Nicholas Kristof: U.S. Budget Cuts a la Pakistan et al?

Our Fantasy Nation? By Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times, Published: June 4, 2011
With Tea Party conservatives and many Republicans balking at raising the debt ceiling, let me offer them an example of a nation that lives up to their ideals.
It has among the lowest tax burdens of any major country: fewer than 2 percent of the people pay any taxes. Government is limited, so that burdensome regulations never kill jobs.
This society embraces traditional religious values and a conservative sensibility. Nobody minds school prayer, same-sex marriage isn’t imaginable, and criminals are never coddled.
The budget priority is a strong military, the nation’s most respected institution. When generals decide on a policy for, say, Afghanistan, politicians defer to them. Citizens are deeply patriotic, and nobody burns flags.
So what is this Republican Eden, this Utopia? Why, it’s Pakistan.
Now obviously Sarah Palin and John Boehner don’t intend to turn Washington into Islamabad-on-the-Potomac. And they are right that long-term budget issues do need to be addressed. But when many Republicans insist on “starving the beast” of government, cutting taxes, regulations and social services — slashing everything but the military — well, those are steps toward Pakistan.
The United States is, of course, in no danger of actually becoming Pakistan, any more than we’re going to become Sweden at the other extreme. But as America has become more unequal, as we cut off government lifelines to the neediest Americans, as half of states plan to cut spending on higher education this year, let’s be clear about our direction — and about the turnaround that a Republican budget victory would represent.
The long trajectory of history has been for governments to take on more responsibilities, and for citizens to pay more taxes. Now we’re at a turning point, with Republicans arguing that we need to reverse course.
I spend a fair amount of time reporting in developing countries, from Congo to Colombia. They’re typically characterized by minimal taxes, high levels of inequality, free-wheeling businesses and high military expenditures. Any of that ring a bell?
In Latin American, African or Asian countries, I sometimes see shiny tanks and fighter aircraft — but schools that have trouble paying teachers. Sound familiar? And the upshot is societies that are quasi-feudal, stratified by social class, held back by a limited sense of common purpose.
Maybe that’s why the growing inequality in America pains me so. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans already have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent, based on Federal Reserve data. Yet two-thirds of the proposed Republican budget cuts would harm low- and moderate-income families, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
For a country that prides itself on social mobility, where higher education has been a traditional escalator to a better life, cutbacks in access to college are a scandal. G. Jeremiah Ryan, the president of Bergen Community College in New Jersey, tells me that when the college was set up in 1965, two-thirds of the cost of running it was supposed to be covered by state and local governments, and one-third by students. The reality today, Dr. Ryan says, is that students bear 78 percent of the cost.
In fairness to Pakistan and Congo, wealthy people in such countries manage to live surprisingly comfortably. Instead of financing education with taxes, these feudal elites send their children to elite private schools. Instead of financing a reliable police force, they hire bodyguards. Instead of supporting a modern health care system for their nation, they fly to hospitals in London.
You can tell the extreme cases by the hum of diesel generators at night. Instead of paying taxes for a reliable electrical grid, each wealthy family installs its own powerful generator to run the lights and air-conditioning. It’s noisy and stinks, but at least you don’t have to pay for the poor.
I’ve always made fun of these countries, but now I see echoes of that pattern of privatization of public services in America. Police budgets are being cut, but the wealthy take refuge in gated communities with private security guards. Their children are spared the impact of budget cuts at public schools and state universities because they attend private institutions.
Mass transit is underfinanced; after all, Mercedes-Benzes and private jets are much more practical, no? And maybe the most striking push for reversal of historical trends is the Republican plan to dismantle Medicare as a universal health care program for the elderly.
There’s even an echo of the electrical generator problem. More and more affluent homes in the suburbs are buying electrical generators to use when the power fails.
So in this season’s political debates, let’s remember that we’re arguing not only over debt ceilings and budgets, but about larger questions of our vision for our country. Do we really aspire to take a step in the direction of a low-tax laissez-faire Eden ...like Pakistan?

