Question to Radio Yerevan: Did Elizabeth Warren use to agree with Betsy DeVos?
Answer: Oh boy don't get me started...
(Vox did a good explainer on the bankruptcy bill, if you want to follow up.)
Oh, yes, that's the book where David Brooks thinks she agreed with Betsy DeVos. It's not quite the book he imagines it is. It was inspired by her work on bankruptcy and her conviction, not standard Republican fare, that the staggering rise in personal bankruptcy in those days was caused not by feckless spendthrifts and easy credit but by structural factors putting a squeeze on middle-class families that they couldn't earn their way out of.
In particular, she and Tyagi addressed themselves to the change in the system in which women with young children once upon a time had options of staying out of the paid workforce to rear the kids or train for a professional career or both (as Warren did herself when she was a young mother and law student), with the possibility of taking a low-income job as a safety valve when things got tight. Now no household could do without two incomes, because men's wages had become so stagnant, and at the same time the expenses of the two-income household, day care and the rise in home prices in neighborhoods with good schools, meant that women in the paid work force were hardly making any money. Paradoxically, the opening up to women of the job market seemed to be effectively reducing their choices.
So one proposal they offered (on pp. 34-36 of a book of 250-odd pages) was the thing they called a school voucher program, of which Brooks writes:
It may be something like the same argument the billionaire DeVos has learned to recite, haltlingly, with her vapid Botox smile, but it's not the same program. DeVos, who had hardly even entered a public school building before she became secretary, is focused on moving dollars out of the nation's public school systems and into the hands of private schools (especially religious ones) and for-profit charter operators; Warren and Tyagi emphatically propose an all-public voucher system:
In effect, it's pretty much the system we worked our kids through for middle school and high school in New York City. Far from agreeing with Betsy DeVos, Warren and Tyagi were agreeing with Bill de Blasio (who was a Brooklyn city councilman putting his own kids through the same system at the same time) and, no doubt, Michael Bloomberg (who, like Warren, also became a Democrat but took quite a bit longer to do it).
That's ridiculous. Warren supported high-quality subsidized daycare then, as long as it was for all children, not just for those in dual-income families—the kind of guaranteed pre-K New York City has now, thanks to Mayor de Blasio, as it happens.
And she still does. Her position hasn't really changed at all. And Brooks is still an idiot who can't be bothered to read the things he wants to cite. Enough.
 |
| W.C. Fields in Leo McCarey's Six of a Kind (1934), and the entire thing (just over an hour and featuring Charlie Ruggles and George Burns and Gracie Allen) is watchable here. H/t Professor Fate! |
Shorter David Brooks, "When Elizabeth Warren Agreed With Betsy DeVos", New York Times, 3 September 2019:
We should be deeply concerned about Senator Elizabeth Warren, once a Republican law professor with startlingly heterodox and innovative views who wrote an entire book on the problem of women being forced to work outside the home, or not, as the case may be, not that there's anything wrong with whichever one of them she was against, and advocating school vouchers as the solution, just like President Trump's heterodox and innovative secretary of education. Now, suspiciously just in time for the presidential primary campaign where she is running as a Democrat, she's suddenly turned around and started blaming everything on the bankers instead!Well, maybe not exactly. I'm not certain when she became a registered Democrat (sometime after 1993 or so), but as one of the nation's foremost and most innovative experts in bankruptcy law she has had the bankers in her sights for a very long time; she just used to think ("capitalist to her bones") members of the Republican party were allowed to feel that way, when it was associated with nice little George Bailey Main Street banks as opposed to the behemoths that gave us 2008:
"They moved to a party that said, 'No, it's not about a level-playing field, it's now about a field that has gotten tilted,' and they really stood up for the big financial institutions when the big financial institutions are just hammering middle-class American families. You know, I just feel like that's a party that moved way, way away."
Warren's views have shifted over the years, but so too has the ground beneath her feet.
A few decades ago, Warren's concern about reining in banks would've allowed her to remain a Republican. Today, it makes her such a left-leaning outlier that even as a Democrat she's forced to face off in dramatic showdowns with her party's leadership. Warren's disruptive influence in Washington isn't guided by a thirst for revolution as much as it is a hope for restoration. (Zeeshan Alam/Mic)For example, in her first book for a non-academic audience, the 2003 The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke, written with her daughter, the management consultant Amelia Warren Tyagi, you should have seen how she tore into Democratic Senator Joseph Biden over his work since 1997 or so for a bankruptcy "reform" demanded by credit card companies and finally passed in 2005 (over the noes of 25 Democratic senators including Barack Obama, but the ayes of all the Republicans) and the National Organization for Women for continuing to support him as he "sold out women" to the "giant corporations and paid lobbyists":
(Vox did a good explainer on the bankruptcy bill, if you want to follow up.)
Oh, yes, that's the book where David Brooks thinks she agreed with Betsy DeVos. It's not quite the book he imagines it is. It was inspired by her work on bankruptcy and her conviction, not standard Republican fare, that the staggering rise in personal bankruptcy in those days was caused not by feckless spendthrifts and easy credit but by structural factors putting a squeeze on middle-class families that they couldn't earn their way out of.
In particular, she and Tyagi addressed themselves to the change in the system in which women with young children once upon a time had options of staying out of the paid workforce to rear the kids or train for a professional career or both (as Warren did herself when she was a young mother and law student), with the possibility of taking a low-income job as a safety valve when things got tight. Now no household could do without two incomes, because men's wages had become so stagnant, and at the same time the expenses of the two-income household, day care and the rise in home prices in neighborhoods with good schools, meant that women in the paid work force were hardly making any money. Paradoxically, the opening up to women of the job market seemed to be effectively reducing their choices.
So one proposal they offered (on pp. 34-36 of a book of 250-odd pages) was the thing they called a school voucher program, of which Brooks writes:
Warren did not argue that women should leave the labor force. Instead, she favored helping parents by providing them with school vouchers and school choice. “Fully funded vouchers would relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools,” Warren and Tyagi wrote.
“An all-voucher system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shakeout might be just what the system needs,” they continued. This is exactly the argument that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos uses to support school choice.
In effect, it's pretty much the system we worked our kids through for middle school and high school in New York City. Far from agreeing with Betsy DeVos, Warren and Tyagi were agreeing with Bill de Blasio (who was a Brooklyn city councilman putting his own kids through the same system at the same time) and, no doubt, Michael Bloomberg (who, like Warren, also became a Democrat but took quite a bit longer to do it).
Professor Warren also supported proposals to help families afford day care, but she opposed the approach that candidate Warren now advocates. Back then, she called taxpayer-funded day care a liberal “sacred cow”: “Any subsidy that benefits working parents without providing a similar benefit to single-income families pushes the stay-at-home mother and her family further down the economic ladder.”
And she still does. Her position hasn't really changed at all. And Brooks is still an idiot who can't be bothered to read the things he wants to cite. Enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment