That’s the claim, anyway. She’s been flogging her “Guaranteed Retirement Account” concept for longer than I’ve been flogging my Jane Plan, since her first book, When I’m Sixty-Four, published in 2008, so, in my pre-blogging days, so I can’t reference a “from the library”-style blog post about it. (Though I can point you to How to Retire with Enough Money and How to Know What Enough Is, a Clear Answer in 116 Pages, but that was a rather throwaway sort of... Read more
I’ve been sitting on a Brookings paper that argues that we need to take a break from worrying about male labor-force drop-outs, and worry instead about women who are not working: In recent years, there has been a reduction in paid work among U.S. women, one that is not paralleled in other advanced nations. Getting more women into the labor market is perhaps an even higher priority than raising male employment rates. This is important, the authors write, because nonworking... Read more
Something that caught my attention via twitter today: a proposal for a new way forward on parental leave, put forth by a group called the Independent Women’s Forum, in a report called, “A Budget-Neutral Approach to Parental Leave.” The core of their idea is this: as a means of providing parental leave without adding to the budget, we could allow new parents to “borrow” against their Social Security, that is, by “purchasing” leave time now and “paying for it” by... Read more
The first, from an article in the Chicago Tribune, “A Kansas chemistry professor got his kids ready for school — then ICE arrested him on his front lawn,” goes like this: a 55-year-old father of three, Syed Ahmed Jamal, an immigrant from Bangladesh who’s been in the U.S. for 30 years, with graduate degrees in molecular biosciences and pharmaceutical engineering, whose 5 siblings are American citizens, who regularly volunteers at his children’s school, who had had an H1-B and student visa... Read more
Being obnoxiously facetious here: I am spectacularly non-athletic. I get out of breath quickly, I’m slow, I’m short. And I’ve passed those genes on to my kids, one of whom was in physical therapy as a toddler, the other in occupational therapy in his early elementary school years. The third is just skinny, and has always been at the very bottom of the weight chart. Do they meet the definition of “disabled”? No. But neither could they have any hope... Read more
In the news today, a literal Nazi will be on the ballot as the Republican candidate in Illinois’ 3rd district this fall. Not because actual Republicans support him, but because Illinois’ laws around primaries enabled the crackpot, a man named Arthur Jones, to get on the ballot with a mere 603 signatures, according to CNN. which also reported that the state Republican organization is now trying to come up with a work-around, such as declaring a write-in candidate to be... Read more
A few paragraph from Saturday’s Ross Douthat column in the Times, after describing the state of affairs in California and elsewhere with high unskilled immigration, which have become stratified into rich and poor, the later consisting of immigrants willing to work long hours for low wages: the winners in this system . . . inhabit a world where they only see their fellow winners and their hard-working multiethnic service class. Which in turn encourages them toward mild contempt for their... Read more
This is really just a question for open discussion, but consider that, when it comes to the whole current debate about how we balance high-skilled immigrants vs. or immigrants who have existing extended family here, the “pro-low-skilled immigration” side generally says that, basically, it’s a “what would Emma Lazarus do?” issue, that it is the particular mission of the United States to take in the most desperate rather than those who are comparatively better-off and would be fine in their... Read more
In my twitter feed this morning: if you think robust immigration is necessary for growth, Russia is bad, the FBI is good, democratic norms should be respected you'll need to leave the GOP or the GOP will need to rid itself of virtually all its elected leaders — Jen 'now @jenrubin9' Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) February 3, 2018 which got me to thinking about her claim, “robust immigration is necessary for growth”: In the first place, I suspect, though admittedly without digging... Read more
To here the activists tell it, Congress ought to, indeed has the moral obligation, to pass a “clean DREAM Act” — a bill which gives permanent residence to individuals who were brought to the United States without legal authorization, as minors. (Here’s the ACLU, here’s a Newsweek opinion piece, here’s a The Hill article citing various Democratic leaders making that demand.) There should be no conditions of any kind — no wall, no e-verify or other enforcement increases, no cuts... Read more
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