Harris-Hudak-Houdini on Hydro Debt Fiction

By Martin Regg Cohn, Toronto Star, June 4, 2011
Look at your hydro bill. You may have noticed a monthly “Debt Retirement Charge” (DRC) that averages $5.60 per household. Hudak promised last month to eliminate it from residential bills — saving ratepayers about $76 a year after taxes. What’s remarkable about the Tory strategy is that the DRC monster they now pledge to kill off is a Frankenstein of their own creation — dreamed up by the old Mike Harris PC government in 1999.

The Harris Tories wanted to privatize Ontario Hydro, but had to off-load its old debt of $21 billion. They conjured up a Byzantine road map for repayment: Its successor companies (OPG for power generation, and Hydro One for transmission lines) would allocate all their future revenue and tax streams to help pay down that debt. Unfortunately, all that projected cash flow — estimated at $13 billion — still wouldn’t cover off the massive debt payments, leaving a yawning gap.
So the Harris Tories came up with an even more exotic financial concept, virtually unheard of at the time: the “Residual (leftover) Stranded Debt.” Sounds like a complex accounting concept, but it was really a financial fig leaf for a pile of unsustainable debt to be backstopped by hydro ratepayers (customers). This portion — the (leftover) unfunded liability — came to $7.8 billion, which is now supported by the DRC on your monthly bill.
As their Hydro privatization plans went awry and deregulation created chaos, the PCs panicked — freezing electricity rates and allowing the hydro debt to soar. When the electricity sector became politically toxic for the Tories, they lost power in 2003. The incoming Liberals started paying down the inherited debt, which slowly declined but is far from paid off. Now, the Tories hope to regain power by promising to drop the DRC from your bill — delaying the day of reckoning as they did in the past. History is about to repeat itself.
Why walk away from the DRC? Remarkably, the Hudak Tories keep claiming the Residual Stranded Debt has been paid off. As proof, they make this breathtaking assertion: At last count, the government had collected $7.8 billion from the DRC — which roughly matches the amount of the Residual Stranded Debt when the Tories concocted it in 1999. That must mean the debt has been paid off, right?
But as any homeowner can attest, there’s no such thing as an interest-free debt (or mortgage) that allows you to pay off only the principal. Ask your friendly bank manager. Any debt has to be serviced. Yet the Hudak Tories persist with the fairy tale that a $7.8 billion debt can be paid off a decade later with precisely $7.8 billion. Last year, Ontario paid a whopping $1.6 billion in interest alone merely to service the overall stranded debt (which has declined to $14.8 billion since 1999).
The financial fiction goes further. The Residual Stranded Debt dreamed up by the Tories was never a fixed amount; there is no lender who holds a separate Residual Ontario Bond. It’s only an accounting concept. Whenever there’s a shortfall in the cash flow from the (unpredictable) future revenues of OPG and Hydro One, ordinary ratepayers must plug the ever-changing gap. The Residual Stranded Debt is a residue that keeps changing. It’s a moving target that will only be eliminated when (projected) hydro cash flow is high enough to cover the rest of the debt down the road — and not before. You can thank the Harris Tories for devising this bizarre black box — it’s the gift that keeps on giving, or more precisely, the debt that keeps on debiting.
That’s why civil servants — the non-partisan stewards of the stranded debt — keep pushing back their projections for when it will be paid off. The Tories claim it’s all scandalously manipulative. Provincial Auditor General Jim McCarter, who operates at arm’s length from the government, has examined the books and found nothing wrong. Unsatisfied with his impartial audit, Hudak has taken the unusual step of calling for an “independent forensic audit.” McCarter chuckled when I asked why Hudak doesn’t trust him to do the job of auditing the stranded debt. If Hudak becomes premier, all he has to do is ask him to conduct another audit, McCarter countered. But he remains highly skeptical of Tory allegations that the government is diverting DRC revenue rather than paying down debt.
Hudak is sticking to his fanciful story, which he retold to the Chamber of Commerce last week: “The (DRC) charge was imposed in 2002 to pay off Hydro’s residual stranded debt. All of the debt principal was paid in full by 2010. But the charge was not removed! In fact, it was extended to 2018. Can you imagine if a bank did this to you as a credit card customer? You’ve paid off your balance — congratulations — but we’re going to keep hitting you for interest payments anyway? They’d go to jail. But in Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario, it’s just another experiment in creative revenue enhancement. Under my leadership . . . It Will Be Gone (sic)!”
In Hudak’s imaginary world, a customer never pays any interest on his initial credit card balance, even a decade later. That’s why he claims the Residual Stranded Debt should have been paid off by now, and blames Liberal impropriety. In the same breath, he acknowledges it won’t be paid off until 2018. Regardless, he vows to stop collecting the DRC from residential ratepayers as premier. Hudak’s office estimates this will cost the province $360 million, to be made up elsewhere (Curiously, PC news releases last month pegged the cost higher, at $400 million). In fact, it’s likely to cost even more, because the Tories clarified with me on Friday that they’ll also remove the DRC for farmers and small businesses. A confidential briefing document prepared for cabinet last fall shows that cutting the DRC on this broader group would have a “negative fiscal impact of $500 million per year” — far more than the latest PC price tag of $360 million.
Any DRC relief, whether $360 million or $500 million, would have to be made up elsewhere — transferring the burden from ratepayers to taxpayers. Either way, the buck stops with voters. Hudak’s DRC gambit — now you see the debt, now you don’t — is the kind of political sleight of hand that damaged the province’s finances when the Tories were last in power, and created a crisis of confidence in their government. By playing the same shell game all these years later, Hudak may successfully dupe some people about the debt. But the Tory leader is fooling himself if he thinks this makes him ready to govern — and that cooking the books will never catch up to him, or the province.
The Tories tried similar tricks once before and paid a heavy price. If voters buy in now, and don’t pay heed, we’ll be going down the same blind alley — a debt maze of our own making.

