Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

The Unserious Party–Indiana Version

During her acceptance speech, Kamala Harris noted that Donald Trump is a deeply unserious man whose election would have very serious consequences. She might have broadened that observation by characterizing the GOP as an unserious political party.

I exited the Republican Party back in 2000, when the GOP’s transformation then underway was usually described as “rightward.” To the extent that “rightward” meant “toward fascism,” that description was accurate–but insufficient. It is equally accurate to note that the GOP has become increasingly unserious about governing.

Democrats do continue to focus on real governing issues–what should our foreign policy look like? What changes should be made to tax policy? What is government’s obligation to provide a social and physical infrastructure?  The GOP, in contrast, is focused on areas that are mostly off-limits to government under our Constitution: books they disapprove of should be removed from public libraries! Private companies should be forbidden from undertaking DEI activities! Women should be forced to give birth!

GOP priorities aren’t those that have traditionally been considered governmental.

 Indiana’s state tickets provide a picture-perfect example. The Republicans are all MAGA culture warriors, while the Democrats are focused on traditional governance issues: public education, taxation, the proper limits of government control over individuals.

The difference between the parties on issues of actual governance was recently explored by conservative economist Michael Hicks, who analyzed the seriousness of recent tax proposals. The headline was instructive: “Property taxes dominate the race for Indiana governor. Only 1 side has a real plan.” 

Indiana voters have now seen three separate property tax plans from candidates running for governor and lieutenant governor. All three offer insights into some of the fiscal philosophies of the candidates, the quality of their policy development process and the respect they have for Hoosier taxpayers.

Hicks began by discarding the plan offered by the Libertarian candidate for governor. 

Their proposal is to eliminate all residential property taxes, and instead tack on 7% sales tax to your home. I view their proposal as political posturing against the promiscuous use of tax abatements and tax-increment financing.

If you are tired of huge tax breaks for large companies, Indiana’s Libertarian Party is focused on your concerns. But their plan fails to consider things like the need to fund police protection, fire departments or provide heat to school buildings in winter.

In other words, it’s a very “unserious” plan.

Then Hicks took on MAGA Mike Braun’s plan.

The Republican — Mike Braun/Micah Beckwith — plan seems to have done two things. I say “seems” because it went through five major changes in three days after it was first announced. So, nailing down facts is not a trivial task.

The first thing this plan offers is the addition of a much larger exemption to homeowners. While this sounds alluring, it really has little or no effect on individual tax liability. Property taxes in Indiana are based on local government budgets, with caps placed on the value of the property, not the exemptions. So, for most Hoosiers, the first version of the Braun/Beckwith plan (or Beckwith/Braun plan according to the lieutenant governor candidate’s social media) had little or no effect on tax liabilities for most homeowners.

In response to major criticisms, the plan changed, but as Hicks noted, in its current iteration, it would either cut local government tax revenues or shift taxes to other taxpayers — primarily farmers and businesses.

Within farming communities, the property tax shift was enormous. Some farmers would see 70% tax increases…rural communities would see huge increases in farm taxes. Urban places would see big cuts in public services because of property tax caps, and suburban communities would need to pass school referendums to maintain bus service.

Hicks then turned to the Democrats’ plan, which would cut property taxes by roughly the same amount as the Braun/Beckwith plan, but in a way that doesn’t shift tax liability to farmers, renters or businesses. That plan

also ensured that local governments — schools, libraries, police and fire departments, and parks — would not face deep revenue losses.

Their plan had two distinguishing features. The first was that almost every element was analyzed by the Legislative Services Agency, with much of it taken from existing property tax proposals the legislature has been working on for the past 18 months. This means we know how much savings are to taxpayers, and how much and to whom the lost tax revenue flows.

The second key feature of the McCormick/Goodin plan was that most of the revenue losses were borne by state, not local government…  Notably, the Democratic plan actually caps property tax growth for individual taxpayers at a reasonable level.

Indiana Democrats want to govern. Unserious Republicans want the power to win the culture war. 

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Family Values

What are “family values?”

To hear Republicans describe them, family values are a traditional, a backward-facing insistence on sexual “purity” (for women) and heterosexuality: mom in the home watching the children (no pre-school or day care), gays in the closet, no access to abortion. Occasionally, there will be a nod to the importance of dad’s fidelity, but that gets awkward these days, given GOP allegiance to a male sexual predator.

Democratic policies illustrate a very different approach to valuing families.

For one thing, Democrats emphasize job creation, so that families can adequately care for the children they may–or may not–choose to have. (On that score, the GOP’s performance has been dismal: during the DNC, Bill Clinton noted that, since 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. Fifty million were created during Democratic administrations, one million under Republicans. This jaw-dropping statistic turned out to be true, albeit slightly misleading.)

