Public Policy and Governance – Page 207

And The Hits Keep Coming

Very few voters know–or care– much about the census. Counting the people who live in the land between “sea and shining sea” is one of those boring, technical tasks that government does, but I doubt that a single vote has ever been cast because the voter felt that it was done well or poorly.

Just because the census doesn’t arouse much in the way of passion, however, doesn’t make it unimportant. In fact, it is very important.

The Constitution requires that the count be conducted every year that ends in zero–that is, every ten years. The census ensures that citizens of each state have the “correct” number of representatives, a number based upon population. It also tells us just how diverse the country is, which categories are growing and which are shrinking. One of the most important functions of the census is that it gives analysts–not just government analysts, but those working for a multitude of businesses and nonprofit organizations– the data they need in order to make important decisions and avoid wasteful efforts.

In a recent survey, 74% of city officials said they relied on the data collected by the census–that it was very important to the discharge of their duties. In a recent article, Think Progress reported

Ethnic minorities and traditionally underrepresented groups especially rely on the census for the voice it gives them in government — and are at risk if the survey goes awry or if their communities are not accurately counted. Because the Census Bureau uses this data to draw congressional maps, an undercount of diverse populations that traditionally vote Democrat could end up benefiting Republican districts.

That last sentence may hold a clue to the present straits in which the Census Bureau finds itself.

The Republican Congress has declined to fund the Bureau at the levels required–even cutting its budget despite the fact that significant population growth has expanded its workload. Worse still, the agency has been without leadership since the resignation of its previous director, and Talking Points Memo reports that Trump is proposing to appoint a pro-gerrymandering professor to the position.

The 2020 U.S. Census will determine which states gain or lose electoral power for years to come, and President Donald Trump is leaning towards appointing a pro-gerrymandering professor with no government experience to help lead the effort.

Politico reported Tuesday that Trump may soon tap Thomas Brunell, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Dallas who has no background in statistics, for a powerful deputy position that doesn’t require congressional approval.

He authored a 2008 book titled Competitive Elections are Bad for America.

This is a position that has historically been held by a career civil servant who has served many years in the Census Bureau. Brunell would come to the post from stints as a “consultant” for a number of Republican-controlled states that have been sued for racial and partisan gerrymandering, including Ohio and North Carolina.

Civil and voting rights advocates have been sounding the alarm since the beginning of this year about the fate of the 2020 Census, and the bureau currently has no director and faces a severe budget shortfall.

Now, there are fears that the appointment of an ideological conservative could lead to changes in the Census that could have repercussions for many years to come. For example, conservatives have long argued for adding a question about citizenship status to the Census, which may scare immigrants away from responding and being counted. As deputy director, Brunell would also have power over the ad budget used to encourage people to participate in the Census, and could potentially steer those resources in a way that favors conservative strongholds.

While most rational (and terrified) Americans are fixated on Trump’s more high-profile unstable and erratic behaviors, and upon Congressional Republicans’ passage of irresponsible legislation that earlier iterations of their party would have loudly condemned, the knee-capping of the Census Bureau illustrates the real danger posed by this collection of crazies and incompetents.

This is the problem with putting people who hate government in charge of government. They will destroy its effectiveness in order to justify a return to that pre-social “state of nature” which Hobbes accurately described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.’

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If You Thought Citizens United Was A Travesty…

Wait until you get a look at the full impact of the “tax reform” embraced by a Senate filled with servants of Big Money and the rabid, white nationalist GOP base.

Among the many unconscionable deals cut in order to round up the necessary 50 votes was a gift to the Christian far right that I’d suggest filing under “be careful what you wish for.”

According to a guest column in that noted leftwing publication Religion News Service (that’s sarcasm, for those of you who might be literal-minded), the tax bill’s repeal of the Johnson Amendment–a repeal much desired by Trump-supporting fundamentalist churches–will inevitably lead to government regulation of churches.

Partisan politics do not belong in church pulpits or in nonprofit offices. This isn’t just common sense, but part of the tax code. The Johnson Amendment says that 501(c)(3) nonprofits, including churches, cannot endorse or oppose political candidates.

The tax bill initially passed by the House exempted churches from the amendment, but at the last minute, the measure was amended to exempt all 501 C3 organizations. According to the Religion News Service analysis, this will not only cost taxpayers billions of dollars, it will end up “dragging nonprofits away from their charitable missions and into the undrained, partisan swamp.”

