Archive for September, 2006

I have been reading the comments from the backbenchers, many of which make suggestions, and so I have decided to take them into consideration by specifically not writing about any of them :) But seriously, I appreciate everyone’s feedback, without participation blogging ceases to be worth the time…and well, it’s depressing.

Sorry my liberal friends, I just wanted to get your hopes up, he’s actually going to win.

Quinnipiac University seems to be the best place for polling data on the Liebermen-Lamont race. According to them, Lieberman maintains a steady 49%-39% lead, with 7% undecided. They break down Lieberman’s support:

In this latest survey, Lieberman leads Lamont 69 – 15 percent among likely Republican voters, with 12 percent for Schlesinger, and 50 – 36 – 4 percent among likely independent voters, while likely Democratic voters back Lamont 57 – 37 percent.

This race interests me for a few reasons.

I have great hope that the lack of Democratic Party support for Lieberman will turn him loose, and possibly even lead to the formation of some viable, moderate third party. I don’t like the thick ties that bind a politicians’ voting patterns to their Party. Now Lieberman will only be responsible to the conscience of his constituents and himself.

It also interests me because of the dichotomy of treatment in the parties that it potentially represents. I’m not convinced of this, but this example certainly supports the thesis. When there is a moderate maverick in the Republican Party, i.e. John McCain, there is a large chunk of the Party that supports him and a large chunk that dislikes him. However, with Lieberman, it sounds like most Democrats, at least nationally, genuinely disdain him. Ironically, tolerance has long been held as a liberal mantra. This means that Republicans are able to have intra-Party debates, which refine our views, as debates are intellectually healthy. Dissent and debate within the Democratic Party seems to be somewhat more, although I have no idea how much more, discouraged.

I don’t like to make arguments like this one, they come off as being partisan hackery, and I hate partisan hackery. But I put them out there to incite response from people within the Democratic Party, so that I might learn from them as to why I’m wrong. And, if you can’t summon sufficiently sharp arguments to kill these accusations, then I’ll blissfully remain a partisan hack.

This column will be printed tomorrow, Monday the 25th, in the Daily Illini.

If you live in an apartment, you’ve probably dealt with your fair share of broken stuff. Maybe the interior lights in the hallway go out, maybe your smoke detector doesn’t work, maybe the toilet leaks, maybe the window in your room is cracked.

And maybe you call up your landlord, and, if you’re lucky, they come and fix it right away. But if you’re not so lucky (and pretty much everybody I know who lives in an apartment falls in this category), it takes them weeks to finally come out and address the problem, or they don’t come out at all.

One of the few methods in place to ensure that your building is up to code is for an Urbana inspector to come inspect the premises. At the moment, Urbana has only enough inspectors to inspect a building once every seven years. This places a heavy burden on tenants to complain to the Tenant Union for an inspection, which many tenants are reluctant to do for fear of creating an adversarial relationship between tenant and landlord.

At an Urbana City Council meeting tonight, a proposal will be discussed which would increase the inspection team to ensure inspections every three years.

Landlords will argue that your rent will increase dramatically as a result of this. But if you do the math, the rent will go up about one dollar a month per unit.

They will also argue that your privacy rights will be infringed upon by snooping inspection teams (the same landlords who objected to a 1994 proposal that required landlords to give advance notice before entering a tenant’s apartment). But the ordinance requires 72 hours notice to both tenant and owner before an inspection team can come, which, by the way, most tenants would enthusiastically welcome if it means that broken window in the bedroom will get fixed.

But just in case there was a concern with privacy issues, I asked Colin Bishop, the chair of the Illinois Student Senate’s Committee on Student Rights and the President of the Student ACLU (an organization of which I am a member), about it. “I strongly favor increased enforcement of housing safety regulations,” he told me, “especially in a college community where many tenants are first-time renters and don’t know what to expect from landlords. It may even be the first time they’ve ever signed a contract.” And when the ACLU can’t find a privacy rights issue buried somewhere, you can rest assured that no such issue exists.

