Public Policy and Governance – Page 96

Preparing For Climate Change

A week or so ago, I suggested that it was time–past time, actually–to rethink federalism. Not to dispense with it, but to reconsider which governance tasks should be left to state and local governments and which must be tackled at the federal (or even global) level.

The problem with nationalizing too many issues is that sending authority to Washington effectively demoralizes local activists working on those issues. If the only people who have authority to do X or Y are far removed, the result is likely to be those feelings of powerlessness I’ve been writing about.

The problems with keeping too much local control over issues more properly addressed at the federal level include lack of impact and incentives for all sorts of mischief–see vote suppression..

There are also an increasing number of issues where we need all hands on deck. When it comes to overwhelming problems like climate change, even enlightened national/global efforts will require equally enlightened local measures. And individuals really can affect local decision-making.

A recent report from Inverse highlighted the resilience efforts of five cities, providing an “instruction manual” of sorts–a delineation of local measures that can make a positive difference. As the article noted, despite the grim evidence of impending climate catastrophe,

there are a few cities whose leaders have taken proactive measures to adapt their cities and protect their residents from the climate crisis. These cities serve as models for how we can modify and strengthen our built environments, reduce human suffering, and protect urban centers from the effects of a warming planet.

Fukuoka, Japan has been adding green spaces, including parks, community gardens and green roofs. It decides where to site those spaces based on surveys of windflow through the city and other measurements to determine the most effective places to plant trees and maintain parks. These green spaces reduce extreme heat and help absorb water runoff during periods of intense rainfall.

Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, is growing plants along railways to absorb flooding and reduce heat, and developing ‘water squares’ that can absorb rainfall and ease the stress on sewage systems.

Ahmedabad, India (a city of 7.2 million that I’d never heard of) was included for its “cool roofs” initiative.

This entails using eco-friendly building materials — such as coconut husk and paper waste — and cheap lime-white paint to deflect sunlight away from buildings. This keeps residents cool. According to Madan, cool roofs reduce indoor temperatures lower by 3.6 – 9° F.

Copenhagen, Denmark has pledged to become the first city to go fully carbon neutral by 2025. It has made substantial progress toward that goal: 49 percent of all trips in the city are by bike, and 98 percent of the city’s heating comes from waste heat from electricity production. Seawater cooling measures have removed an estimated 80,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the city’s atmosphere.

Here in the United States, Chicago, believe it or not, was one of the five cities cited in the report. Chicago made the list because is was an early adopter of green stormwater infrastructure, and a developer of urban vertical farms.

In 2014, under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the city developed a $50-million, five-year green stormwater infrastructure plan with the aim of reducing basement flooding and water pollution and improving environmental quality and climate resilience.

Some of the key features of Chicago’s plan included capturing, storing, and filtering water through green techniques rather than channeling it into storm drains; investing in permeable, or more water-absorbent, pavement to reduce flooding; compiling rainfall frequency data to better predict flooding; and offering resources on green design to maintain water runoff and reduce flooding through rain gardens and natural landscaping.

The city also plays host to one of the world’s largest urban vertical farms, which grows vegetables in a 90,000-square-foot facility. Chicago made this urban vertical farm possible by changing its zoning laws.

The linked article not only highlights these cities, but includes suggestions for how other urban centers might emulate them.

We are finally, if belatedly, recognizing the threat posed by climate change, and large numbers of citizens–especially but not exclusively young ones–are coming together to combat it. Working at the local level on measures targeted to the specific threats faced by those localities can not only help ameliorate the effects of an over-heating world, it can give citizens an opportunity to work together to effect important changes.

Ultimately, the ability to actually do something–something that clearly matters– to work with our neighbors to ameliorate a threat we all face (and that, increasingly, we all recognize) can help us overcome the extreme polarization that has paralyzed our government.

After all, there’s nothing like a common enemy to bring people together.

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For Goodness Sake, Indiana!

Remember that much-hyped slogan, developed by (undoubtedly overpaid) consultants–the one that was going to bring gobs of tourists to our state? “Honest to goodness, Indiana!” didn’t do much for me, and as best I can tell, it didn’t prompt many people to think “well, that’s a state I simply have to visit!”

