Public Policy and Governance – Page 214

Missing the Point

In the wake of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accords, apologists have gone into overdrive. Even those who recognize that climate change is real have pooh poohed the significance of our withdrawal; after all, the goals were voluntary and weak, and anyway, America’s cities and states are stepping up to the plate, so we’ll probably make our goals even without participating in a formal agreement.

A recent article in Time is typical of the many arguments that what looks like a sow’s ear might really be a silk purse in disguise:

Trump knew his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the climate agreement would provoke global outrage, and it did. For Trump, the economy is the priority. But Trump’s promise to revive the coal industry isn’t going to happen; instead, the opposite will occur. And it’s safe to say that by 2020 — the earliest date that the U.S. can technically withdraw from the climate pact — Trump could point to his decision even as he points at all the shuttered coal plants, and say: “See, I told you we didn’t need the Paris deal. America’s emissions went down regardless, and our economy became stronger without it.”

Let’s parse that paragraph. If Trump knew the decision would provoke outrage, he should have recognized that such outrage would make it more difficult to achieve other goals, both domestic and international, so why do it? As even the apologists have conceded, the targets we had endorsed were entirely voluntary; the administration could simply have ignored any that they felt were bad for the American economy.

What we’ve seen of this deeply disturbed man suggests that he withdrew because it would provoke outrage. Trump likes to stir the pot, and he desperately needs to be the center of attention. Achieving his goals quietly (assuming he has goals unconnected to his ego), without fanfare, doesn’t feed his narcissism.

And what about that statement that the economy is his priority? Where’s the evidence that Trump has even the slightest understanding of economic policy? His insistence that he will bring back a coal industry that even coal company CEOs admit is no longer viable should have been a clue to his cluelessness.

And arguing that we will meet our emissions goals without being party to the Paris Accords misses the point. The point is: symbolism matters, and it matters a lot.

When President Obama led the negotiations that produced the Paris Accords, he was signaling that the United States remained the world’s leader. He was demonstrating this nation’s willingness to work with countries around the globe to address common challenges, and our willingness to do the hard work of analyzing relevant science and working through thorny political barriers in order to hammer out an agreement.

Obama’s commitment to the process sent a message to the rest of the world, and it was a message that enhanced American stature and our ability to exercise global “soft power.”

The message sent by Donald Trump’s exit from that hard-won agreement was exactly the opposite: America is no longer a steadfast global presence, no longer a source of reassuring leadership in a dangerous world.

Under a volatile, unpredictable, and profoundly ignorant President and his cabinet of intellectual and moral pygmies, America is withdrawing from global leadership. (As Angela Merkel put it, in her typically understated way, America is “no longer a reliable ally.”)

Whatever the practical effect of withdrawal on our ability to fight climate change, the symbolism was devastating. Far from making America “great,” it diminished us and significantly weakened our influence around the world.

It was yet another unforced error by a man who tweets them daily.

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The Deepening Divide

America is reaching historic levels of inequality. We are likely to surpass the divide between rich and poor that characterized the Gilded Age, and what is worse, lawmakers are doubling down on policies that eviscerate the middle class and further enrich the wealthy.

We are getting used to seeing articles that tell us how much someone has to make in order to afford basic housing. The bottom line: there is not a single place in the United States of America where someone working a full-time minimum wage job can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment.

What about a one-bedroom unit?

You would have to earn $17.14 an hour, on average, to be able to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment without having to spend more than 30 percent of your income on housing, a common budgeting standard. Make that $21.21 for a two-bedroom home — nearly three times the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

Forget compassion (the GOP certainly has.) Lawmakers with even a cursory understanding of economics ought to look at that mismatch between the minimum wage and a worker’s ability to afford a roof over his head and realize that people making that wage–people who are spending every cent they have on life’s necessities– have no disposable income to spend in the marketplace.

It is demand that drives our economy and creates jobs; if fewer people can afford my consumer goods, I buy less from my suppliers, who then buy less raw material. I need fewer salespeople, and my suppliers need fewer people on the factory floor.

If we needed evidence that today’s Republicans dismiss both arguments– compassionate and economic–Karen Handel recently reminded us. Handel is running against Jon Ossoff in Georgia, in a special election to fill a Congressional seat recently vacated by Tom Price. During a debate, Ossoff was asked about the wage issue, and strongly endorsed raising the minimum wage. Handel responded to the same question by saying, “No, I don’t support a livable wage. I’m a Republican.”

While Handel didn’t have to take a hard line on a “livable wage,” her views are not out of the mainstream for Republicans in a place like Georgia, where opposition to any minimum wage is common. The Republican who held the district for a dozen years before becoming HHS secretary, Tom Price, voted against the increase that raised the minimum wage to where it is today.

If America had an adequate social safety net, the wage issue might be ameliorated somewhat, but very few of the working poor qualify for any sort of benefit. The most glaring omission from that safety net, of course, is healthcare. The Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) is imperfect, but it was a step in the right direction. Most other industrialized countries have some version of national healthcare, or single-payer; such systems not only improve health outcomes significantly, they make an enormous difference to low-wage workers.

