Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

To Your Health…..

Federalism has many virtues, but it also makes some problems more difficult to solve. I don’t care how much your local city council cares about air pollution, there isn’t a whole lot they–or even your state legislature, assuming you have a more enlightened one than we do here in Indiana–can do about it. Health policies likewise tend to require state or national action; there isn’t a lot that local communities can do.

But there are some things we can do locally, and there really isn’t any excuse for failing to do them. Cities and states can encourage healthy lifestyles and physical fitness by providing well-tended parks, by increasing bike lanes, and by banning smoking in public places. These measures not only promote public health, they ultimately save money by reducing Medicaid and similar costs.

The Ballard Administration has at least responded to calls for additional bike lanes (although those downtown, where I live, are considerably less than optimal–the ones on New York Street were evidently painted by someone who was drunk or otherwise seriously incapacitated). Otherwise, not so much. Far from expanding opportunities for recreation, our parks have been shamefully neglected. And worst of all, Ballard has consistently blocked efforts to ban smoking in public places.

The Mayor’s refusal to honor his campaign promise to sign a smoking-ban ordinance is particularly galling, not just because he did a 180-degree turn on the issue once he was elected, but because smoking bans are a low-cost, highly effective way to improve public health.

There are essentially two arguments against smoking bans. Bar owners worry that business will suffer if customers cannot smoke in their establishments. Other opponents of the bans argue that no one has to patronize a bar or restaurant–that if smoke bothers you, you can just go somewhere else.  The evidence from other cities that have passed these bans should comfort the bar owners–far from diminishing, in many places business actually improved when nonsmoking customers weren’t assaulted by the smell of  “eau de stale cigarette.” And the argument about choice ignores the very real health hazard smoking poses for employees. (When asked about the impact on workers, Mayor Ballard dismissed employees as “transients” whose health clearly was not a concern.)

Hint: Telling hard-working waiters and bartenders that they should just get another job if smoke bothers them ignores the realities of the current job market, among other things.

Cities are in a world of fiscal hurt right now. At a time when there isn’t money to do many of the things that would improve our neighborhoods, a smoking ban is a virtually cost-free way to improve public health and make our public spaces more pleasant at the same time. Polls show an overwhelming majority of residents favoring such a ban, and in fact, when he ran for Mayor, Ballard supported the policy.

All of this makes the Mayor’s current, stubborn opposition hard to understand. If he has reasons for his abrupt about-face, he has yet to articulate them.

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Something Old, Something New…

Reading the news lately, I was reminded of the old rhyme for brides: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”

Something old? This morning’s Star had a story about the nearly three million dollars in fees being paid by the Ballard Administration for services in connection with the ill-conceived fifty year lease of Indianapolis parking meters. This may have been a bad deal for the city, but law firms and mortgage bankers did quite well. I believe this gets filed under “blessed are the deal makers, for they shall inherit the goodies” or perhaps the even older “he who has, gets.”

Something new? I vote for the absolute brazenness with which the current Indiana legislature has favored the haves over the have-nots. Although people who can afford to make contributions and pay lobbyists have always had an edge, this year the majority has been absolutely shameless.  The rhetoric has been about “shared sacrifice” at a time when money is tight. So they reduced corporate tax rates and made up the difference by requiring “shared sacrifices” from the most vulnerable: eliminating dental coverage for most Medicaid recipients, cutting the number of children who will be eligible for CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (despite the fact that 75% of that money comes from the federal government), increasing co-pays for infants and toddlers with developmental disabilities, and depriving poor women of desperately-needed healthcare by de-funding Planned Parenthood.

Something borrowed? Citizens Action Coalition issued a news release yesterday about legislative approval of higher profits for utilities, allowing shareholders of those utilities to “borrow” from the school corporations and municipalities–and ultimately the taxpayers–that will have to pay higher rates. That’s small change next to the smoke and mirrors that accompanied the Ballard Administration’s deal to sell the water company to Citizens. The deal allowed the administration to get a big up-front payment it could use to pave streets and make infrastructure improvements. That “saved” tax dollars, which will have to be “borrowed” from rate-payers later.

Something blue?  Indiana citizens.

File Under “Kick Them When They’re Down”

The more we see of Paul Ryan’s “innovative” budget proposal, the more mean-spirited it gets.

Take Food Stamps–another target for “savings.” According to Meteor Blades over at Daily Kos, Ryan would change food stamp dollars to block grants, which would be funded at only 80 percent of the current level of spending. “That means cuts of $127 billion between now and 2021. To achieve that would require dropping millions of low-income Americans from SNAP rolls or cutting their benefits or some combination of both. Ryan doesn’t specify. This “reform”—astonishing what gets that label these days—would also impose new restrictions on recipients, including time limits on how long they would be eligible to receive food stamps.”

