Morning Ed: United States {2016.02.17.W}
Zaid Jilani argues that ex-presidents get generous pensions precisely so that they don’t have to engage in Clintonesque speaking tours. Anti-Clinton angle aside (obviously, it’s not just the Clintons), it’s an interesting history.
In an article lamenting the lack of regulation for tax preparation services, Ben Steverman points out that tax preparers actually have a worse track record than amateurs. Some of that may be due to the complexity of the returns they hand.
The ABA is cracking down on underperforming law schools with simpler-but-tougher bar-passage requirements.
Assimilation: Still not a problem.
The Hmong seem to be doing pretty well in the US.
When it comes to religion, the US is in the middle of the pack, but compared to wealthy countries we are a major outlier.
With Planned Parenthood defunded, Texas is looking to fill the gap that was created.
I read a fantastic book on a Hmong family — and broader Hmong culture — called “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”. Powerful, moving, but heavy.Report
That was a great book.Report
I lived in Merced when that was taking place. Maribou is also a fan of the book. The other big Hmong book is Tragic Mountains. Over the years I have worked with and known a lot of Hmong people. Great people to know.Report
Law School: I think this requirement is likely to backfire and schools are going to turn law school into three years of Bar Prep. That’s what happened to Golden Gate University Law School in San Francisco when they were put on warning about low passage rates around 2007.
When the legal economy collapsed, many people predicted that a lot of lower-tier law schools would close their doors.* There were varying degrees of elitism and/or snobbery in these comments. People were saying anything from “Don’t go unless you get into one of the top 50 schools, top 20 schools, top 14 schools, top 10 schools.” What people did not account for is that the school’s would fight to stay open for a variety of reasons. The admin and professors count on their law schools remaining open for employment. Many (maybe most) law school professors would be just as a jobless as the recent graduating classes. Or if they got employment, the hours would be much longer.
There were also sentimental(ish) reasons for many law schools to stay open. My alma mater, USF, was founded in 1912. For decades, it was a well-respected local law school in Northern California. California’s eminent historian, Kevin Starr, mentions that USF’s Law school provided the bar and bench of San Francisco for many years in his epic history of California. This changed somewhere in the early aughts.**
What did many schools do to survive? They either offered free tuition and went from being cash cows to
money losers and/or they radically slashed their admissions standards. The reason that so many people are failing the bar is that law schools are admitting people who would not have been admitted 5-10 years ago to any law school even ones like Cooley.
*I don’t know why everyone expected a bunch of law schools to say something like “I guess we should close up shop. We had a good run.”
**What happened seemed to be the collapse of the locally well-respected law school. This started happening long before the current legal market collapsed but the fiscal crisis acted as a catalyst. Schools like USF, Suffolk, etc were known for training your work-a-day lawyers and judges. Now grads from more elite schools are taking jobs at the small firms, medium firms, and government offices that used to employ grads from Suffolk, USF, etc.
*I think the real thing that happened in the legal marketReport
Law schools that are attached to universities are especially unlikely to fold. It’s a point of pride for the schools, but also law schools are where state legislators come from. Southern Tech’s law school has been with it’s weight in gold.Report
From what I can tell, law school tuition helps subsidize other programs in most universities. There is no particular reason that a year of law school should cost more than a year of undergrad in most liberal arts programs.Report
This was true until recently. Law School cost a lot and subsidized everyone else. This is why many schools wanted to start their own like Indiana Tech and UC-Irvine.Report
I’m not sure your timing is right.
When the Great Recession hit first year law school enrollment went up (PDF). (going back to school has been a common response to the last three recessions) Plus, two *more* law schools opened.
The drop off in law employment *then* caused law school enrollment to crater starting in 2012. Because in the big picture, supply and demand does work.
