The TANF catch-all.

Interesting, and surprising to me, new report from the Brooking Institute on what has happened to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program in the US since it replaced AFCD welfare ten years ago. In short: TANF isn't welfare in the way we commonly understand it, and the way AFDC was commonly understood. For instance, in the three states considered, "cash assistance accounted for between a quarter and a third of Temporary Assistance spending in the three states in 2004" -- specifically, 24% in Wisconsin, 28% in PA and 35% in Ohio. Of that cash assistance, between 25% and 35% went, in the form of state earned income tax credits or similar programs, to individuals currently holding jobs. And 60% went to household with at least one active worker.

It's not entirely clear from the report how exactly the other two thirds of the TANF money is being spent, but a lot of it is going to child care, job training and various employment-related "social services" (see endnote 8 in the PDF for the clearest discussion) -- that is, in-kind services for working people. And many of the families receiving this in-kind assistance are not among those receiving cash assistance, and so don't get reported to the feds as beneficiaries of TANF. In fact, only about 20% of those who are receiving cash assistance from TANF receive the transfers for more than a year, making even the cash-portion of the program more of an unemployment insurance program than a "welfare-to-work" program.

(As an aside, Jason DeParle, in his book on welfare reform, quotes studies finding that about 20% of the old AFDC caseloads constituted the "permanent" AFDC welfare population. That same number, 20%, was excepted under federal law from the five-year time limit under the transition to the TANF block grant. It would be interesting to know if it's roughly the same 20% of people now getting permanent cash assistance under TANF.)

The authors of the Brookings report worry in the American Prospect that TANF will continue to lose its federal support without a clear role and accurate accounting of beneficiaries. If the program is as malleable as it appears to be, it's likely morphing to fill up the holes in the states' safety nets that most need plugging -- which is useful information in itself.

Child care for low-income workers is one such hole, obviously. Another possible benefit of the "new" TANF could be as a temporary disability insurance program. Currently, when injured or sick workers exit the labour market to apply for social security disability (SSDI) or SSI benefits, or both, they usually face a five month waiting period while their case is reviewed and their disability status confirmed (and that's not including the period of declining health and labour market activity before application). A 2002 paper out of the Population Studies Centre at UMich suggests that, in the mid-1990s, the income hole during those months was being partially plugged for some but not all SSDI-eligible families by workers' comp, private insurance or employer pensions. AFDC, by contrast, played no role (see Table 5 or Figure 11 if you're interested). But a catch-all state TANF program might do so. Or it might not. But it seems pretty important to understand in more detail what it is doing. Because it's not, apparently, providing "welfare".

Guh.

Tales from The Plank:

Last week in the Weekly Standard, the apparent inventor of the phrase, Stephen Schwartz, dismissed those who'd be offended by "Islamofascism" as "primitive Muslims." That should tell you all you need to know about those who use the term. I confess to using it, if ironically, in a recent piece, and here in Dearborn I learned precisely why you and I shouldn't. The people it infuriates aren't primitive. They're the moderate, pro-American, well-integrated Muslims who form one of the greatest bulwarks against Al Qaeda that the U.S. possesses, and they see the term as draining their Americanness away.

And for what? For a dubious linkage to a much different historical phenomenon? It doesn't diminish the crimes of the Taliban to observe that a Nazi would find Taliban-ruled Afghanistan unrecognizable. "Islamofascism" merely strokes an erogenous zone of the right wing, which gains pleasure from a juvenile reductio ad Hitlerum with the enemies of the U.S.

-- Spencer Ackerman, "The Case Against Islamofascism", 2:40 pm yesterday.


Oh, and by the way, according to The New York Times this morning, Iran's "supreme leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, (not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who increasingly and wrongly is being treated as a comic figure instead of a madman with post-modern arms at his disposal, an Islamofascist, in fact), announced yesterday that his country will "forcefully" pursue its uranium enrichment nuclear programs. Anyway, greetings from Israel, the first and already designated target of these activities. Don't blame the Israelis if they take these threats seriously.