It is telling that every major nonprofit coalition has lobbied against repeal. More than 4,500 nonprofits have signed a letter to Congress asking that the rule be protected.

As the article points out, tax exemption is a privilege, not a right–if churches want to engage in political activities, they are free to do so now; they need only relinquish their tax exemption. After all, political donations shouldn’t be “laundered” through religious or nonprofit organizations; preventing that was precisely the reason for the Amendment in the first place. But these churches want to eat their cake and have it, too.

The havoc that would be wrought by repealing the Johnson Amendment would make Citizens United look like the golden age of American democracy. Permitting tax-exempt churches to engage in partisan politicking would throw untold millions — even billions is no exaggeration — of dark money into U.S. elections. Right now, all 501(c)(3) organizations except churches and church-related charities file annual tax returns, the detailed Form 990, with the IRS. Every penny donated and every penny spent is tracked. But churches file nothing. They are exempt. They are financial and informational black holes.

So if the Johnson Amendment is repealed, any megadonor could write the nearest megachurch a check of any size and take the tax write-off. The pastor gets the check, takes his cut — a tithe, so to speak — and spends the rest on politicking. Churches would become super-PACs. All in the name of religious freedom.

Only the most naive policymakers and proponents of repeal could possibly believe that this situation would be allowed to continue unabated.

Trump, Ryan and other opponents of the rule are shortsighted, especially if religious freedom is the true goal. Imagine for a moment that they get everything they want. Churches become unregulated, unaccountable, opaque super-PACs. Regular PACs start reorganizing as churches because their donors have suddenly found tax-deductible Jesus and fled.

This scenario is unsustainable if our democracy is to survive. At some point, the government will be forced to regulate churches: financial disclosures, donor disclosures (including even regular parishioners and tithe-givers), IRS filings, FEC filings — the regulatory list will be long and onerous. Churches will get money, power — and invasive government regulation to match….

A vote against the Johnson Amendment is a vote for church regulation. Surely that’s not something the party that has proclaimed itself the champion of religious liberty intended. But that’s what happens when a reality TV show host dictates tax policy as a way to thank his zealous supporters. The law governing churches’ involvement in politics might change, but the law of unintended consequences will not.

We aren’t just living in an age of corruption–we’re living in an age of idiocy.

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Yes, It’s Disheartening. But It’s True.

We’re getting used to seeing headlines like this recent one in the Washington Post: “Hate in America is On the Rise.” According to the lede,

A NEW FBI report on hate crimes tells a sobering story. For the second year in a row, police departments across the country reported a rise in the number of crimes motivated by bias.

A statistical breakdown suggests that nearly 60 percent of these crimes were motivated by racial bias, with African Americans targeted in about half of those. Over 20 percent were expressions of religious animosity; more than half of those attacks were aimed at Jews, with another quarter targeting Muslims. (There has been a sharp rise in crimes against Muslims and people of Arab descent.)

Sociologists and psychiatrists can offer informed analyses of the social conditions that cause people harboring bigoted attitudes to “act out.” But it isn’t much of a stretch to attribute a significant portion of this troubling spike in hate crimes to a President who traffics in racial and religious stereotypes.

In fact, Trump’s victory poses a chicken-and-egg conundrum: did rising tribalism and bigotry lead to his election? Or did he win by nurturing and exploiting that bigotry?

The answer, of course, is both.

In the Atlantic, Adam Serwer has provided a compelling analysis of the essential nature of Trump’s appeal. He began that analysis by revisiting David Duke’s gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana. Then, as now, the Chattering Classes attributed Duke’s appeal to economic “distress.” Then–as now–the data simply didn’t support that explanation.

Duke’s strong showing, however, wasn’t powered merely by poor or working-class whites—and the poorest demographic in the state, black voters, backed Johnston. Duke “clobbered Johnston in white working-class districts, ran even with him in predominantly white middle-class suburbs, and lost only because black Louisianans, representing one-quarter of the electorate, voted against him in overwhelming numbers,” The Washington Post reported in 1990. Duke picked up nearly 60 percent of the white vote. Faced with Duke’s popularity among whites of all income levels, the press framed his strong showing largely as the result of the economic suffering of the white working classes. Louisiana had “one of the least-educated electorates in the nation; and a large working class that has suffered through a long recession,” The Post stated.