Public Housing...no place to live, but a place to die

By Stephen Spencer Davis and Timothy Appleby, Globe and Mail, June 3, 2011
A tenant is at least four times as likely to be murdered as someone living elsewhere in the GTA, statistics suggest.

When 15-year-old Andrew Naidoo was fatally shot this week in the courtyard of the battered, low-rise public housing complex that was his home in northwest Toronto, the tragedy garnered headlines chiefly because of his age.
Few however – certainly not the police – were surprised about where the city’s 23rd homicide of the year took place. Data analyzed by The Globe and Mail, including months of security reports obtained through a freedom of information request, show that among the 164,000 Toronto Community Housing Corporation tenants, the likelihood of falling victim to violent crime in general, and murder in particular, far exceeds that of the rest of the city’s population.
Righteous indignation will not bring Andrew Naidoo back. Neither will it change the attitudes and policies of the public in current Canadian culture to "public housing" projects that leave residents in peril.
We need public leaders, spokespersons, in the calibre of John Ralston Saul, who never misses an opportunity to declare that both homelessness and poverty can be eliminated in this country if we had the political will. We certainly have the resources.
Cries from church leaders, from occasional columnists like Carol Goar of the Toronto Star, and even social activists seem to fall on deaf ears at municipal, provincial and federal government levels. Even headlines of murders do not bring change. Nevertheless, this 'canary in the coal mine' is only one of many that are singing their song of the loss of hope, the loss of dignity and the loss of significance.
These people who live in public housing, in every town and city across the country, are among the country's forgotten, the country's ignored, the country's nameless citizens. Many do not have work and are living on public funds, without either promise or hope of lifting themselves out of this climate and culture, without a dramatic change in public attitudes.
It is so obvious that politicians respond to publicly perceived and publicly expressed and publicly defined squeeky wheels. They know only "keep the issue at a low, imperceptible level where the public will not be arounsed to demand change." The political aspirations of elected officials, certainly those in municipalities, often has more to do with rewarding friends and financial supporters than with attending to the filth, the dirt and the danger of such statistics as "murder rates in public housing." Those are for the people on the front lines, the police, the social workers, the clergy, the occasional educator, and the fire departments responsible.
Of couse, no one is suggesting that murder rates are as high in every community as they are in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area). However, conditions below a standard in which none of us would choose to live are the conditions in which the poor and the impoverished are living.
And there is no voice in the political arena that takes up their plight...none!
Simply put, their cause has no political pay-back. It is without reward. There are so few votes among the poor and yet, to spend public money on changing the conditions in which they live is so counterintuitive to the public discourse of buget restraint, budget cuts, and budget debt and deficit (even though those formerly in charge of the public housing department in Toronto were apparently quite free with their public cheque books on their own spending on luxuries).
While everyone agrees that we are in an age of accountability, we are not, apparently, accountable for our culture of "denial" of the kind of problems this Globe story illustrates.
And yet, who is doing the accounting for the social costs of not attending to issues like homelessness, and sub-par living conditions maintained by the public purse, and a failure to take such issues seriously?
We are quick to judge the members of the board of the housing administration, for their personal greed, but when do we hold the politicians to account for their closed eyes and ears to such plights as the real people whose lives are reduced, diminished and even shortened by the conditions in which they live.
It seems we would rather attack the public "zits" that recognize and address the public cancers. Do we even have "laboratories" where studies can be conducted of successful social projects that reclaim such living conditions in other jurisdictions, whose findings can be incorporated, with necessary amendments, to our own cities and towns. There is a kind of silo of provincialism in many Ontario towns, that keeps the public servants in the dark about sucessful projects in other towns and cities. Similarly, silos keep cities across the country in the dark about visionary developments in other parts of the country.