The most contentious provision of this proposal has nothing to do with inspections, though. The provision imposes fines on landlords who do not correct code violations by the first deadline given by the city. As the system works now, a landlord goes unpunished for violating code violations until the case escalates to the point of prosecution and conviction, which means the violation could go unaddressed for half of a tenant’s lease.

Esther Patt, the coordinator of the Tenant Union, calls this the most important provision of the proposal. “If there are no fines, my enthusiasm for this ordinance would disappear,” she told me. “The city fines tenants and homeowners for numerous violations, [including] noise, failing to cut grass, leaving trash on the curb—it’s ridiculous that landlords violating city codes get away with no fines.”

Especially when the issue comes down to a matter of safety. When a broken interior light results in an injury, or a broken window enables a robbery, or a fire goes undetected until it is too late due to a faulty smoke detector, landlords will have to fall back on sturdier arguments than minimal rent hikes and nonexistent privacy issues.

The city council meeting is tonight at 7:00 at 400 S. Vine Street. If you’ve got the time, and if you live in an Urbana apartment, go there and speak out. Your roommates will thank you, even if your landlord doesn’t.

Lately I have been surprised on multiple occasions to hear from many well-educated friends that they refuse to shop at Wal-Mart. Please correct me if this is inaccurate, but their moral concern can be stated as such:

1. I care about people who live in the middle and lower classes of this country.
2. It is my duty to do what I can to support them.
3. Therefore, my duty compels me to not shop at stores which do not pay ““living wages” to their employees.

I agree with prongs 1 and 2 of their moral concern. However, it’’s instructive to analyze how rational and factually accurate the conclusion, prong 3, is.

Jason Furman, an economist at New York University, wrote a paper which addresses our problem, Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story. The main conclusion from his paper is graphically represented by my mad Excel skillz below, but here is some concise, powerful language from his paper:

Productivity is the principal driver of economic progress. It is the only force that can make everyone better off: workers, consumers, and owners of capital. Wal-Mart has indisputably made a tremendous contribution to productivity. From its sophisticated inventory systems to its pricing innovations, Wal-Mart has blazed a path…Today, Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the country, the largest grocery store in the country, and the third largest pharmacy. Eight in ten Americans shop at Wal-Mart…

Plausible estimates of the magnitude of the savings [to consumers] from Wal-Mart are enormous,– a total of $263 billion in 2004, or $2,329 per household. Even if you grant that Wal-Mart hurts workers in the retail sector,– and the evidence for this is far from clear,– the magnitude of any potential harm is small in comparison. One study, for example, found that the “Wal-Mart effect”” lowered retail wages by $4.7 billion in 2000…

The most important thing from that excerpt is that savings from Wal-Mart’s productivity and efficiency, $263 billion, far exceed the negative impact that they have on wages, $4.7 billion. We know that the average Wal-Mart shopper has a household income of somewhere below $40,000 (That’’s according to George Will, but the median U.S. family income according to the BLS is ~$44,000). With savings of $2,329 per year, that’’s about 6% of those family’’s incomes. It’s also important to realize that savings from Wal-Mart must be added to a Wal-Mart employee’s salary if we are to compare Wal-Mart versus Target (or other stores) salaries. Combining these facts and then applying them to our original 3 prongs, we arrive at a very different conclusion: Support for Wal-Mart satisfies your duty to aid the middle and lower classes, while antipathy for Wal-Mart violently rejects your duty to aid the middle and lower classes. Slate also did a great, lengthy interview with Furman.

If you care about middle and lower class people, and you feel it is your duty to support them, then your morals should compel you to support and to buy from Wal-Mart. In fact, by not supporting and not buying Wal-Mart you harm the very people you so ardently and genuinely believe to be defending. By not shopping at Wal-Mart, you shop elsewhere and support less efficient businesses, which do not benefit millions of people as much as Wal-Mart does. You also lower Wal-Mart’s profit, which makes their employees less likely to receive wage raises and more likely to increase their prices for consumers.

This story is analogous to the outsourcing scare, which I wrote a Daily Illini article on with plenty of fun Data. The relatively small amount of harm done to a small number of people is easier to identify than the diffuse benefit bestowed upon millions of consumers, but anectdotal impressions is not the proper way to approach an economic question.