If the schools are trying to sustain themselves financially by reducing revenue from the existing students, well, that must be why they’re lawyers and not MBAs.Report
The idea that most of the second and third tier law schools would shut down willingly and without a fight is one of the dumbest parts of the law school crisis debate. My law school, New York Law School, existed since 1896. Its one of the oldest and few remaining independent law schools in the United States. Like USF, it has a long tradition of providing an education for the everyday lawyers and judges of the New York City metropolitan area. Senator Wagner of the Wagner Labor Relations Act and the younger Justice Harlan were educated at New York Law School. Even if New York Law School was no longer in the top law schools nationally, it wasn’t the sort of institution that would willingly close down because of changes in legal education and the legal market.Report
There is actually a very big need for lawyers willing to practice real person law. The problem is that a lot of people who need help from real person lawyers can not afford to pay even a fair market rate unless they are in a highly motivated position to do so because of the nature of their needs like immigration or criminal defense. Many people who really need legal help simply can’t afford it.Report
I’m almost never in need of legal services, so am asking what is a “fair market rate” these days?Report
It depends on the nature of the service needed and the geographic location but I’d say most real person law should cost somewhere between 4000 and 6000 dollars at minimum from start to finish. Even for fairly successful people, this could be a lot of money. It also depends on whether a lawyer charges by the hour or not. For my area of law, immigration, charging by the hour doesn’t really work for a variety of reasons so you need to figure out what a typical service should cost and hope you don’t exceed it or have a provision about unforeseen expenses.Report
Most people who need legal services are ignorant of the fact.
If you’re doing something that’s larger than about $1,000, you should probably consider a lawyer. Doubly so if you’re doing home improvements, or anything where you are creating a “relationship” rather than a simple business transaction of terse length.
It’s a couple of thousand dollars for title insurance and to have a lawyer when you close on a house. Totally worth it, if only so the real estate agents can’t collude and lie to you (their incentive is to get a deal, any deal, and if you’ll roll, they’ll roll you if needed to get their money).Report
Re: Presidential pensions, I’ve always been curious about how hard it is to adjust to no longer flying on a private jet, not having someone do the cooking and cleaning, etc. After eight years in particular, it must be quite a shock.Report
re assimilation, CAP buries it’s findings. It’s unsurprising that Latino immigrants have fared well in Arizona. Assimilation rates are impacted by public education and density. California does relatively poorly at assimilation because fewer demands are made to learn English, and the schools (at least in L.A.) teach that Latinos are victims.
Looking at the figure on page 27 of home-ownership rates of Latinos, one might conclude that red-states do better at assimilation than blue states. That is no doubt due to high cost of housing in blue states, but that is still a creation of policy — these states have higher preferences than affordable housing, and these preferences hinder assimilation.Report
That sort of presupposes that home ownership is an inherent aspect of assimilation. But California’s native-born citizen population has a low rate of home ownership too. To say that immigrants in California aren’t assimilating because they’re not buying homes is circular reasoning.
Specifically, the report cites that the CA trendline, though it reflects the high costs of housing in CA, fits the overall pattern. Ditto other states with high costs of housing, and conversely, other states with low cost of housing.Report
Home-ownership isn’t my preferred metric, it was one selected by the report to make their point. And if they wanted to adjust for variation in cost-of-living, they could have done that, but then their income metric would have cratered in California as well.Report
The divergence between the United States and other Western countries on matters of religion is one of the most interesting developments in Western society. The standard explanation is that the United States remained more religious than Europe because we had separation of religion and state and a religious market place from the get go while in Europe religion suffered from monopoly problems. I’ve never really put much stock in this explanation. European countries might have had state religions but many of them did allow for at least some freedom of religion by the 19th century. The other settler countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also had freedom of religion from the start but quickly secularized during the mid-20th century. Quebec was a de jure Catholic theocracy until the Quiet Revolution and Ontario was a very Protestant place. Toronto used to be called Toronto the Good because of its strict adherence to Sabbath observance. Canada is just as secular as Europe these days.Report
There are a lot of different flavors of secularism. The post-theistic universalism that seems ascendant is really interesting to watch in practice.
But I say that as someone raised to be one of those weaponized Young Earth Creationists.Report
Would they put you and other people from your church in a catapult or something and aim you at a bunch of non-religious people?Report
You’re a religious minority, Lee. Have you been oppressed yet?Report
Sorry if I caused offense. I was just making an unfunny joke from your choice of words.Report
It’s all good.Report
I have a hair trigger today and probably will for the foreseeable.
This low-carb diet is putting stress on me in areas where I am used to fluffy, fluffy comfort.
I apologize for snapping.Report
Coming off the blood sugar roller coaster can be a bitch baby!
