Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Indiana–Aspiring To Be Mississippi

I frequently begin these daily rants by promising to “connect the dots.” That’s because Americans have a distressing tendency to argue policy in silos–ignoring the fact that the effects of policy A will often have a significant effect on policies B, C and D.

A friend recently sent me a column by Michael Hicks that connected our state’s disastrous education policies with our efforts at economic development. Hicks is a conservative and an economist, and his observations are based on data, not ideology. As he reports, Indiana’s economy is not keeping up with national trends. (Evidently, keeping taxes too low to provide the infrastructure necessary to an attractive quality of life isn’t the most intelligent approach. But then, that’s my snarky take.)

First, the data.

The Indiana Economic Development Corporation turns 20 years old in early 2025. In 2005, Indiana had 104,854 businesses, 2.96 million jobs and 6.28 million people.

In the most recent year for all these data, 2021, Indiana had 99,280 businesses, 3.23 million jobs and 6.81 million residents.

If the state had grown at the same pace as the rest of the nation, we would have 110,305 businesses, 3.23 million jobs and 7.05 million people. That leaves Indiana with a two-decade growth shortfall of more than 11,000 businesses, 151,000 jobs and 240,000 people.

Hicks says the reality is even worse than these numbers suggest.

Since its formation in 2005, Hoosier factory employment has declined by almost 55,000 jobs, or 10%. Indeed, since Indiana’s LEAP district was announced, the state has shed a further 14,000 factory jobs, while the nation as a whole added 166,000 manufacturing positions.

Over the past two decades, average real wages for manufacturing workers in Indiana dropped by a stunning 14.4%. Nationwide, they rose by just under 1%.

This performance–as Hicks acknowledges– is “policy failure in its purest, most unadulterated form.” But as he also acknowledges, the failures aren’t attributable to poor performance by the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, which he says is one of the better such concerns. The problem is that the IEDC represents a “state with increasingly poor economic fundamentals”.

Hicks predicts a future performance that is even worse, thanks to Indiana’s war on education. There is, to begin with, 15 years of funding cuts to state universities–funding cuts that have left us with 10 years of declining attendance and graduation. Our legislature’s failure to reverse that decline places us behind Mississippi, of all places,  where one-third more high school graduates attempt college each year than here in Indiana.

The lack of action on college completion removes from our economic development organizations the single most important aspect of a region’s future economic performance — educated young people.

To illustrate this disaster, we can look to the recent past. Since 1980, 72% of population growth, and almost all job growth, went to the 15% of U.S. counties with the highest educational attainment. There are only six of those in Indiana — four in the Indianapolis suburbs and the host counties of Purdue and Indiana University.

Over the same four decades, the least well-educated half of Indiana counties lost 13,764 people. This will inevitably worsen in the decades to come. Education is now more, rather than less, important to economic growth and prosperity.

Indiana’s education failures aren’t limited to higher education. There’s a reason fewer of our high school graduates to to college.

Indiana spends less per student on K-12 education than we did in 2010. One result is the average college graduate working in one of Indiana’s public schools is paid less than they were in 2004. On top of that, Indiana’s proposed high school curriculum will make it among the weakest in the nation…Either Indiana gets a lot more kids to finish college each year, or it gets used to slow growth, declining relative incomes, fewer businesses, wage declines and economic stagnation.

If Indiana’s goal is to be worse than Mississippi, then we’re doing great. Not only are we spending less on education at all levels, we are siphoning off what we do spend on educational vouchers that have done nothing to improve educational outcomes, but have deprived the public school system of critically-needed resources in order to support religious schools and enrich upper-middle-class families.

Early voting in Indiana begins on October 8th. By November 5th, Hoosiers will have made a choice between Jennifer McCormick, a gubernatorial candidate who understands the importance of education to economic development and overall quality of life, and Mike Braun, a candidate who wants to destroy public education by using our tax dollars to fund a “universal voucher” program.

McCormick has consistently done her homework. Braun clearly has not.

