Public Policy and Governance – Page 217

Crying Wolf When There’s a Wolf…

Godwin’s law is an Internet “meme” that recognizes a recurring phenomenon of online argumentation: as discussions get lengthier and more passionate, a debater will eventually compare someone or something to Hitler. Godwin’s Law provides that when such a comparison is made, the guilty person has effectively forfeited the argument.

Godwin’s Law is recognition that name-calling is not productive debate. An accusation that a person or argument is “just like” Hitler is generally unconnected to any actual resemblance between the accused and Nazi Germany. (In other times, the comparison might have been to Satan or the Anti-Christ.) The person doing the name-calling is using Hitler as a stand-in for “evil” (and by falling back on an ad hominem response, demonstrating the poverty of his or her substantive argument).

As a Jew, I have always found thoughtless, almost casual use of the Nazi epithet particularly inappropriate, because it tends to minimize the historical horror that was Nazi Germany. If everyone you disagree with is a Nazi, then actual Nazis are no longer moral aberrations.

Worse, when you have habitually been describing behaviors with which you disagree as Nazi-like, what do you do when something truly Nazi-like emerges? Will the genuine threat be dismissed, as in the story of the boy who cried wolf?

Which brings me to Sebastian Gorka.

Gorka is a top aide to Donald Trump. He was previously the “national-security editor” at Breitbart, working with Steve Bannon. Bannon, of course, is now President Trump’s top strategist. Gorka’s virulently negative views on Islam are similar to those of Bannon, the President and most of Trump’s other top aides. As an article in the Atlantic noted, however, those views are far outside the mainstream of scholarship on terrorism and Islam, and experts in the field view Gorka’s qualifications as highly questionable, at best.

Now, Slate has reported on a story uncovered by The Forward.

Reporters Lili Bayer and Larry Cohler-Esses found strong evidence that Gorka swore a lifetime oath to a far-right Hungarian group, the Vitézi Rend. The State Department classifies the Vitézi Rend as having been “under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany” during World War II; as such, members are “presumed to be inadmissible” to America under the Immigration and Nationality Act and must disclose their membership on immigration applications. (The organization was banned in Hungary following World War II but reconstituted after the fall of communism.)

Two leaders of the Vitézi Rend told Forward that Gorka is a full member.

The disclosure of Gorka’s ties has been met with demands for an investigation from at least two Senators, and by dark humor on Facebook. (A photoshopped picture of Angela Merkel has her saying, “In the United States, you call it the ‘alt-right.’ In Germany, we refer to it as “why grandpa lives in Argentina.”)

Given the disquieting parallels between how the Nazis behaved as they were coming to power in Germany and the early actions of the Trump Administration, the Urban Dictionary has issued a notice “suspending” Godwin’s Law.

THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:

With the emboldening of the Alt-Reich Fascists all over North America and Europe following the election of their cheeto-dusted Fuhrer, Donald J. Trump, The Godwin’s Law is hereby suspended in solidarity with the Anti-Fascist resisters, until further notice.

This time, there may be a real wolf…..

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This Isn’t Who We Are–Is It?

I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but America is in the midst of an identity crisis, and the identity that emerges will shape the future our children and grandchildren inhabit.

Are we the people who inscribed “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” on the Statue of Liberty? Or are we self-absorbed climbers seeking to ingratiate ourselves with the powerful and privileged while devaluing the poor and ignoring the needs of the disadvantaged?

Are we a country committed to working with other nations to solve problems and resolve disputes, or are we belligerent saber-rattlers throwing our weight around?

Do we respect scientific expertise and intellectual excellence, recognize the social value of the arts and humanities, or do we sneer at the life of the mind and swagger with the hubris and arrogance of people who don’t know what they don’t know?

These are the questions posed by the “budget” the Trump Administration has presented to the U.S. Congress.