Duke’s position as a leader of the KKK was explained away by Louisiana voters, who blamed the media for “making Duke seem racist.”

The economic explanation carried the day: Duke was a freak creature of the bayou who had managed to tap into the frustrations of a struggling sector of the Louisiana electorate with an abnormally high tolerance for racist messaging.

Right.

Fast forward to 2016, and the Trump campaign. As Serwer writes

During the final few weeks of the campaign, I asked dozens of Trump supporters about their candidate’s remarks regarding Muslims and people of color. I wanted to understand how these average Republicans—those who would never read the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer or go to a Klan rally at a Confederate statue—had nevertheless embraced someone who demonized religious and ethnic minorities. What I found was that Trump embodied his supporters’ most profound beliefs—combining an insistence that discriminatory policies were necessary with vehement denials that his policies would discriminate and absolute outrage that the question would even be asked.

It was not just Trump’s supporters who were in denial about what they were voting for, but Americans across the political spectrum, who, as had been the case with those who had backed Duke, searched desperately for any alternative explanation—outsourcing, anti-Washington anger, economic anxiety—to the one staring them in the face. The frequent postelection media expeditions to Trump country to see whether the fever has broken, or whether Trump’s most ardent supporters have changed their minds, are a direct outgrowth of this mistake. These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of. (emphasis mine)

Serwer notes the “specific dissonance” of Trumpism—people advocating for cruelly discriminatory policies while denying–undoubtedly even to themselves–that there is any racial animus involved. He concludes that without the racism of so substantial a number of white voters, Trump simply could not have won.

This conclusion is supported by virtually all of the data that has emerged since the election.

Serwer also answers a question that has consumed people of good will, as they watch the escalating disaster that is the Trump Administration: when will his supporters realize how destructive his Presidency is? Why hasn’t his abandonment of virtually all of his campaign promises awakened them?

Answer: because the promises he’s kept are the ones that matter to them.

..his ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries; the unleashing of immigration-enforcement agencies against anyone in the country illegally regardless of whether he poses a danger; an attempt to cut legal immigration in half; and an abdication of the Justice Department’s constitutional responsibility to protect black Americans from corrupt or abusive police, discriminatory financial practices, and voter suppression. In his own stumbling manner, Trump has pursued the race-based agenda promoted during his campaign.

Serwer’s conclusion? So long as Trump promotes the social and political hegemony of white Christians, his supporters won’t abandon him.

There is much more in the article, and it is definitely worth reading in its entirety.

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The More We Learn, The Less We Like

The GOP tax bill has cleared another hurdle, and appears to have momentum–there are even reports suggesting it will be voted on today. Those of us hoping that at least two or three Senate Republicans might put the interests of the country above those of their party are likely to discover that those principled Republicans don’t exist.

Every time I discover something new about this abominable bill, it gets worse. So far, I’ve come across no redeeming features of this obscene and economically destructive proposal.

The latest “discovery” comes courtesy of Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Republicans love to tell us that if the government would just stop providing a social safety net, churches and charities would step in and everything would get better. But a study of the new Republican tax “reform” bill says it will reduce charitable giving by up to $24 billion a year.

It’s hard to tell whether this nasty little surprise was intentional–I rather doubt it, since the entire bill displays incredible ignorance of how the economy really works. (If anyone supporting this giveaway to the rich really believes it will create either jobs or prosperity, that would be the ultimate triumph of hope over experience.)

As any economist or tax lawyer will affirm, many–perhaps most– of the provisions in the IRS Code work a lot like the balloons used by the guys making them into animals at fairs and festivals–squeeze here, and it gets bigger there. As the referenced study found,

Even though the House version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) preserves the charitable income tax deduction, other income tax provisions of the bill could reduce charitable giving by between $12 billion and $20 billion in 2018, based on new estimates from the Tax Policy Center. A second provision—repeal of the estate tax—could reduce giving by another $4 billion in the longer run.

By nearly doubling the standard deduction and either repealing or scaling back most itemized deductions, the House version of the TCJA would substantially reduce the number of taxpayers who elect to itemize. TPC estimates that fewer than 13 million taxpayers would itemize deductions in 2018 under the House version of the TCJA, down from more than 46 million under current law.