I once made a presentation of an original program of re-education hundreds of victims of the dot-com bust in Ottawa.There had been a large bubble of workers released as redundant from the tech sector in that city. The program included time for hands-on work, classroom instruction, mentoring and job-placements as interns, prior to full resumption of workplace re-entry. The only question I was asked by the executive of the social service agency to which I made the presentation was "Why can't we have someone from Ottawa writing and presenting such a proposal?" I was then living in North Bay, Ontario, a brief three-plus hour drive away. Of course, the proposal was rejected by the narrow provincial attitudes of the administrator.

Congrats to Ms DePape for her courage and sacrifice

“This country needs a Canadian version of an Arab spring, a flowering of popular movements that demonstrate that real power to change things lies not with Harper but in the hands of the people, when we act together in our streets, neighbourhoods and workplaces,” (Brigette DePape, in her press release following her removal from the Canadian Senate during the Throne Speech reading by the Governor General.)
What is so exciting about this story (see previous blog, "STOP HARPER," acorncentreblog.com June 4, 2011) is that a Canadian student in international and foreign development at the University of Ottawa, has pricked the bubble of the "establishment" in Ottawa with a political protest of a so-typically Canadian variety.
She had worked in the Senate as a page for a year, and thereby had both the "uniform" and the knowledge of when and how to appear to make her statement. There was no violence; there was no upheaval; there was only a lone person, without opening her mouth, simply carrying a  red cardboard cut in the shape of a "stop" sign, with two words, "STOP HARPER" on it. Of course, at that very moment, the Governor General was reading the Speech from the Throne to both houses of parliament, in the Red Chamber, the Canadian Senate.
Seeking to abolish the Senate and first to set term limits on Senators who may be elected, the Harper government seems more interested in placing its imprint on the structure of the government, along with an increase in the number of Members of Parliament in at least three provinces: Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.(Notably missing from the list is Quebec, which many believe, has, for 75 years, held a traditional 25% of the seats in the Commons, and would therefore be entitled to an increase in M.P.'s as well.)
None of this manoevring will do anything to make M.P.'s more active, or more relevant or more instrumental in the political process. Together, they will merely add to (or subtract from) the superficial structures. Control will remain in the Prime Minster's Office. The purchase and building of millions of dollars of new prison cells, and the purchase of billions of dollars of new F-35 Fighter Jets will take place, as the Commons will dutifully rise, individually and on command, (at least in the Conservative caucus) to cast votes to accomplish those goals.
There is apparently enough public funds available for such expenditures, while we are also told that four of the top scholars at the National Art Gallery have been declared redundant, in order to save some $400,000 annually. Does anyone really wonder if the Philistines are in charge in Ottawa?
In the budget, buried the details, thereby obviating a public debate, will be a line removing the public subsidy from all political parties. And the marching band of Conservatives will, again, rise, individually and sequentially, to confirm the government's (really Harper's) will.
Civil servants who speak out against government policy will be terminated, or forced to offer their resignations. As  the leader of th eGreen Party, Elizabeth May, reminds us, there is not a single line in the Throne Speech about environmental protection, so Canada will continue to fall in stature on the world stage through both a failure to act and a failure to fulfil commitments already made on the environment.
So, without going very far into the government's plans, it is quite easy to see Ms DePape's disenchantment, disaffection and disillusionment with the current government. And she speaks for more than just those Canadians who are under thirty, considered the "youth vote". She speaks for many, rational, even seasoned observers like this scribe.
And at the acorncentreblog.com, we would like to congratulate Ms DePape for her courage, her leadership, her compassion and her vision...and her sacrifice in being fired from her position as "page" a job which would have ended in three weeks without her miniature drama in the "red chamber".

