Public Policy and Governance – Page 75

Who Do We Subsidize?

There was a very interesting–and very odd– article in Governing recently, purportedly about means testing.The introductory argument was that our various policies about who we subsidize have resulted in rewarding those who clearly don’t need the particular benefit involved, while failing to help those who definitely do need help.

The lede gives you a hint of the author’s thesis:

When I turned 65, I instantly became eligible to ride on any D.C. Metro train for half-price. Perhaps I ought to have been grateful for this windfall, but in fact I found it annoying. I’m not rich by any means, but I can afford to pay full fare for a subway ride. I didn’t appreciate the idea of charging the taxpayers (myself among them) to give me and countless others a benefit we didn’t need. Warren Buffett can ride on the Metro for half-price if he comes to visit Washington. Stupid is the only word for it.

It isn’t simply kindness to old folks that has pissed him off; he also attacks the exemption for blind people on America’s tax returns. After all, he says, some blind people are wealthy.

It evidently hasn’t occurred to the author that these accommodations may have been intended as a way to show social respect for the elderly, or as a minor compensation for the lack of sight–that they weren’t measures intended to be part of America’s (admittedly inadequate, crazy-quilt) social safety net.

Aside from that somewhat odd introduction, the article didn’t really focus on problems with means testing, which is defined as a determination of eligibility for government assistance based upon the means (income) of the potential recipient. Instead, the article (quite properly) criticizes the way in which many fines are assessed.

A low-income single mother gets stopped for a minor traffic violation, perhaps a broken headlight or an illegal left turn. The fine is a couple of hundred dollars, which is more than she can afford. She is summoned to a court date that she can’t keep because she has to work or care for her children. A few missed court appearances, and she can be sent to jail and/or have her driver’s license suspended, possibly costing her the job she holds and needs to have.

It doesn’t seem fair, does it? A middle-class violator can walk into court, pay the fine and then walk out again. At first glance, it might seem equitable to charge everyone the same $490 for driving alone in a carpool lane (which is what California does). But it isn’t equitable.

The author proposes that, in order to be equitable, fines of this sort should be levied in an amount proportional to what the offender earns in a single day of work. Evidently, other countries do this, and the bulk of the article is an argument for following their example.

It’s a reasonable argument–but it really has nothing to do with means testing or the provision of subsidies–at least, not in the way we usually use those terms.

And that’s too bad, because I’m convinced that policymakers do need to revisit our approach to America’s tattered safety net and the whole concept of means testing, which rests on some deep-seated convictions about “deservingness.” (I once traced that obsession back to England’s 15th Century poor laws, which prohibited giving alms to “sturdy beggars.” The notion that some poor folks are deserving and others are not also has roots in a bastardized Calvinism, an analysis I will spare you…)

This approach to deservingness ignores all manner of structural/systemic inequity. It is also both massively expensive to operationalize and very frequently unfair in application. But aside from all the practical and equitable problems, America’s current approach to social welfare operates to strengthen popular divisions and harmful stereotypes.

Think about it.

I haven’t heard complaints from financially-comfortable Americans that “those people” are getting Social Security. Or that “those people” are driving on roads that I paid for with my tax dollars. I seriously doubt that any of the right-wingers braying about how national health insurance would be “socialism” are refusing to accept their Medicare. As other Western democracies have learned, a universal social benefit is not only less expensive to administer, it is far less socially divisive.

Bottom line: social safety net policy considerations shouldn’t be limited to a single-minded focus on “means,” just as there should be considerations other than uniformity of punishment when we assess fines.

And not so incidentally– policy debates would be dramaticallyimproved by a more judicious attention to the use of language…

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Progress!

In the wake of the most recent, terrifying climate report, I think it’s important to look at the positive side of the policy ledger.

Although there is plenty of data on the “dark side” (what I sometimes think of as the OMG side), there is also a lot of evidence of progress. (At least what I consider progress; the “take me back to the 1950s” folks will undoubtedly disagree.)