When a broken leg can mean the difference between an uninsured person paying the rent or being evicted, the Republicans’ current mean-spirited effort to deprive twenty-three million people of health insurance is incomprehensible.

Equally incomprehensible is Congress’ steadfast refusal to allow government agencies to negotiate prices with Big Pharma, or to allow Americans to purchase drugs manufactured in America from countries that have negotiated for–and achieved–lower prices.

If you are poor in the United States, a broken leg or extended bout of influenza is bad enough, but treatment of a serious illness like cancer is simply unaffordable. Doctors are desperately trying to find ways to keep cancer patients alive without bankrupting even those with better-than modest resources.

A group of prominent cancer doctors is planning a novel assault on high drug costs, using clinical trials to show that many oncology medications could be taken at lower doses or for shorter periods without hurting their effectiveness….

The initiative is the latest response to rising concerns over “financial toxicity,” the economic devastation that can be wrought by the high cost of cancer care. With new oncology therapies routinely debuting at more than $100,000 a year, “lots of people are worried about developing drugs that people can’t get,” said Leonard Saltz of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who helped organize the new group.

Our lawmakers are very good at protecting the profits of drug companies. They are also good at figuring out how to fund tax cuts for the wealthy–just decimate Medicaid and stop subsidizing health insurance for poor Americans.

What they aren’t so good at is recognizing the human, social and economic consequences of continuing to expand the abyss between the rich and the rest.

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A Hoosier Cautionary Tale

First Kansas. Now Indiana. One by one, the pillars of conservative fundamentalism are failing real-world tests.

Under then-Governor Pence, Indiana negotiated a much-ballyhood 35-year “public-private partnership” with the Spanish firm Insolux Corsan to build and maintain a portion of Interstate 69, between Bloomington and Indianapolis. The project has dragged on and on, making trips between Bloomington and Indianapolis slow and treacherous. (I know this from personal experience; faculty of IU routinely make the trip between campuses, and I’ve done my share of cursing while in transit.)

The original contract called for a completion date of October, 2016; that date has been pushed back four times amid media reports suggesting that the state’s private partner was as slow in paying subcontractors as it was in building the highway. Now, it appears the contractor is going bankrupt. The Indianapolis Star reports that the state “intends to take control of the troubled I-69 project from Bloomington to Martinsville as the public-private partnership used to finance and build the highway crumbles.”

It is a GOP article of faith that the private sector is always more efficient and more competent than government, and that contracting out–privatization–saves money. In the uncongenial place called the real world, it seldom works out that way. The collapse–or “crumbling”–of this particular partnership joins a long line of failed privatization schemes, some scandalous and corrupt, many simply ineffective and expensive, that have ended up costing taxpayers more than if government had done the job.

This isn’t to say that contracting out is always a bad idea. As I’ve said repeatedly, the issue isn’t whether to work with the private sector, but when and how. Public officials need to carefully evaluate proposed contracting arrangements: is this something government routinely does, or an unusual task requiring specialized expertise that the agency doesn’t have? If the motive is saving money, how realistic is that? (After all, private entities have to pay taxes, and their bids will reflect that expense.) Does the contracting agency have the expertise needed to properly negotiate the contract and monitor the contractor? Have all the risks been weighed, and due diligence exercised?

Do the officials making the decision recognize that contracting with a third party won’t relieve the government agency of its ultimate responsibility to see that the project is properly completed or the service is properly rendered?

Are there situations where public-private partnerships are both appropriate and competently structured? Of course. The Brookings Institution recently reported on the success of the Copenhagen City and Port Development Corporation in revitalizing Copenhagen’s waterfront. I was particularly struck by this description of that effort:

The approach deploys an innovative institutional vehicle—a publicly owned, privately run corporation—to achieve the high-level management and value appreciation of assets more commonly found in the private sector while retaining development profits for public use.(emphasis mine)

Two elements of this particular partnership stand out: (1) it was formed to execute a lengthy, difficult and highly complex project requiring skills that few municipal governments have in-house; and (2) it distributed risk and reward in a way that ensured taxpayers would benefit financially from the project’s success.

In contrast, virtually every American contract I’ve seen has socialized the risk and privatized the reward; that is, taxpayers have assumed the risks of cost overruns, unanticipated problems and project failures, while the private contractors have reaped the lions’ share of the profits.(Trump’s infrastructure plan–to the extent it exists–would take that formula to new heights. Or lows…)

I69 and the Indianapolis parking meter fiasco are just two of the more recent examples of what happens when privatization is a mantra–a semi-religious belief–rather than one of several strategically deployed tools in the public toolbox.

Personal P.S. Thanks to all of you who posted good wishes for my husband’s surgery. All went well, and he’s home (with a very rakish temporary eye patch).

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Thoughts on the Comey Hearing

Today’s post will be brief because my husband is having a surgical procedure this morning (outpatient and cringe-worthy, since it requires cutting into his eyeball, but not major or life-threatening). I’ll return, undoubtedly in full verbose mode, tomorrow.

