Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Something Different, Continued

Yesterday’s post on the pros and cons of labeling foods with genetically-altered ingredients led to a back-and-forth discussion that exemplifies the real-world problems of policymaking, where matters are seldom black and white.

The discussion illustrated a contemporary reality: given the increasing complexity of the world we inhabit, in many policy domains, few people will fully understand the issues involved. Think climate change, poverty, education, healthcare…and food labeling.

Miriam’s comment raised many of the potential pitfalls involved in labeling; as she noted, in an effort to give people relevant information, we may instead end up misinforming them. In particular, her question “how far do we drill down?” is key. How much information is enough, and how much is too much? How are we defining our terms? What do we include/exclude?

Mort underscores the economic motives of the stakeholders in this particular debate, reminding us of the increasing role that money and influence play in our policymaking, often to the detriment of accuracy and the public good. (The climate change debate is an example.)

What do consumers have a right to know about the products they purchase? What do they need to know?

On the one hand, the vendor/manufacturers’ “trust us” is not only insufficient, it is contrary to the premises of our regulatory structure. On the other hand, both Miriam and Mort are undeniably correct  when they point out that most consumers do not have the background and scientific training needed to evaluate technical information accurately and will either over-react to it or ignore it.

Most of us shake our heads or laugh when the stewardess demonstrates how to buckle a seat belt, or when we read the label on a ladder that warns us against falling off.

We don’t need a nanny state that overprotects us. We do need relevant information that allows us to make informed choices. Deciding where to draw that line–deciding what information should be conveyed–is the hard part.

Yesterday’s exchange reminded me of the old story of the village rabbi who is approached by two men to settle an argument. The first tells his side, and the Rabbi says, “you’re right.” The second tells his side, and once again the Rabbi says, “You’re right.” An onlooker protests: they can’t both be right! To which the Rabbi says, “You, too, are right!”

Policy is complicated. Simple answers and binary choices don’t make for good policy.

Maybe that’s one reason we don’t have much good policy these days.

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Are We Really Talking About Taxes?

I’m beginning to suspect that all the anger/righteous indignation/resentment directed at the subject of taxes isn’t really about taxes at all.

If Americans were really discussing the tax system, surely they would know more about it. And I’m not just referring to the ludicrous arguments being made by the televised talking heads in the wake of the healthcare decision. (Hint: the Supreme Court ruled that the imposition of a penalty for noncompliance was an appropriate exercise of Congress’s taxing power–they didn’t rule that the penalty was a tax.) I’m talking about far more basic information.

A recent poll of Tea Party folks found that 90% of them believed taxes had either gone up or remained flat under Obama; only 2% answered (correctly) that taxes had gone down, which they have for 95% of American taxpayers. Bill Maher noted the irony: members of an organization formed to oppose taxes and named after a historical group known for its anti-tax activism don’t know whether taxes have gone up or down.

Nor is this an anomaly. Discussion of taxes rarely include definition of the term. So people will assert, with a straight face, that “the bottom half” of Americans “don’t pay taxes.” This is hogwash–they pay lots of taxes. Poor people may not make enough money to owe federal income taxes, but they pay federal payroll taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes, utility taxes, property taxes (even renters pay property taxes, which are part of the rent)…In fact, the percentage of their income that the poor pay in state and local taxes is far higher than the percentage paid by the wealthy.

So–we have people who don’t know whether taxes have increased or decreased, and pundits whose calculations of the tax burden conveniently or mistakenly leave numerous taxes out of the equation. But my biggest pet peeve is the folks who discuss tax rates without distinguishing between the marginal rate and the effective rate.

Right now, we are arguing about the wisdom of returning to the marginal rates under Clinton–approximately 39%. Listen to the bloviators on your favorite talk show and you are likely to get the impression that such a rate translates to taking 39% of the taxpayer’s income in taxes. Of course, it means no such thing. It means that once an individual has made enough to be in the highest income bracket, each dollar in that bracket will be taxed at that rate. The effective rate is the actual percentage of overall income paid, after averaging out the rates applied to each income bracket. That–plus lots of loopholes aka “incentives”–is why Mitt Romney’s effective rate was in the neighborhood of 13%, and why corporations that are theoretically subject to 30%+ tax rates actually paid 12.6% in 2008.