In the words of Homer Simpson: “Hmm forbidden doughnut”Report
Separation of church and state is not a good reason by itself, particularly as many U.S. states had established churches and religious tests for a long time.
I think an explanation starts with the English-speaking world having higher “tradition” values in the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map, and religion is an aspect of tradition. Many of the early immigrants came for religious reasons during years of religious tumult in Great Britain and Northern Europe, which had largely dissipated by the time the later colonies were really settled.
Jeffersonian democracy is far less respecting of elite/establishment opinions on religion. Building democratic consensus in the States between heterogenous (Protestant) religious groups led to an armistice, not a hierarchical solution..
One of the most religious groups in the United States are descendents of slaves, and the historically black churches have remained important. Latinos also identify religion as very important to them. The more people come from third-world countries to the West (and not just the secular elites), the more religious Western countries will become.Report
“Those people refuse to assimilate: they insist on owning their own homes and going to Church.”Report
Speciation through self-selection in migration patterns.
Every generation, the most religious in Europe were statistically more likely to emigrate. This dampened the fire slowly over time, and while there are still a lot of believers, they don’t get quite as bent out of shape about e.g. atheist politicians or comedians. However, on the US side, this resulted in a concentrated stream of strong believers. Being from a lot of different places, they didn’t form one monolithic church – and largely supported separation of church and state in places there wasn’t a monoculture, preferring a theologically armed truce to one sect “winning”. But a de facto shift of emphasis from theological differences to social/political similarities has more and more guns pointed outward rather than inward, leading to more strongly defined battle lines in the eternal culture war.
Now, I’m not married to this idea, and it probably has more wrong than right. I have heard variations of it from both sides of the Atlantic, so it’s not unique to me, and I think there’s a grain of truth there.Report
Regarding Texas, today’s Conservatives inability to stick to their own narratives when a bright and shiny object flitters by them never ceases to amaze me.Report
Its their own fault for suffering for ADHD.Report
I’m not really seeing a fluttering off the message here. The people taking away contraception options are the elected government, the people giving out contraception options are the permanent State.Report
[Hold on one sec, let me just turn my snark up a bit… Okay, I think that’s high enough.]
That is so 2016.
I remember a time (either in the early 1800s or just a year or so ago, I can’t remember exactly) when subsidized birth control from the government was so against our firm and unshakable values that we all agreed we would do anything to oppose it. In fact, if memory serves, subsidized birth control was paying women to have sex, which meant that the government was turning girls into prostitutes. It didn’t matter that the initial cost of subsidized birth control was so negligible or that is saved public money over time, it was just that we were standing on a principal of a belief so bedrock that we could not budge.
But of course, that was back when the ACA was the bright shiny object. Planned Parenthood is the bright shiny object now, so of course conservatives would pass laws giving out free birth control to try to put PP out of business. Because really, why would you expect a foundational bedrock principle from 2014 to mean squat in 2106? Thinking it would hold water in a different news cycle is just a gross misunderstanding of what a foundational bedrock principal is.
[Okay, turing the snark down again now, before it makes my brain hurt.]Report
Setting aside the question of whether it is wise policy, the following seems to me to be not-inconsistent policy:
“We want people to have access to contraception, but do not want to give public money to organizations that provide abortions in order to provide the contraception.”
And that does not seem inconsistent with believing that employers should be able to opt-out of providing birth control coverage on their insurance plans.Report
I think the question is whether they previously really wanted people to have access to contraception or if they thought a lack of access to contraception would prevent the sort of problems that tend to arise when people have a lack of access to contraception.Report
Well, they want to insofar as they are actually working to provide it to people that can’t afford it.
Not in direct response to you, I did want to link back to the fact that Republicans do not have a moral problem with birth control.Report
Then, as @tod-kelly points out, why were there so many objections to government-subsidized access? Or, hell, even teaching about the damn stuff in public schools?
I think it is clear that there is a sizable portion of the population — which skews right — that thinks (thought?) that if people didn’t have access to contraception or know about its use and effectiveness, they would not have sex. And because this portion of the population had all sorts of… misgivings… about people having sex outside of long-term committed heterosexual adult relationships, they pursued policies that limited education about and access to contraception.