At the beginning of this year, The Guardian ran a story about progress against climate change during the preceding year. Granted, in 2021 we saw a number of climate disasters and what the article called “a grim prognosis from the world’s top experts.” Granted, too, some of the harm is probably irreversible. But as the article documented, a movement to fight climate change is gaining momentum.

As the UN secretary general declared in August, the urgent need to curb carbon emissions marks a “death knell” for the fossil fuel industry.

For decades, Americans were told that standing up to powerful oil and gas companies wasn’t possible. But the reality is that everyday people are making a difference in the fight to cut emissions. These grassroots victories also show that the people who have been made most vulnerable by fossil fuel extraction, including Black and brown communities, already have solutions on hand.

What were some of those victories?

After a nine-year, highly-contentious organizing battle, students with Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard succeeded in pushing the university to divest all of its $42bn endowment – the largest in the world – from fossil fuel-related companies.

That victory wasn’t limited to Harvard. Both Boston University and Wellesley University also divested from fossil fuels in 2021. With respect to Wellesley, divestment was the product of “a decade of student activism from campus groups called Renew Wellesley and Fossil Free Wellesley.” The victory also wasn’t limited to universities: Boston’s mayor signed an ordinance in late November that will require phasing out the city’s investments in fossil fuel, tobacco, and prison industries by 2025.

It’s worth noting that all of these decisions were the result of activism by the young people who are often inaccurately excoriated for their lack of civic engagement.

The Guardian also enumerated several community victories.

In Memphis, Tennessee, a majority-Black neighborhood was able to stop construction of a 49-mile underground pipeline that was slated for approval in mid-2021.

In the north-east, the Delaware River Basin Commission secured a moratorium on new drilling permits. The historic fracking ban covers some 14,000 square miles of the river’s basin.

The board of supervisors for Los Angeles county voted–unanimously– to scrap new and existing oil and gas drilling projects.

The new rule is slated to impact Inglewood Oil Field, the largest urban oil field in the country, which is surrounded by many majority-Black neighborhoods. In April, a pipeline in the oil field spilled 1,600 gallons of oil just a few hundred feet from the nearest playground.

It is heartening to see these victories by minority neighborhoods and young activists, but it is even more significant to consider what the Guardian calls “shareholder revolts.” A primary example occurred when hedge fund activists won election to three of the 12 voting seats on Exxon’s board

The activist hedge fund Engine No 1 staged an upset victory in electing three new directors to Exxon’s board after disgruntled investors hoped to push the oil giant toward a greener future.

Meanwhile, Chevron faced opposition from the Dutch activist campaign group Follow This, which led a shareholder revolt in voting to force the company to implement tougher emissions targets.

Why it matters: Mark van Baal, who founded Follow This, said the shareholder rebellions mark a “paradigm shift” for investors and a “victory in the fight against climate change”.

There were other important victories:Indigenous groups negotiated the return of stolen lands in Maine and Minnesota to halt destruction to the environment; a Dutch court ruled that Shell has to reduce its emissions by nearly half within this decade; and 16 of those young people who are routinely dismissed were victorious plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging that Montana contributed to the climate crisis and violated their constitutional rights. The judgment requires the state to implement a plan to reduce emissions.

Addressing climate change–and many of the other challenges we face– requires that we change the culture–and culture change is a slow and inevitably incremental process. The term “culture wars” is apt–those who recognize the imperatives of our modern, globalized world are facing the hysterical resistance of people who want to go “back,” or at the very least, cling to the cultural status quo. As a friend once put it, changing the culture is like turning a tanker mid-ocean–neither quick nor nimble.

It’s easy to focus on the barriers to progress, but it’s important to recognize the progress, too.

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The Problem With A Two-Party System

What do you do in a 2-party system when one party goes off the rails?

Americans tend to view European multi-party systems with incomprehension, if not disdain; how do the representatives of different parties form coalitions to support particular policies? Isn’t the electoral competition of multiple parties an invitation to chaos? We Americans prefer our Manichean dualism, the “either/or” of “right or wrong” (or actually, the tribalism of “us versus them.”)