My point here is not to advocate for any particular tax policy–we can all agree or disagree about what an optimum tax system would look like. My concern is more basic. It seems to me that if we were really arguing about taxes, we would know much more about them. And if we aren’t really arguing about taxes–if taxes are just a useful surrogate for whatever it is that actually has our collective panties in a bunch–what is that sore spot?

What’s the real source of our sour national disposition?

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My Country ‘Tis of Thee….

If you are looking for an uplifting, “ain’t we great” post appropriate to the 4th of July, you probably need to stop reading now.

I began my reading this morning with Kurt Anderson’s Op Ed in the New York Times, on the downside of liberty. Anderson revisited the historic American tension between individualism and community, and concluded–in concert with many other contemporary observers–that Americans have confused a robust defense of individual rights with a wholesale abandonment of our civic obligations to the wider community. He argues that we have lost the ability to distinguish between individual rights and self-interested greed.

Anderson points to a cultural phenomenon. Thanks to the recent weather, I have been pondering a structural one.

As anyone who isn’t spending time in the arctic knows, we’ve been having an unprecedented heat wave. Much of the nation has also been battered by ferocious storms, and television news has been featuring visible evidence of the damage–especially shots of the downed power lines responsible for a massive loss of electricity. As of last night’s newscast, more than a million homes remained without power. Elderly people and children, especially, are at risk without air conditioning.

My question is simple: why don’t we bury our power lines? My answer is equally simple: because we have a political/economic structure that privileges short-term savings over long-term quality–a structure that rewards those who are penny-wise and pound foolish.

It costs more up front to bury our utilities. It’s cheaper–initially– to string lines. But not only does burying those lines improve the appearance of our cities and towns, it is much cheaper in the long run. It doesn’t take extraordinary storms to down the lines; more predictable weather also takes a toll. Over a period of years, utilities will more than save the extra dollars spent to bury the lines and consumers will enjoy more dependable service.

This same “penny wise, pound foolish” mind-set permeates our public services. Go to Europe (yes, I know, it is heresy to suggest that other countries might do some things better than we do) and walk on granite pavements that have lasted longer than most of our cities. Expensive to build, much less expensive to maintain and replace. Look at the current rush to sell off public assets–Toll Roads, parking meters, even the City-County Building–rather than spend what is necessary to maintain those assets for future generations.

In business, the triumph of the shareholder and manager over the entrepreneur-owner has meant that the next quarter’s bottom line is privileged over the long-term best interests of the enterprise. It’s more important to return an extra twenty cents per share now than to invest in improvements that will benefit the business ten years hence. In politics, it has always been the case that “long term” means “until the next election.” So we have the ridiculous spectacle of the State of Indiana returning $100 to each taxpayer rather than applying those funds to necessary improvements in education or infrastructure that won’t yield such immediate gratification.

Maybe it’s fitting that we have fireworks on the 4th of July. Children love fireworks, and we seem to have become a nation of children.

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Reconsidering ID

I’ve always been reflexively opposed to the notion of a national ID card. Call it the civil libertarian in me, but such an identifier raises visions of police states past and privacy intrusions future. That said, I’ll admit this is not an issue I’ve really thought through–my distaste is more visceral than intellectual.

So I was grudgingly persuaded by Bill Keller’s column in this morning’s New York Times.  Keller’s point of departure was the recent Supreme Court decision that struck down most of the Arizona immigration law, but left intact the right of police to demand “papers” from people being detained for other reasons. As he pointedly asked, “What ‘papers’?” What sorts of identification do any of us carry that proves we are citizens? Wouldn’t employers and police officers be better served by the existence of a standard ID?

Keller acknowledges the privacy concerns.

