More on Redistribution and Voting Patterns

Having previously written about the subsidization of red states by blue states, I was interested to read last Sunday’s NYTimes article on the seemingly paradoxical, some would say hypocritical, attitudes of people who receive aid and their support of a candidate who advocates reductions to the social safety net. The piece highlights Chisago County, northeast of Minneapolis, an area with little poverty but plenty of people who receive government benefits.

Many people [in Chisago County] say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.

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But the reality of life here is that [residents of Chisago County] continue to take as much help from the government as they can get. When pressed to choose between paying more and taking less, many people interviewed here hemmed and hawed and said they could not decide. Some were reduced to tears. It is much easier to promise future restraint than to deny present needs.

“How do you tell someone that you deserve to have heart surgery and you can’t?” Mr. Gulbranson said.

He paused.

“You have to help and have compassion as a people, because otherwise you have no society, but financially you can’t destroy yourself. And that is what we’re doing.”

He paused again, unable to resolve the dilemma.

“I feel bad for my children.”

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The government helps Matt Falk and his wife care for their disabled 14-year-old daughter. It pays for extra assistance at school and for trained attendants to stay with her at home while they work. It pays much of the cost of her regular visits to the hospital. Mr. Falk, 42, would like the government to do less.

“She doesn’t need some of the stuff that we’re doing for her,” said Mr. Falk, who owns a heating and air-conditioning business in North Branch. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing if society can afford it, but given the situation that our society is facing, we just have to say that we can’t offer as much resources at school or that we need to pay a higher premium” for her medical care.

Mr. Falk, who voted for [upset winner over long-serving Congressman Jim Oberstar, GOP Representative "Chip"] Cravaack, said he did not want to pay higher taxes and did not want the government to impose higher taxes on anyone else. He said that his family appreciated the government’s help and that living with less would be painful for them and many other families. But he said the government could not continue to operate on borrowed money.

“They’re going to have to reduce benefits,” he said. “We’re going to have to accept it, and we’re going to have to suffer.”

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Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates. [Minnesota, it should be noted, is not one of those states. It contributes more to the federal treasury than its residents receive. --ed.]

Conversely, states that pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits tend to support Democratic candidates [like Minnesota does --ed.]. And [Dartmouth political science professor Dean P.] Lacy found that the pattern could not be explained by demographics or social issues.

Chisago has shifted over 30 years from dependably Democratic to reliably Republican. Support for the Republican presidential candidate has increased relative to the national vote in each election since 1984. Senator John McCain won 55 percent of the vote here in 2008.

Residents say social issues play a role, but in recent years concerns about spending and taxes have predominated.

Some of the fiercest advocates for spending cuts have drawn public benefits. Many, like Mr. Falk, have family members who rely on the government. They often cite that personal experience as the reason they want to cut government spending.

Paul Krugman devotes his column today to the Sunday Times article and points out the seeming contradiction of residents of states and communities that receive more aid than they contribute being the most aggressive and adamant in their desire to elect representatives dedicated to cutting benefits.  He offers three theories as to why that might be:

…working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.’s exploitation of social issues. And it’s true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who don’t.

Still, as Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman points out, the really striking red-blue voting divide is among the affluent: High-income residents of red states are overwhelmingly Republican; high-income residents of blue states only mildly more Republican than their poorer neighbors. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Gelman invokes social issues, but in the opposite direction. Affluent voters in the Northeast tend to be social liberals who would benefit from tax cuts but are repelled by things like the G.O.P.’s war on contraception.

Finally, Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they “have not used a government program.”

I agree with much of Krugman’s analysis, but I have a fourth theory. Back to the initial Times article that is the basis for Krugman’s commentary:

Brian Qualley, 49, has a sister who survived a brain tumor but was disabled by its removal. The government pays for her care at an assisted-living facility. Their mother scrapes by on Social Security.

Mr. Qualley said that the government should provide for those who need help, but that too much money was being wasted. Mr. Qualley, who owns a tattoo parlor in Harris, north of North Branch, said some of his customers paid with money from government disability checks.

“They’re getting $300 or $400 tattoos, and they’re wearing nice new Nike shoes that I can’t afford,” he said, looking up from working a complicated design into the left leg of a middle-aged woman. “I guess I shouldn’t say it because it’s my business, but I think a tattoo is a little too extravagant.”

From time to time during my time in Chicago, I have worked with professionals who live among those receiving federal benefits like food stamps and welfare. Yes, I know I live among those receiving federal benefits like Social Security and Medicare, but stay with me on this. Never have I met people more uniformly ticked off about how that aid is used and how it affects their communities. They were in pretty much every case quite adamant about the dangers and perverse incentives of the federal safety net, its unfairness with people getting it that don’t deserve it, and the need to reduce benefits. (The reference to welfare should tip you off about how long ago these days were.) So, like Mr. Qualley, I think that those that see the effects of federal aid on a regular basis and experience it in their own lives understand it in a slightly different way than the rest of us do.* It’s more visceral; they live it on a daily basis.  And as cited throughout the article, residents of Chisago County recognize the untenable position that they and the federal government are in with the generosity of the aid. They know the flow must, at some point slow. They’re doing their part to slow it by electing a budget cutter. Like many an addict, they can’t wean themselves from it so long as it’s offered. Some of them show discomfort for taking it and see what it’s doing to them, but so long as you show up with the score, they’ll take it.