We are just beginning to emerge from the most significant economic downturn since the Great Depression. Thousands and thousands of hardworking, taxpaying Americans lost jobs and home, and a significant number of people who had always been self-sustaining found themselves on food stamps. Their needs, however, cannot compete with the need to protect the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% of earners.

Ryan’s defenders will claim that these historically low tax rates will generate investment and translate into jobs. The evidence against that is overwhelming and compelling.

This is really an effort to dismantle the remnants of our already dangerously frayed social safety net–by self-proclaimed “Christians” who have no understanding of their own religion’s teachings, and no empathy for anyone who doesn’t look just like them. And it is unforgivable.

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Ideology and Evidence Redux

Many years ago, when I first starting taking policy arguments seriously, I was persuaded by the logic of tax relief for the wealthy. That argument had two parts: first, if tax rates are confiscatory, people will have less incentive to work and invest; second, if the rich have “extra” money, they will invest it, and those investments will be used by entrepreneurs to create jobs.

I still oppose confiscatory taxes, but it has been a very long time since the days of the 90% marginal rate. And–although the argument about lower taxes generating job creation made sense–all available evidence suggests it doesn’t work that way in the real world.

As one pundit recently noted, “The Mad Men who once ran campaigns featuring doctors extolling the health benefits of smoking are now busy marketing the dogma that tax cuts mean broad prosperity, no matter what the facts show.”

What happens when a firmly-held belief hits evidence contradicting it?

What should happen, I submit, is that–after careful consideration of the credibility of the evidence and a determination that it is sound–we relinquish the unsupported belief. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. It’s hard, for one thing. Most of us resist admitting that we have been wrong about something, and the more devoutly we believed (in religion, ideology, our own righteousness), the more difficult it is to change. So many of us go looking for alternative evidence to support our original ideology. In a recent column, David Cay Johnson lists 9 “facts” about taxes that are widely believed, but demonstrably untrue, from “poor Americans don’t pay taxes” to “the wealthy are carrying the burden” to “corporate tax breaks create jobs.”

There’s a lot of hand-wringing and bemoaning about the loss of bipartisanship in our politics. But bipartisanship requires that people on both sides of the aisle go into political life determined to respect evidence. Such a determination won’t turn free-market capitalists into socialists, or vice-versa, and it won’t eliminate good-faith arguments over what the evidence shows. But we would be spared the spectacle of watching 36 GOP members of the House Energy Committee vote that global warming doesn’t exist, among other things.

I don’t know whether Representatives like Mike Pence and Michelle Bachmann are “true believers” or simply pandering to the true believers in their base, and at the end of the day, it probably doesn’t matter. When you elevate religious and ideological fervor over reason and evidence, you end up with the Dark Ages.

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Dollars and Sense

We hear a lot of talk from the Governor and legislators about the hard decisions being forced by tough fiscal times, and on this one, I’m sympathetic. When there isn’t enough money to do the things we need to do, finding the least painful cuts can be an incredibly difficult task.

Of course, it is made infinitely more difficult when you begin with a decision to keep your tax rates lower than those in all of the surrounding states.

So, where does HB 1000–our budget bill–aim Mitch the “Blade’s” knife? At education and social services funding. A few examples:

  • The Family and Children’s Fund is being cut by 219 million dollars (with no explanation or justification offered).
  • The 2011 appropriation for Healthy Families, Indiana’s much-touted health insurance program for poor Hoosiers (we don’t need no stinking federal healthcare reform!!) is being cut by 86%, despite the fact that there is a waiting list and the program is turning people away.
  • Health coverage under the CHIP program is also cut. Approximately 7000 eligible children will not be covered–despite the fact that over 75% of the costs of that coverage would be paid by the federal government, and the rest is supposed to be paid out of the proceeds of the tobacco lawsuit settlement.
  • Similarly, hospital care for the indigent is being cut by approximately ten million dollars–but the State will lose twice that amount in Federal Medicaid Leverage dollars.

I could go on and on, but you see the pattern. Mental health drugs are being restricted, making it more likely we’ll pay more through the criminal justice system. Public mass transit–the lack of which is already a huge drag on efforts at job creation–is cut by 15 million. Numerous cuts to K-12 and transfers to Charter schools belie all the rhetoric about improving education–while it is true that simply “throwing money at the problems” won’t solve them, it is equally true that starving public education will only make those problems worse.

I don’t want to minimize the difficulty of funding state government in tough times. But I am struck by three themes that run through these budgetary decisions: the cuts made hurt those who have the least “voice” in our political system (i.e., those who have no lobbyists at the statehouse, and whose displeasure is least likely to be felt at the polls); many of these cuts will actually cost us more in the not-so-long run, making their fiscal prudence highly questionable; and our adamant refusal to look at both the costs and income sides of the ledger not only makes this job much harder than it needs to be, it also benefits the well-to-do at the expense of our poorest citizens.

That doesn’t make either economic or moral sense.

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