Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Squirrel!

In the charming animated movie UP, a recurring joke had the dog distracted from his task of the moment by the appearance of a squirrel. For a while, it became a meme–if a debate threatened to get personal, or a line of inquiry a bit too probing, someone would yell “squirrel!” to change the focus and break the tension.

“Squirrel!” became shorthand for distraction, and an inability to continue focusing on the task at hand.

Today’s “squirrel!” is fear of lurking transgender folks in the bathroom.

It isn’t only bathroom use, of course.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Some public schools are starting summer vacation several days early. Others are contemplating a four-day week to cut costs. And more than 200 teachers in Oklahoma City were handed pink slips in March.

But instead of addressing a burgeoning budget crisis that threatens public education and other critical state services, Oklahoma lawmakers have been busy debating proposals to criminalize abortion, police students’ access to public bathrooms and impeach President Obama.

It isn’t only Oklahoma, either. In fact, some of the most egregious examples of misdirection can be found in Congress, where 50+ votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, interminable investigations of Benghazi, and attempts to impeach the head of the Internal Revenue Service, among similar distractions, have consumed the energies of lawmakers to the detriment of actually doing the nation’s business.

It’s hard to know whether the surreal political landscape we currently inhabit is simply a “phase” we are going through–sort of a national adolescence–or whether it is the beginning of a disintegration of the Republic– evidence that in an increasingly complex modern world, responsible citizenship and self-government are simply beyond our capacities.

If it is the latter, the really worrisome question is: what will replace it? If–as most of us fervently hope– we are just experiencing the dislocations of social change and “paradigm shift,” what sorts of policies should our elected officials be putting in place to safeguard a Constitutional system that has served us well, while still responding to the challenges of globalization and modernity?

But hey–let’s worry about Target’s bathroom policy.

Squirrel!

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Well, THIS Certainly Ups the Stakes….

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been reports from interviews with Donald Trump that should give any sentient being pause: in one, it became embarrassingly clear that he had never heard of the GI Bill; in another, challenged on his ability to push through a constitutional amendment to stop women from giving birth to all those “anchor babies,” he responded–wrongly– that birthright citizenship wasn’t in the constitution. (“It just takes a statute.”)

The Donald’s most recent policy pronouncement, however, is far more terrifying. As a number of media outlets are reporting, Trump says that if he is elected he will pull out of the Paris climate agreement and approve the Keystone pipeline.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said on Thursday that he would pull the United States out of the U.N. global climate accord and slash environmental regulations on the energy industry if elected…

“We’re going to cancel the Paris climate agreement,” Trump said at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismark, the capital of North Dakota, the second largest U.S. oil-producing state. It was Trump’s first speech detailing the energy policies he would advance from the White House.

Trump said he would invite TransCanada to reapply to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the United States, reversing a decision by the administration of President Barack Obama to block the project over environmental concerns.

“I want it built, but I want a piece of the profits,” Trump said. “That’s how we’re going to make our country rich again.”

Trump is on record (not that being on record means anything in his case, since he changes his positions more often than most people change their underwear–but still) as repeatedly saying that climate change is a hoax. Whether he believes that or not, the policies he is promising to pursue are all based upon the increased use of fossil fuel and the rollback of regulations on energy.

As Ed Brayton wryly observed over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, it may simply be another rather breathtaking exhibition of Trump’s hypocrisy:

Now remember, he said this literally two days after it was revealed that his company has applied to build a high sea wall at one of his golf courses in Scotland in order to protect the property from the rising seas resulting from global warming. So he knows damn well that global warming is real and has serious consequences. But he’s more than willing to screw over pretty much the entire world in order to get elected. Speaks volumes about the man, don’t you think?

At the end of the day, however, what Trump actually thinks (assuming, in the absence of evidence, that he actually does engage in that activity) is irrelevant. He is promising that on his watch, America will pursue policies having the foreseeable consequence of making the planet largely uninhabitable.

If his misogyny, racism, xenophobia, narcissism and profound ignorance about our government haven’t given Americans reason enough to insure that he never, ever gets near the Oval Office, this should do it…..
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What Teddy Roosevelt Understood That We Don’t

Back when Republicans were responsible stewards of the public good, Teddy Roosevelt waged war on monopolies. He understood that the virtues of capitalism–and they are many–required government protection. American commerce was no longer characterized by small merchants and farmers competing on a more-or-less equal playing field, and that made it imperative to constrain the powerful from dominating the marketplace and squeezing out the little guys.

In a recent column, Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz points out that the problem of monopoly power is still with us, and still an enormous impediment to the proper working of a market economy:

In today’s economy, many sectors – telecoms, cable TV, digital branches from social media to Internet search, health insurance, pharmaceuticals, agro-business, and many more – cannot be understood through the lens of competition. In these sectors, what competition exists is oligopolistic, not the “pure” competition depicted in textbooks….

US President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, led by Jason Furman, has attempted to tally the extent of the increase in market concentration and some of its implications. In most industries, according to the CEA, standard metrics show large – and in some cases, dramatic – increases in market concentration. The top ten banks’ share of the deposit market, for example, increased from about 20% to 50% in just 30 years, from 1980 to 2010.

Some of the increase in market power is the result of changes in technology and economic structure: consider network economies and the growth of locally provided service-sector industries. Some is because firms – Microsoft and drug companies are good examples – have learned better how to erect and maintain entry barriers, often assisted by conservative political forces that justify lax anti-trust enforcement and the failure to limit market power on the grounds that markets are “naturally” competitive. And some of it reflects the naked abuse and leveraging of market power through the political process: Large banks, for example, lobbied the US Congress to amend or repeal legislation separating commercial banking from other areas of finance.