Trump’s budget cuts programs like Meals on Wheels that feed housebound seniors. It drastically curtails housing assistance to poor people. It takes the axe to job training and education. It eliminates the Senior Community Service Employment Program, which helps low-income job seekers age 55 and older find work by pairing them with nonprofit organizations and public agencies. It dramatically reduces funds for scientific and medical research.

The budget ends support for both NPR and PBS–sources of unbiased information for millions of Americans. It eliminates the endowments for the arts and the humanities.It destroys the EPA’s ability to enforce the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. It guts the State Department and “soft power” in favor of more and more powerful weapons–despite the fact that the Department of Defense has previously insisted that such expanded military capacity is unnecessary and even counter-productive.

As Daily Kos posted,

Trump’s budget does have its increases. There’s much more money for defense, so Trump can add ships the Navy didn’t ask for, build more planes that the Air Force doesn’t need, and in general make defense contractors moan in ecstasy. There’s also a lot more money for DHS — because deportation forces and walls don’t run cheap.

CNN Money described what America would look like if the budget were to be passed as introduced:

More agents along the border, but a hobbled PBS. A bigger military, but less chance of getting a decent lawyer if you’re poor.

The budget unveiled by the Trump administration on Thursday would remake the United States — vastly expanding national defense but cutting or gutting dozens of programs that touch the lives of Americans every day.

Charter schools would get more money. But federal money would be eliminated for an agency that improves water and sewer systems in impoverished corners of Appalachia.

The takeoff and landing of your plane would be guided by an air traffic controller working for a nonprofit, not the government. If you live in a small city served by subsidized commercial airline service, you might have to drive farther to get to an airport.

And if you use Amtrak trains to travel across the country, that would become harder, if not impossible. The budget would end support for the company’s long-distance train services.

It isn’t just that the proposed budget is inhumane– a “reverse Robin Hood” exercise that privileges the already privileged. It is also fiscally insane.

People who understand policy–who can connect the dots–know that most of the proposed “cost saving” cuts will end up being much more expensive than the amounts being saved; Meals on Wheels, for example, keeps seniors in their homes longer, and helps them avoid time–overwhelmingly paid for by Medicaid– in hugely more expensive nursing homes. Job training programs reduce welfare rolls. Clean air and water reduce medical outlays. Research breakthroughs save money while improving lives and health.

The budget that encapsulates Donald Trump’s “vision” for America is a prescription for a third-world country, where art, music, science and scholarship are considered effete affectations, where compassion for the less fortunate is a weakness and poverty is seen as evidence of a lack of merit (and certainly not a problem with which the privileged need concern themselves.)

Donald Trump’s “vision” for America is a nightmare.

Lady Liberty weeps.

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Those Pesky Facts

One of my earliest research projects when I entered academia focused on an element of the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996,” (PRWORA) aka welfare reform. I looked at the consequences of the measure’s invitation to (undefined) Faith-Based Organizations to help government agencies provide welfare services.

Needless to say, the “armies of compassion” envisioned by George W. Bush failed to materialize, since the invitation was based largely on fanciful–indeed, “faith-based”–beliefs about the capacities of the invitees.

I mention this in order to explain my heightened interest in a recent “spat” between Peter the Citizen and Arthur Brooks.

In “The Dignity Deficit: Reclaiming Americans’ Sense of Purpose,” Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), emphasizes the importance of work requirements for welfare programs and suggests that the 1996 welfare reform law provides a model for other safety net programs:

Putting more people to work must also become an explicit aim of the social safety net. Arguably, the greatest innovation in social policy in recent history was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The PRWORA, which became synonymous with the phrase “welfare reform,” made several major changes to federal policy. It devolved greater flexibility to the states but established new constraints, such as a limit on how long someone could receive federal welfare benefits and a work requirement for most able-bodied adults.

As Peter points out, PRWORA changed a number of programs, but what Brooks is lauding is TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). Peter, like Brooks, is a political conservative; he was a former member of the Reagan Administration whose “portfolio” was welfare programs.