I have very little to add to the mountains of commentary that issued before, during and after Comey’s testimony. I’m not a criminal lawyer, was never a prosecutor (when I did practice law, I drafted contracts and mortgages and articles of incorporation), so my grasp of the fine points of obstruction of justice law is worse than imperfect.

With those caveats, a couple of observations:

Love him or hate him, James Comey is a professional with a reputation for integrity. He understands how to navigate Washington and how to speak to a camera, and his calm professionalism was on consistent display. His responses were forthright, but never exaggerated or over-reaching. He was neither defensive nor evasive. His entire performance was impressive.
The question whether Trump engaged in obstruction of justice will inevitably require interpreting the President’s statement to Comey that he “hoped” the investigation of Flynn could be dropped. Senator Risch questioned whether a Presidential “hope” could really be considered a directive, although Comey responded that–given the context–he took it to be. Both Times reporter Charlie Savage and Senator Angus King responded with the perfect analogy: “I hope” is like the famous line Henry II uttered about Thomas Becket, which his minions understood to be a direction to murder him: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
Senator John McCain has passed his “sell by” date.
Judging from the reactions of Paul Ryan and other luminaries of what passes for the Republican party these days, patriotism of the sort displayed by Eliot Richardson, William Ruckleshaus, then-Senator Barry Goldwater and others during Watergate is long gone. It evidently eloped with those other bygone qualities, honor and integrity.

The United States placed a dangerously ignorant, clearly incompetent, unstable man in the Oval Office. We’ve known that. What we didn’t know, and are slowly discovering, is the degree to which the members of his party value power over country.

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Even Toto Is Leaving Kansas

Not that it will make any difference to the ideologues for whom evidence is irrelevant, but Republicans in Kansas have now thrown in the towel on the nation’s most wholehearted effort to prove that lower taxes generate higher state revenues.

As the Washington Post headline put it, “Kansas Republicans Raise Taxes, Ending Their GOP Governor’s ‘Real Live Experiment’ in Conservative Policy.”

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback is a supply-side “true believer,” who made draconian tax cuts after assuming office in 2010, and waited with anticipation for the state’s economy to grow in response. That growth failed to materialize during his first term, but he was re-elected, and he continued stubbornly waiting–still a true believer– as Kansas’ deficit grew to over a billion dollars and basic services were cut. Education, mental health, healthcare–all took huge hits.

Members of his own party called for an end to the “experiment,” and joined Democrats in passing a bill to increase taxes. Brownback vetoed it. The legislature subsequently overrode that veto; in the end, eighteen of the state’s 31 GOP senators and 49 of the 85 Republican members of the House voted against the governor.

Under Brownback, as has been widely reported, the pace of economic expansion in Kansas has consistently lagged behind that of the rest of the country. What is particularly telling is the very different experience of Minnesota, where a Democratic Governor elected at the same time as Brownback raised taxes and substantially increased education spending, and where by 2015 there were multiple reports like this:

Since 2011, Minnesota has been doing quite well for itself. The state has created more than 170,000 jobs, according to the Huffington Post. Its unemployment rate stands at 3.6% — the fifth-lowest in the country, and far below the nationwide rate of 5.7% — and the state government boasts a budget surplus of $1 billion. Forbes considers Minnesota one of the top 10 in the country for business.

Despite the fact that Brownback’s experiment in Kansas has failed so spectacularly, its tax cuts remain the blueprint for the Trump Administration and for “true believers” like Paul Ryan. As the Post article puts it,

The principles Trump endorsed during the campaign and in the early stages of his presidency are broadly similar to those enacted in Kansas. As Brownback did, Trump has proposed bringing down marginal rates, getting rid of brackets and giving a new break to small businesses.

That is no coincidence, since Brownback is well connected to the Republican policymaking establishment in Washington. Trump and Brownback have shared economic advisers, and when Brownback was a U.S. senator, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), now the speaker of the House, served as his legislative director.

There’s a pattern here.

Today’s Republicans–unlike the sober and prudential members of the party to which I once belonged–are simply impervious to evidence.

They continue to insist that raising the minimum wage will depress employment, ignoring the fact that cities that have raised the wage have seen job growth and increased economic activity.

They ignore rigorous studies by (genuine) conservatives showing that so-called “welfare reform”–far from being a great success, as they routinely proclaim –has diverted funds from programs to help struggling Americans (who are, if anything, worse off) and used the money to plug state budget holes and compensate for tax cuts for the wealthy.

They stubbornly insist that tax cuts will generate economic growth, and that their repeated, demonstrable failure to do so is because we just haven’t cut deeply enough, or waited long enough.

These are the same people who dismiss climate change as a hoax, but tell us that if it turns out to be real, God will take care of it. They’re the same folks who agree with Jeff Sessions that the drug war would work if we’d just increase the penalties for smoking weed.

With these people, ideology consistently trumps experience. (What are you going to believe? Conservative political doctrine or your lying eyes?)

I’m beginning to think these people would go to a doctor who told them what they wanted to hear even if that doctor’s patients all died…

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