We will either elect someone who can begin to reverse Indiana’s steady decline, or we can continue to vie with Mississippi for the title of America’s most failed state.

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Why Democracy Is At Risk

The punditry keeps telling us that democracy is at risk. There’s a reason why that is.

Yes, Donald J. Trump (aka “the former guy”) poses an existential risk to American democracy. But let’s be honest– crazy Donald and Project 2025 are only threats because of the actual, underlying reason for the erosion of our democratic processes: the systemic distortions that continue to promote minority rule.

I have used this platform to pontificate about several of those distortions, from the Electoral College (hugely undemocratic) to the current form of the filibuster (significantly undemocratic), but especially (and yes, repeatedly) gerrymandering.

In one of Heather Cox Richardson’s recent Letters from an American, she explained more eloquently than I have the degree to which partisan redistricting–aka gerrymandering–mutes the voice of the electorate. As a result, I’m quoting her explanation at length.

The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this election is stark, and it reflects a systemic problem that has been growing in the U.S. since the 1980s.

Democracy depends on at least two healthy political parties that can compete for voters on a level playing field. Although the men who wrote the Constitution hated the idea of political parties, they quickly figured out that parties tie voters to the mechanics of Congress and the presidency.

And they do far more than that. Before political thinkers legitimized the idea of political opposition to the king, disagreeing with the person in charge usually led to execution or banishment for treason. Parties allowed for the idea of loyal and legitimate opposition, which in turn allowed for the peaceful transition of power. That peaceful exchange enabled the people to choose their leaders and leaders to relinquish power safely. Parties also create a system for criticizing people in power, which helps to weed out corrupt or unfit leaders.

But those benefits of a party system depend on a level political playing field for everyone, so that a party must constantly compete for voters by testing which policies are most popular and getting rid of the corrupt or unstable leaders voters would reject.

In the 1980s, radical Republican leaders set out to dismantle the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. But that system was popular, and to overcome the majority who favored it, they began to tip the political playing field in their direction…. By the 1990s, extremists in the party were taking power by purging traditional Republicans from it.

And yet, voters still elected Democrats, and after they put President Barack Obama into the White House in 2008, the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take over state legislatures so Republicans would control the new district maps drawn after the 2010 census, especially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It worked, and Republican legislatures in those states and elsewhere carved up state maps into dramatically gerrymandered districts.

In those districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

At the same time, the skewed playing field meant that candidates who were corrupt or bonkers did not get removed from the political mix after opponents pounced on their misdeeds and misstatements, as they would have been in a healthy system.

There is much more, and I encourage you to click through and read Richardson’s letter in its entirety–or, for that matter, if you are not now a subscriber, to become one. As a historian, she provides an illuminating historical context to the problems we face.

One of those problems is that, in a democracy, many voters–perhaps most—fail to recognize the immense importance of the systems within which We the People operate. Only when those systems operate to facilitate fair play and to provide a level playing field are the people we elect incentivized to heed the will of their constituents.

Richardson says there are two possible outcomes to today’s corrupted system: the election of Republicans who will follow the Project 2025 playbook, or a voters’ revolt sufficient to dislodge its beneficiaries and prompt reform of the cult that has replaced the GOP.

In November, we’ll know which of those outcomes we’ve chosen.

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That GOP Retreat From Reality

Watching the Republican Party morph into a cult has been extremely demoralizing–especially to the millions of sane Americans who once called that party home. I have detailed many aspects of the spiraling lunacy–the denial of climate change, the efforts of Christian Nationalists to neuter the First Amendment, the failure to admit that Donald Trump is mentally-ill and getting worse–basically, the Republican insistence on “facts” that are demonstrably untrue.

A recent editorial by Thomas Edsall in The New York Times explores yet another aspect of the GOP’s increasing retreat from reality: science denial.

In “The Polarization and Politicization of Trust in Scientists,” a paper presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, James Druckman and Jonathan Schulman of the University of Rochester and the University of Pennsylvania wrote:

Consider in 2000, 46 percent of Democrats and, almost equivalently, 47 percent of Republicans expressed a great deal of confidence in scientists. In 2022, these respective percentages were 53 percent and 28 percent. In 20 years, a partisan chasm in trust (a 25-percentage-point gap) emerged.

Edsall quoted Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, who warns that distrust of science is “arguably the greatest hindrance to societal action to stem numerous threats to the lives of Americans and people worldwide.” As he pointed out, Americans died because they had been led to believe that mRNA vaccines were more dangerous than a bout of Covid.

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Dallek argued, turbocharged anti-science conspiracy theories and attitudes on the American right, vaulting them to an even more influential place in American politics. Bogus notions — vaccines may cause autism, hydroxychloroquine may cure Covid, climate change isn’t real — have become linchpins of MAGA-era conservatism.

Edsall argues that the roots of Republican science denial go back at least 50 years, to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and passage of the  Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

These pillars of the regulatory state were and still are deeply dependent on scientific research to set rules and guidelines. All would soon be seen as adversaries of the sections of the business community that are closely allied with the Republican Party, although each of these agencies and laws was backed by a Republican president, Richard Nixon.

These regulatory efforts made science a part of political debates, since federal agencies like the E.P.A. and OSHA “are considered adversarial to corporate interests. Regulatory science directly connects to policy management and, therefore, has become entangled in policy debates that are unavoidably ideological.”

Edsall quoted an academic article that found antipathy to science taking hold during the Reagan administration, “largely in response to scientific evidence of environmental crises that invited governmental response. Thus, science — particularly environmental and public health science — became the target of conservative anti-regulatory attitudes.”

Republican distrust of science became far more prevalent when an ascendant religious right began its takeover of the GOP. Religious fundamentalists supported creationism over evolution, and religious and political skepticism of science became “mutually constitutive and self-reinforcing.”

Meanwhile, individuals who are comfortable with secularism, and thus secular science, concentrate in the Democratic Party. The process of party sorting along religious lines has helped turn an ideological divide over science into a partisan one.

These days, when political tribalism shapes identity, people are more and more likely to accept scientific findings only when those findings align with their political beliefs. Edsall noted a recent survey that asked, “How much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?” Strong Democrats saw severe risk potential; strong Republicans close to none. As another scholarly paper has put it,

The fundamental principle of science is that evidence — not authority, tradition, rhetorical eloquence or social prestige — should triumph. This commitment makes science a radical force in society: challenging and disrupting sacred myths, cherished beliefs and socially desirable narratives. Consequently, science exists in tension with other institutions, occasionally provoking hostility and censorship.

There is much more in Edsall’s essay, but the central message is clear–and very disturbing.

It is easy enough to make fun of the “anti-science” folks who–as one Facebook meme has it–use smartphones incorporating  scientific discoveries to post anti-science diatribes to a science-based internet. But the consequences of the GOP revolt against evidence and empiricism has spread to rejection of other facts incompatible with religious beliefs, and to growing contempt for medical and other scientific expertise. It powers not just climate denial, but the GOP’s growing antagonism to vaccination and other public health measures.

You’d think “pro-life” people would notice that antagonism to science is often incompatible with life. You’d be wrong.

There’s a reason Scientific American endorsed Harris–only the second time it has endorsed a Presidential candidate.

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More Hair-Raising Proposals From Project 2025

Yesterday, I focused on the theocratic elements of Project 2025. But those elements–horrific as they are–pale in comparison to several of the Project’s less-often-noted aspirations.

A cousin of mine participates in a study group that recently assembled a list of the proposals in Project 2025. He shared that document with me, and I am posting it in its entirety today. It displays a worldview that isn’t simply backward–it’s terrifying and dystopian. Anti-science. Anti-equality. Anti-American.

Allow me to share that (unedited) compendium of crazy with you–and remind you that this is the world we’ll get if the GOP prevails.

