So it seems that some guy killed a couple of television news employees while they were broadcasting. It’s interesting that here in the US this kind of thing has become a “dog bites man” story. Steve M linked to an old story in The Onion, “No Way to Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. That was in reference to a mass shooting. And let’s be honest: in today’s tragedy, there wouldn’t be much coverage of it. After all, it only involved two murders. According to the FBI, mass shootings happen about one every two weeks. But that doesn’t include all the data. And even more important: a “mass shooting” must involve four or more people. So two deaths doesn’t even count.

But I’m not going to talk about gun control or any of that here. This is because I’ve learned that now is not the time to talk about these things. I used to think that “now” meant the time right after one of these horrific crimes. But since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that “now” means literally “now”: at the current time. We cannot talk about the easy access to guns and our over supply of guns unless it is not now. And since it is always now, we can never talk about it. Thus, I won’t talk about it, because as it turns out, it is now right now.

But I was struck by this bit of reporting by CBS News, Gunman in Deadly On-Air Attack Dies After Manhunt:

Thank God for that! It would be terrible if it were terrorism. If it had been some Indonesian Muslim we would have been required to talk about terrorism and immigration. But we aren’t. It’s strange though. There are roughly 10,000 gun homicides per year in the United States — 25 per day — one per hour. There are more than double that many suicides. Since 9/11, there have been 26 jihadist murders in the United States. There have been 48 (generally right-wing) terrorist murders. That’s a total of 74. For those arithmetic fans out there, in 14 years, we’ve had as many terrorist murders as we do on a typical three day weekend due to all causes.

I only mean to compare these numbers because people get so freaked out about terrorism while we can’t talk about gun violence in a general sense. If this attack in Virginia had been about Islamic terrorism, we would get nonstop coverage of how we must do something about the terrorists and how the Iran nuclear deal is to blame and all kinds of other nonsense. On the other hand, if it had been right-wing terrorism, we would be hearing about how terrible it is that there are still pockets of racism in our country — and that it wasn’t terrorism. But as it is, this will just be about a disgruntled employee or a mentally unstable man. One thing it will not be about is guns, because after all, he could have used a knife or a pipe bomb.

I say we should either care about the causes of senseless killing or we shouldn’t. We could go with not: “Adam Ward and Alison Parker and twenty odd other people were killed with guns today — no story there.” Or we could go with caring: “Adam Ward and Alison Parker were tragically murdered and we must do something about it.” I think the former approach is the better one, because we all know what we are actually going to do about this horrible crime: the same thing we always do: nothing.

Afterword

Despite the tone of this article, it is a tragedy that Adam Ward and Alison Parker were murdered, and my condolences go our to their friends and families.

Not surprisingly, Jonathan Chait wrote a big article swatting at the teachers unions, How New Orleans Proved Urban-Education Reform Can Work. It is based upon a recent Tulane University study that found that children in New Orleans are doing better since Hurricane Katrina was used to destroy teachers unions and rev up those charter schools that Chait’s wife gets paid to push. I’ve written about this before, Jonathan Chait Should Stop Writing About Education Reform. The truth is that Chait has no objectivity when it comes to this issue.

In contrast, Andrea Gabor wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover. There are a few aspect to it. But the bottom line is that the system is not working for the children that most need it. They are allowed to fall through the cracks via “tools” such as “suspensions, pushouts, skimming, [and] counseling out.” So hooray! The statistics on this are pretty clear: if you exclude the students who are doing most poorly, test scores will go up. That’s basic arithmetic that I suspect even the charter school cheerleaders understand.

In addition, there’s this, “A key part of the New Orleans narrative is that firing the unionized, mostly black teachers after Katrina cleared the way for young, idealistic (mostly white) educators who are willing to work 12- to 14-hour days.” There are a couple of things to think about here. First, this is the modern corporate world’s approach to cutting costs: get rid of experienced middle aged workers who cost more and replace them with inexperienced young workers who cost less. But if they are willing to work 14-hour days, isn’t that a good thing? No, it isn’t. First, we shouldn’t expect that of any workers. But more important is that as those young teachers get older, they will not be willing to kill themselves for the job. Now it may be that the schools will just replace them with a new round of young inexperienced teachers who will work 14-hour days. But this brings up a related issue: teacher shortages.

