Category Archives: morality

The VA Strikes Again

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Used to be, veterans could apply for disability via letter, even a hand written note.  Further, when that note arrived, coverage began for the applicant, should his application be accepted, including backdated payments to cover the period between receipt of the application and its acceptance.  Not anymore.

The Department of Veterans Affairs says the many ways that requests for disability compensation arrive actually hamper its ability to administer benefits, and they contribute to a claims backlog that has about 400,000 veterans waiting more than 125 days for a decision.  At times, workers spend so much time trying to figuring out what’s being claimed and trading letters with applicants that it’s slowing down decisions for everyone.

Never mind that the Godfather of the VA, General Omar Bradley, its first MFWIC, told VA staff that they were there to serve the veterans, not themselves.

According to the VA’s bright idea,

the first communication from a veteran may not trigger anything.  Those veterans who put their claims in writing would have to completely fill out a standard form [generally on line], and the clock that determines how far back the government will pay, won’t begin ticking until the VA receives the successfully completed form.

And that form better be filled out correctly.  If it’s not, there’ll be delays, including the possibility the form will be returned “for resubmittal in 90 days for further disapproval.”  Oh, and never mind that critics of this move point out that

veterans who are the most vulnerable—the homeless, those with traumatic brain injury, and those with a limited education—would have the most trouble meeting the new standard.

The VA emphasizes its online form, which is more convenient for the VA bureaucrats.  After all,

The VA said that veterans who don’t have a computer can go to the closest VA facility to get help.

Never mind that lots of veterans, especially those in rural areas and the elderly, either don’t have access to the Internet, or they don’t have a computer at all.

Another Thought on Economic Mobility

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Gerald Auten and Geoffrey Gee wrote about “Income Mobility in the United States: New Evidence from Income Tax Data.”  It’s an extensive paper; I’m abstracting a couple of points in this post [emphasis added].

  • More than half of taxpayers…moved to a different income quintile over this period [1996-2005]. About half…of those in the bottom income quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005.
  • Median incomes of taxpayers in the sample increased by 24% after adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two–thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period.  Furthermore, the median incomes of those initially in the lowest income groups increased more in per centage terms than the median incomes of those in the higher income groups.  In contrast, the real median incomes of taxpayers who were in the highest income groups in 1996 declined by 2005.
  • The composition of the very top income groups changed dramatically over time.  Less than half…of those in the top 1% in 1996 were still in the top 1% in 2005.  Less than one–fourth of the individuals in the top 1/100th% in 1996 remained in that group in 2005.

Those evil 1%-ers not only had trouble staying in the 1%, a significant fraction of them were erstwhile bottom%-ers.

Taking economic mobility—income changes—relative to all taxpayers, Auten and Gee found this:

  • About 56% of taxpayers…in the lowest income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher quintile by 2005.  While 29% moved up to the second quintile, nearly as many (27.4%) moved up two or more quintiles and 4.5% moved all the way to the top quintile.
  • More than twice as many middle–income taxpayers moved up to a higher income quintile…as dropped to a lower one[.]

Thomas Sowell had this comment on the matter three years ago:

Only by focusing on the income brackets, instead of the actual people moving between those brackets, have the intelligentsia been able to verbally create a “problem” for which a “solution” is necessary.  They have created a powerful vision of “classes” with “disparities” and “inequities” in income, caused by “barriers” created by “society.”  But the routine rise of millions of people out of the lowest quintile over time makes a mockery of the “barriers” assumed by many, if not most, of the intelligentsia.

And now comes President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party colleagues decrying exactly that static income inequality folderol in the middle of their failed economic recovery and the outcomes of their failed social control policies.  Truly, they are desperate to change the subject in this election year.

Filibusters and the Senate

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) blew up the Senate filibuster with his manufactured claim of Republican obstructionism and with his Senate rules-breaking move to eliminate it (for now only regarding Presidential nominees) with a (Democrat only) majority vote.