It would be lovely if everyone making a charitable contribution was motivated purely by concern for whatever cause their dollars are supporting. (If you do believe that, I have some swampland in Florida to sell you…) Even generous givers, however, are conscious of the tax incentives involved. When the effective cost of a donation is less, it’s easy to give more. This tax bill reduces that incentive by increasing the after-tax cost of giving by about 8 percent.

This troubling result is less obvious from the face of the bill than several of the other consequences that have been highlighted: the 1.4 trillion added to the deficit, severe automatic cuts to Medicare, making graduate school unaffordable by taxing tuition supports as income (or, for that matter, making all college educations less affordable by removing the deduction for interest on student debt.) It goes on and on.

We are living with an American government that reserves its favors for the “haves” while doing steadily less for the “least among us.” The people getting the short end of the stick are going to depend to an even greater extent upon the charitable organizations that are already stretched well beyond their capacities– organizations that are demonstrably unable to fill the considerable gap between what poor families need to survive and what they earn.

It’s going to get very ugly.

On the other hand, you will still be able to deduct the expenses for your corporate jet….

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Rawls And Masson Are Right

Doug Masson can always be counted upon for thoughtful observations about policy proposals, whether those are at the state or federal level. In a recent post, he took a look at the GOP’s tax bill, and made a point that is often missed–or misunderstood.

After criticizing Orrin Hatch’s nonsensical justification for a provision that would widen the gap between the rich and poor, Masson writes

I always get grief from my conservative friends when I say stuff like this, but reducing wealth disparities in the country isn’t just a matter of bleeding-heart, feel-good liberal mumbo jumbo like fairness and equality. Concentration of large amounts of wealth in a few hands distorts markets and democratic processes. The system can tolerate — even thrives under — certain amounts of inequality. It creates incentives that fuel the economy. But, beyond a certain point, things start to break down.

The most common defense of Masson’s position–a defense that is entirely accurate, albeit incomplete–is historical. Most countries that have experienced persistent large-scale inequalities have eventually been destabilized by revolt or revolution. This country is already seeing signs of citizen unrest; continued Congressional theft from the poor in order to bestow even more goodies on the rich will be met with anger and resistance, and it won’t be pretty.

Economists also support Masson’s thesis. They point out (as I’ve done several times on this site) that 70% of American economic activity is dependent upon consumption, and when large numbers of Americans have little or no disposable income with which to consume–when they are barely able to afford necessities–the economy can’t grow. When demand is weak, employers don’t increase production–which means they don’t create new jobs.

Those practical arguments are persuasive, but we shouldn’t ignore the fairness argument, because it goes to the heart of what makes a just society.

John Rawls was the pre-eminent political philosopher of the 20th Century, and his book Justice as Fairness established a framework within which political philosophers still argue. Rawls believed that all social primary goods–by which he meant liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and what he termed “the bases of self-respect”–should be distributed equally, unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these is to the advantage of the least favored.

Inequality, in other words, can be justified, but only if that inequality is necessary to the improvement of the lives of the least fortunate.

When Masson writes “The system can tolerate — even thrives under — certain amounts of inequality. It creates incentives that fuel the economy. But, beyond a certain point, things start to break down,” I read that as another way of making Rawls’ point.

When markets work–when we have genuine capitalism, not the corporatism that characterizes the United States today–they usually meet Rawls’ criteria. Invent that better mousetrap, and everyone’s mouse-catching is improved. The money earned by the inventor provides an incentive to other ambitious folks, prompting them to invent something else that will improve life for many people, including poor people. A rising tide really does lift all the boats–we just have to be careful to define what constitutes a “rising tide.”

The fact that our mousetrap inventor has more money than someone else is thus a permissible inequality, because he has earned it in a way that improves–in some way, to some extent– the lives of the less fortunate.

This definition of justifiable inequality doesn’t reflect the inequities in today’s America. As Masson points out, money acquired isn’t necessarily the same thing as money earned; there’s a difference between that inventor/entrepreneur and those whose wealth was inherited or acquired as a reward for “gaming the system” or helping others to do so. Bigly.

Our gilded age inequality fails all three tests: history, economics and fairness.

We need to fix it.

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