PROJECT 2025

•    100+ conservative think tanks involved

•    400+ contributors and writers

•    240 Trump former administrators among authors

•    31/38 chapters written by Trump administrators

•    920+ pages in length

•    Mentions “Trump” 320+ times

•    Trump 2023 — “This is great work, our roadmap”

•    Trump 2024 —  “I don’t know these folks”

•    Trump campaign manager calls it “a pain in the ass”

•    Trump 2024 – Keynotes a Heritage Foundation convention

FROM THE RIGHT

•    Spells out a bright American future

•    Rescues the nation from the grip of the Radical Left

•    A governing agenda, putting the right people in place

•    A definite plan to execute a conservative agenda on Day One lead by a strong executive

FROM THE LEFT

•    Authoritarianism, strips rights, destroys economy

•    Trump has selective amnesia about Project 2025.

•    Heritage President Kevin Roberts acknowledged that Trump’s claims of ignorance are a “politically  tactical decision”  — and then he was forced out of office. (April 2024)

Pillars of Project 2025:

•    Restore family as the centerpiece of American life and protect children.

•    Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

•    Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

•    Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

THE DEFENSE OF AMERICA

The plan “…unshackles America’s military from the long-term rot of misspent budgets, politically driven policies, and a lack of focus on the military threat posed by China.” Restore warfighting as the military’s sole mission

•    End the Left’s social experimentation in the military

•    Halt the admission of transgender individuals into the military

•     Reduce the number of generals, increase Army by 50,000

•     Move US troops stationed overseas to US borders

•     Grow Navy from 292 to 355 ships

•     Purchase 60/80 more Air Force F-35A’s/year

•     Triple the number of US nuclear weapons worldwide

•     Build an American “Iron Dome”

•     Increase fighting responsibilities for all Allies

•     Continue to provide nuclear protection to Allies

•     Shift war-planning from reaction to one of strength in denial

•     Preposition resources to anticipate threats

•     Reconstitute NATO or withdraw from the NATO alliance

•     Allies must pay for all US weapons provided to them

•     Disavow NATO Article Five

•     All alliances will be bi-lateral

•     Withdraw from arms reduction treaties

Governance Principles

•    Replace 50K civil service “deep state” employees. Most civil service employees to answer to the Chief Executive

•    Eliminate or re-write the First Amendment

•    Change the oath of office from “…protect & defend the constitution”

•    The government should “…operate on Christian Principles

Trade/Foreign Assistance Principles

•    USAID to defund women’s rights foreign aid initiatives

•    Withdraw from all multi-lateral trade agreements

•    Withdraw financial aid from Ukraine

•    Institute 60% tariffs on Chinese goods

•    10% tariffs on all imports worldwide

Principles for Educating Our Kids

•     Eliminate the Department of Education

•     Eliminate Head Start, Title 1, & lunch programs

•     Eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion efforts

•     10 Commandments posted in all classrooms

•     Books pertaining to race/gender be removed

•     Schools requiring vaccinations lose federal funding

•     Vouchers for private/Christian schools to be the law

•     Public high schoolers take a military entrance exam

•     Eliminate federal funds for certain special needs

•     Arm classroom teachers

•     Defund NPR and PBS

Principles To Direct Entitlements & Protections

•    Words “abortion” & “reproductive health” cut from all federal regulations, policies, and any legislation

•    Reinstate student debt (6.8%)

•    Repeal the Affordable Care Act

•    Eliminate Medicaid

•    Privatize Medicare — Advantage the default choice

•    Raise retirement age

•    Eliminate drug price negotiations

•    Limit benefits for veteran disability payments

•    Eliminate/repurpose EPA, OSHA, EEOC, FDIC

•    Privatize TSA

•    Federal elections done in 1-day, on paper, no mail-in, with ID

Principles Dealing With “Minorities”

•    Immediate mass deportation of the undocumented

•    Construct internment camps

•    Limit total immigrants (20K)

•    Limit foreign college education applicants

•    Deport existing “dreamers” & end birth-right citizenship

•    Muslims, Haitians banned from the country

•    Ukrainian refugee status reviewed

•    Roll back gay rights/invalidate homosexual marriage

•    Outlaw transgender rights

•    Outlaw no-fault divorce

Principles Guiding Climate Decisions

•    The climate is not changing and not to be taught

•    Eliminate climate and environmental protections

•    Eliminate greenhouse gas regulation

•    Defund FEMA & EPA. Emergencies are a state responsibility.