Even if you discount the importance of a robust economy to the health of the American family, a glance at the policies pursued by the parties confirms that Democrats are far more family-friendly. Nicholas Kristof recently made that case. Calling Republican efforts to paint themselves as the “pro-family” party “chutzpah,” Kristof wrote

Children are more likely to be poor, to die young and to drop out of high school in red states than in blue states. The states with the highest divorce rates are mostly Republican, and with some exceptions like Utah, it’s in red states that babies are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers (partly because of lack of access to reliable contraception).

One of President Biden’s greatest achievements was to cut the child poverty rate by almost half, largely with the refundable child tax credit. Then Republicans killed the program, sending child poverty soaring again.

Can anything be more anti-child?

Well, maybe our firearms policy is. Guns are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, largely because of Republican intransigence and refusal to pass meaningful gun safety laws.

It’s because of the G.O.P. that the United States is one of only a few countries in the world without guaranteed paid maternity leave. Republicans fought universal health care and resisted the expansion of Medicaid; that’s one reason a child in the United States is three times as likely to die by the age of 5 as a child in, say, Slovenia or Estonia.

Kristof also noted several of the anti-child policies advanced in Project 2025, including ending Head Start–which has been a lifeline for low-income children– and dismantling the Department of Education.

Banning abortion and requiring women to give birth whether or not they can afford to feed and clothe a child is hardly “pro family”– even ignoring the fact that when women with dangerous pregnancies cannot access adequate care, they often die, leaving existing children motherless. And Republican extremism on abortion and birth control has led to obstacles to in vitro fertilization–for some families, the only avenue to producing those children Republicans want women to keep turning out.

Kristof also recognized the importance of the economy in supporting families. If marriage rates are important–and he agrees that they are–the evidence of economic influence is compelling.

Union membership among men raises their marriage rates, for example, apparently because they then earn more money and become more stable and appealing as partners. But Republicans have worked for decades to undermine unions.

And while marriage is important, so is access to divorce. Before easy access to divorce, large numbers of women were trapped in violent marriages that terrorized them and their children. (JD Vance is on record counseling women to remain in such marriages.) As Kristof notes,

One careful study by the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that the introduction of no-fault divorce in America was associated with about a 20 percent reduction in female suicides, at least a 25 percent reduction in wife-beating and an apparent decline in husbands murdering wives.

Which raises the question: can an anti-women party be pro family values?

In this policy arena–as in so many others–the fundamental difference between today’s GOP and the Democratic Party really does get back to dramatic differences in values. That’s why calls to “bridge our differences” and “achieve compromise” ring so hollow. If the debate is about the best way to achieve result X–say, feeding hungry children–then we can absolutely come to some sort of mutual agreement. But when one party wants to feed children and the other party doesn’t, compromise isn’t likely. 

Americans aren’t divided over policy; we are divided over values–and not just family values.

 
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The Documented Trump

I recently read Joe Conaston’s book “The Longest Con”–a deep dive into political corruption. It was an admittedly partisan dive, focused on Republican officeholders–I’m not naive enough to believe that Democrats are all saintly do-gooders. But Conaston’s reporting did “bring the receipts” as the saying goes; the last quarter or so of the book was a comprehensive list of resources.

When he got to Donald J. Trump, the sleaze went off the scale. From simple laziness and inattention to the job (Trump spent one out of every three days of his presidency on visits to his resorts, hotels and golf courses), to his direction of millions of public dollars to his own businesses (he arguably violated the Constitution by encouraging foreign governments seeking favors from the U.S. to stay at his hotels and resorts), Conaston concluded that Trump kept his business enterprises solvent with taxpayer dollars.

It was a portrait of the grifter as President. 

None of those observations would surprise those of us who follow politics closely. But a recent column in the Washington Post focused on an element of Trump’s tenure that did surprise me, although it was obvious once Matt Bai, the author of the article, pointed it out: unlike virtually every other President, Trump didn’t show signs of aging while in office.

Watch any video of Biden four years ago, and you’ll have the odd sensation of having turned back the clock by a decade at least. It was the visual effects of Biden’s aging, rather than evidence of any cognitive decline, that doomed his candidacy from the moment he appeared on the debate stage in June.

Why does the presidency have this effect? It’s not the late nights and endless flights (although they probably doesn’t help). It’s the physical burden of awesome responsibility. Every decision seems to involve bad options and worse; some cost livelihoods, others, actual lives. Add to this the toll it all takes on a family (in Biden’s case, the very public prosecution of his only surviving son), and you can see why a normal person isn’t built to withstand it.

