Why Not Then?
I was doing my nightly run-through of headlines on CNN.com when I came across this.
The link goes to an article about a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that surveyed Americans and asked them whether, if an election were held today, they would vote for a faceless Democrat or George Bush, and 55% would vote for the Democrat. In my experience, I've found generic candidates, as is the case with Bush's competition in the poll, score 3-5% lower than an actual contender, so if the election were held today, it would be a tremendous landslide.
The question here is: why now? What has made 6-10% of Americans decide Bush was not the right choice? Why did they feel otherwise last November? Or, was Kerry such a terrible candidate that he actually bucked trends and was less attractive to voters than a generic candidate?
If it was the latter, then it is a failure of the Democratic party to connect with the average American, which needs calibrating. But if it was because American's perception of Bush has changed, this is a serious issue. Bush has not changed one bit since the election, or, for that matter, since 2000. What this means is that Americans were unable to see Bush for what he really is - a narrow-minded religious zealot bent on securing the world for corporate interests and capitalism. I don't know what events caused this sea change in perception, but it is far too late to be worth anything. Americans should have taken an active stance in preventing the White House from pushing through a veritable declaration of war on Iraq.
If anything, this poll has made me even more pessimistic about the state of this country.
Efficiency Practices At UConn
I do believe this is my first post concerning my home-away-from-home.
Efficiency at UConn. Let me first state that the preceding statement is a total oxymoron. I have never in my life seen poorer standards for conservation of resources. I'll start with water, since the school managed to recently dry up a river, then move to heating, since that is of the most concern to me right now (it being very cold outside).
Not long after school started, students recieved an email from the university pleading with them to conserve water, since the nearby Fenton river had recently been run dry by a combination of drought and UConn's increased pumping of it. A few days later, we recieved a congratulatory email saying that the school had cut 150,000 gallons of water usage from its peak daily total of over two million gallons. That's something to be commended, for sure.
The problem is that most of the cutback came from the university itself, not the student body, and I was unable to notice a single thing that was different. In the email, they claimed to only water the atheletic fields at half capacity, and to put off washing university vehicles. What disturbs me is that they were able to cut out 150,000 gallons of water usage, daily, without any noticeable side effects. Usage was just that wasteful in the first place. The university's long term solution is to upgrade it's pumps on the Willimantic river, which can handle larger demands than the Fenton. Furthermore, water usage will increase in the coming years with the further additions that UConn has planned, most notably the Mansfield Downtown project, which, according to blueprints, will add nothing to the water demand, though it will have a plethora of water fountains, bathrooms, and other water-usage facilities.
The problem with the heating, at least in the dorms, is that the system is so old it is unable to fulfill it's function effectively. There is no control system on the heaters in our rooms, only a dubious knob that seems to have little effect on the volume of air coming out. There is no temperature control, or, more importantly, shutoff. The air coming out is exceedingly hot, which forces all the rooms to open their windows to alleviate the heat. Therefore, the university has succeeded in violating the number one rule of air temperature control: "Don't try to air-condition (or, in this case, heat) the outdoors."
If the university would spend a few million dollars renovating the system to be more efficient, millions of dollars (of taxpayer and student money) could be saved each year on wasted heating. Even something so simple as allowing individual rooms to shut off and turn on the heat at their discretion could serve the purpose adequately. Instead, the university presses ahead with new projects aimed at expanding the college's prestige and image, deferring what should be routine maintenance until later and putting off renovations indefinitely. Recently, the heater in the Arjona building broke. What should be a routine repair will instead take three weeks because the system is so old the parts have to be found, not ordered.
It is essential that government institutions conserve resources, especially when the amount of resources is tremendous, as is the case with UConn. Energy efficiency is seven times as effective per dollar as the construction of new power plants, yet the government presses ahead with a two-pronged offensive: Urging consumers to conserve (government hypocrisy in action, once again) and building over 200 new nuclear power plants. It is absurd that a power-generation system proven unsafe nearly twenty years ago at Chernoybl would be viewed by the administration as the power source of the future. If public institutions would lead the way in conservation, we would not need to build these time bombs.
HA HA HAAAA!
It's happening! It's really finally happening!
Yea, it's all a big conspiracy, right Tom?
What's The Number One Problem In America?
Hint: It's not George W. Bush, but it has something to do with him.
So what is it? Voter apathy and ignorance. If we could fix the lack of citizen engagement in the democratic process, all the other problems - immoral wars, corrupt politicians, unfair taxation policies, corporate control of the government, etc. - would fix themselves.
There are two parts to the problem: apathy and ignorance. The first is a symptom of the second, so we'll start with ignorance.
