Public Policy and Governance – Page 327

Reaganism Triumphant

This morning, I made my usual mistake, and listened to the news.

The protests in Wisconsin–and to a lesser extent, Ohio–triggered by efforts to blame fiscal shortages on people who work for government. A story about a southern town that has stopped making pension payments to retired police officers and firefighters, because the town “ran out of money.” Various congresspersons of the Republican persuasion demanding ever-more draconian cuts in social programs we can no longer “afford” (while failing to explain why we can still afford all manner of military expenditures, including the Pentagon’s practice of sponsoring NASCAR races). You all know the drill–it’s drearily familiar.

So here’s my question: why, in all of these discussions, do we never hear anyone suggest raising taxes?

Now, I will grant that taxes can be a double-edged sword: depending upon who and what we tax, we can cause economic distortions. Tax policies can provide perverse incentives, or reduce incentives for behaviors we want to encourage. But that recognition hardly justifies taking taxes off the table, and that seems to be what we’ve done. Taxes have become a dirty word, rather than a revenue source.

The result is that we are strangling government’s ability to invest in the future of the country. When governors refuse federal dollars to built high-speed rail, they are not only refusing to create temporary construction jobs, they are ensuring that America will be less competitive for a generation. When they choose to “balance” budgets on the backs of pensioners and public servants, they are opting to weaken government’s ability to provide services and undermining the public’s trust in that government.

Ronald Reagan famously said that government is the problem, not the solution. Then he set in motion a political ideology that embraced a very selective version of Reagan’s Presidency and made that statement into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Those who subscribe to “Reaganism” conveniently forget that even the Gipper raised taxes when necessary.

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Proof of Citizenship

Well, I see that our embarrassing legislators have given committee approval to the “let’s target brown folks” bill–aka “immigration enforcement.” Much like the widely criticized Arizona law after which it was modeled, the measure would allow police to stop people and demand proof that they are in the country legally if there is “probable cause” to question their immigration status. “Probable cause” includes failure to speak English, a provision that led a snarky friend of mine to suggest that people in southern Indiana should start carrying their birth certificates.

How would you prove that you are a citizen, or otherwise legally entitled to be in the United States, if you were stopped? Those of us with passports could start carrying them everywhere, I suppose. Or we could carry birth certificates. A driver’s license isn’t considered proof.

Since the sponsors of this bill insist it does not depend on profiling or skin color, we would all need to carry “official papers” of some sort in case we were stopped. And that is ironic, although I’m sure it is an irony that escapes our intrepid lawmakers.

When my oldest grandson was twelve or thirteen, my husband took him to New York’s Ellis Island. The museum of immigration had a wonderful interactive display, showcasing the history of those who came to America and the reasons they left their homelands. What made the deepest impression on our grandson was the number of people who left their original homes because they were required to have “papers” on them at all times, required to prove their right to walk the streets of the cities in which they lived. He found such a requirement incomprehensible.

I hope he has his papers. He tans easily.

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Downside of Democracy

Many years ago, during a discussion with a friend whose husband served in the Indiana House, she said something I’ve always remembered: “The problem with representative democracy is that it is representative.”

This session of the Indiana Legislature seems intent on proving the point.

If you’ve been following national news, you may be thinking that those we elected to the General Assembly couldn’t possibly be as crazy as, for example, the South Dakota lawmaker who sponsored a bill that would have made it legal to shoot abortion doctors (he withdrew it in the wake of the publicity), or the Arizona legislator who responded to the horrific shootings in Tucson by sponsoring a bill to allow concealed guns to be carried anywhere, or the Wisconsin Governor who is threatening to call out the National Guard if public workers protest his efforts to strip them of bargaining rights they’ve had since the 1950s.

But you’d be wrong.

Think an anti-bullying bill should be a slam-dunk? Think again. The Senate Committee killed it on a 3-5 vote. Opponents expressed an uncharacteristic concern for the First Amendment rights of schoolchildren…especially their right to express anti-gay sentiments.

Speaking of child safety, surely a bill to require all child care providers to meet health and safety requirements—staff criminal history checks, fire safety, drug testing and the like—should be a no-brainer? Wrong! Advance America’s Eric Miller brought in God’s folks to testify that the bill gave government “too much authority over Church ministries,” and the bill died without a committee vote.