-- Martin Peretz, "Ahmadihejad Attacks Maria of Romania", 10:04 am today.


Passive-aggressive self-parody? Is that a new one? I realize to my chagrin I'm offended on behalf of somebody I've never met.

But the hardest part of being a still-loyal but increasingly disspirited TNR subscriber is the realization of how good the magazine would be if Peretz would just shut the fuck up.

A brief explanation of everything.

...At least everything to do with functional welfare capitalism. This very neat article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker.

Read the whole thing. But in a nutshell:

1) Birth control is wonderful stuff.
2) Dependency ratios have huge predictive power for growth and welfare.
3) Private pension plans are a disaster in theory and practice (and for reasons you might not have explicitly thought of).
4) Public pensions and health insurance are basically the solution.
5) Walter Reuther understood all this stuff long before you did.


Fantastic stuff. Made my day.

Why good pundits don't necessarily make good politicians.

"The same logic of lesser evil applies only too obviously to Israel, whre granting the self-determination claims of Palestinians -- obviously the right political strategy to reduce terror attacks on Israel -- simultaneously requires the Israeli state to forcefully withdraw settlers who believe they have an equal right to the land."

-- Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil, p.87

Ottawa -- Liberal leadership front-runner Michael Ignatieff frankly admits he goofed when he said he was "not losing sleep" over civilian deaths in Lebanon.

"I think there's no question this was a mistake," Mr. Ignatieff said in an interview yesterday.

The rookie Toronto MP and internationally acclaimed human-rights expert has been mired in controversy since last week, when he made his first pronouncements on the crisis.

-- The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, August 14, 2006


It just goes to show, everybody needs an editor.

(On a more serious note, it would be nice if politicians didn't have to self-censor, but the world being as it is, and Canada especially being as it is, they do. (And no, Ignatieff doesn't appear to have been taken out of context here.) Even if you don't find Ignatieff's remark offensive or objectionable for non-political reasons -- and POGGE has a reasonable argument why you maybe should -- Ignatieff just has to learn not to make the sort of foolish, blowhard comments that Harper and the NDP can crunch on. At this point, I really think it's going to take a few more years of practice and patience before he does.

The Weekly Standard parodies itself.

Via John at Ezra's and Mojo: no, it's not time yet to actually attack Pakistan where officials recently helped to foil the attempted airplane bombings, arresting two men associated with the scheme.

But it's certainly time to start seriously thinking about attacking Pakistan, just to, you know, keep them on the straight and narrow.

The Globe and Mail's AIDS trainwreck.

Yes, it's time for more bitching about the Globe and Mail... this time its goony A4 feature story on AIDS in Canada, offered up in advance of the International AIDS Conference to be held in Toronto next weekend. Here's the gist of the piece:

When we think of HIV and AIDS now, we think of African countries, where HIV infection rates are skyrocketing each year. But the epidemic at home is more real than ever. Why is Canada, a developed nation that prides itself on its health-care system and one that helps fund international research for the disease, continuing to see people contract the virus that causes AIDS?

And here is the graphic that accompanies the piece:



I'll start with the obvious bloopers. Close inspection reveals that three of the HIV--infection source categories in the pie charts at the top are "male homosexual contact" (on the decline as a source of HIV), "heterosexual contact/other" (on the rise) and -- as a wholly separate category -- "sexual contact with a person at risk" (also apparently on the rise). Maybe I'm just too innocent, but if sexual contact isn't homosexual or heterosexual (or "other"!), just what kind of sexual contact is it?