Bottom line lesson: government should be an “umpire,” ensuring a level playing field, rather than a member of the “team” that has most effectively used its greater resources to game the system and co-opt the process.

As Stiglitz notes, unequal distribution of power in the marketplace drives inequality and undermines democratic institutions. It’s hard to disagree with his conclusion:

If markets are fundamentally efficient and fair, there is little that even the best of governments could do to improve matters. But if markets are based on exploitation, the rationale for laissez-faire disappears. Indeed, in that case, the battle against entrenched power is not only a battle for democracy; it is also a battle for efficiency and shared prosperity.

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What About the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

We Americans treasure religious liberty. We’re just a bit vague on the definition of “religious.” (Actually, we aren’t too clear on what we mean by “liberty,” either.)

I still recall a conference I attended early in my academic career; I approached a religious studies scholar who had delivered what I considered a brilliant paper, and during the ensuing discussion, she shared her belief that the First Amendment should simply have protected “intellectual integrity”–that the problem with specific references to religious liberty was that they required courts to decide what should count as “religious” for purposes of constitutional analysis.

And what should count as “religious” has been–and remains– hotly contested.

Think, for example, about the awkward history of conscientious objector jurisprudence. For a long time, courts only recognized moral objections to engaging in combat if the person registering the objection belonged to a “recognized” (um..established??) pacifist church. Others claiming that status were challenged. But–as the courts ultimately came to recognize– there are many non-theists and members of other denominations and religions who have sincere and deeply-felt pacifist beliefs.

More recently, of course, we are seeing people claim religious sanction for a right to discriminate, and it is hard not to suspect that their “sincerely held beliefs” have more to do with bigotry than godliness.

The point is, it is by no means clear what sorts of beliefs and conduct can properly be labeled “religious,” as opposed to “political,” “ideological,” “philosophical” or even delusional.

I receive Sightings, a digital newsletter from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and that publication recently referenced a Massachusetts lawsuit raising precisely that issue:

But courts do get asked about “religion,” and can’t wiggle out of exchanges on this. It was easier to define in historic cultures where a manifestation of religion, e.g. “an established church” got to define religion in “we” versus “they” terms. Today, propose a parlor game in which participants have to define the term, and listen. If “established” versions you will hear are too constricted, others are too protean. One hears then: “if everything is religious, then nothing is religious.” Now, pity the people who are called to fight over religious subjects not in games but in courts…

O’Loughlin’s case involves the keepers of a Massachusetts “religious” shrine whose property is tax-exempt for those parts of its workings which strike “everyone” as being focally religious: worshiping, nurturing, shaping spiritual life. But, strapped-for-tax-revenue neighbors of the shrine-keepers argue, should parts of the property used for what some would call “secular” purposes be tax-exempt because the owners or custodians of the shrine deem them and claim them to be ‘religious’?

Unsurprisingly, religious leaders of several traditions filed a brief in support of the tax-exempt status of the entire facility.

The notion that local assessors or any government actor is equipped or would presume to deem whether one use of a religious organization’s property or another falls within the definition of ‘religious worship’ is antithetical to religious freedom,” said the brief, signed by leaders representing Jewish, Christian, and Muslim organizations. Catholic bishops in Massachusetts, including Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley, also weighed in, arguing in a brief that the shrine’s grounds offer “communion with nature,” which “is a core religious activity with ancient roots in Christianity’s past.”

Gee–I “commune with nature” in distinctly unChristian fashion…But I digress.

According to this argument, courts and other secular institutions are simply precluded from drawing distinctions between properties used for authentically religious purposes (whatever those are) and those simply owned by religious organizations–although to the extent properties are tax-exempt, secular taxpayers’ rates increase. (Someone has to pay for the public services such properties enjoy–streets, police and fire protection, garbage collection and the like.)

I can’t help thinking of Flip Wilson’s inspired “Church of What’s Happening Now” rants (you youngsters can Google that), or the more contemporary “worship” of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Despite rightwing rhetoric, it isn’t the LGBT community that is demanding “special rights.”

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About Those School Lunches…

If only issues were as simple and uncomplicated as people think they are…

Indiana Representative Todd Rokita has proposed to ban the practice of providing free lunches to all students in schools where over 40% of the students are eligible for such lunches. He wants to limit the program so that only the students who qualify eat free.

Sounds reasonable enough; as Indianapolis Star editor Tim Swarins recently framed the issue in an editorial defending Rokita’s proposal, why should we spend tax dollars to feed children who (presumably) can afford to pay for their lunches?

Well, there are several reasons, actually, and the one that should be most compelling to Mssrs. Rokita and Swarins (had they bothered to investigate) is financial.

It turns out that the cost of managing the paperwork and processes required to verify who is and who is not eligible for the free lunch is not inconsiderable. In fact, I’m told that the time and effort previously spent determining and confirming continued eligibility often exceeded the cost of simply providing meals for all the children in schools where there are high percentages of impoverished youngsters. (In case you haven’t been in a school cafeteria recently, they aren’t getting filet mignon.)

There are also humanitarian concerns. In schools where children must demonstrate eligibility for the free lunches,  those who pay for their food with vouchers or other required identification are often stigmatized by their classmates. Not only is this demeaning for those children, studies suggest that it creates a disincentive to participate–with the result that some percentage of children from families that would clearly qualify simply refuse to apply.

It would be so gratifying if our elected officials–and those in the media who cover them–would take some time to actually investigate the issues involved, instead of jumping to the conclusion that any decision they don’t immediately understand must be wrongheaded and/or wasteful.

Of course, poor kids don’t have lobbyists….

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