But this is where Trump is truly not normal. I’m trying not to be cruel here, but it’s not exactly breaking new ground to say that he seems to lack for something innately human: the basic capacity to internalize other people’s pain. As president, Trump never betrayed remorse or apologized, never seemed to take personally the 800,000 Americans who died of covid-19 on his watch. Tragedy breeds in him only defiance. Trump’s motto might be: “Don’t worry, be angry.”

At another point in the essay, Bai points to a behavior that reinforces Conaston’s perspective on what really matters to this very twisted man:

When Trump and his children talk about the sacrifices their family made to serve the public, they aren’t talking about his anguished nights spent roaming the halls of the White House. They’re talking about money.

The point is that empathy and self-doubt — the feeling that we’re failing to meet the critical needs of others — are the things that really take a toll on us. Whereas clinical callousness may well be a fountain of youth — from which Trump has been guzzling his entire life.

This analysis goes a long way toward explaining why people thought of Biden as much older than Trump, despite the fact that, at 78, Trump is less than 4 years younger, and is now the oldest person ever to run for President. Anger and hostility can manifest as energy. Not caring about others–certainly not the people he was elected to serve–protected Trump against the dramatic aging we almost always see in Presidents after they’ve served a term. 

What anger and extreme entitlement/narcissism cannot mask, however, is increasing senility– loss of even the minimal control Trump was once able to muster. After Biden’s withdrawal and the surge in support for Harris, an increasing number of articles have asked whether Trump is “losing it.” (That assumes he ever had “it,” but I quibble.)

As one such article noted,

Today in New Jersey, Trump tricked reporters into covering a “press conference” that turned out to be a lengthy speech to his supporters at his golf course. Low-energy Trump read from a thick binder that included a string of outrageous lies, including the ridiculous claim that more than 100% of new jobs created in the U.S. are going to migrants….

“He lacks self-control. He lacks discipline,” Republican donor Eric Levine told the New York Times. He’s focused on a “very strange victimhood and grievance,” said Republican strategist Liam Donovan.

Yet millions of Americans will vote for this deteriorating con man–presumably, because he gives them permission to be as hateful as he is.

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That Electoral College

There’s been no lack of political commentary as the Presidential campaign has heated up, much of it thoughtful (and lots of it not), but I was struck with a point made in the Bulwark–a point about the systemic, structural issues that so often muffle or stymie the electoral voice of We the People.

In a commentary on the competing theories of the two campaigns, Jonathan Van Last noted that

Trump is running to get to 47 percent. Harris is running to get to 52 percent.

But there’s something deeper going on here.

The reason Trump is aiming for 47 percent is because the Electoral College makes minority rule possible for the rural party. Which incentivizes the rural party to be insular and to focus on energizing—not expanding—its coalition.

By disadvantaging the urban party, the Electoral College incentivizes it to broaden its coalition. Which means that the Democratic party of this moment must be constantly seeking to expand its reach and bring in new constituencies if it is to have a chance at holding executive power.

In other words: The Electoral College distorts the character of our parties, nudging one of them to be a majority-seeking organism and the other to be a base-pleasing organism. The character of our two parties today flows from the system architecture used to allocate power.

Which explains why Trump’s campaign is focused on maneuvering to win the Electoral College, not on trying to build a national majority. Trump doesn’t think he needs to expand his base, despite the fact that it is a minority of American voters. He just needs to energize them. America’s systemic “allocation of power” protects government by the minority. That’s what allowed Donald J. Trump to “win” the Presidency while losing the popular vote by some three million votes.

The Electoral College substantially advantages white rural voters. Research suggests that every rural vote is worth one and a third of every urban vote. Small states already exert disproportionate power by virtue of the fact that every state–no matter how thinly or densely populated–has two Senators. This system adds to that undemocratic advantage.

Trump likes to claim that our elections are rigged. They are–but thanks to the Electoral College and “winner take all” state election laws–they’re rigged in ways that unfairly benefit him. As legal scholars have reminded us, no other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like the Electoral College. 

It isn’t just the existence of the College–there’s also the way states implement it.

If we fall short in the current effort to neuter the Electoral College with the Popular Vote Compact, we should mount a national effort to address a less-understood aspect of it’s unfairness: statewide winner-take-all laws. Under these laws (which states adopted to gain political advantage in the nation’s early years, even though it was never suggested by the Founders) most states award all their electors to the candidate with the most popular votes in their state.

That erases all the voters in that state who didn’t vote for the winning candidate. Even if only 50.1% of voters in a state vote for candidate A, the 49.9% of voters who opted for candidate B are unrepresented–all of that state’s Electoral College votes will be cast for candidate A.

It would be far fairer to award Electoral votes proportionally. If 60% of the votes are cast for candidate A, candidate A should get 60% of the state’s electoral votes–not 100%. People in the political minority in a state would suddenly have an incentive to vote–an incentive that doesn’t exist now. Today, absent a “wave” election, a presidential vote by a Democrat in Indiana or a Republican in California simply doesn’t count.