Two of the next graphs show infection rates by province and ethnicity without any information about the underlying population distribution by province and ethnicity. But the real kicker comes in the final bar-graphs, in which we learn that Canadian doctors are diagnosing about 300 new AIDS victims per year. Leaving aside the G&M's breathless report, can the correct number really be that low, or is it a per-million-adult-population figure or something? According to the CIA World Factbook, there were 1500 Canadian deaths from AIDS in 2003 vs. what looks about 100 on the G&M's graphic. And even the 58,000 Canadians-living-with-HIV number reported by both the G&M and the CIA factbook indicates a national incidence of 0.3%, which -- although certainly the most startling number in the report -- actually seems pretty benign when you consider Dorothy Aken'ova's op-ed reporting that, worldwide "7,000 girls and women are infected with HIV every day." Every day.

But it gets better. Midway through the piece we read: Unlike many developing countries, Canada doesn't have tens of thousands of people becoming infected with HIV annually, but it is still seeing a climb in infection rates in all major groups...Canada needs to implement some basic strategies before it can expect progress in its efforts against HIV and AIDS, Dr. Montaner said.

All major groups? Before we can expect progress? Unless they're severely mislabelled, or unless HIV is showing a wildly different trend from full-blown AIDS, the bar graphs show that both total new diagnoses and total deaths have been declining monotonically in Canada for over a decade! It may be the case that women are making up a historically high percentage among total new HIV infections as the article goes on to discuss, but the overall AIDS pandemic is, according to the graphics, very much on the decline in Canada and has been since about 1992. Is this totally due to anti-retroviral therapy? What about people who don't go in for HIV tests? And what are the actual annual numbers on HIV infections? Who edited this article?

To be sure, I'm not saying AIDS isn't a problem in Canada (one in three hundred residents isn't something to sneeze at). I'm not even disagreeing with the various experts quoted in the piece that more federal money is needed to fight it. I don't honestly know. But this piece of reporting is just goony.


Update: Oddthoughts has some further thoughts. On further reflection, what seems incredible is that of a population of 58,000 HIV positive residents (a quarter of them undiganosed according to estimates reported at CBC), AIDS is causing so few actual deaths. Based on some more Googling, the numbers for exactly how many are all over the map. But GlobalHealthFacts says less than 1000. So maybe the trend is due almost entirely to anti-retroviral therapy and not to falling HIV infection rates. It would be nice if the G&M would tell us.

By his friends you shall know him.

I don't feel terribly sorry for Joe Lieberman as he faces defeat in the Conneticut senate primary tomorrow, but I do wonder if anybody in Lieberland has paused to think about how jarring it is that Lieberman's two Big Media defenders on the eve of the contest are Robert Kagan and Martin Peretz, both making about the worst possible cases (though in slightly different ways) that could be made for Lieberman before a Democratic primary.

Peter Beinart, characteristically, made a better, less hysterical defence of Lieberman recently:

To be sure, Lieberman's record in the '90s was not flawless. Some of his aisle-crossing--his support for capital gains tax cuts, for instance, and opposition to the expensing of stock options--was indefensible. But, on balance, his Clinton-era heresies--many of which became the heresies of Clintonism itself--left liberalism in a far stronger position at the end of Clinton's presidency than it had been at the beginning.

Does this matter? In a way, that's the question at the heart of Lieberman's reelection struggle. In the '90s, Lieberman proved a crucial check against his party's worst instincts. In the Bush era, by contrast, he has proved a poor check against the GOP's. While, in the Clinton era, he was often prophetic in recognizing the threat to liberal values posed by enemies overseas, in the Bush era he has been slow in recognizing the threat to liberal values posed by adversaries at home.


Fine, but it's all moot, isn't it? Lieberman could have made these arguments himself -- forcefully if he believed them -- and the liberals who support him could have echoed him strongly and created a counter-narrative to the sometimes ugly and unfair blogospheric-grassroots anti-Joe cacophony. But that didn't happen. As Mark Schmitt, Jason Zengerle, Charles Pierce and other commentators with varying degrees of sympathy have continuously pointed out, Lieberman ran a terrible primary campaign. And not just in terms of raw tactical and strategic incompetence (like say the recent Canadian Liberal national campaign.) Lieberman ran a positively alien-like Democratic primary campaign, with little or nothing for the Beinarts and Zengerles of the world, his honest liberal and neoliberal defenders, to latch onto and make resonate. Into that bemused void flowed Peretz and Kagan and Marshall Wittman to sound their angry, out-of-touch death knells for a Democrat.