Ignorance is a serious problem in American politics today. Many Americans believe themselves to be too busy to inform themselves on basic political issues, and in some cases that is true. Most Americans, however, could probably cut out an hour of sitcoms at night to read the paper and gain a basic understanding of what is going on in the world. An ignorant voter is, in fact, worse than an apathetic voter (or, more accurately, non-voter). Bush won both elections riding on a wave of ignorance that the mainstream television media helped to perpetuate. Gore was consistently misquoted, and the ignorant voter took such lines as "I invented the internet" and used them to form a picture of Gore as a boring, pretentious prick. Kerry was portrayed as a "Massachuesetts liberal" though, as The Political Compass does an excellent job of pointing out, he was in fact a conservative, albeit less so than Bush. Both these situations could have been rectified by a small amount of basic research by the voter. Gore, in reality, only mentioned that he voted to create the predecessor to the internet, and Kerry opposed liberal ideas from gay marriage to national healthcare.
Not only is how politicians viewed by citizens affected by ignorance, but so is how they view themselves. Gore repeatedly talked of how he would fund his programs by raising taxes on the wealthiest one percent of Americans. The problem is that, according to a recent survey, 20% of Americans believe they are in the top 1% of earners, and 78% believe if they are not there, they soon will be. This is a serious problem. A very worthy idea was defeated because Americans do not understand that the richest one percent are many times more wealthy than they ever can hope to be, and they most certainly do not belong to that group already.
Ignorance breeds apathy. When people feel they are not able to keep up with politics, they give up and disenfranchise themselves. Apathy, however, also causes ignorance. When someone doesn't care about something, they have little to no motiviation to learn about it - like me and math. This cycle means that the majority of the country is uninformed about what is going on in their government and what they can do about it.
What is needed is a on-going civics program in schools that teaches students from a young age that participation in the democratic process is essential to their well-being. What is needed is not the stuffy civics programs many schools offer today, which bored even me with useless facts about the Constitution that do not matter any longer. What is needed is to teach students about past events where a group of concerned citizens made a difference in government, and have them write letters to congressmen about issues that concern them. Have them participate in mock elections, and make sure they understand who they are voting for when they do so. Break down the common practice of voting along party lines, since many Democrats have less in common with Democratic voters than third party candidates do.
If citizens would be able to understand for themselves what is going on in government, and be positively engaged in the system, elections would become true "changings of the sheets" and not just the reaffirmation of an incumbent that they are now (97% of incumbents in Congress are re-elected). I don't care if someone votes for Bush because they agree with his tax policies or his stance on terrorism or whatever, as long as they know what they are voting for. What I do care about is someone who votes for Bush because he seems like a "good ol' country fella" and then has to spend the next eight years wondering why her children are always sick, never making the connection with Bush's lax environmental laws that allow the power plant in her backyard to release poisons into the neighborhood.
Living Wages
The federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. Connecticut has a slightly better pay rate, at $7.10 an hour. However, neither of these are enough to support a large majority of Americans. Raising the minimum wage is not a great idea either, because the ensuing inflation would hurt the poor almost as much as it would help them. Therefore, there needs to be another way to help the poor without hurting them and the rest of us - and there is.
A standard wage to use for a living wage is $10. This is assumed to be enough to support one worker and one dependent. Raising the minimum wage to $10, however, would cause a large inflationary increase - labor costs for those paying workers minimum wage will have nearly doubled. I could not get nationwide statistics for the number of workers earning less than $10 an hour today, but in California, it is around 30%, which I will assume to be about accurate for the nation, though in reality California is not a very good model for the national situation...
A better idea than raising the minimum wage outright would be to raise it to a lower rate, such as $8.00, and then have the government pay the remaining $2.00 to reach the living wage. If we assume 30% of workers in the country (and using the December 2004 workforce size of 132 million), then we have about 40 million workers who are earning less than $10 an hour. Now we will assume that each worker works 40 hours a week, and requires a weekly government compensation of $80. Yearly, each worker will require $4160 of government payment. For 40 million workers, it would cost the government $166.4 billion a year to compensate the entire United States workforce. This number, however, is the absolute highest possible figure. In reality, some workers now earning under $10 would have their wages raised above that mark when the minimum wage is increased, while others would earn between $8 and $10 an hour and require only partial government compensation. Furthermore, part-time workers are seven times more likely to be paid the minimum wage than full-time workers, making my example, which used the full-time benchmark of 40 hours of work per week, inaccurate and skewed the cost higher. Furthermore, tax income would increases along with the expenses, so some of the cost would be offset. In reality, the total cost to the government would be much lower.
How could we pay for this? Well, the most obvious answer is to raise taxes on the wealthy, and make sure they pay them. Every year, the nation's wealthiest individuals put $55 billion dollars in offshore accounts that are immune from federal taxes. If we were to tax that money alone, at a rate of 40%, it would generate over $20 billion a year in excess revenue. If we were to raise taxes on the wealthiest one percent (which, by the way, 20% of Americans believe they belong to), who control half of the country's wealth, we could easily pay for the wage compensation program and have money left over for education and health care. And if we reinstated the estate (death) tax, which would affect only the wealthiest of Americans, even more money would be available to pay for things such as rebuilding New Orleans. Overall, the idea of helping the poor survive by taking from those who will never touch the billions they have lying around is hard to argue with.
