Spring Forward? Not For The Middle Class

The Article: The Middle Class Really is in a Three-Decade Slump by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones.

The Text: Did middle-class incomes really decouple from overall economic growth in the mid-70s? If you look at median family income vs. GDP per capita, the answer is yes. From 1950 through 1975, both grew at about the same rate. After that, median family income grew quite a bit slower than GDP per capita.

But wait! You need to make sure to calculate inflation the same way for both measures. And maybe GDP per capita is a bad measure. Plus you need to account for health insurance and other benefits when you calculate median income. And the number of people per household has changed over time. These are all legitimate issues. So Lane Kenworthy redrew the chart to compare apples to apples: median household income vs. average household income. Median income shows only the movement of households that are smack in the middle of the middle class, while average income is similar to overall economic growth since it depends on total national income.

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Why Educated Conservatives Deny Science — and Reality

The Article: The Republican Brain: Why Even Educated Conservatives Deny Science — and Reality by Chris Mooney in AlterNet.

The Text: I can still remember when I first realized how naïve I was in thinking—hoping—that laying out the “facts” would suffice to change politicized minds, and especially Republican ones. It was a typically wonkish, liberal revelation: One based on statistics and data. Only this time, the data were showing, rather awkwardly, that people ignore data and evidence—and often, knowledge and education only make the problem worse.

Someone had sent me a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming.. It’s a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a paradoxical tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become more firmly established.

Those facts are these: Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the “radiative” properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation that would otherwise escape to space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place, but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can’t explain what we’re seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and their smokestacks.

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Paul Krugman On What’s Ailing Europe

The Article: What Ails Europe by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

The Text: LISBON- Things are terrible here, as unemployment soars past 13 percent. Things are even worse in Greece, Ireland, and arguably in Spain, and Europe as a whole appears to be sliding back into recession.

Why has Europe become the sick man of the world economy? Everyone knows the answer. Unfortunately, most of what people know isn’t true — and false stories about European woes are warping our economic discourse.

Read an opinion piece about Europe — or, all too often, a supposedly factual news report — and you’ll probably encounter one of two stories, which I think of as the Republican narrative and the German narrative. Neither story fits the facts.

The Republican story — it’s one of the central themes of Mitt Romney’s campaign — is that Europe is in trouble because it has done too much to help the poor and unlucky, that we’re watching the death throes of the welfare state. This story is, by the way, a perennial right-wing favorite: back in 1991, when Sweden was suffering from a banking crisis brought on by deregulation (sound familiar?), the Cato Institute published a triumphant report on how this proved the failure of the whole welfare state model.

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Why The Military Loves Ron Paul

The Article: Why Does the Military Love Ron Paul? by Adam Weinstein in Mother Jones.

The Text: Conventional wisdom on politics in the military can feel almost as age-old as the Constitution itself: Conservative Republicans are strong on defense, and the military skews conservative and Republican. Foreign wars? Bring ’em on! Unwavering ally of Israel? You betcha. More dollars for defense? If not, you must be with the terrorists.

The 2012 presidential race tells a different story: The lion’s share of political contributions by servicemembers and defense industry workers is going to anti-war, “soft on Israel,” also-ran candidate Ron Paul. In fact, the battle for their dollars isn’t even close: Paul has raised at least $282,868 from individual active-duty servicemembers and Pentagon employees—more than four times what the other three Republican presidential candidates have raised, combined. (President Obama has fared slightly better, drawing $123,644 from that group, but still less than half of Paul’s total. For more, jump to the charts below with the numbers by candidate and branch of the armed services.)

“Clearly there’s something about Paul that appeals to some members of the military,” says Viveca Novak of the Center for Responsive Politics [1], which provided Mother Jones with the most recent tally of military contributions. “Whether it’s that he speaks his mind, wants to end foreign engagements, has a libertarian’s view of the world—we can’t say.”

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What’s Missing From Children’s Books? Nature

The Article: Nature Goes Missing from Kids’ Picture Books by Sarah Laskow in GOOD News.

The Text: The film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax comes out on Friday, and conservative pundits fear the movie will inculcate America’s children with a passion for the environment. But even if Lorax-loving children do get their hands on a copy of the original Seuss book, whose environmental is stronger than the movie, it’s likely to stand out from the rest of their picture books just by depicting nature at all.

Children’s books with an explicit environmental message have always been rare, but a new study shows that, over the past few decades, fewer children’s books have included any images of nature. A team of sociologists examined Caldecott Award-winning books from 1938 to 2008 and found that, starting in the 1960s, built environments—a house, a store, anything constructed by humans—became much more common settings than the natural world. “Natural environments have all but disappeared,” the authors write.

“The environmental movement got into full swing around the 1960s and 1970s. I was really hoping that what we’d see was an increase” in natural environments, says Allen Williams, the paper’s lead author. “But what we were seeing was no, it’s not increasing.”

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