I have been flummoxed over the past few years to see two parallel things happening in public education. First, we have the education “reform” movement doing everything it can to make teaching a worse profession. Jonathan Chait is a great example. He simply lies when he claims that the current system “gives teachers high, and virtually absolute, levels of job security.” This is the old hysteria about not being able to fire bad teachers. Instead, Chait wants teaching to be the way it is for fast food workers where teachers can simply be fired without cause. He also has a problem with the system that “pays them based on years of tenure.” Because, you know, paying older, more experienced, and loyal workers is something that only applies to teachers.

But even while the education “reformers” are doing everything they can to make teaching a worse career move, we find that it is getting harder and harder to find qualified teachers. Carol Burris wrote, When it Comes to the Teacher Shortage, The New York Times Got it Wrong. She’s referencing an article that I discussed a couple of weeks ago, Schizophrenia of Education “Reform” Movement. The Times article claims that there are teacher shortages because the economy is improving and teachers have other options. That’s a nice story, and probably has a small amount of truth in it. But as usual when discussing education “reform,” the obvious cause is ignored.

Burris quoted a shocking statistic: over the last decade in California, there has been a 74% drop in students entering teacher education programs. A much bigger issue is that, “Common Core and its battles, high-stakes testing, the erosion of tenure, and the evaluation of teachers by test scores, have all contributed to the crisis.” In other words, being a teacher is not a compelling profession. We are turning teaching into exactly the kind of job that will not appeal to the kinds of people who would make the best teachers. We could still get teachers the old fashioned way — by paying them more — but, of course, that isn’t on the table either. The education “reform” movement wants miserable students who are great at taking tests and thinks that this should be facilitated by miserable teachers with low pay and no job security.

Everyone agrees that our educational system can be improved. But what we are doing is not designed to better educate our children. In as much as it is about the children at all, it is designed to create a better trained workforce so that our corporations don’t have to invest in worker training. But primarily what we are doing is making teaching a worse job and then whining that not enough young people are choosing it as a profession.

Over at The Fiscal Times, Mark Thoma wrote a really interesting article, The Politics of Income Inequality. He noted that, “The calls to cut government spending to avoid disastrous, though largely imagined consequences, and the push to cut taxes to avoid harmful economic distortions that supposedly lower economic growth are, in the end, about the desire to reclaim income lost to taxes.” In other words, all the claims about improving the economy and balancing the budget are just about the rich wanting to lower their taxes. That should come as no surprise to anyone around here. By and large, the rich are rich because they don’t care about anyone but themselves.

But a really big question remains, “Why do so many non-rich people go along with this?” After all, there are very few people who are rich. Clearly they are not supporting these policies out of a sense of greed. One big way that we are seeing in the Republican presidential nomination is immigration. More immigration is certainly to the benefit of the rich. But it isn’t that big a deal. They can easily bypass it if they can use immigrants as the reason why this generation of American workers is not doing as well as the last. “It’s not that the rich are taking all the productivity gains; it’s that immigrants are mowing laws for cheap!”

Thoma put it well:

So people blame the poor and the immigrants. Of course, it is nonsense. The truth is that the middle class and the rich get huge largess from the government. It is just, as I have discussed many, many times before, that our system is set up so that the richer you are, the less the help you get looks like welfare. The poor get special cards that they use in public so that their government assistance comes with a big dose shaming. The rich get billions in bank bailouts, set up so that they can say they were forced to take them and didn’t actually need them. The middle class, of course, don’t see the thousands of dollars they get from the government to pay their mortgages as welfare — it is just a tax deduction! (Uber-conservative Milton Friedman would disagree.)

The question is whether conservative policy would actually improve the lots of the working class. “Republicans will close the borders, slash spending that requires the redistribution of income to the undeserving, and when all is said and done the belief is that there will be more income and opportunity available to hard-working, upstanding, moral households.” I think the answer to that should be obvious. This isn’t an ideological conclusion of mine. It is empirical. The Republicans made this claim under Reagan, and not only did the working class do no better — they ended up paying higher taxes. The same policies were pushed under George W Bush and again, the working class got nothing. It’s kind of funny, actually, because the Republicans run around saying the Democrats have no new ideas, but the Republicans are pushing the exact same policies they’ve been pushing for 40 years. But there is an extra irony: those policies clearly haven’t worked, but they still push them.

Thoma’s argument is that we must do something about income inequality. Currently, it is just getting worse. And the worse it gets, the more pressure builds to do something about it. It would be nice to think that the economists are busy working on solutions. And I know that the so called liberal economists are working on it. The conservative economists are too busy giving well paid talks to groups of hedge fund managers. But ultimately, I think we will need to reevaluate the entire idea of capitalism.