•    Dismantle NOAA and Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, halt climate research.

•    End Global Change Research Act of 1990. \

•    Withdraw from the Paris Accords.

•    Stop EV research, regulation, and tax initiatives

If this doesn’t motivate you to vote–and vote BLUE–I don’t know what will.

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The Theocracy At The Center of Project 2025

A writer for The Guardian recently read the entire 900+/- pages of Project 2025, rather than relying on what she called “snippets.” What she found was even more appalling than the various excerpts most of us have seen.

Basically, the Project lays out a road to theocracy.

The document repeatedly characterizes America as a country poisoned by “wokeness.” And it proposes, as an antidote to “wokeness,” remaking the government in accord with a fundamentalist version of Christianity.

Across multiple agencies, it would make access to abortion infinitely more difficult. It would change the name of the federal health and human services department to the “Department of Life”. It would criminalize pornography. There would be mass deportations and curtailments of legal immigration programs, including Daca. It would dismantle the Department of Education.

Throughout the manifesto, authors also recommend ways to increase funding for religious organizations by giving them more access to government programs – largely through increased use of school vouchers that could go to religious schools or by modifying programs like Small Business Administration loans to make religious groups eligible for funding.

In some parts, the project takes a more explicit Christian worldview. In the chapter about the Department of Labor, the manifesto suggests a communal day of rest for society because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest”. One way to enforce this idea would be for Congress to require paid time-and-a-half for anyone who works on Sundays, which the project calls the default day of Sabbath “except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time”.

In nearly all chapters, there is a mention of driving out any forces that seek to increase diversity in the federal government. And whenever LGBTQ+ rights are mentioned, it is to say there should be fewer of them.

Heritage might just as well have named Project 2025 “Project Christian Nationalism.” The document doesn’t stop with the enumeration of goals, either–it outlines the practical steps that would enable a Trump Administration to reach those goals.

Achieving the goal of “Christianizing” America would be the task of loyalists who would replace civil servants–as has been reported, Project 2025 advocates reclassifying thousands of federal jobs as “political” rather than non-partisan, in order to replace the civil servants who are currently doing those jobs with Trump loyalists.

The effort would also require taking control of the census.

The census helps decide how federal resources should be allocated to communities, but, for our purposes here, it’s most relevant that census data is used to decide how to divvy up seats in the US House and make electoral maps during decennial redistricting done by states. The census can alter the balance of power in statehouses and in Congress.

Given its influence, the project suggests an incoming conservative president needs to install more political appointees to the census bureau and ensure ideologically aligned career employees are “immediately put in place to execute a conservative agenda”. The next census isn’t until 2030, but plans for it are already under way.

That conservative agenda includes adding a citizenship question, something Trump tried to do for the 2020 census but was blocked by the US supreme court. The project says “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census.”

The project also suggests reviewing and possibly curtailing plans to broaden the race and ethnicity categories because “there are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”

There is much more, of course, but the quoted material is enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck, and probably the necks of most rational Americans.

Those of us tempted to dismiss Project 2025 as a theocratic fever dream unlikely to be realized even in a Trump administration need to understand that the people committed to imposing their beliefs on the rest of us are nothing if not patient. They worked for fifty years to overturn Roe v. Wade. If Trump wins, their wait will be shorter–as the article notes, to the (very limited) extent that Trump has enumerated any policies (or would recognize one if he encountered it), they’ve aligned with those in Project 2025. Even if he loses narrowly, they will be encouraged to dig in.

Even a massive loss–a Blue Wave–will only slow them down. They will bide their time and continue trying to “return” the country to a place that existed only in their twisted imaginations. Americans who want to protect our constitutional system will need to stay perpetually alert.

As the saying goes, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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