George Will has written a column on this topic which is loaded with data; however, in keeping with arrogant syndicated columnist traditions, does not cite most of his sources. He states that in response to a new Chicagoland store “More than 25,000 people applied for the 325 openings.” But those jobs hurt people, right? Anti-Wal-Marters must believe that 25,000 people are either masochists or don’t know what’s best for their own lives.

This analysis also points to the contradictory claims made by Democrats: We support middle and lower incomes families AND we do not support Wal-Mart. According to George Will, Johnny Kerry has said that Wal-Mart is “Disgraceful”” and symbolic of “what’s wrong with America.” Thus my assault is not only against those financially privileged enough to have the option of shopping at higher cost stores because their morality compels them to do so, but also against the Chicago City Council and the Democrats who are using Wal-Mart bashing as a 2006 campaign strategy. They are either stupid, confused about the reality of the situation, or disdainful of the millions of ordinary Americans who save $2,329 a year.

I have yet to see any substantive, data-driven arguments which show that hatred for Wal-Mart is anything more than a callow, trendy, bourgeois attempt at someone proving that they have a righteous moral system. It is made by people comfortable enough to not understand why Wal-Mart is important, even necessary to low-income families, and why it is the opposite of what they claim it to be: Moral.

Sometimes benevolent intentions without good understanding is just as evil as malicious intentions with good understanding.

I am waiting with baited breath for Buck B.’s promised respect rankings over at America vs. the World, but in the meantime, here’s my new edition, for the first time complete from 1 to 10.

1. Russ Feingold

2. Barack Obama (up)

In my last respect rankings, I called Obama “still a little unproven,” and that concern remains to a certain extent, but he is beginning to prove himself. His trip to Africa was a good start, and his surprising work with Tom Coburn (R-OK) has produced not only this bill mandating an online searchable database of all federal contracts and grants, but this one, designed to crack down on no-bid contracting at FEMA.

3. Colin Powell (up)

His letter urging the President not to redefine Common Article 3 was a bodyblow to the administration’s hopes of pushing through military tribunals in which men on trial for their lives cannot so much as see the evidence against them.

4. Arlen Specter (down)

Specter drops a couple spots due to his caving in on the NSA wiretapping program. The strange thing here is that Specter sponsored two different bills, one a compromise with the Bush administration that most Republicans are supporting and one co-sponsored with Dianne Feinstein, who, you will note, has eked her way onto this list.

5. Eliot Spitzer (down)

6. Edward Kennedy

7. Condoleezza Rice

8. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (up)

He is considering a run for mayor of Chicago, which would require him to unseat Daley. And while Daley is also on this list, he appears for one very specific reason. Regardless of that reason, Daley deserves to be unseated for his corruptive stranglehold on the city. It takes guts to take on a machine like Daley’s, and Jackson may just have some (not to mention, he could actually succeed).

9. Richard Daley (up)

It was tough picking who to rank higher between Jackson and Daley. Daley used his first veto ever to strike down the “big-box” ordinance, which Jackson strongly criticized him for. Daley is right. And for that, he makes the list, but I just couldn’t ignore his corruption enough to place him above Jackson.

10. Dianne Feinstein (up)

As noted above, she co-sponsored a bill with Arlen Specter that would streamline the warrant process but still ensures that FISA has exclusive oversight of domestic surveillance. Kudos to her.

Our friend Jaybandit over at Entropic Order has written this post on global warming, emphasizing to readers that the issue is still highly debatable.

Jaybandit does, it should be stressed, get at least one thing right in his post. The debate can be easily muddled because it involves several levels. Jaybandit is not arguing that global warming is not occurring, nor is he definitively taking the stance that people are not causing it. He is merely arguing that there is more than one side to the debate and that science has not come to a conclusion on the questions he raises. And while that sounds reasonable enough, it is the same last-resort argument that conservatives use when trying to insert intelligent design into biology classrooms or when attempting to cling to a reason to oppose adoption by gay couples. It’s a simple strategy: when the facts don’t support your side, argue that the facts aren’t 100% settled just yet.

But knowing that Entropic Order is maintained by two men of science, I humbly offer this attempt at a factual rebuttal of the points Jaybandit makes.

