Author Archives: Sheila

Politics as Farce

That anyone–anywhere–is taking “The Donald” seriously is a black mark on America.

This megalomaniac with really, really bad hair, whose most salient characteristic is a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, is busy pandering to the very worst elements in our political system–much as he has pandered to our obsession with money and celebrity. As a side show, I suppose some may find him moderately amusing, if bad taste and cluelessness are your thing. As a presidential contender, not so much.

On the other hand, the shamelessness with which he is playing to the Tea Party folks makes it abundantly clear what truly motivates them: hatred of Obama. Not the real, flesh and blood person who occupies the White House, but the idea of Obama. “Birtherism” is simply a slightly less obvious attack on Obama’s race. The other attacks flow from that central conviction: a black President is unthinkable, illegitimate.

Was there intense hatred of George W. Bush? Absolutely. But it developed over time, as Bush took actions that enraged many citizens. Even after the disaster of the hanging chads and the Supreme Court’s intervention, there was partisan disapproval but not the white-hot anger that developed as Bush revealed himself through word and deed. That is not the case with Obama; he was the object of searing personal attacks before he even assumed the office. You don’t have to agree with everything he’s done (and I don’t–especially his continuation of Bush’s national security policies) to recognize the difference.

But even the most reactionary among us surely don’t hate Obama–or America–enough to consider Donald Trump anything but the shallow side-show he is.

Right?

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Ideology and Evidence Redux

Many years ago, when I first starting taking policy arguments seriously, I was persuaded by the logic of tax relief for the wealthy. That argument had two parts: first, if tax rates are confiscatory, people will have less incentive to work and invest; second, if the rich have “extra” money, they will invest it, and those investments will be used by entrepreneurs to create jobs.

I still oppose confiscatory taxes, but it has been a very long time since the days of the 90% marginal rate. And–although the argument about lower taxes generating job creation made sense–all available evidence suggests it doesn’t work that way in the real world.

As one pundit recently noted, “The Mad Men who once ran campaigns featuring doctors extolling the health benefits of smoking are now busy marketing the dogma that tax cuts mean broad prosperity, no matter what the facts show.”

What happens when a firmly-held belief hits evidence contradicting it?

What should happen, I submit, is that–after careful consideration of the credibility of the evidence and a determination that it is sound–we relinquish the unsupported belief. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. It’s hard, for one thing. Most of us resist admitting that we have been wrong about something, and the more devoutly we believed (in religion, ideology, our own righteousness), the more difficult it is to change. So many of us go looking for alternative evidence to support our original ideology. In a recent column, David Cay Johnson lists 9 “facts” about taxes that are widely believed, but demonstrably untrue, from “poor Americans don’t pay taxes” to “the wealthy are carrying the burden” to “corporate tax breaks create jobs.”

There’s a lot of hand-wringing and bemoaning about the loss of bipartisanship in our politics. But bipartisanship requires that people on both sides of the aisle go into political life determined to respect evidence. Such a determination won’t turn free-market capitalists into socialists, or vice-versa, and it won’t eliminate good-faith arguments over what the evidence shows. But we would be spared the spectacle of watching 36 GOP members of the House Energy Committee vote that global warming doesn’t exist, among other things.

I don’t know whether Representatives like Mike Pence and Michelle Bachmann are “true believers” or simply pandering to the true believers in their base, and at the end of the day, it probably doesn’t matter. When you elevate religious and ideological fervor over reason and evidence, you end up with the Dark Ages.

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Dollars and Sense

We hear a lot of talk from the Governor and legislators about the hard decisions being forced by tough fiscal times, and on this one, I’m sympathetic. When there isn’t enough money to do the things we need to do, finding the least painful cuts can be an incredibly difficult task.

Of course, it is made infinitely more difficult when you begin with a decision to keep your tax rates lower than those in all of the surrounding states.

So, where does HB 1000–our budget bill–aim Mitch the “Blade’s” knife? At education and social services funding. A few examples:

  • The Family and Children’s Fund is being cut by 219 million dollars (with no explanation or justification offered).
  • The 2011 appropriation for Healthy Families, Indiana’s much-touted health insurance program for poor Hoosiers (we don’t need no stinking federal healthcare reform!!) is being cut by 86%, despite the fact that there is a waiting list and the program is turning people away.
  • Health coverage under the CHIP program is also cut. Approximately 7000 eligible children will not be covered–despite the fact that over 75% of the costs of that coverage would be paid by the federal government, and the rest is supposed to be paid out of the proceeds of the tobacco lawsuit settlement.
  • Similarly, hospital care for the indigent is being cut by approximately ten million dollars–but the State will lose twice that amount in Federal Medicaid Leverage dollars.

I could go on and on, but you see the pattern. Mental health drugs are being restricted, making it more likely we’ll pay more through the criminal justice system. Public mass transit–the lack of which is already a huge drag on efforts at job creation–is cut by 15 million. Numerous cuts to K-12 and transfers to Charter schools belie all the rhetoric about improving education–while it is true that simply “throwing money at the problems” won’t solve them, it is equally true that starving public education will only make those problems worse.

I don’t want to minimize the difficulty of funding state government in tough times. But I am struck by three themes that run through these budgetary decisions: the cuts made hurt those who have the least “voice” in our political system (i.e., those who have no lobbyists at the statehouse, and whose displeasure is least likely to be felt at the polls); many of these cuts will actually cost us more in the not-so-long run, making their fiscal prudence highly questionable; and our adamant refusal to look at both the costs and income sides of the ledger not only makes this job much harder than it needs to be, it also benefits the well-to-do at the expense of our poorest citizens.

That doesn’t make either economic or moral sense.

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The Center Will Not Hold

I attended a conference on Media Reform last weekend, and came back pretty depressed. Although there were several thousand people in attendance who were determined to save journalism–not necessarily newspapers, or broadcast news, but the essential watchdog function that led our Founders to give Constitutional status to the press–it’s abundantly clear that right now, no one has a clue how to provide the public with the news democratic societies require.

In place of widely-read, credible news media serving the general public, we have “niche news” tailored to our personal prejudices and politics. Thanks to consolidation and corporate ownership focused on the bottom line to the exclusion of journalism’s social mission, we have more “human interest” and “self-help” stories and less real news; more “opinion” and less fact-checking. That we have ever-more dysfunctional government is not a coincidence.

In fact, America seems to be actively dismantling the institutions that create unum from our pluribus: those places in our society that knit individuals into a public.

I’ve written here often about our diminished constitutional literacy, and the likely consequences of that in a diverse country that depends for its very identity upon a common understanding of our form of government.

Add to that constitutional illiteracy the utterly ferocious attacks on public education we are experiencing. Whatever the defects in our public schools, they are and have been the institution that–as Benjamin Barber eloquently put it–is constitutive of a public. When we privatize education, we treat it as if it is a consumer good–skills we are “buying” so that our children can compete economically. But public education should be more than that; it should respect our diverse private identities while providing a common social umbrella.

When we no longer know our common history or political structure, when we no longer meet each other in public schools, when each of us gets our news from different sources operating out of different political and social realities, what will Americans have in common? What will make us a public?

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