That they have now realized how wrong they are — and that people are going to have sex and that sex absent access to contraception is going to present real costs — doesn’t excuse or change this history.Report
Well, in the case of Texas, have they realized that they were wrong? It seems to me that they’ve been subsidizing it throughout. (The article is more about changing the way they do it so that they can do it more effectively to plug in the gaps.)
Also, to be clear, I’m not saying that they’re generally in favor of government-subsidizing of it. Some at least are almost certainly opposed to it. Merely that they don’t generally have a moral objection to it the same way they do with abortion.
That being said, I’m not clear on the last major push for the government to stop subsidizing birth control generally. I remember Defund Planned Parenthood, but that was about the organization rather than birth control per se.
Which isn’t to say that I missed a different row. And it’s almost certainly the case that some Republicans have said they don’t want it government-funded at all ever.Report
I don’t think we necessarily disagree, Will. I think it is possible that people don’t object morally to birth control but still take issue with it. OR that some Repulicans are okay with it and some are not.
My sense is that much objection to birth control is less about moral objection and more about the “ickiness” of sex.Report
I actually think the relationship between the two is tighter than that; as far as I can tell, the sort of people who turn out to be so-cons make their moral objections based on what strikes them as icky. Kinda like how their opposite numbers do so based on what strikes them as unfair.Report
To be clear, I do not think that Rs are anti-contraception people who got caught up in the PP hubbub and knee-jerk supported free birth control.
I think Rs are people who are very pro-birth control, and by and large use it regularly, who knee jerked themselves being anti-contraception when the news cycle told them that would get them air time to pretend to be so.Report
I sorta agree, about the air-time and all. At the root, tho, in my view, is Cleek’s Law, and the irresistible allure of defining yourself exclusively in opposition to the thing which (so you’ve been told!) your political identity requires you to existentially hate.
More seriously: the Rs – as GOP politicians – are anti-contracepttion because that’s where their own politics have taken them. (~liberal!!!)
Conservative non-politicians are prolly in general perfectly OK with contraception. (Hence Trump.)Report
“I’d rather pay for depo shots than schools and prisons. More poor people means bigger government!”Report
Where I am coming from is this: It seems frequently that Republican stances that are not, on the first order about birth control, become framed that way. So Texas sort of looks like this to me:
R: Planned Parenthood performs abortions and we shouldn’t fund them.
D: They’re a primary access point for women getting birth control!
R: There are other ways for women to get birth control. This is about abortion.
{Law passes, other ways of getting birth control to women are beefed up}
D: Look at the inconsistency! Yesterday they were against birth control and now they’re scrambling to support it!
This is, again, not to support the wisdom of the law (I’m against it, but even if I weren’t I would not voice that opinion here). But the nature of the argument here presupposes that defunding Planned Parenthood was actually about birth control. And what might be considered evidence that it’s actually more complicated than that is instead recieved as evidence of… I don’t know, dishonesty or inconsistency or something.
(Having said that, I do concede that there may be a case where birth control was targeted specifically because birth control. Our governments have lots of moving parts and a lot of Republicans are idiots. But in the case of Texas, I am largely seeing a consistency that is consistent with arguments I heard at the time PP defunding was debated at the national level and I assume, but do not know, in Texas as well.)Report
From the article itself; contrasted to Medicaid which requires no consent.
It is a different approach to the subject matter. Will is right.
While I personally am in the tiny minority of 15% of Catholics who eschew birth control, the garden variety conservatives including almost all Evangelicals do not. What they have is a different framework for its appropriate application. About that the culture wars revolve.
To borrow a term from Jaybird, what we’re seeing here is weaponized birth control.Report
Historically, contraception bans were about upholding a high moral standards against promiscuity, and were mostly only passed in the North and West. The only former Confederate states to have such bans were Arkansas and Mississippi.
It may useful to use a class framework, rather than religious.Report
That would be a better argument if the cultural battle had stuck to just religious institutions subsidizing BC, and not the government doing it in general.Report
“I’m not really seeing a fluttering off the message here.”
