Local Government – Page 33

How Not To Win Friends….Or Persuade People

When he was asked about policy disagreements, former Indiana Senator Dick Lugar had a favorite saying: “That’s something about which reasonable people can disagree.”

That attitude–that recognition that well-meaning people can come to different conclusions–is the foundation of civil discourse and democratic deliberation. Unfortunately, Americans have lost that essential insight (along with the reasonable GOP to which Lugar belonged).

What triggered this recollection was a distasteful display at a recent meeting of the Indianapolis Public School Board. (In the interests of full disclosure, our daughter is a member of that Board, which also includes a former student of mine.)

Serving on a school board, or City Council, or on one of the City’s many boards and commissions is often a (thankless) labor of love, undertaken by people who care deeply about the missions of those bodies and who spend innumerable hours reviewing reports and budgets and meeting with concerned citizens. That doesn’t mean that every decision they make is the right one, or the best that could be made–but in most instances, those decisions have been made in good faith after many hours of weighing the available information and debating alternatives.

Like many other urban districts, IPS educates significantly fewer students than it used to. In 1968, the district’s high school enrollment was 26,107; this year, it is 5,352. The current capacity of the seven high school buildings it operates is 14,450–nearly three times the number of students attending them. The money spent operating and maintaining buildings with so much excess capacity could be better spent improving classroom performance, and the Board has recently faced up to the necessity of closing three of its underused schools.

Such decisions are always difficult and contentious.

The Board has scheduled meetings around the district to explain its deliberations and to hear community responses to the planned closures. At its most recent meeting, members heard from a self-identified “urban education expert” who holds an academic appointment at a local university. This individual has testified at previous Board meetings, and his presentations have been consistently arrogant and accusatory: he has lectured the Board that it is “amateurish,” accused members of being “bought and paid for,” and characterized their elections as “undemocratic.” Rather than a courteous sharing of perspective or evidence, he has delivered boorish, self-righteous rants–the sorts of performances that give academics a bad name.

He outdid himself at the recent meeting. Board members had ulterior motives; board members hadn’t really looked at alternatives; the pending closures would ruin the lives of students whose schools were being closed. (I’m not making this up.) He topped it off by telling the white members of the Board they were racists. (He’s white.) He rarely looked at the Board during this extended diatribe; instead, he aimed his rhetoric at the largely African-American attendees who were clearly his real audience.

Not exactly how one wins friends and influences decision-makers.

I don’t understand people who behave this way. I assume–perhaps naively–that people attend and testify at public meetings in order to influence policy, to offer perspectives that may not have been considered or pose questions that might not have been asked.

Telling policymakers that they are corrupt, racist ignoramuses who don’t know as much as you do is not a strategy likely to persuade them to your point of view, and it certainly isn’t the evidence-based, informative testimony we should expect from an “expert.” (It’s worth noting that, in the testimony I reviewed, he offered absolutely no alternative proposals or constructive suggestions. Just insults.)

If this episode of incivility was an anomaly, it wouldn’t merit a blog post, but such behaviors have become far too common in our toxic political age. Policy differences are no longer issues about which reasonable people can differ; instead, they are showdowns between good and evil. People with whom we disagree can’t simply be wrong, they must be bigoted or “bought.”

This sort of indiscriminate nastiness is deeply corrosive. When everyone who comes to a controversial conclusion is labeled a corrupt racist, we lose the ability to identify people who truly are those things. Voters become cynical about our governing institutions, and public-spirited people–the very people we most need to involve in local government– retreat from public service.

I don’t know how we restore civility to public debate, but we need to figure it out. Sooner, rather than later.

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Lessons From Houston

I wonder if we will learn anything from the pictures of devastation coming from Houston.

Leave aside the contentious arguments over climate change, and the degree to which it contributed to the severity of the storm. There were other omens even denialists should have been able to appreciate. Last year, for example, a ProPublica/Texas Tribune investigation found that officials charged with addressing Houston’s obvious susceptibility to flooding had discounted scientists’ warnings as “anti-development.”

That reaction was so typically Houstonian.

For years, Houston has reveled in its “freedom” from “onerous, unnecessary regulations.” The city has no zoning, and its building codes are lax. As Newsweek has reported, Houston is “drowning in its freedom.”

The feeling there was that persons who own real estate should be free to develop it as they wish…In less-free cities, the jackbooted thugs in the zoning department impose limits on the amount of impervious cover in a development.

Houston’s allergy to “jackbooted thugs” like city planners and its preference for “freedom” over strict building codes is a longstanding feature of its politics. Whether that city’s powers-that-be will moderate their distaste for regulations that would mitigate future disasters remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the federal government–under our “pro-business” President– is moving away from prudence and toward Houston’s free-wheeling approach.

As Vox explains,

Since 2015, infrastructure projects paid for by federal dollars have had to plan ahead for floods and water damage. But when Houston and surrounding towns start to rebuild after floodwaters recede from Tropical Storm Harvey, they won’t be required to plan ahead for the next big storm.

That’s because on August 15, President Trump rolled back the Federal Flood Risk Mitigation Standard, an Obama-era regulation. The 2015 directive, which never fully went into effect, required public infrastructure projects that received taxpayer dollars to do more planning for floods, including elevating their structures to avoid future water damage and alleviate the burden on taxpayers.

Trump characterized his move as repealing an onerous government regulation and streamlining the infrastructure approval process. But he was criticized by both environmental groups and conservatives, who said it made sense to try to protect federal investments.

Between 2005 and 2014, the federal government spent an estimated $277 billion dollars responding to natural disasters like Harvey.

Obama’s flood risk mitigation regulation was intended to reduce those sorts of expenditures by prescribing certain standards for newly constructed infrastructure. Adhering to those standards might cost more money upfront, but requiring such flood mitigation measures would save taxpayers far more in the long run. According to experts, flood mitigation has a 4-1 payback.

No federal projects were ever built with the new standards, because it took years to go through the required public comment process before the rules were finalized. As federal agencies like FEMA and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development were waiting for final approval, Trump nixed the standards. And without that final approval, the agencies won’t be able to act on any of Obama’s recommendations.

“Had those regulations been finalized for FEMA and HUD in particular, they would have ensured that all the post-Harvey rebuilding complied with those standards, helping ensure that we built back in a way that was safer,” said Rob Moore, senior policy analyst at the National Resources Defense Council.

When the floodwaters recede and Houston looks toward repairing and rebuilding its damaged infrastructure, there very may well be state and local officials advocating for more mitigation projects. But there will be no incentive from the Trump administration to do so.

In fairness, Trump didn’t invent this “penny wise, pound foolish” mindset. It is part and parcel of the anti-government rhetoric that is carefully nurtured by politicians who would never conduct their personal affairs in a similarly imprudent manner.

It will be interesting to see what lessons–if any– the anti-regulation, anti-government, anti-science zealots take from the disaster that is Houston.

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I Don’t Know What This Is, But It Sure Isn’t Capitalism…

A number of media outlets have recently reported that Foxcomm, a company usually referred to as a “Taiwanese giant,” will open a plant in Scott Walker’s Wisconsin. As the Guardian prefaced its article,

The announcement by the Taiwanese giant Foxconn that it will build an LCD-manufacturing facility in Wisconsin worth an estimated $10bn was met with considerable fanfare.

But the state has a troubled history in matters of economic development, and the company, a supplier to Apple, Google, Amazon and other tech giants, has a lackluster record when it comes to fulfilling its promises. The news should raise red flags.

In a way, it is a transaction that barely merits publicity; for as long as I can remember, states and municipalities have been trying to entice “job creators” to their areas by offering bigger and better incentives: tax abatements, infrastructure improvements, job training “grants”–all manner of goodies funded out of our tax dollars.

The deal, backers say, will create 13,000 jobs in six years – in return for a reported $3bn in state subsidies. Only 3,000 of those jobs will come immediately. Furthermore, the Washington Post has reported that Foxconn has a track record of breaking such job-creation promises. In 2013, the company announced plans to hire 500 people and invest $30m in Pennsylvania. The plan fizzled out.

Walker and Paul Ryan aren’t the only politicians taking credit for this deal; the White House immediately weighed in, with President Trump reportedly saying, with his characteristic modesty and eloquence: “If I didn’t get elected, [Foxconn] definitely would not be spending $10bn.”

