Public Policy and Governance – Page 303

The Frame Game

It’s a new year, and with it has come a whole new crop of state and local elected officials. It’s early, but the signs are not auspicious.

One of the first official pronouncements from Indiana’s newly inaugurated Governor was a solemnly-delivered promise to stop regulating—to cease issuing administrative rules except when “absolutely necessary.” Cynics noted that the language of the executive order pretty much anticipated business as usual, but they missed the point of the exercise, which was to confirm the new Governor’s conservative, small-government “bona fides.” And what better way to accomplish that than by demonstrating his profound misunderstanding of his own job responsibilities and the role of the state in the operation of the market?

What is the proper role of government in a capitalist system? It is to act as “umpire” or referee, ensuring that everyone plays by the rules. Wasn’t it Teddy Roosevelt who reminded us that monopolies distort markets? If one company can dominate a market, that company can dictate prices and other terms with the result that free-market transactions—defined as exchanges between a willing buyer and a willing seller both of whom possess the necessary relevant information—will no longer be a genuinely voluntary transaction.

If Manufacturer A can avoid the cost of disposing of the waste produced by his factory by dumping it into the nearest river, he will be able to compete unfairly with Manufacturer B, who is following the rules governing proper waste disposal.

If Chicken Farmer A is able to control his costs and gain market share by failing to keep his coops clean and his chickens free of disease, unwary consumers will become ill.

Most economists agree that in order for markets to operate properly, government must act as an “umpire” in such situations, assuring a level playing field. They use the term “market failure” to describe three situations in which Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” doesn’t work: when monopolies or corrupt practices replace competition; when so-called “externalities” like pollution harm people who aren’t party to the transaction (who are neither buyer nor seller); and when there are “information asymmetries,” that is, when buyers don’t have access to information they need to bargain in their own interest.

Policymakers and economists may disagree about the need for particular regulations, or the optimum number of regulations, or the relative costs and benefits of suggested regulations, but most do agree that capitalism requires appropriate regulation. Unregulated markets can lead to a very different system, a system about which I have previously blogged, called corporatism. In corporatist systems, government regulations favoring powerful corporate interests are the result of lobbying by corporate and monied special interests that stand to benefit from them. You might think of it as a football game where one side has paid the umpire to make calls favorable to that team.

The rhetorical framework employed by Governor Pence, where the forces of Leviathan–defined as the government in which he serves–are in opposition to the creative energy of the market, has been a staple of American politics for at least three decades. Unfortunately, it’s an incomplete and misleading framework, and its continued use undermines both the government’s ability to do its job and, ironically, citizens’ ability to impose appropriate limits on government authority.

American politics has devolved into an exchange of bumper-sticker slogans and labels barely masquerading as discussion. Terms like capitalist, fascist, socialist and communist are used as epithets by people who rather clearly have no real acquaintance with the elements of those economic philosophies. The result is a discourse that has more in common with a mud fight than a debate, a faux “conversation” where everyone is talking nonsense, but it really doesn’t matter because no one is listening anyway.

Those of us who teach public administration talk a lot about transparency. An essential element of that transparency is a “back to basics” honest discussion about the role of government. Americans may be talking a lot, but we are not having that discussion.

It’s seductively easy to blame “Washington” or “government” or “the Statehouse” for doing too much or not doing enough or doing the wrong things. It’s a lot more difficult to have an adult discussion with one’s constituents about the complexities and ambiguities of decision-making in the administrative state. I get that: no one was ever elected using a campaign slogan proclaiming “On the one hand…but on the other hand..” (I know. I once tried.)

Until we elect people who are willing to have that honest discussion, however, we will continue to see officeholders—many of whom have spent their entire lives in government—rhetorically biting the hand that feeds them, and continuing to undermine the enterprise they claim to serve by mischaracterizing the questions we face.

Government officials do not face a choice between regulation and the free market. They face a much more difficult question: which regulations will protect the operation of the market and ensure a level playing field? How much is enough, and how much is too much? What are the costs and what are the benefits? Who will bear those costs?

Elected officials who don’t understand that this is the question aren’t likely to endorse sensible answers.

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Faith versus Fact

The New York Times put it succinctly:

“The debate over what to do to reduce gun violence in America hit an absurd low point on Wednesday when a Senate witness tried to portray a proposed new ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines as some sort of sexist plot that would disproportionately hurt vulnerable women and their children. …

But there is a more fundamental problem with the idea that guns actually protect the hearth and home. Guns rarely get used that way. In the 1990s, a team headed by Arthur Kellermann of Emory University looked at all injuries involving guns kept in the home in Memphis, Seattle and Galveston, Tex. They found that these weapons were fired far more often in accidents, criminal assaults, homicides or suicide attempts than in self-defense. For every instance in which a gun in the home was shot in self-defense, there were seven criminal assaults or homicides, four accidental shootings, and 11 attempted or successful suicides.”