Yet Republican-led (note that: not the Republican satrapy, as Reid views his Senate to be for Democrats) House passed 200 jobs- and economy-related bills in 2013 and some dozen that were passed with 250 or more votes—i.e., with considerable Democrat (that would be bipartisan, for those Progressives following along at home) voting support.

The Democrat-ruled Senate?  An immigration bill and a farm bill.  A budget, but only under the embarrassment of having Senators’ pay withheld if they didn’t pass one.  Under real pressure, a sequester bill (that originated with President Barack Obama) and a natural disaster relief bill.

Indeed, of the 70-ish bills Obama signed last year, 56 originated in the House, and all of 16 came from Reid’s fiefdom.

The rest of those 200 House-passed bills?  Reid wouldn’t even let them come to a vote.  There are, for instance, 40 explicitly jobs-related bills that Reid refuses to allow the Senate even to discuss.  Of the Senate-originated bills, Reid wouldn’t let the minority party even offer amendments.  Under Senate rules, there are only so many amendments allowed to be proposed for a bill.  Reid routinely, and universally, “filled the tree” with his own or those of his trusted lieutenants, Senator Chuck Schumer (D, NY) and Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL).

There is the filibuster.

What He Said

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV), during his Democrats’ attempt to ram through, unilaterally, another enormous extension of Federal unemployment insurance payments (in the middle of a quickening, according to those same Democrats, economic recovery) had this to say about one political party or another:

[They are] continually denigrating our economy…and frankly, I believe, our country.

I wonder: was he talking about his fellow Democrats?

A New Phase

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…in the Obama administration’s war on education.

The DoJ and the Department of Education have sent out another of their Dear Colleague letters, this time concerning the disparate impact of punishing minority students in our public schools.  Investor’s Business Daily summarized the letter,

Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan Wednesday issued “recommendations” urging schools to find ways to avoid suspending or expelling students who act out.  …

The two Cabinet members argued that suspensions deny minority students time in the classroom….

And suspensions of “majority” students don’t have the same effect?  No, that’s not Eric Holder’s and Arne Duncan’s argument.  They argued in their 32 pg letter that “minority” students get the treatment disproportionately—disparately.  Never mind that these students misbehave…disparately.

The danger of applying this pernicious and racist disparate impact meme is clearly identified by Commissioner Gail Heriot of the United States Commission on Civil Rights in her remarks on the Commission’s School Discipline and Disparate Impact report:

There are two sides to the “disparate impact” coin.  Secretary Duncan focuses only upon the fact that, as a group, African-American students are suspended and expelled more often than other students.  By failing to consider the other side of the coin—that African-American students may be disproportionately victimized by disorderly classrooms—his policy could easily end up doing more harm than good to the very group he is attempting to help.

Indeed.  This disparate impact policy on school discipline will have a disparate impact on minority students’ ability to get an education in a classroom full of disparate impact-protected misbehavers.  All while carefully ignoring the underlying causes of one group having a higher misbehavior rate than another group.

More, a footnote in Heriot’s remarks also hints at the fundamental lawlessness of the Obama administration [emphasis added]:

4 [page 98 of the report, the same page as the portion of Heriot’s remarks quoted above] I agree with Commissioner Gaziano that Title VI simply does not permit the Department of Education to proceed against schools on a disparate impact theory and that the Department’s regulation nonetheless adopting that theory, 34 CFR sec. 100.3, is therefore unauthorized by law.  It requires actual discrimination.  See Section 601 (Title VI) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 USC sec. 2000d (No person shall “on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”).  See also Alexander v Sandoval, 532 US 275 (2001). I also agree with Commissioner Gaziano that the problem with disparate impact analysis is not simply that it goes beyond what Congress authorized in Title VI; it actually contradicts Title VI.  If one group receives more school discipline than another because (for whatever reason) its members violated more school rules than the other, race-conscious efforts to alter the “disparate impact” are usually themselves discriminatory.

Sadly, this phase, in addition to denying minority students access to their education, is also another example of the unconscious racism of the Left.