Politics

A brief history refresher from the November 15, 2006, episode of The Writer's Almanac. This seemed particularly interesting to me. I don't think I had realized how shaky things were for us under the Articles of Confederation.

It was on this day [November 15] in 1777 that the American colonies, in the midst of a war for Independence, approved a final version of the Articles of Confederation. It was the first time in modern history that a complete system of government was drawn up and approved by a committee. The document began by naming the new country: The United States of America. The debate over the Articles had begun in the summer of 1776, and it mainly concerned states' rights. At the time, the colonies still saw themselves as fairly separate entities, and each wanted to be able to create its own laws. Also, none of the colonies wanted to be pushed around by the other colonies once they were free and independent. Many of the people debating the new form of government were afraid that a strong central ruling body would become tyrannical, just like a king. John Adams was one of the few people who imagined that the new country would be a single nation, not just an association of individual states. He was joined by Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin, but they were overruled. The central government under the Articles of Confederation had no real power. It had no power to raise armies, no power to impose taxes, and no power to enforce laws it had passed. The Articles of Confederation finally went into effect in 1781, a few months before the Revolutionary War ended. In the months after the end of the war, the soldiers who had fought for the revolution actually considered seizing power. They hadn't been paid in months, they were exhausted and bitter, and pamphlets began circulating, advocating an armed takeover of Congress. Congress would have been powerless to stop them, since it couldn't raise its own armies. The only thing that prevented the takeover was George Washington's sheer force of will. He showed up at a meeting of rebellious soldiers and spoke out against their plans, and they dispersed. There were other attempts at armed rebellion under the Articles of Confederation, the most famous of which was a rebellion led by a man named Daniel Shays, which almost took over the state capital in Boston. Congress had no authority to help Massachusetts take any action against Shays' rebellion, and some worried that the rebellion would spread to other states. It was ultimately Shays' Rebellion that changed a lot of minds about strong central government, and in the spring of 1787, delegates met to revise the Articles of Confederation, and the result was the Constitution we have today.

Via Andrew Sullivan, feel like speculating about the 2008 presidential race? If so, check out this web page where you can choose the Rep. and Dem. candidates for president and see what polls say about the match-up.

Via Today's Papers, in an article of the same title in the Wall Street Journal, Deborah Solomon discusses the results of a minimum wage hike (and mandatory increases to keep pace with inflation) in Oregon in 2002. From the WSJ article:

During the 2002 debate in Oregon, foes of a minimum-wage increase argued that it would chase away business and cripple an economy that traditionally had higher unemployment than the national average. "With so many Oregonians already unemployed, raising the minimum wage and then increasing it annually would devastate our economic recovery," Bill Perry, head of the Oregon Restaurant Association, wrote at the time. Four years later, though it is impossible to say what would have happened had the minimum not been raised, Oregon's experience suggests the most strident doomsayers were wrong. Private, nonfarm payrolls are up 8% over the past four years, nearly twice the national increase. Wages are up, too. Job growth is strong in industries employing many minimum-wage workers, such as restaurants and hotels. Oregon's estimated 5.4% unemployment rate for 2006, though higher than the national average, is down from 7.6% in 2002, when the state was emerging from a recession. Some employers are being squeezed, for sure, and their experiences will become ammunition for those who will fight any increase in the federal minimum wage. Agriculture is pinched because sellers can't raise prices, set on global markets, when labor costs go up. Some businesses say they have avoided expanding in Oregon because labor costs have risen, the sort of change in behavior at the margin that foes of a minimum wage worry about.

Barb Iverson and her brother say higher wages prompted them to stop cultivating daffodils and potatoes at their Willamette Valley farm. "Why grow a potato here when you can do it in Idaho for $5.15 an hour?" asks Ms. Iverson.

Maybe because paying your employees enough to live on is the right thing to do.