My husband and I happened to see the testimony the Times was referencing: in it, the young woman told a Senate committee considering the assault weapon ban a poignant story of a woman who had shot intruders and protected her children. One of the Senators on the committee happened to be familiar with the incident she cited, and pointed out that the weapon the woman had used was a shotgun that would still be available to her if the ban passed. The facts didn’t phase the woman offering the testimony, who continued to insist that any effort to limit gun availability would endanger innocent women and children.

Her entire performance reminded me of a religious believer reciting a ritual–impervious to data or evidence contradicting her deeply-held belief.

The analogy that springs to mind is the congregation of simple folks without much in the way of worldly goods who nevertheless continue to donate hard-earned money to pastors living the high life thanks to their credulity. In this case, the pastors are the gun manufacturers and the believers are the fanatic fringe of the NRA.

I know reasonable people who own guns. I know rural folks who hunt. I even know single women who have pistols they have purchased for self-protection. None of them use–or defend–assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and they aren’t the problem. The problem is the True Believers–the people who are emotionally invested in a theology of guns.

People of faith.

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Pretty Please with Sugar on It….

The other day on Facebook, a friend posted one of those perennial whines about hard-working Americans who resent watching their tax money being wasted on support for slutty welfare moms and assorted lazy bums. This one was attributed to Bill Cosby, despite the fact he has repeatedly denied authorship, but it doesn’t really matter how many times Snopes.com “debunks” this and similar aggrieved diatribes–the myth that we are working to support legions of welfare queens persists.

I’m sure there are poor people who take advantage of “the system,” but they can’t hold a candle to the big boys–the sophisticated corporate welfare recipients who’ve been milking the taxpayers for years. For every single mom making minimum wage who depends upon our diminishing social safety net to feed her children, there’s a well-connected industry costing taxpayers and consumers billions.

Before you dismiss that assertion because it came from a “bleeding heart liberal,” it might be enlightening to hear what noted liberals Richard Lugar and Pat Toomey recently had to say about one of the most egregious offenders: big sugar.

In a blog post published by The Hill, Lugar, Pennsylvania’s Toomey, and New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen wrote of their support for reforming “an extravagant sugar price-support program that costs consumers and businesses an estimated $3.5 billion and 20,000 jobs each year.”

Sugar is the most tightly controlled–read “subsidized”–agricultural commodity in the country. The favorable policies that operate to keep sugar prices artificially high benefit approximately five thousand wealthy farmers at the expense of the rest of us. These aren’t family farmers, either–they are large corporate farmers like Archer Daniels Midland and United Sugars Corporation. In 2000, we taxpayers forked out more than a billion dollars to keep the price of sugar high enough to protect their profit margins.

Sugar subsidies artificially inflate the price of candy, breakfast cereals and other foods that use sugar, ensuring a price for sugar that is about three times as much as its price on the world market. Americans’ bodies may be getting fat from sugary foods and beverages, but our wallets are getting much, much thinner; the General Accounting Office reports that thanks to sugar subsidies, U.S. consumers pay in excess of two billion dollars per year too much for our sugary foods.

We’re not only paying extra–we’re depressing job growth. A 2006 study by the Commerce Department found that for each job the program saved in the sugar industry, it cost three jobs in food manufacturing.

The Agriculture Department guarantees sugar growers a set price, and protects domestic sugar interests from competition through the imposition of import barriers and domestic production control. If that isn’t welfare, what is? (It’s sure as hell not market capitalism!)

If the financial costs of this welfare program aren’t outrageous enough, sugar subsidies are also causing environmental degradation–large areas of the Florida Everglades have been converted to cane sugar production as a direct result of the sugar protection racket, causing damage fro drainage, runoff of chemical fertilizers and destruction of the natural habitat.

The next time someone complains about the “culture of dependency” and the costs of welfare, ask them about sugar.

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Suddenly I Don’t Feel So Safe…..

Heartbreaking. Yesterday in Chicago, a fifteen-year-old was shot dead–evidently caught in the crossfire of a gang shoot-out. Just the week before, she’d been thrilled to participate with her school’s band in the Presidential inauguration. Like the children at Sandy Hook in Newtown, she was an innocent child who had her whole life ahead of her.