Think about it.

Today, 48 states use winner-take-all. That’s why most are considered comfortably safe for one party or the other.  That “safety” leads to the current disenfranchisement of voters in states like Indiana. The only states that matter to either party in a national election are the so-called “battleground” states — especially bigger ones like Pennsylvania, where a swing of a few thousand or even a few hundred votes can shift the entire pot of electors from one candidate to the other. We saw this in 2016, where Trump’s incredibly thin wins in three states (just under 80,000 votes in total over the three states) gave him the White House.

If newly hopeful Democrats can produce a “wave election” in 2024–if they can manage a trifecta at the national level–this systemic unfairness can be changed. The John Lewis Act can be passed. Gerrymandering can be outlawed. Winner-take-all laws can be addressed.

If enough of us vote Blue, we can restore small-d democratic accountability.

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We Need To Listen To Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman are my two favorite economists–probably because, despite both being Nobel Prize winners– both of them are able to explain their conclusions in language I can (mostly) understand, and because those conclusions usually strike me as eminently reasonable.

Stiglitz recently took on the neoliberalism that has characterized American governance since Reagan. Neoliberalism has been described as an economic system generally opposed to the provision or expansion of government safety nets, and highly skeptical of regulation, extensive government spending, and government-led countercyclical policy.

As Stiglitz notes,

On one side of the economic debate are those who believe in largely unfettered markets, in which companies are allowed to agglomerate market power or pollute or exploit. They believe firms should maximize shareholder value, doing whatever they can get away with, because bigger profits serve the common good.

The most famous 20th-century proponents of this low-tax/low-regulation shareholder-centric economy, often referred to as neoliberalism, are Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. These Nobel Prize-winning economists took the idea beyond the economy, claiming this kind of economic system was necessary to achieve political freedom.
The strongest argument advanced by neoliberals is that economic freedom translates into political freedom. As Stiglitz points out, however, “not quite.”
We’ve now had four decades of the neoliberal “experiment,” beginning with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The results are clear. Neoliberalism expanded the freedom of corporations and billionaires to do as they will and amass huge fortunes, but it also exacted a steep price: the well-being and freedom of the rest of society…
Friedman and his acolytes failed to understand an essential feature of freedom: that there are two kinds, positive and negative; freedom to do and freedom from harm. “Free markets” alone fail to provide economic stability or security against the economic vagaries they create, let alone allow large fractions of the population to live up to their potential. Government is needed to deliver both. In doing so, government expands freedom in multiple ways.
Stiglitz’ basic argument is that the “Road to Serfdom” isn’t paved by governments that do too much; loss of freedom–serfdom– is a consequence of governing that does too little. He points out that populist nationalism poses a greater threat in countries like Israel, the Philippines and the United States than it does in in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. In those Scandinavian countries, high-quality public education, strong unemployment benefits and robust public health provide an economic floor that shields citizens from what he calls the “common American anxieties over how to pay for their children’s education or their medical bills.”
Discontent festers in places facing unaddressed economic stresses, where people feel a loss of control over their destinies; where too little is done to address unemployment, economic insecurity and inequality. This provides a fertile field for populist demagogues — who are in ample supply everywhere. In the United States, this has given us Donald Trump.
We care about freedom from hunger, unemployment and poverty — and, as FDR emphasized, freedom from fear. People with just enough to get by don’t have freedom — they do what they must to survive. And we need to focus on giving more people the freedom to live up to their potential, to flourish and to be creative. An agenda that would increase the number of children growing up in poverty or parents worrying about how they are going to pay for health care — necessary for the most basic freedom, the freedom to live — is not a freedom agenda.
Champions of the neoliberal order, moreover, too often fail to recognize that one person’s freedom is another’s unfreedom — or, as Isaiah Berlin put it, freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. Freedom to carry a gun might mean death to those who are gunned down in the mass killings that have become an almost daily occurrence in the United States. Freedom not to be vaccinated or wear masks might mean others lose the freedom to live.
Stiglitz provides examples of the various ways government regulation can enhance, rather than impede, individual freedom, and he ends by defining what he calls “progressive capitalism” (what I would call the “mixed economy.”) The goal of any economic system ought to be the creation of a broadly shared prosperity. The Isaiah Berlin quote captures the essential problem we face in today’s crony capitalist economy: we have a government that has been solicitous of the freedom and well-being of the wolves, and we’ve ignored the negative effects on the sheep.
Only government can (1) provide a social and political infrastructure accessible to all, and (2) prevent the wealthy and powerful from dominating and harming others. Neoliberalism fails on both counts.
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