 “The trick, and I won’t pretend it’s always easy, is to distinguish the reasonable and constructive from the invasive and excessive. We want the sales clerk at the Gap to know our credit card is good, but not to have access to our whole credit history. We want our doctors to share our health histories with one another, but probably not with our employers. We may or may not want retailers to know what kind of books we read, what kind of car we drive, where we are thinking of traveling. We may or may not want those who follow us on the Web to know our real-time location, or our real name.”

“This will not satisfy those who fear that any such mandate is potentially “a tool for social control,” as Chris Calabrese of the A.C.L.U. put it. But the only way to completely eliminate the risks of a connected world is to burn your documents, throw away your cellphone, cancel your Internet service and live off the grid.

As it happens, the proposal I described is already on the table. Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham included it in their menu for comprehensive immigration reform in 2010. For obvious reasons, they didn’t call it a national ID. They called it an “enhanced Social Security card.”

Like just about everything else, immigration reform is stuck in the mangle of election-year partisanship. And if Congress ever does revert to the business of solving problems, there should be many parts to a humane, sensible immigration bill — including expanded legal immigration and a path to citizenship for many of those already here. But a fraud-proof, limited-use national identification card is an essential part of the package.

Then the Arizona police can go back to doing their real jobs.”

I won’t say his argument entirely persuades me–but it’s undeniably logical, and worth more consideration than I have previously given the matter. Read the whole column, and see what you think.

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Absence of Trust

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, I was once again reminded of how painful it has become to watch what passes for political discussion/debate in this country.

We have always had disputes about policy, about the proper role of government and the reach of the federal courts. We always will have those disagreements, and that’s how it should be. What is qualitatively different about our current discourse is the degree of suspicion and paranoia that characterizes it.  Americans simply do not trust the motives of those in government, and as a result of that distrust, we are unwilling to grant that honorable people of good will can come to different conclusions about the problems we face.

In Distrust, American Style, I investigated the sources and consequences of that distrust. The sources were easy enough to identify: for the past two decades, we’ve seen massive betrayals by businesses and Wall Street, scandals in institutions ranging from churches to major league sports, obscene amounts of money being spent on lobbying for legal advantage and more recently, poured into Super Pacs. There are undeniable reasons for our current levels of cynicism and distrust.

The problem is, when citizens don’t know who they can trust, they don’t trust anyone, and politics becomes impossible.

Yes, there are bad corporate actors–but there are also scores of good corporate citizens. Yes, there are politicians who are “on the take” and/or beholden to those who finance their campaigns, but there are also many, many good public servants who genuinely are trying to do the right thing. Yes, there are judges whose ideology drives their decision-making, but there are many more who divorce their policy preferences from their responsibility to faithfully apply the law.

Wholesale distrust makes for toxic politics.

It is one thing to disagree with President Obama’s priorities and policies–quite another to suggest, as “commentators” on Fox News and others regularly do, that he is a Kenyan Muslim Socialist who wants to destroy the United States. It’s one thing to disagree with Senator Lugar, quite another to suggest that his ability to work with Democrats on national security issues makes him unfit to hold office. You may disagree with the Court’s analysis of the healthcare law (although very few people seem to know enough about the actual law to form a reasoned opinion), but to suggest that Chief Justice Roberts is a “traitor” or (more bizarrely) that his opinion was flawed because he takes epilepsy medication is to embrace paranoia.

We have reached such levels of derangement that we no longer believe anything we don’t want to believe–and thanks to technology, we can choose to inhabit media environments that reinforce our most unhinged conspiracy theories.

We don’t trust the “lame stream” media (or what is left of it). We don’t trust businesses or unions. We don’t trust the courts. We don’t trust the President, Congress or the Supreme Court. Increasingly, we don’t trust each other.

This is no way to run a country.

It won’t be easy, but rational people need to insist on measures that will make our governing institutions trustworthy again–beginning with more transparency and more control of money in politics. If we can restore a measure of basic trust in the good will of those we elect, perhaps we can begin to calm the crazy and actually talk to each other again.

Failing that, maybe Prozac in the water supply??

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