central point, although the histrionic responses failed to do more than rage at a guy . . . .”
How was this Henderson’s central point? My complaint about the tone and attitude and information in the letter was precisely that it did not make a central point other than the long whine about how his lifestyle would be affected by any increase in his taxes.
I am firmly convinced one of the last thing that the “Hendersons” will give up is their house cleaning service. In our experience, with that subculture: 1) find more income. 2) move/find charter/other options & reconsider private school costs 3) cut down vacations 4) cut discretionary spending — like computers & cars 5) decrease savings rate 6) cut household help.
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I do agree with Siobhan’s point about “it’s still a point at which you have to work and plan towards life-long wealth.” That’s where the professional “rich” class sees themselves as drawing the line — between themselves, who have to work, consistently, and at the height of their profession, in order to maintain their income/standard of living & those who don’t. And the wise among them are trying to build wealth so that earning 500K a year is not a requirement for their lifestyle.
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bj,
I agree that housecleaning would be far down the list, but I think cutting down on restaurant dining would also be one of the first things to happen, since it’s so obviously expensive for what you get (you may be thinking of meals out in “discretionary spending” but I think it deserves its own category since it’s potentially so large). With regard to household help, there’s also the option of going to a nanny-share, rather than having a whole nanny of your own (that was a popular cost-cutting option in DC).
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On second thought, even housecleaning and yard work aren’t on/off things. If you have cleaning help once a week, you can switch to once every two weeks. If you have cleaning help every two weeks, you can switch to once a month. If you have cleaning help once a month, you can switch over to as-needed help before Christmas or big MIL visit, etc. Likewise with hiring yard work (which I’m less familiar with because my husband and kids do 90% of our yardwork), you could step things down in much the same way.
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By the way, Siobhan, am I right in thinking that a lot of deductions that the rest of us get fade out at your level?
Oh, sure… but I don’t mind that too much. What upsets me is the horrific arbitrariness of the AMT. It’s a system designed to penalize people who have children and pay high local taxes. We are a family of five in southwestern PA, so we get screwed so hard, you would not believe it.
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On second thought, even housecleaning and yard work aren’t on/off things. If you have cleaning help once a week, you can switch to once every two weeks. If you have cleaning help every two weeks, you can switch to once a month. If you have cleaning help once a month, you can switch over to as-needed help before Christmas or big MIL visit, etc. Likewise with hiring yard work (which I’m less familiar with because my husband and kids do 90% of our yardwork), you could step things down in much the same way.
Yes, this is what I’m talking about. When I referred to “optional” domestic labor, I wasn’t thinking of all of our help. There’s an equal amount that I consider essential to our household’s sanity — and I would cut back on the items on bj’s list to keep it.
But the weekly-instead-of-biweekly cleaning? Having the gardener trim and weed and sculpt every week, instead of just cut the grass? Those would be the first things to go.
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In my circle of acquaintances, the cleaning service is the first to go, followed by charitable donations, vacations and new clothes. The yard service goes last, just before foreclosure.
For many high-earning professions, an appearance of affluence is very important. Thus, the luxury car lease continues. Home hygiene cannot be seen from the curb. There is some variation; if the husband is in charge of the family finances, the cleaning service goes first. If the wife is in charge of the family finances, cable t.v. goes first. If the children are o.k., but not great, at travel team sports, the family will “simplify their children’s schedules.”
Dining out is often a business expense, for some, and thus may be covered by the employer. Frequent flier miles may be paying for vacation travel. Hair coloring and professional nail treatments are also often cut from the family budget.
Moving is currently not a reliable option, unless you’re willing to downsize to a shack, as anything in a good school system would require a jumbo loan. You can leave your child in the private school, and downsize to a rental apartment in a bad school system–I’ve seen that.
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“Moving is currently not a reliable option, unless you’re willing to downsize to a shack, as anything in a good school system would require a jumbo loan.”
Plus there’s the problem of being unable to sell the silly thing.
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Oh, yes, that’s true all over, isn’t it? I thought I had included that in “currently not a reliable option.” I’d assume that people earning a great deal of money would have expensive houses, as the family home represents the bulk of most people’s savings. I see many houses on the market right now with *very*high* asking prices. They aren’t selling. Buyers don’t want to pay too much money for a house, even if they’re willing to take the risk of buying. I’m not in the market for a house right now, but I have noticed some sales fall through (signs reading, in succession, For Sale–Under Contract–For Sale, New Price!)
I do know someone who’s renting out her original house, and living in her “new” house. Two mortgages are not fun.
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Joanne Jacobs has just gone over some of the same ground: http://www.joannejacobs.com/2010/12/special-ed-spending-in-tough-times/
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