And he begs to differ.

For the past two years, I have been writing papers as a citizen to highlight TANF’s many problems. My hope is that conservatives will adopt more “rigor” in their assessment of the 1996 law and use evidence rather than ideology in developing reform proposals.

Brooks claims that TANF reduced poverty, and that its “lessons” about “the dignity of work” should be extended to other poverty programs. Peter convincingly demolishes the first assertion, and provides copious data to prove his point. Although he clearly agrees that there are “lessons” to be learned, the content of those lessons differs significantly from what Brooks suggests. I really encourage readers to click through and read the entire paper. The exchange illustrates the difference between ideology and intellectual integrity–between seeing what you want to see and seeing what the evidence shows.

What really caught my eye, however, were the following observations (emphasis mine):

TANF’s block grant structure creates a situation in which states don’t have the resources to run meaningful welfare-to-work programs, as the amount is not adjusted for inflation or demographic changes. This problem is exacerbated when state politicians divert scarce funds to plug budget holes….

In fiscal year (FY) 2015, just 25 percent of TANF funds were used to provide basic cash assistance and just 7 percent were for work-related activities, despite the fact that the number of poor families with children was higher in 2015 than in 1996. In many states, TANF has become a slush fund used to supplant state spending and fill budget holes…

Since TANF’s inception, states have used tens of billions of federal TANF dollars to simply replace existing state spending. For example, Jon Peacock of the Wisconsin Budget Project explains how “a significant portion of the federal funding for … assistance is being siphoned off for use elsewhere in the budget, to the detriment of the Wisconsin Works (W-2) program and child care subsidies for low-income working families.” It would be one thing if poverty had declined in Wisconsin since TANF’s enactment, but the poverty rate for children in Wisconsin grew from 14.3 percent in 1997 to 18.4 percent in 2011. If the supplanted funds were used to fund other programs for poor families, the practice would be less harmful, but that doesn’t seem to be what happens in Wisconsin. According to Peacock, “That shell game uses TANF funds to free up state funds [general purpose revenue] (GPR) to use for other purposes, such as the proposed income tax cuts.”

Trump’s budget–which combines utter fantasy with gratuitous cruelty (eliminating Meals on Wheels!?)– contains deep cuts to Medicaid and proposes to fund what’s left through block grants, facilitating–and probably ensuring– precisely the sort of “shell game” that the states have played with TANF.

Anyone who thinks that the monies sent to the states via Medicaid block grants would all be applied to the costs of providing medical care for poor people is smoking something, and it’s hallucinogenic.

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That Terrible Corporate Tax Burden

One of the reasons I became a faithful reader of Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars is that he disdains the euphemisms that “polite” commentators use to convey their criticisms, and simply tells it like it is. A good example is a recent post about the “confusion”–or deliberate obfuscation–surrounding discussions of corporate tax rates.

As he began,

Republicans love to claim that America’s corporate taxes are the highest in the developed world. This is a lie. The marginal tax rates, up to 35%, are among the highest. The actual rates paid are a fraction of that. In fact, some of the most profitable companies in the world pay no federal taxes at all.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy used the tax information filed by 258 profitable Fortune 500 companies to analyze what those corporations actually paid. The companies chosen for the analysis collectively earned more than $3.8 trillion in profits over the eight-year period of the analysis.

Although the top corporate rate is 35 percent, the study found that 100 of the companies — nearly 40 percent — paid zero taxes in at least one year between 2008 and 2015.

Eighteen, including General Electric, International Paper, Priceline.com and PG&E, incurred a total federal income tax bill of less than zero over the entire eight-year period — meaning they received rebates.

This result was entirely legal. The companies simply took advantage of numerous loopholes in the tax code. Some, including American Electric Power, Con Ed and Comcast, qualified for accelerated depreciation. That allowed them to write off most of the costs of new equipment and machinery well before it wore out–or in “tax speak,” well before before the end of its “useful life.”