*This was not true of my experience with the safety net. I received thirty-nine weeks of unemployment insurance during my sixteen months without work. It was enough to put groceries on the table, gas in the car, and keep the lights and heat on but not much more. Contrary to the popular argument against unemployment insurance, I was under no illusion that I should hold off on getting a job because of the generosity of the federal largess being directed at me. I was fortunate to have built my own safety net; I could get by without it, though not indefinitely. I wasn’t embarrassed to take it. I don’t believe my receipt of the aid was undeserved. My employer had paid into the system for that purpose and was going to extract everything owed to me from them. I felt that they got much more than they paid for in terms of my efforts versus their “lovely parting gift” to me. In the long run, the aid was a gift, but not a monetary one. It changed the way I think about being poor and nearly poor and those who, haven’t won the Birth Lottery, as I have and as those that have surrounded me for my entire life have. Those people who have to figure out life without the good schools and the caring parents and role models and ambitious friends and the ability to afford college and all those other innumerable advantages that have accrued to me and those around me. The process has made me more empathetic–a word rarely associated with me in the past–and appreciative.

The People That Make Our Stuff

There are no yoga breaks at Foxconn

Hey technology lovers, spend 45 minutes and listen to Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory, a story broadcast on This American Life (and if you can’t listen then read the transcript, excerpted below).

I listened to it this morning on the train, and couldn’t stop even after I arrived at my desk.  It has haunted me all day. Part of that haunting is the way the author tells the story.

There’s some things in it that are difficult to listen to; listening as I do with “first world ears.” The working conditions described are not to be wished on anyone, but they’re all part of the process of economic development, as Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof express at the end of the piece. But knowing that what’s described is a necessary part of lifting people and countries out of poverty doesn’t make me feel better about the process and its effect on the workers involved at FoxConn and all the other factories like it.

Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show recently did a feature on FoxConn, too. The Fear Factory segment can be seen here. What Mike Daisey does with his totally absorbing monologue, Stewart and his team carry out with humor.  But don’t laugh so hard that it makes you miss the point and not give you the creeps. The Daily Show can be funny that way.

There are many universities that have become very finicky about where the t-shirts and sweatshirts bearing their logos are made and whether they’re manufactured with prison labor or child labor. Yet some of those same universities somehow have deals with Apple to outfit their students with technology made in those same kinds of places.

We all are turning a selectively blind eye.

I’d like to hope that once you hear this story and think about its meaning, you’ll be a little less cavalier with how you treat your equipment and how you think about them. Someone spent 34 straight hours making that thing that you’re about to leave in a cab or throw on the couch. Treat it with respect not only for the miraculous things it can do, but as a work of art that people literally slaved to place into your hands.

Here are excerpts of Mike Daisey telling his story:

My only hobby is technology. I love technology. I love everything about it. I love looking at technology. I love comparing one piece of technology with another. I love reading rumors about technology that doesn’t exist yet. I love browsing technology. I love buying technology. I love opening technology. Even when it’s in that bubble packaging, I love opening it. I love the smell of a new piece of technology, that sort of burnt PVC smell when you run electricity through it for the first time. I love that.

And of all the kinds of technology that I love in the world, I love the technology that comes from Apple the most, because I am an Apple aficionado. I’m an Apple partisan. I’m an Apple fanboy. I’m a worshiper in the cult of Mac. I have been to the house of Jobs. I have walked the stations of his cross. I have knelt before his throne.

…

Today Shenzhen is a city of 14 million people. It is larger than New York City. Depending on how you count it, it’s the third largest city in all of China. It is the place where almost all of your crap comes from.

And the most amazing thing is, almost no one in America knows its name. Isn’t that remarkable that there’s a city where almost all of our crap comes from, and no one knows its name? I mean, we think we do know where our crap comes from. We’re not ignorant. We think our crap comes from China, right? Kind of a generalized way. China.

But it doesn’t come from China. It comes from Shenzhen. It’s a city. It’s a place.

…

My plan is this. We are in a taxi right now in the factory zone. We are driving on our way to Foxconn. Foxconn, a single company, makes a staggering amount of the electronics you use every day. They make electronics for Apple, Dell, Nokia, Panasonic, HP, Samsung, Sony, Lenovo, a third of all of it. That’s Foxconn. And at this plant they make all kinds of things, including MacBook Pros and iPhones and iPads.

And so my plan is to take this taxi to the main gate, and then I’m going to get out of the taxi with my translator. And then my plan is to stand at the main gate and talk to anybody who wants to talk to me.

…

…the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen is enormous. The Foxconn plant in Shenzhen has 430,000 workers. That can be a difficult number to conceptualize. I find it’s useful to instead think about how there are more than 20 cafeterias at the plant. And then you just have to understand that workers told me that these cafeterias can hold up to 10,000 people. So now you just need to visualize a cafeteria that seats 10,000 people.