Jennifer Shilling, a Democratic Wisconsin state senator, is one of those who have criticised the deal, noting that the company “has a concerning track record of big announcements with little follow through,” and questioning the legislative appetite for a $1bn-to-$3bn corporate welfare package. Of course, Wisconsin’s legislature is controlled by Republicans who won’t need bipartisan support to pass the enormous subsidies.

The Guardian noted the patchy performance of Foxcomm elsewhere–Foxconn investments in Indonesia, India, Vietnam and Brazil failed to live up to the hype, despite written agreements–and also referred to the less-than-impressive performance of Wisconsin’s previous economic development efforts.

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) is a participant in the Foxconn deal. During Walker’s brief presidential run, it was dogged by questions over failed loans. Businessman and Republican donor Ron Van Den Heuvel was indicted for fraudulently borrowing $700,000 from a local bank. Months after WEDC was created in 2011 the agency, then led by Walker, lent him more than $1.2m, without performing a background check.

Likewise, the state’s manufacturing and agriculture tax credit has been widely criticized as a simple refund for millionaires, according to the Wisconsin Budget Project (WBP) nearly “wiping out income taxes for manufacturers and agricultural producers”.

What the Guardian and other outlets failed to address was the absolute absurdity of these sorts of “job creation” efforts. The use of tax revenues to lure large, profitable corporations to one’s city or state may or may not be immoral (I vote for immoral), but the practice is hardly consistent with genuine capitalism and free enterprise, which require that entrepreneurial activities take place on a level playing field.

Criticisms of these sorts of economic development agreements tend to focus on whether the state or city has made a “good deal.” (Evidently, Wisconsin has not.) But that is almost beside the point. The local factory or other home-grown enterprise that prospers enough to hire new workers doesn’t receive these perks; meanwhile, new, sometimes competitive enterprises are being lured to their state with their tax dollars.

This is corporatism, not capitalism. Paul Ryan and Scott Walker are said to be fans of Ayn Rand, but I’ve read Atlas Shrugged. Rand was a capitalism fundamentalist, and would have been disgusted by this deal; she would have labeled the beneficiaries “looters.”

And she’d have been right about that.

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Reality Bites….

It’s really a shame that American policymakers are so allergic to evidence, because we have recently had a couple of natural experiments testing the GOP’s most fervent economic ideologies, and we could learn a lot from both of them.

Most people who follow the news are aware of Sam Brownback’s effort to make Kansas a shining example of economic growth to be achieved by drastic reductions in state taxes. To say it didn’t go well would be an understatement. Eventually–after brutal cuts to public education, infrastructure and public services and no sign of the promised offsetting economic growth–more rational Republicans in the state legislature forced him to accept tax increases.

Fewer people are aware of an even more dramatic experiment in Colorado.

The story began with the 2008 recession; like many other municipalities, Colorado Springs was experiencing fiscal distress.

To fill a $28 million budget hole, Colorado Springs’ political leaders—who until that point might have been described by most voters as fiscal conservatives—proposed tripling property taxes. Nearly two-thirds of voters said no. In response, city officials (some would say almost petulantly) turned off one out of every three street lights. That’s when people started paying attention to a city that seemed to be conducting a real-time experiment in fiscal self-starvation. But that was just the prelude. The city wasn’t content simply to reject a tax increase. Voters wanted something genuinely different, so a little more than a year later, they elected a real estate entrepreneur as mayor who promised a radical break from politics as usual.

For a city, like the country at large, that was hurting economically, Steve Bach seemed like a man with an answer. What he promised sounded radically simple: Wasteful government is the root of the pain, and if you just run government like the best businesses, the pain will go away. Easy. Because he had never held office and because he actually had been a successful entrepreneur, people were inclined to believe he really could reinvent the way a city was governed.

Bach promised to transform city government, making it work for everyone without tax increases. (Sound familiar?) He promised to do away with the personal property tax for businesses and to reduce the time needed for developers to get permits. He promised that these and his other “businesslike” measures would promote job growth–he promised 6,000 new jobs a year. He sold himself as an outsider fighting the city’s “regulatory agency mind-set.”

“Sixty Minutes” and “This American Life” covered the election and the town’s new “business friendly” governance. We haven’t heard much from the media since then, and it turns out that a lot has changed. As Politico noted, “seven years after the experiment began, the verdict is in—and it’s not at all what its architects planned.”