Facebook, Aetna and Exxon Mobil, among others, saved billions in taxes by giving options to top executives to buy stock in the future at a discount. The companies then get to deduct their huge payouts as a loss. Facebook used excess tax benefits from stock options to reduce its federal and state taxes by $5.78 billion from 2010 to 2015, the institute found.

As Ed reminds us, “In the 1950s, corporate taxes were about one-third of all federal revenue; today, it’s under 10%. And the burden is then transferred to individual taxpayers.”

Conservative economists will remind us that ultimately, individual consumers will pay corporate taxes–that the taxes companies pay will be factored into the prices of the goods they sell. And that is absolutely true. But it is a far fairer and much more honest way to do business.

The prices of consumer goods should reflect the actual cost of producing them, and taxes are–or should be– part of that cost. We don’t want the manufacturer who is “disposing” of his waste illegally to be able to undercut the prices of the guy who is following the rules, and we don’t want companies with more “creative” tax avoidance strategies to undercut competitors who are paying their fair share . Capitalist markets only work properly when pricing is honest.

Our current system doesn’t reward innovation; it rewards “game playing.” Lobbyists sneak arcane loopholes into our increasingly complicated tax code. Those loopholes further tilt the playing field, distorting market forces in ways that favor the companies that can afford the lobbyists.

I’m all in favor of lowering the top marginal corporate tax rate, if we get rid of the loopholes at the same time. (We should start with those that provide an incentive for moving American businesses to off-shore tax havens–but we shouldn’t stop there.)

The current system allows corporations to whine about the tax rate in public, while making out like bandits behind the scenes. It’s dishonest, it’s anti-competitive, and it shifts the tax burden in ways that are unfair to individual taxpayers and a drag on the economy.

A responsible Congress would eliminate or dramatically reduce the loopholes and readjust the tax burden. Our Congress, however, is too busy making the system worse.

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Now For The Numbers….

So–the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has released its analysis of “TrumpCare.”

Here are their numbers:

14 million Americans will lose their insurance by 2018
21 million Americans will lose their insurance by 2020
24 million Americans will lose their insurance by 2026
There will be 52 million Americans with no health insurance by 2026 (for comparison, there were 46 million uninsured before Obamacare became law)
The bill will cut $880 billion from Medicaid by 2026
15 percent of Planned Parenthood patients will lose access to care
A 64-year-old making $26,500 would have to pay $14,600 for insurance in 2026 (for comparison, that 64-year-old pays $1,700 under Obamacare), and

After transferring $275 billion from public-health spending to the richest 1 or 2 percent via tax cuts, it will reduce budget deficits by $336 billion between 2018 and 2026.

AHCA–aka “Trumpcare” or perhaps “Ryancare”– would reduce deficits by $336 billion but would cut government spending on healthcare programs by $1.2 trillion.

When you think about it, this is a brilliant approach to deficit reduction that we could apply across the board.

We can cut billions out of the budget if we stop paving Interstate highways and inspecting and fixing bridges. We can reduce the deficit significantly if we stop hiring those high-priced CPAs to monitor bank compliance with financial regulations and enforce the SEC’s oversight of corporate securities offerings. We can save another bundle if we no longer enforce rules against air and water pollution (actually, Scott Pruitt, the new EPA Chief, has already begun that effort.) Betsy DeVos assures us that schools don’t need oversight, so we don’t need the Department of Education. We probably don’t need those bean-counters at the CBO or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, either.

And of course, we could stop paying Social Security to all those useless old people. Think of what that would save us!

It’s true that if we did all these things, government would no longer function, and we’d be thrown into a Hobbesian, dog-eat-dog world, but that’s actually the result many Republican Congress-critters have been working toward. The President wouldn’t mind, because he really has no idea what most of government does anyway.

Of course, if we wanted to make a real dent in the national debt, we could dramatically reduce the bloated amounts we spend on the military. But something tells me that might be a bridge too far…..

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