STOP HARPER: "Ex-Page" writes history in Canadian Senate

           Brigette DePape is escorted from Senate                             Photo by Chris Wattie/ Reuters

By Joanna Smith, Toronto Star, June 3, 2011
Brigette DePape, 21, walked into the Senate chamber wearing the black bow tie and white gloves that were part of her page uniform with a handmade protest sign — a red stop sign emblazoned with the message “Stop Harper” and a cartoonish exclamation mark — tucked into her skirt.
“I was kind of nervous as I was walking down that I would trip or something like that, but everything went smoothly,” DePape told the Star in an interview on Friday.
This was no after-hours prank or photo shoot.
This was as Governor General David Johnston was delivering the Speech from the Throne.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper looked on as DePape stood silently with her sign, long brown braid thrown over her shoulder, for a few seconds before the sergeant-at-arms escorted her out of the room
She was fired from her job around the same time she issued an emailed news release explaining her act of civil disobedience and her name — and “Stop Harper” message — became a trending topic on the social media site Twitter.
“Harper's agenda is disastrous for this country and for my generation,” DePape wrote in the professional-looking press release emailed to media while she was still being detained by parliamentary security.
“This country needs a Canadian version of an Arab spring, a flowering of popular movements that demonstrate that real power to change things lies not with Harper but in the hands of the people, when we act together in our streets, neighbourhoods and workplaces,” DePape said in the release....
The recent graduate from the University of Ottawa, where she studied international development and globalization, was clearly ready for her time in the spotlight....

Her former boss at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said DePape was opinionated but easy to work with.

“She's just very passionate about the issues that are important to her and we certainly saw that in her last summer, so I guess it doesn't entirely surprise me,” said Shauna MacKinnon, executive director at the Manitoba office.
“She's just very gutsy and very passionate and has a very different vision than the Stephen Harper vision and also someone who's probably disillusioned by the political process and so I guess she felt that this was something she needed to do.”

Gays can't marry in Trinity College Chapel...how tragic!