As we ate dinner last night, the television news reported on two other shootings. It also covered a portion of the Congressional hearing on the administration’s proposals for background checks and restrictions on the sales of large “magazines” that allow a shooter to rapidly fire multiple shots without reloading–including, poignantly, halting testimony from Gabby Gifford, the Congresswoman shot in the head in Phoenix while meeting with her constituents. The cost of her miraculous survival was on full display–this formerly vibrant woman is now partially blind, able to form words only with great effort, partially paralyzed.

A colleague shared with me an article from Slate, featuring a graphic and an interactive map of all the firearms deaths since Newtown. You can access it here. As of a couple of days ago, the toll stood at 1440. Just since Newtown.

Can we craft laws that will eradicate all this violence? No. Will background checks eliminate the ability of criminals to get their hands on weapons? No. In a country with a toxic gun culture and an estimated 300,000,000 guns, we aren’t going to be able to wave a policy wand and make it all go away. But surely, we can make it incrementally more difficult to kill and maim, to destroy lives and terrorize law-abiding citizens.

The survivalists (one of whom, the news just reported, has killed a school bus driver and abducted a young boy) and the paranoid see every modest measure to protect the public as part of a plot to disarm them. Newtown has had one salutary effect: it has pulled back the covers and given the American public a good look at that worldview, as expressed by Wayne LaPierre and his fellow crackpots at the NRA, and most of us–including responsible gun owners–have been understandably appalled. (Until now, like many other Americans, I had considered the NRA simply another lobbying group, rather than a cult. I was wrong.)

It shouldn’t take another Newtown, or the death of another promising 15-year-old, to shake well-intentioned lawmakers out of their complacency. As for those elected officials whose inaction has been purchased with NRA support, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I will no longer vote for a candidate who accepts campaign contributions from that organization.

Just because we can’t wave a magic wand and make everyone safe doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take reasonable measures to reduce the violence and mayhem. And “reasonable measures” do not include arming kindergarten teachers. It’s past time to stop the crazy.

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Whose Ox is That Being Gored??

Democrats and liberal pundits are all up in arms about proposals emerging in some states that would allocate the electoral vote by Congressional District. The reason they oppose such a measure is strictly partisan: given the current effects of gerrymandering (largely by Republicans at the state level), it would disadvantage Democrats. Why do I think that if Democrats had been doing the gerrymandering, the whole concept would be less offensive?

Let’s review the current situation and our options.

The Electoral College–whatever its original purposes or merits–is outmoded. It is certainly inconsistent with our current goal of “one person, one vote.” But eliminating it will require a constitutional amendment, and that would take years and be very difficult. Currently, most states award all of their electoral votes (a number equal to the number of Senators and Representatives from that state) to the candidate who wins a majority of the popular vote in that state–no matter how thin the victory.

In red Indiana, that means that voters who opted for Barack Obama in November might just as well have flushed those votes down the toilet. Ditto New York voters who preferred Mitt Romney. Winner take all effectively erases the votes cast for the loser, even if that loss was by a mere fraction.

The Constitution permits each state to decide how its electoral votes will be allocated, and two states–Maine, and (I think) Nebraska–have long allocated them by congressional district, awarding the district vote to the winner of that district and giving the two additional votes to the candidate who wins statewide. Since congressional districts are supposed to be roughly equal in population, the result is an allocation that more closely approximates the breakdown of the vote statewide.

The kicker here, of course, is gerrymandering. Not surprisingly, the sudden interest in electoral fairness is being seen in states where the Republicans have been most successful in rigging the boundaries in their favor. But only the most naive among us would expect a different result if the situation were reversed; Democrats have been just as eager to draw squiggly lines that benefit them when they’ve had the power to do so.

If we really want a system in which everyone’s vote actually counts, a system that doesn’t give politicians of either party the opportunity to game the system, there is an easy fix: allocate the electoral vote to reflect the popular vote.

If candidate A gets 55% of the popular vote and candidate B gets 45%, allocate the electoral votes 55/45.

We talk a lot about the importance of voting, and each election we hear that “every vote counts.” That may be true of votes for local offices (unless gerrymandering has been at work at the local level), but with respect to our votes for President, it’s bull-hockey. Under our present system, red votes in blue states don’t count. Blue votes in red states don’t count.

If we really cared about electoral fairness, and not just about comparative advantage–not just about whose ox is gored–we’d allocate the electoral vote to represent the actual voice of the people.

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