First, this:

More than 1,500 of the world’s most distinguished senior scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in science [98 out of 171], have signed a landmark consensus declaration urging leaders worldwide to act immediately to prevent the potentially devastating consequences of human-induced global warming.

That’s from an article published in 1997, during the Clinton administration. These cries have only gotten louder as the scientific community grows more and more alarmed. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the United Nations and composed of government scientists as well as several hundred academic scientists and researchers, concluded in a 2001 report the following (this is taken directly from the IPCC article on Wikipedia):

1. Emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols due to human activities continue to alter the atmosphere in ways that are expected to affect the climate (Anthropogenic aerosols are short-lived and mostly produce negative radiative forcing; Natural factors have made small contributions to radiative forcing over the past century)
2. There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.
3. Human influences will continue to change atmospheric composition throughout the 21st century

In addition, the national science academies the G8 nations plus Brazil, China, and India; the Committee on the Science of Climate Change of the National Research Council; the American Meteorological Society; the American Geophysical Union; the Geological Society of London; and the American Association of State Climatologists have all issued statements saying that (1) global warming is occuring, (2) it is being caused by humans, and (3) prompt action should be taken by world leaders.

I’d also like to respond in turn to several errors in Jaybandit’s analysis.

Error #1:

There are all of these convenient little graphs that show how temperature fluctuation coincides very closely with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Once again, there is no verification of this assumption that they are linked. I’m not trying to be a nut-job here, but there is nothing that says it couldn’t be the other way around. Perhaps there is another factor that actually causes the carbon dioxide to change because of the weather. Call me crazy, but billions of people on the face of the earth running around at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit produce a bit of heat.

It is scientific fact that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes the atmosphere to trap more heat than it otherwise would. That’s is what the greenhouse effect is, and that’s why carbon dioxide is labeled a greenhouse gas (GHG).

Error #2:

The ozone hold is one of those things that people use to “prove” that we are destroying the environment…All we know is that we found it all of a sudden, and that the concentration of ozone is decreasing; but there is no definitive evidence showing why this is happening. Another thing that you should realize is that it isn’t a “hole” as in there is a void in the atmosphere. It just means there is an area with low concentration.

First, the ozone layer and global warming are two unrelated issues that are often conflated. But regardless, let’s talk about it.

The Environmental Protection Agency disagrees with the first statement, saying here that ozone layer depletion is:

caused by the release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-depleting substances (ODS), which were used widely as refrigerants, insulating foams, and solvents.

It continues:

While it is true that volcanoes and oceans release large amounts of chlorine, the chlorine from these sources is easily dissolved in water and washes out of the atmosphere in rain. In contrast, CFCs are not broken down in the lower atmosphere and do not dissolve in water. The chlorine in these human-made molecules does reach the stratosphere. Measurements show that the increase in stratospheric chlorine since 1985 matches the amount released from CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances produced and released by human activities.

And while it is true that there is not a void in the atmosphere, the EPA demonstrates why the importance of the existence of an “area with low concentration” should not be diminished:

A diminished ozone layer allows more radiation to reach the Earth’s surface. For people, overexposure to UV rays can lead to skin cancer, cataracts, and weakened immune systems. Increased UV can also lead to reduced crop yield and disruptions in the marine food chain.

More detailed reports on the effects of ozone depletion and the health benefits of protecting the ozone layer are here and here.

Error #4

He cites this from Michael Chrichton’s book, State of Fear:

Most of the warming in the past century occurred before 1940, before CO2 emissions could have been a major factor.

The Industrial Revolution started in 1800s. CO2 has been increasing well before 1940.

This is getting pretty long, so I’m gonna quit for now and wait for the response. And, like Jaybandit did, let me make my intentions here clear. I am not merely arguing that global warming is happening, nor am I merely arguing that people are causing global warming. I am arguing that those two points are settled facts, and that prompt action should be taken by world leaders (I like to set a high bar for myself).

What that action should be is a reasonable topic of debate; I know there are plenty of reasons to question the Kyoto Treaty, for example. But I make the insistence that the time for debate over whether something needs to be done is over.