It’s time to recognize that two-party systems have considerable downsides, too.

In reality, our two major parties have always been collections of not-necessarily-consistent factions. They haven’t always been really big tents, but each party has historically encompassed a variety of philosophies. When I was much younger, the complaint was that the tents were too commodious–that having to choose between Republican and Democrat didn’t really provide the voter with a way to declare a clear policy preference, the way a Brit voter for the Green Party could, for example.

As the GOP has become far, far more monolithic, we can see the downside of that once-desired clarity. For one thing, there’s currently no political home for sane, principled conservatives, many of whom are appalled by what has become of a once-traditional party. (Remember when many Republicans were “fiscal conservatives and social liberals”?)

To the extent that some of those homeless conservatives have reluctantly become Democrats, the Democratic Party faces a huge challenge.

Democrats have always had a bigger tent than Republicans, and have accordingly had trouble enforcing anything that looks like party discipline. (What was that old saying? I don’t belong to an organized political party–I’m a Democrat.) With the addition of disaffected former Republicans, Democratic strategists find themselves trying to herd cats–trying to achieve something approaching consensus among legislators and voters who come from very different places on the political spectrum.

It’s one thing to note that the devolution of the GOP into a conspiracist cult is a huge headache for the Democrats. A much bigger worry is what that devolution means for American democracy. As Jennifer Rubin has written,

A new survey from Bright Line Watch, an organization that monitors democratic practices, provides some interesting insights but little solace about Republicans’ commitment to democracy. They might say they support democratic principles (e.g., “All adult citizens enjoy the same legal and political rights”), but they fail to embrace the most fundamental democratic principle: acceptance of election results and the peaceful transfer of power.

The most basic disconnect from reality (and democratic values) remains the 2020 presidential winner. The survey reports, “94% of Democrats say [President] Biden is the rightful winner compared to just 26% of Republicans — a split that has also remained remarkably stable since Biden took office.” As a result, only 42 percent of Republicans have confidence in the outcome of elections compared to 80 percent of Democrats. That raises a question that was so prominent throughout the Senate runoffs in Georgia: Why vote if you think the whole thing is rigged?

Rubin notes that political scientists “are especially alarmed” by the number of GOP candidates who do not accept the results of the 2020 election–not just those running for Congress, but at least 10 GOP candidates for secretary of state in five battleground states. Putting partisans who endorse Trump’s “Big Lie” in charge of administering elections poses a huge threat to election integrity from within.

The transformation of one major party into an illiberal, authoritarian movement is the greatest threat to democracy we face. It manifests itself in the “anti-fraud” measures (when there is no fraud) to restrict access to the ballot and to put partisans in charge of election administration; in the GOP’s decision to rally around House members who spout virulent racism and depict violence against Democrats; and in the real potential that the John Eastman memo becomes the 2024 post-election game plan for Republicans.

Unless and until all 50 Democratic senators realize that “bipartisanship” on voting and democracy reforms is impossible with a party infected with anti-democratic impulses, they will fail to install the guardrails needed to protect the country from these authoritarian forces.

In multi-party systems, members of a Green Party can find common ground with legislators from a Labor Party or a Conservative party on a number of issues. In today’s U.S., however,”bipartisanship” requires lawmakers who are trying to enact reasonable policies to work with people who are steeped in racist conspiracy theories and are clearly untethered to reality.

Research confirms that there are many more sane voters than the Trumpers who control today’s GOP, but they need to vote and those votes need to be accurately counted. When the Whigs disappeared, they hadn’t gerrymandered themselves into positions of power disproportionate to their numbers. Today’s Republicans have.

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Note: like most of you, I am watching–with fear and disbelief–the Russian assault on Ukraine. I have no foreign policy expertise, and there are numerous sources of genuinely informed news available, so I don’t intend (at this point, at least) to post about it. That said, I will make two observations: first, President Biden has spent much of his career immersed in foreign policy, and I have confidence in his leadership at this very perilous moment; second, the Trump party’s reflexive support for Putin isn’t simply on the wrong side of history, it is reminiscent of the Americans who sided with Hitler and the Nazis at the outset of WWII.