There's a special kind of cluelessness at work here and it's got nothing to do with the "angry left" or the "sensible center". So long, Joe.

Postmodernisms

Derrida’s essay on Lyotardist narrative holds that consensus is created by communication. However, the primary theme of Pickett’s[3] model of Foucaultist power relations is a subcultural paradox.


In case somebody out there besides me hasn't happened upon this yet, the postmodernist essay generator.

More on "sucks".

I wrote about this before (and yes, I did used to really like Lee Seigel before, well...) and now somebody else has done it better:

Sucks is here to stay. And what's more, it deserves its place in our lexicon, for a couple of reasons. First, it's impossible to intelligently maintain that sucks is still offensive. The word is now completely divorced from any past reference it may have made to a certain sex act. When I tell you that the new M. Night Shyamalan movie sucks (and man, does it suck), my mind in no way conjures up an image of a film reel somehow fellating an unnamed beneficiary.


Exactly. And:

Sucks is the most concise, emphatic way we have to say something is no good. As a one-syllable intransitive verb, it offers superb economy. Granted, some things require more involved assessments (like, say, James Joyce: I find his early work unparalleled in its style and its evocation of emotion, while his later writing became willfully opaque in a manner that leaves me cold). But other things don't require this sort of elaboration (like, say, John Grisham: He sucks).


Here are some things that suck:

1) Peter MacKay's clownshow diplomacy.
2) The fact that my candidates hardly ever win elections (bad news for Gerard Kennedy).
3) Just about everything to do with the Middle East. Here's a good example.
4) Living with pain.
5) Raisins (especially when used to ruin cinnamon buns or bread pudding).
6) Law and Order: Special Victims Unit
7) Most of the Globe and Mail op-ed page.
8) "South Park Republicans".
9) The original Frankenstein. (Honorary mentions to D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love and Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley.
10) Pitchfork Magazine's review of How We Operate (which I could stomach if they actually liked early Gomez, but they gave In Our Gun at 2.7! Wankers.)

Feel free to add your suggestions.

Martinez and Carriles

From Jon Lee Anderson's current New Yorker piece on Cuba (my emphasis):

Castro has used the case of Luis Posada Carriles to argue that America has a double standard in its war on terror. Posada Carriles, a Cuban who holds Venezuelan citizenship, has spent the past forty-five years trying to kill or depose Castro. He is wanted in Venezuela for allegedly helping to plan the midair bombing of a Cuban passenger jet near Barbados in October, 1976, which killed all seventy-three people on board. (Cubans, citing recently declassified C.I.A. and F.B.I. documents that appear to support them, accuse the agency of having had prior knowledge of the attack.) In between escaping from a Venezuelan jail and—as he admitted to the Times—planning the bombing of hotels in the summer of 1997, killing an Italian tourist, Posada Carriles worked for Oliver North’s program to resupply the Contras in Nicaragua.

...Senator Martinez didn’t want to comment directly on the Posada Carriles case, because it was in the courts. But he denied that it had anything to do with the war on terror. “Cuba began the practice of hijacking airliners, and if Luis Posada Carriles bombed an airliner”—Martinez paused—“without condoning any specific act of violence, there was a hostile state of affairs at the time. This is no longer an issue and is just being used by a failed regime to keep people stoked up. We need to talk about the future, not the past.”


Wow. Just...wow. I realize Martinez himself is a Cuban refugee, but it's still amazing to read a US senator speaking that nonchalantly about someone accused of blowing up his own country's civilians.