…

And I look up past the gates and the guards. I look up at the buildings, these immense buildings. They are so enormous. And along the edges of each enormous building are the nets, because right at the time that I am making this visit, there’s been an epidemic of suicides at the Foxconn plant. Week after week, worker after worker has been climbing all the way up to the tops of these enormous buildings and then throwing themselves off, killing themselves in a brutal and public manner, not thinking very much about just how bad this makes Foxconn look. Foxconn’s response to month after month of suicides has been to put up these nets.

…

Do you really think Apple doesn’t know? In a company obsessed with the details, with the aluminum being milled just so, with the glass being fitted perfectly into the case, do you really think it’s credible that they don’t know? Or are they just doing what we are all doing? Do they just see what they want to see?

…

They work a Chinese hour, and a Chinese hour has 60 Chinese minutes, and a Chinese minute has 60 Chinese seconds. It’s not like our hour. What’s our hour now, 46 minutes? You know, you have a bathroom break, and you have a smoke break. If you don’t smoke, there’s a yoga break. This doesn’t look anything like that. This looks like nothing we’ve seen in a century.

They work on the line, and the lines only move as fast as its slowest member, so each person learns how to move perfectly as quickly as possible. If they can’t do it, there are people behind them watching them. And there are cameras watching both sets of people, and people watching the cameras. They lock it down. They sharpen it to a fine, sharp edge every hour, and those hours are long.

The official work day in China is eight hours long, and that’s a joke. I never met anyone who had even heard of an eight-hour shift. Everyone I talked to worked 12-hour shifts standard, and often much longer than that, 14 hours a day, 15 hours a day. Sometimes when there’s a hot new gadget coming out– you know what the [BLEEP] I’m talking about– sometimes it pegs up to 16 hours a day. And it just sits there for weeks and months at a time, month after month after month, straight 16′s, sometimes longer than that.

While I’m in-country, a worker at Foxconn dies after working a 34-hour shift. I wish I could say that’s exceptional, but it’s happened before. I only mention it because it actually happened while I was there.

…

Then the workers start coming in. They come in in twos and threes and fours. They come in all day. It’s an eight, nine-hour day. I interview all of them. Some of them are in groups.

There’s a group that’s talking about hexane. N-hexane is an iPhone screen cleaner. It’s great because it evaporates a little bit faster than alcohol does, which means you can run the production line even faster and try to keep up with the quotas. The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them can’t even pick up a glass.

I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It’s like carpal tunnel on a scale we can scarcely imagine. And you need to know that this is eminently avoidable. If these people were rotated monthly on their jobs, this would not happen.

But that would require someone to care. That would require someone at Foxconn and the other suppliers to care. That would require someone at Apple and Dell and the other customers to care. Currently no one in the ecosystem cares enough to even enforce that. And so when you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27, your hands are ruined. And when they are truly ruined, once they will not do anything further, you know what we do with a defective part in a machine that makes machine. We throw it away.

…

[Here's New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul] Krugman. “It is the indirect and unintended results of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs. It is not an edifying spectacle, but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful, but nonetheless significantly better.”

Does Krugman make you feel any better about what you’ve heard or read?  Me neither.

Interesting Pictures (If You Like This Sort of Thing)

“There are three kinds of lies.  “Lies, damned lies and statistics.”

This quotation is often attributed to former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, although the coinage is in doubt. Personally, my money is on Mark Twain.  Not because of any particular knowledge but because it sure sounds like something he’d come up with.

In general, I’m in agreement with the assessment of the use of numerical analysis to bolster weak arguments.  I’m in the business of making presentations and I can make a graph dance with data designed to show only the side I want you to see.  I don’t mess with the data, only the way the data is depicted in the picture.  It’s not remarkable, but you’d be surprised how many presenters don’t pay attention to the power of their pictures and how many audiences don’t realize they’re being manipulated.

With that said, I present three charts that are making their way around the Internets now that we’re done with the Hurricane Hysteria (for now).  The data in the charts is not complicated and therefore not subject to the kind of manipulation discussed above (that’s the way to tell if you’re being toyed with–ask yourself about the underlying complexity of the data.  If it should be simple but appears complex, you’re being played).  All three charts concern federal spending and the budget deficit.  The data is sourced from the Budget of The United States and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  I have not independently sourced or verified the data.

The charts were originally produced here, and the author of that site is responsible for the captioning (of which I’m not necessarily a fan).  Further, I think that the accuracy of the estimates for 2012 and 2013 should be highly discounted, given the dismal performance of the U.S. economy.  I think it’s fair to say that the only way the numbers depicted become reality is with a rather substantial economic turnaround–one that has not made itself apparent at this point.

Recently, former Bush II speech-writer David Frum (author of the phrase “axis of evil” and other bell-ringers) wrote what I think is the most provocative and eye-opening couple sentences about the state of political discourse and economic thought and information on his blog, FrumForum.

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

So, in the interest of providing information that might run counter to your current thinking on the topic and with all the caveats noted above, here are the graphs.

It's a lot of money, but certainly not as big a change as some would like you to think it is.

Not information you'll get from watching CNBC.