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Coerced Abortion

The pious frauds in the Indiana legislature have once again displayed their utter lack of self-awareness or integrity.

According to the Indianapolis Star, the World’s Worst Legislature–or at least the Senate portion of that embarrassing body–has passed a measure that will criminalize “coerced abortion.”

The Indiana Senate approved new abortion regulations on Tuesday by a 38-10 vote in an attempt to limit “coerced” abortions.

Supporters say it’s a necessary layer of protection to prevent Hoosier women from being forced into an unwanted abortion and to catch human traffickers, while opponents say the requirements just further stigmatize abortions without actually helping women.

Now, I will grant you that the Indiana legislature is not known for exercises in logic or for considering that pesky thing called “evidence,” but if they were so inclined, they would discover that such coercion is far less likely to be exercised by a parent or male partner than by the reality of poverty.

Data compiled by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops–a very pro-life organization–is unequivocal:

Surveys indicate that low-income women are more against abortion than other women. Yet economic realities pressure many to act against their convictions. This has been a disturbing reality for a long time, and is getting worse.

In a 2005 study, 73% of women undergoing an abortion said not being able to afford a baby now was a reason for the abortion. That number rose to 81% for women below the federal poverty line. And while the abortion rate for American women declined by 8% between 2000 and 2008, among poor American women it increased by 18%.

It occurred to me that Catholic social teachings about poverty might have incentivized the bishops to cherry-pick the data. But no–research conducted by the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute has come to the same conclusion, as has a study published in 2017 by the American Journal of Public Health.

Studies have determined that most women having abortions– fifty-nine percent of them in 2014 –had had at least one previous birth. But three-fourths of them were low income—49% living at less than the federal poverty level, and 26% living at 100–199% of the poverty level. Many also lacked health insurance, and in the U.S., even an uncomplicated childbirth is very expensive.

Bottom line, readily available data confirms that not being able to afford a child–or another child–is what impels (coerces) a large number of women to abort. So clearly, it’s the lawmakers who consistently vote for public policies that operate to keep women impoverished who are really guilty of “coercing” women to terminate their pregnancies.

The piety police in our legislature have chosen to ignore such “inconvenient” data. To the contrary; the GOP super-majority has doggedly pursued policies intended to keep all Hoosiers–especially female Hoosiers–poor. I’ve written previously about the ALICE reports issued by the Indiana United Ways. Those meticulous reports should embarrass lawmakers sufficiently to motivate change. But this is Indiana, so… no.

The same lawmakers who purport to be concerned about “coercion” of abortion have steadfastly refused to raise Indiana’s minimum wage, which has remained at 7.25/hour since 2008, despite copious evidence that full-time minimum wage work doesn’t even rise to the level of subsistence–and despite data from places that have raised the wage that convincingly rebuts the old argument that a higher minimum wage translates into fewer jobs.

Worse still, In Indiana, lots of folks don’t even get that 7.25 an hour–they’re exempt from the requirement. Employees who are exempt from this minimum wage include:

Tipped employees must be paid a cash minimum of $2.13 per hour, with a $5.12 tip credit to earn $7.25 an hour (including tips).

A special training minimum wage of $4.25 per hour can be paid to workers under 20 years of age for the first 90 days of employment.

Full-time high school and college students can be paid 85 percent of Indiana minimum wage ($6.16) if they are participating in a work-study program or working 20 or fewer hours per week.

And don’t even whisper about providing expanded or universal health care…why, in Indiana, that’s commie talk.

Genuinely “pro-life” lawmakers would support policies making it easier for low-income pregnant women to afford birthing and feeding the child they’re carrying. But that might cost money better spent on tax cuts and/or the priorities of their donors–so these phonies opt to vote for meaningless performative policies.