That’s because you aren’t super-smart like Tod Kelly. You know, he can hear dogwhistles even when people aren’t speaking, that’s how smart he is.Report
Too bad the Feds have to force Apple to help unlock the terrorist’s iPhone.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/02/san-bernardino-apple-shooters-219357Report
Didn’t I hear that future/current apple products will encrypt such that even apple is not capable of getting access? If so, good on them.
Give the phone to the nsa, i’m sure they have the crypto to break it…eventually. If not, maybe they should focus on that vs hoovering up all my email messages.Report
I’ve seen one story that apple claims that the software doesn’t exist to do what the feds want and that they won’t create it.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/02/apple-tim-cook-fbi-hack-san-bernardinoReport
Do they have an obligation to do so, legally, morally, or otherwise?Report
Morally: no.
Legally: I’d guess no, especially if the sw doesn’t exist. Frankly, I’d find it hard to believe that the NSA doesn’t have this already.
Otherwise: no
Just my opinion.Report
If it exists then I would say yes to legally. I don’t think the feds can legally order them to create something that doesn’t exist, if true. I’d be surprised if Apple hadn’t done it already. The other two are no.Report
Even leaving aside the security risk of Apple creating software to bypass its own encryption (which, as they note, could then get out into the wild), I’d be troubled at the govt. telling any law-abiding person or entity that “you must make [thing that currently does not exist] so that we can use it for our purposes.”
It wouldn’t be right if it was a physical widget, and it’s not right for software either. It’d be pretty clearly “forced labor”, right?Report
As I understand it, the heart of the iOS storage encryption is a 256-bit random key burned into the dedicated encryption hardware that Apple added to the system design, and accessible only to the encryption hardware. The encryption hardware is incapable of providing external access to the key. Apple says that they keep no record of which key is burned into which devices.
Given sufficient time and resources, someone like the NSA is no doubt capable of taking the integrated circuit apart to the point where they can read the key off the burned fuses (or whatever non-volatile ROM tech Apple’s design uses — I’m guessing something simple and very robust, since losing a bit would brick the device). Heck, given Apple’s market share, I’d be surprised if the NSA folks haven’t already done it, in case they need it on short notice.Report
Exactly.Report
I think Apple is being asked to provide a way to bypass the “10 wrong tries and we destroy all your data” bit, not break the encryption itself.Report
I believe you are correct, but the principle remains the same – both functions are there to prevent data from being misused, and Apple should not be forcibly tasked with circumventing them.Report
Why not force apple to open the phone? Its a legitimate law enforcement interest.Report
They can’t with later versions of the OS — they lack the encryption key. Previous versions, where Apple could, they complied with court warrants to do so.Report
yeah, there’s something really discomforting about the All Writs Act (from 1789!) being read to compel a company to task its employees to spend considerable time and money to create a piece of software. I’m not even sure how to approach the analysis — a seizure? a taking?
Brother Burt, any thoughts on the scope of the compulsion powers of the federal government / judiciary, by the issuance of a writ? Does the writ issue and then Apple goes to the Court of Claims?
I suppose I could read the briefing, but it is still work hours here in California, and while I’m sick and tired of my workload it still is piled up in front of me.Report
I am definitely not a lawyer, but yeah, this seems categorically different from a warrant that simply compels you to provide evidence you already have in your possession (even if you must expend effort gathering it).
This is like the government forcing a locksmith to invent a new type of lockpick, that as a bonus may eventually put him put of business if (when) the lockpick he was compelled by them to invent falls into the wrong hands.Report
Yes, that’s want the fbi wants.Report
That level of effort seems about right. If it’s worth it to spend the money physically destroying the ROM and extracting the key for one person, then it’s worth doing. The problem arises when there’s basically no cost to doing it so they err on the side of reading everybody’s data because it’s free.
I’m not against Apple having to develop a no-lockout version of the firmware to allow law enforcement to crack the phone assuming it would never get out into the wild or be abused, but that seems unlikely. The good news is that it will at least still require a brute force step after the firmware is loaded. If it’s sufficiently onerous (and not just software running through a 16 bit counter in a few milliseconds), hopefully it will be expensive enough to prevent fishing expeditions. If it requires a custom hardware bot to poke the soft keys on the screen, so much the better.Report
De Blasio is alright by me.Report
Ha, “put the Pastrami down and back away slowly”Report