From today's The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor:

Today is Election Day. Millions of people across the country will be going to the polls today to elect new legislators, judges, sheriffs, and school board members. For the first 50 years of American elections, only 15 percent of the adult population was eligible to vote. To be eligible to vote at the time, you had to be a white male property owner. In Connecticut, you had to be a white male property owner of a "quiet and peaceable behavior and civil conversation." Thomas Dorr was one of the first politicians to argue that poor people should be given voting rights. As a member of the Rhode Island legislature, Dorr argued that all white adult men should have the vote, regardless of their wealth. He incited a riot to protest the governor's election of 1842 and went to prison for treason, but most states began to let poor white men vote soon after. Women were given the right to vote in 1920, and many African Americans were prevented from voting in the South until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Today, the only group of adult American citizens who are regularly prevented from voting are convicted felons. Gore Vidal said, "Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for president. One hopes it is the same half." W.C. Fields said, "I never vote for anyone. I always vote against."

You've heard about John Kerry's botched Bush insult that turned into an insult of America's service men and women, his refusal to apologize, his eventual apology...and probably saw the photo of a group of Minnesota National Guard soldiers in Iraq mocking Kerry's comments. I hoping this puts a stake in Kerry's presidential campaign plans for 2008. The more brash and snarky version of Kerry that I've seen lately is even more annoying than the one who couldn't beat Bush in '04. Via Today's Papers, Rosa Brooks in the LA Times asks the very interesting question: Was Kerry right?

SINCE John Kerry "botched" a joke and implied that those without education "get stuck in Iraq," political leaders from both parties have been piously describing U.S. troops as valiant young Einsteins in desert camouflage. But deep down, a lot of them probably think Kerry is right.

Most of our current political leaders didn't waste any time serving in the military. Like Vice President Dick Cheney, they had "other priorities." As recently as 1994, 44% of members of Congress were veterans. Today, it's only 26%. And despite the mandatory "I adore our heroic troops" rhetoric, most on Capitol Hill aren't steering their own children toward military service. Only about 1% of U.S. representatives and senators have a son or daughter in uniform.

During the Vietnam War, the controversial student deferments helped keep most affluent and educated young men out of the military, while those without college opportunities were far more likely to be drafted. Today, the military continues to attract many young men and women from less-affluent families by offering job training and scholarships. But recent studies of military demographics suggest that today's military is neither uneducated nor poor. Statistically, the enlisted ranks of the military are drawn mainly from neighborhoods that are slightly more affluent than the norm. The very poor are actually underrepresented in the military, relative to the number of very poor people in the population. That's mainly because the military won't accept the lowest academic achievers. The Army limits recruits without high school degrees to 3 1/2 % of the pool, for instance, while the Marines won't accept recruits without high school degrees. Poverty correlates strongly with high school dropout rates, so these rules significantly limit the access of the very poor to military service. At the same time, they ensure that enlisted members of the military are more likely than members of the general population to have high school degrees. The same pattern holds for commissioned officers. In 2004, for instance, only 4.2% of officers lacked college degrees, and a whopping 37% held an advanced degree of some sort, compared to only 10% of adults nationwide. The myth that the military is mainly the province of the poor and the uneducated is grossly misleading, and it's also dangerous. It obscures the far more worrisome gaps that have recently emerged between the military and civilian society. Demographically, the military is profoundly different from civilian society. It's drawn disproportionately from households in rural areas, for one thing. For another, the South and Southwest are substantially overrepresented within the military, while the Northeast is dramatically underrepresented. Compared to civilians, members of the military are significantly more religious, and they're also far more likely to be Republicans.

And though the average member of the military is neither poor nor uneducated, social and economic elites are dramatically underrepresented in the military.

If political elites don't like the thought of getting stuck in Iraq themselves, they should consider the results of a recent study. Duke University researchers Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi analyzed data from the period between 1816 and 1992 and found that "as the percentage of veterans serving in the executive branch and the legislature increases, the probability that the United States will initiate militarized disputes declines by nearly 90%." Want to make sure that the U.S. never again gets stuck in a pointless and aggressive war? Draft Congress!