If this piece of garbage legislation becomes law, the “coercers” who should be criminally charged are the members of Indiana’s GOP super-majority. But thanks to gerrymandering, most of them won’t even lose their seats…

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An Explanation That (Unfortunately)Makes Sense

As the Republican Party has morphed from a traditional political party into a White Christian Nationalist cult, pundits and academics have spent a lot of time studying the “base”–the GOP voters who have embraced the radicalization–and have developed a variety of theories about why so many “average Americans” have succumbed to its appeal. (Most of the research projects have come to the same conclusion I have: it’s pretty much all grounded in racism.)

Much less time and attention has been directed toward analyses of the conservative intellectuals whose theories of society were protective of tradition and who proposed policies justified by those theories. A few of them–especially those who were also political strategists–have been horrified by what the GOP has become, and departed, but most have embraced the mob dynamic.

The question is, why? Surely they are bright enough to see how destructive–even nihilistic– today’s GOP has become.

A recent essay by Damon Linker in The Week explored that phenomenon.Linker was once a part of that conservative intelligencia, working for four years at First Things.

Much has been written about the transformation of the GOP over the past several years from the party of Ronald Reagan to the party of Donald Trump and his populist imitators. But at the same time a parallel change has been taking place among conservative intellectuals.

This evolution of ideas and temperament has been catalyzed by the political shift to Trumpian politics, but it isn’t reducible to that change. Ideas, like psychological dispositions, shift according to their own logic. What we have been witnessing among growing numbers of conservative thinkers is a process of self-radicalization driven by the interaction of political events with prior ideological assumptions and moods.

Linker says that what he terms “self-radicalization” has been triggered by hope.

As he explains, during the George W. Bush Presidency, when the intellectuals within the First Things community met to discuss the state of the country and the world, those meetings regularly “devolved into a cry of cultural despair, even though a friend and ally was then ensconced in the White House.”

That’s because the people in the room were profoundly alienated from the moral, cultural, and spiritual drift of contemporary American life, and they didn’t expect that to change. They supported the Bush administration and were willing to provide a public defense of its policy agenda. But in private they doubted any of it would fundamentally change the most troubling trends unfolding around them. Abortion would remain legal. Homosexuality would keep being normalized and even celebrated. Pornography would continue to permeate the culture. Euthanasia would become more widely accepted. Secularism would persist in its march through the country and its institutions.

According to Linker, despair has generally been the default disposition of these opponents of cultural, moral, and political change. Despite the arguments they marshaled against such changes, most (at least according to Linker) doubted they would be able to stem the tide. They fully expected to lose the fight for the culture.

By the time Trump burst on the scene in the summer of 2015, the traditionalist right had nearly given in to outright despair, even in public, with many moving into a purely defensive position. No longer hoping to reverse the direction of the culture, they now hoped they might merely receive modest federal protection from persecution at the hands of emboldened secular liberals.

Their embrace of someone like Trump might seem strange for defenders of “moral purity,” but Linker explains. They might not win the culture war, but in Trump, they saw someone who could tear down “the administrative state” and destroy government’s power to enforce liberal rules and regulations. He could rally popular opposition to “the reigning consensus of bending history toward justice defined in liberal-progressive terms.”

Trump or a populist successor “could at long last give conservatives their chance — not by slowing an inevitable march to the secular left but by razing the liberal edifice altogether, making it possible to found society anew on properly conservative foundations.”

In other words, if you can’t change it, destroy it.

Linker’s final paragraphs are chilling.

What comes next for these conservative intellectuals? Are they prepared to offer unconditional support for another Trump run for the White House, despite his treacherous words and deeds during the two months following the 2020 election? Are there any lies from the candidate or potentially reinstated president that would prove to be deal-breakers? Any acts or policies that would be considered a bridge too far? Or would they be willing to countenance just about anything in return for a presidential promise to crush the infamous enemy, the liberal-progressive regime that currently governs America?

We will learn the answers to these ominous questions soon enough.

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