Wisconsin isn’t the only state trying to strip public employees of bargaining rights—here in Indiana, a bill to abolish Indiana’s merit system has emerged from committee. And Mike Delph’s effort to have Indiana emulate Arizona by targeting people who “look like” they might be illegal immigrants is moving along nicely (never mind that Arizona’s convention bookings declined 36% in the wake of that state’s law, and never mind that immigration is an exclusively federal responsibility).

And of course, our “representative representatives” aren’t content with defeating the anti-bullying bill, and reviving the bill to amend the Indiana Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Taking their war against gay Hoosiers up a notch, there’s an upcoming committee vote on a bill to prohibit state universities from providing domestic partner benefits.

The haters and the crazies are well represented in the Indiana General Assembly. The rest of us, not so much.

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State’s Rights and Wrongs

“States’ Rights” are back.

The last time a significant number of states resisted federal edicts was during the 50’s and 60’s, when they were fighting desegregation and insisting that the big, bad federal government couldn’t tell them that “equal protection of the laws” meant giving actual equal rights to black people.

This time around, “states’ rights” has a new name: nullification. But it’s really the same old song; indeed, both the words and the music are all too familiar.

Nullification is the theory that states have the right to reject federal law. It is a discredited theory that ignores pesky constitutional details like the supremacy clause, not to mention the last hundred years or so of constitutional jurisprudence.

Ostensibly, what set off the current political tantrum was the Affordable Care Act, aka health care reform. Like a two-year-old screaming “you can’t make me!” to his mother, legislatures in several states are in the process of declaring that the federal government can’t force them to comply. (Those legislative shrieks of defiance are likely to have precisely the same effect as the shrieks of the two-year-old—which is to say, none. Mothers and the federal government will always have the last word.)

The real question raised by current efforts at nullification is: why? What is so terrifying, or awful, about reforming the health-care system so that 50 million uninsured Americans will have access to at least a minimum level of care? What is so totalitarian/Socialist/Nazi-ish about telling health insurers that they can’t deny you coverage you paid for simply because you got sick? I understand differences of opinion about the particulars of the reform—I would have preferred a different approach myself—but policy disputes don’t spawn the sort of hysteria we are seeing.

It becomes a little clearer when you see what other elements of federal law the more reactionary states are rejecting. Arizona was the first state to enact a draconian measure targeting immigrants, even though immigration is a matter reserved to the federal government, and other states—including Indiana—are scrambling to do the same. Listen to the rhetoric about immigrants, then listen to the fury over health care, and you will hear an ugly common theme: everything that’s going wrong in this country is “their” fault. And who are “they”? Poor people, brown people, gay people…anyone who is different, anyone who is “other.” Unlike “us,” “they” are all undeserving.

History teaches us that inter-group tensions increase during bad economic times. People are anxious and fearful and looking for someone to blame.

I just hope the recovery picks up steam before we “nullify” America.

Spin Cycle

I get so disheartened listening to political arguments about health care reform.

It’s not that I am a big fan of the bill that finally passed. I would much rather have seen “Medicare for All,” for policy reasons not germane to this post. But I have been astonished by the venom that the bill has engendered. It’s bad enough that crazies like Glenn Beck compare Obama’s effort to provide health care to the uninsured with Nazism. The despicable lie about “death panels,” hyped by Sarah Palin and her ilk, was equally odious. But perhaps the most annoying of these efforts at disinformation has been the recent effort by presumably serious GOP lawmakers to persuade the public that the Affordable Care Act–which they dub sneeringly as “Obamacare”–is a “jobs killer.”

This all started when the Congressional Budget Office reviewed the Act. Along with concluding that the reform bill will reduce the deficit significantly over the next ten years, the CBO noted that the measure will allow a number of people to leave the workforce. Congressional Republicans immediately cited this as evidence the Act was a “job killer.”

What the CBO found, however, had nothing at all to do with the number of jobs. It had to do with the number of people who are currently working only because they need affordable health insurance.

In other words, there are people who are only working because they desperately need employer-sponsored health insurance. These are people who have the means not to work full-time, if they have access to a health insurance market that currently shuts them out. Many of these workers will choose to retire early because they will now be able to buy their own health insurance.

This is what Republicans mean when they say that health care reform is ‘destroying jobs.’

There’s a reason many of us despair of ever having reasoned, rational discussions of policy. When ideology and political posturing trump reality, the common good–not to mention common sense–gets lost in the spin cycle.