By Nicki Thomas, Toronto Star, June 1, 2011
Like so many other couples, Christopher Papps and his longtime partner think Trinity (College) Chapel is the ideal spot to tie the knot.
Papps has admired the building, a masterpiece of Gothic architecture, since his days at the University of Toronto. His partner, an Anglican, wants a church ceremony.
“Of all the places we looked at, it was just the one we had a connection with and we could see ourselves getting married there,” said Papps, 33.
But they can’t.
Papps and his partner, Chris Moret, 37, are gay. And, despite the diocese’s provisional authorization of same-sex blessings, they can’t be married in the chapel.
Unlike adjoining Trinity College, which is affiliated with the university, the chapel is the jurisdiction of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto. And it hasn’t yet been allowed to offer same-sex blessings.
“Regrettably from my standpoint, they can’t,” said Trinity’s chaplain, Rev. Andrea Budgey. “The inclusion of same-sex couples in the church is something that’s the subject of pretty much constant conversation . . . I’m one of the people in the Anglican Church who would very much welcome the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people and that’s why I’ve been part of this conversation for a long time.”
And I'm one of the people, an alumnus of Trinity College, and former clergy of the Anglican Church, who no longer has any association with the church for many reasons, but this is among the top few.
It is the church's regretable unwillingness to move through the fog of resistance to full acceptance of gays and lesbians, including ordination, that will bear considerable responsibility for its demise.
Within the last several months, an active Anglican clergy stated to me and my wife, "I believe that within five years, there will be no Anglican churches in this part of Ontario."
Perhaps that prediction is slightly premature, but it certainly expresses a view from inside the church that does not bode well for the future of the hierarchical instition.
Just last week, the Presbyterian church, hardly known for its radical nature, authorized the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy.
Just because the "power structure" has its collective head in the sand does not make the church's intolerance any less contemptible.

Two Student deaths at Queens likely result of alcohol: coroner

By James Bradshaw, Globe and Mail, May 31, 2011
 Six Queen’s students have died in little more than a year, though not all the deaths were linked to drinking. Still, when two teenage students fell to their deaths two months apart last year, alcohol was ruled a factor both times, making the cohesive, spirited school an emblem of national efforts to take the danger out of campus party culture.
A coroner’s report released Tuesday recommended Queen’s accelerate a review of its policies and take steps to alter an unhealthy “culture of drinking on campus,” including removing jurisdiction over alcohol-related misbehaviour from a student judiciary that rules on non-academic offences.
The report also argues Queen’s needs to expand educational initiatives, and even says the school should consider the feasibility of getting student permission to search residence rooms for alcohol.
Queen’s principal Daniel Woolf stopped short of promising to adopt all the suggestions, but said the school will discuss the recommendations through an alcohol working group under way since January.
He also said allowing students who break the rules to be disciplined by their peers – a unique privilege Queen’s students have held since 1898 – “has served Queen’s very well,” even as Kingston regional supervising coroner Roger Skinner said he “had concerns that the system was not an effective means of dealing with alcohol use.”
Excessive drinking by university students is not a phenomenon exclusive to Queeen's. However, there is no question that public focus on the deaths resulting from excess consumption of alcohol at Queen's is a stain on what is seen by many as a platinum reputation for a contemporary university.
Even this report begs questions such as:

• Why would the principal stop short of agreeing to implement the recommendations of a coroner's report?
• Why would the policy of having students discipline other students not warrant serious examination from the administration?
• What is the culture of an institution that sees at least two, of the six deaths attributable to abuse of alcohol?
• What changes to that culture are being contemplated in order to address the crisis?

This piece does not presume to know the answers to all the many nuances of the issue of student attitudes to alcohol. However, it might be worth a look into the level of perfectionism that is both expected and delivered among Queen's students, and the pressures that such attitudes would inevitably bring to the situation.
Becoming the "Harvard" of the north, as the public reputation of Queen's seeks to attain, is hardly without danger. Words like "preppie," snobbish, exclusive, are more likely to accompany such a pursuit and that, in a Canadian context, could well spark tensions.
This is not Harvard; this is not the state of Massacheusetts; this is not the U.S. And the stronger the attempt to replicate that institution, adn that culture, the more alien will be the results.
Even after the most recent Aberdeen Street bash that has acompanied Homecoming celebrations for several years, when many of the "street drinkers" are not even Queen's students but are interlopers who know how and where to find another opportunity to get drunk, Queen's refused to reimbuse the city of Kingston for even a portion of the extra costs to the city for the extra police protection that the incident generated. So, the public can attest that Queen's, while desperately wanting to say and do all the right things, is less likely to step up to the plate than it could, if that example is any indication of their approach.
There is a move to bridge "town and gown" at Queen's but there is also a need to address some fundamental cultural issues that only those on the inside can determine their severity.