Who can resist one of these quizzes?

Left Wing Modern Orthodox: 57%
Right Wing Modern Orthodox: 86%
Left Wing Yeshivish/Chareidi: 44%
Right Wing Yeshivish/Chareidi: 10%

Congratulations. You're Modern Orthodox all right, but wait! Just when you were ready to live an idyllic happily-labeled life they announce Left Wing and Right Wing Modern Orthodoxy. What the heck is up with that? Maybe you need to rethink and refine some of your positions, and then take the test again so I can put you in a little box.

Not shocked by the result, although I did quibble with a number of the questions. I'l skip the little box, thanks.

Our beloved Renegade Rebbetzin some cogent thoughts about her family's relative position and how they are forced into a persistent status of relative penny-pinching. Her descriptions of her (well-meaning) congregants' clueless comments on the subject deserve to be immortalized in any compilation of "The Thoughtless Things People Say (Volume XLVII)."

A related thought: I think RR is also touching on an explanation for another important phenomenon she's discussed before: why educated, MO-type women of our generation rebel against the "rebbetzin" label and unpaid responsibilities that come with it. While a lot of it has to do with the rebellion against the old European model and the presumed brain-death that comes with it (not that that's necessarily true, but the perception of June Cleaver in the shtetl, with many more children, summs it up), much of it also has to do with the fact that if the rabbi's wife works at a well-paying job, the financial stresses she aptly describes can be somewhat alleviated. (Another factor, of course, is the external validation that comes with "using" those advanced degrees.)

It's hard to be surprised when those who have the ability to avoid those stresses, choose to do so. But it does lead to a communal shortage of "rebbetzins."

A few years ago, during the initial contretemps over female "congregational interns," one of the women involved was quoted as saying something along the lines of (I don't have the exact quote) that her goal for that program wasn't the inauguration of female rabbis, but of women who would be appropriately recognized and compensated for performing the communal duties that rebbetzins have performed in the past. Regardless of one's feelings about that particular experiment, it seems that a shul (even one that doesn't want the kiss-of-death label of "progressive") should recognize the communal benefits of having a rebbetzin, and pay accordingly for those services. Then maybe RR could afford some better Chanuka presents.

On the other hand, most shuls don't have two nickels to rub together for a fire in case of a power outage (for reasons good and bad, also touched on in RR's post). So RR and her cohorts probably shouldn't include it in their budgets anytime soon.

Various must-reads on the (hopefully ending) NYC transit strike:

- Joel Kotkin and Harry Siegel in TNR, detailing how state and city governments (and more importantly, their tax bases) have become little more than funding vehicles for public-sector unions:

...During the past 30 years, public-employee unions have largely won the battle for urban political power by default. Other traditional power centers--neighborhood associations, small business organizations, reform groups--have over time receded from urban politics. Businesses, after all, can always go elsewhere, either to the suburbs or overseas; frustrated individuals often get worn down, electing to move on or give up. Public sector unions, by contrast, have remained powerful, withstanding occasional assaults by reformist mayors of both parties.

Democrats are usually seen as the beneficiaries of this situation, since they often receive cash and organizational backing from unions. But there is a downside to this support, which the current strike illustrates. City councils in New York, Los Angeles, and most other major cities are dominated by Democrats. Most council elections in New York, for example, are determined in the Democratic primary, which consistently sees low voter turnout. (In 2003, turnout in the city council primaries was 11 percent.) This magnifies the power of unions--since a handful of highly organized voters can easily sway an election--and makes Democratic politicians more or less beholden to the wishes of public employees. New York, where several prominent council members have already expressed support for the transit workers' union, may be the most obvious example of this problem; but it is hardly the only city afflicted.

