Do you need to be an economist to talk about the economy?

Sometimes I think we think that. “We” being people and “that” being “a Ph.D. in economics is needed.”

If we cede the economic conversation to corporate special interests, however, we lose on issue after issue to the laissez-faire economic story: “Let the markets work.”

At the “Pope is Dope” messaging session this year at Netroots, the panel was asked: What is the biggest mistake people make in conversations?

Without hesitation, Anat Shenker-Osorio responded: “Overuse of the passive voice.”

“People do things,” she said, “If you don’t make it sound like it’s people caused, it is cognitively impossible for it to be people fixed.”

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting Paul McGann, the 8th Doctor Who, at a local comic expo.

As we were chatting, my friend Rick asked him about the Scottish independence vote. The 8th Doctor mentioned two things that really stuck with me.

When I first saw this tweet, my first thought was: “Yes! Finally someone nails it. And of course, it’s Chris Rock.”

Some friends of mine are helping to put together the #Rally4Equality next week in Washington, D.C.

They asked me if I’d ever written anything about equality. I’ve written about economic equality, I said.

To be quite honest, the idea scared the crap out of me.

Why? I typically write about economics and framing. What could I say about women’s rights that hasn’t been said by several generations of women activists and suffragist leaders?

Of course I was also intrigued. What could I say?

So I told them I’d think about it.

One question that kept coming up: How would I explain women’s rights and equality to my conservative friends? Could I even talk about this issue with conservatives? Could I convince conservatives that equality was an issue worth fighting for?

Below are my early attempts and what I learned.

Andrew W.K. might be my new hero.

He writes a letters column for the Village Voice and I’d never heard of him until yesterday when someone I know posted his response to a letter from Son of a Right-Winger.

In a recent community forum conversation, someone posted the following in a discussion about taxing the wealthy. He was describing a friend of his who owned horses and the issues this business owner faced:

Why is this amazing?

First, someone turned a $240,000 profit off of a $20,000 investment after taxes and trainer fees. That’s a 1200% return on investment. Not bad.

Second, the person involved in this tremendous profit considers this “not a good deal.”

Third, because this comment has everything to do with the recent Hobby Lobby decision.

And fourth, because I consider the author of this post an ally, not an adversary.

If any of this intrigues you, click to read on.

The subject of yesterday’s City Council Neighborhood Committee meeting was the Central Parkway protected bike lane. City council voted 9-0 to approve this during the fall and several people I know recommended attending the meeting as for some unknown reason the issue was being raised again.

I went down to show my support for the bike lane wondering if this was going to turn into another streetcar debacle.

It didn’t. At least not yet.

But it was very interesting.

A few weeks back I had the random pleasure of meeting Bruce Levine, clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up and Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic.

As we introduced ourselves and he talked about his activism in the field of mental health, I was struck by something he said: “Making a difference was easier than I thought.”

I wanted to know more. He was kind enough to respond to a few questions.

Monday night Ohio Governor John Kasich delivered his state of the state speech.

Governor John Kasich speaking with attendees at the 2016 First in the Nation Town Hall (photo by Gage Skidmore/CC-BY-SA-2.0)

He cribbed the biblical Reagan “city on a hill metaphor” to describe Ohio:

All of these things have helped Ohio move up to higher, more solid ground, and, if you look, the clouds are moving apart and the sun is beginning to shine, and we can get a glimpse of the summit ahead. We’ve got much further to go, but the success we’ve had gives us the confidence to climb higher. We’re not hopeless, we’re hopeful. We’re not wandering, we have direction. Let’s keep going.

As an Ohioan, I’d like to tell a different story.

It’s a story that appears in bits and pieces in city & school financial reports, in letters to the editor and editorials, in economic analyses, but the full story has largely hid from public sight because it’s not a single sensationalist event.

It’s not a story about a person or administration because you have to go back further than that to see the pattern.

You have to go back further than that to see how a state gets budgeted back to the stone age.

The pattern is simple but takes place over a long period of time: shift tax burden, create deficit, blame government, defund government, repeat.

And unfortunately, it’s a story that’s not just happening in Ohio, but at a national level and in many states across the nation because it’s being pushed by influential corporate groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The story begins in 2005 …