It turned out that putting people who don’t understand government in charge of government isn’t a formula for success. The new mayor fired people who had institutional memory and governing expertise; deferred critical infrastructure maintenance, and quarreled with the City Council when its members had the nerve to act like a co-equal branch of government rather than as his subordinates. The promised job growth didn’t come. Chaos did.

The next election, Colorado Springs elected as mayor a man who had spent his entire professional life in government.

It’s still a conservative town. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by more than 22 points in Colorado Springs’ El Paso County. But even with that “small-government mind-set,”

[T]hree times in his first two years as mayor, Suthers has gone to voters either proposing a new tax or asking to keep extra tax revenue. By overwhelming margins, he has now persuaded the supposedly anti-tax zealots of Colorado Springs to commit $250 million to new roads, $2 million to new park trails and as much as $12 million for new stormwater projects.

What has all this “wasteful” government spending done to economic growth? Some 16,000 jobs have been created in the past 24 months, and unemployment is at 2.7%.

Amazing as it may seem, running a government requires different skills than running a business–and fiscal prudence is not a synonym for low or no taxes.

Who knew?

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Deconstructing The Rhetoric

A week or so ago, an Indiana legislator–a Republican– posted a comment to Facebook about the current effort to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. I know this particular Republican to be thoughtful and well-intentioned; he’s not one of the mean-spirited or rigidly ideological partisans who populate our Statehouse.

His “logic,” however, defied reality.

He began by saying that we are not debating healthcare–we are debating access to health care via insurance coverage and that government should “let the insurance market work.” (Why he thought the distinction significant mystifies me, but okay.)

I am a huge proponent of markets–in areas of the economy where they work. Most people recognize that healthcare is an area where markets do not work; market transactions require a willing buyer and a willing seller both of whom are in possession of all information relevant to the transaction. That definition doesn’t characterize doctor-patient interactions, and it also doesn’t characterize the health insurance “marketplace.”

Even if you assume that all citizens understand the complexities and “fine print” of the policies offered by health insurers, that they all understand the technical terminology employed and are able to make considered opinions about the nature and extent of their desired coverage, you are left with several major problems that cannot be solved by “market magic.”

First of all, most Americans get their health insurance through their employers. They don’t get to participate in the choices involved. (This coupling of insurance and employment is problematic for lots of reasons unrelated to the subject of this post; for one thing, it makes American businesses less competitive in the global economy. But that’s a subject for another day.)

Second, significant numbers of people who do not get their insurance through their jobs–either because they don’t have jobs or their employer doesn’t offer it–cannot afford the coverage they need. (That’s why we have Medicare and Medicaid.) In the U.S., non-governmental health insurance policies are priced to cover expenses that include not just the expected payouts to providers, but the costs of marketing, profits and taxes. Private insurance overhead also includes very substantial salaries paid to insurance companies’ management, costs not incurred by Medicare and Medicaid. Last time I looked, Medicare overhead averaged around 3% while private insurance overhead averaged around 24%.

Third, and most important: markets, by definition, are voluntary. (That “willing” buyer and seller…). Insurance works by spreading risk. If younger, healthier people decide they aren’t “willing” buyers–if only the elderly and sick and people with pre-existing conditions participate in the market–the whole system comes crashing down. Insurers have to charge higher and higher premiums, and policies become more and more unaffordable. That’s why the ACA’s mandate was an essential part of the law.

If we accept the premise that access to healthcare is a human right–and I am well aware that most Republicans do not accept that premise–then people who cannot afford insurance must be subsidized. For the reasons I’ve listed, providing access through “market forces” would add enormously to the costs of the insurance and thus to the amount of the subsidies.

There is a reason other developed nations have pursued a variety of ways to nationalize health insurance; it’s the only way to make universal access cost-effective.

When you deconstruct Paul Ryan’s rhetoric about giving people the “freedom” to go uninsured, and the GOP’s reverential references to “market economics,” what you get is what the Congressional Budget Office described: millions of Americans losing insurance entirely, and millions of others paying much more for much less coverage.

Eventually, Americans are going to have to decide between a system like “Medicare for All,” that pays for actual healthcare, and our current, unsustainable and immensely more expensive insistence upon subsidizing the bottom lines of Big Insurance and Big Pharma in the name of “the market.”

The purchase and sale of health insurance in today’s U.S. can be called many things, but a genuine market isn’t one of them.

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