- Noah Millman, simultaneously embracing Reaganism and Leninism (while willing to put much of his money where his blog is):

...I wish Mayor Bloomberg would fire every single transit worker and break the union. But (a) I don't think he (nor, I suspect, anyone else) has the clear authority to do so, and (b) he'd never do it if he did have the authority; he's a cautious, centrist, consensus managerial type. That's still a whole lot better than Pataki; Bloomberg has done much less to actually sell out the city's economic interests that Pataki has the state's. But he's no Ronald Reagan.

...I am normally highly resistant to Leninist "the worser the better" logic, but in this case we really do need to highten the contradictions. The sooner NYC and our other major cities and blue states realize that their contracts with public sector unions are absolutely unsustainable, the better for everyone. For that reason, I would say that the Bush Administration tax proposal I most strongly favor is also the proposal that would most hurt New Yorkers, and would cost me personally a great deal of money every year: eliminate the deduction for state and local income taxes.

As an aside, he is right about Pataki: it might be useful to remind those liberals who blame the party affiliation of Pataki and Bloomberg for the strike how Pataki won re-election by signing the state treasury over to Local 1099.

- Ryan Sager on the class war being waged in NYC right now - by the transit union against workers who make less than the average TWU member, who (probably) are more likely to live in the outer boros than in Manhattan or suburbia and thus have the most difficulty bypassing the strike by walking or taking Metro-North or the LIRR:

...[T]here is a class confrontation of a kind going on — but it's not between rich and poor. It's between the working class and what might be called the government-worker class.

As one commenter wrote in to the TWU: "Get with reality . . . 90+% of people in this area will never be able to retire by 55 . . . pensions across America are going to default. Sad state of America, yes, but unfortunately the rest of us are in the same boat."

- This springtime City Journal piece I've linked to before about how to save the NYC subways also has some resonance now:

When today’s TWU leaders fight the MTA, they’re still carrying the banner for a whole anti-capitalist philosophy. Members see any concession not as a necessary compromise but as an unforgivable sellout to a sworn enemy. As the New York Times reported after the 2002 contract settlement, some workers had wanted to strike just to tell their children and grandchildren “that they fought the good fight, as did many transit workers who walked out in 1966 and 1980.” Of course, under New York law, it is illegal for public-service employees to strike. But that doesn’t stop the TWU from periodically forcing Gotham’s taxpayers and private-sector businesses to incur millions of dollars in emergency-planning costs when the TWU threatens to break the law and strike anyway, as it threatened three years ago.

Sound familiar?

Ms. Gelinas also has been promulgating the pro-privatization-and-competition line here (advocating that, in the event of a strike, the city and state take actions far tougher than they actually have), here (advocating privatization of the buses) and here (advocating using other buses to break the strike).

One recent thought about the NYC transit strike, that came to me while standing on a Metro-North train with several thousand fellow New Yorkers (and we were certainly the lucky ones). Caution: rampant, unverified and uncredentialed speculation ahead:

Don't defined-benefit pension plans and stock options, each as they were formerly ladled out, have something fundamental in common? In each case, companies and/or governments handed them out relatively freely, in part because of various accounting and/or regulatory reasons that enabled the grantor to underestimate the benefit's true cost - stock options weren't required to be expensed until recently, and various regulations make it easy for companies to underfund their pension plans. (True, the cost of pension plans also has been heavily affected by the same demographic forces bankrupting Social Security: increasing life expectancy and the massive slowdown in the increase of workers relative to the Baby Boom generation.)

And as we're finding out with respect to pensions, reflecting the true cost of the benefit make it that much less likely that any such benefits will be offered in the future, absent massive changes in the costs - something that understandably does not make workers happy. It is too soon to gauge the impact of the new rules requiring the expensing of stock options, but it will probably (and justifiably so) make it that much harder for companies to hand options out like candy, as opposed to the practice in the 90s.

Anyone else have any thoughts or actual knowledge of those issues, as opposed to the above random speculation?

Do you really want to know about the latest hiatus?

I didn't think so.

There has been some good news on the personal front. I hope that within a few months (lawyers' natural caution, sorry) I'll be able to describe it pretty fully.

Anyway, onto other things.