I wonder if we’d do better with a teaser like, “come see one of the most gerrymandered states in the whole of the USA!”

The results of the 2020 census have been issued and the states–including Indiana–are in the midst of the redistricting that takes place every ten years. In Indiana, a coalition of citizens headed by the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and other nonpartisan, “good government” organizations has been strenuously lobbying for fair maps for at least the last five years; clearly, as the IBJ recently reported, the hundreds of Hoosiers who’ve called and written their legislators and descended on the Statehouse could have saved themselves the trouble.

Republicans will keep greater control of Indiana’s Legislature than merited by the number of votes they receive, according to a political analyst who on Thursday called the state’s proposed new election districts among the most skewed in the country.

The analysis came as a legislative committee held a second day of public hearings on the Republican-drawn maps, with several people criticizing the fact that the new election district maps were released less than 48 hours earlier.

The redistricting plan review conducted for the left-leaning political group Women4Change found Republicans would likely win 69 of the 100 Indiana House seats while typically receiving 56% of the vote. Republicans now hold a 71-29 majority in the Indiana House.

Christopher Warshaw, a political scientist at George Washington University who analyzes election data, said the proposed maps that will be used for the next 10 years boost Republicans by creating overwhelmingly Democratic districts to limit the impact of those voters.

“I think that while geography or other factors could explain part of these biases, these are so extreme that really nothing but politically intentional gerrymander could really explain the extent of the bias in these maps,” Warshaw said.

Calling Women4Change “left-leaning” is only possible in a state where opposing race and sex discrimination and favoring civic education and “one person, one vote” are considered extremely liberal positions. The organization includes a number of prominent Republicans (granted, of the sane variety) and bends over backward to be nonpartisan. But I digress.

A friend who shall remain nameless had a meeting a couple of months ago with the current Speaker of the House, and raised the issue of maps. Let’s just say the response was not along the lines of “oh, yeah, we’re working hard to make them fair…”

The only hopeful data I’ve come across was an observation from a friend who is a political science professor. He’d looked at the census numbers, and noted that this particular round of partisan redistricting was considerably more difficult than in the past, because rural areas of the state are less populated than they previously were. Those areas are continuing to empty out. Indiana Republicans are dependent upon those thinly populated parts of the state, so unless there is a significant change in Hoosiers’ population trends, the GOP’s carefully constructed advantage will disappear–probably not in 2022 or even 2024, but soon thereafter.

I sure hope his reading of the population tea leaves is correct….

Meanwhile, the voices in the heads of the far right Trumpers continue to harp on “voter fraud” and the Big Lie. Since there is exactly zero evidence supporting these attacks on the legitimacy of those who won election, I was initially puzzled. On what, exactly, do they base these hysterical, manufactured claims?

Then I figured it out. As Jamelle Bouie noted in the New York Times,

“Voter fraud” is not a factual claim subject to testing and objective analysis as much as it’s a statement of ideology, a belief about the way the world works. In practice, to accuse Democrats of voter fraud is to say that Democratic voters are not legitimate political actors, that their votes do not count the same as those of “the people” (that is, the Republican electorate) and that Democratic officials, elected with those illegitimate votes, have no rightful claim to power.

Yep. Members of the GOP’s super-majority in our legislature firmly believe that “those people”–city dwellers, Democrats, people of color–aren’t really entitled to cast ballots that count the same as the ballots cast by “real” Americans…so the gerrymandering that disenfranchises them is perfectly appropriate.

For goodness sake, Indiana!

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We’re Number Eleven…

The problem with living at a time when there are so many problems–and so many truly major ones, at that–is that our focus gets splintered. Climate change. Vote suppression. White Supremicists. Rightwing domestic terrorism. Guns. Government gridlock. The pandemic. Continual wars and the growth of the military-industrial complex …The list is endless.

But a recent report in the Washington Post reminded me of one of our most long-term and shameful problems–America’s perverse refusal to follow the lead of other wealthy (and plenty of non-wealthy) countries and provide universal access to health care. The negative consequences of our refusal to allow anyone to opt in to Medicare (Medicare for those who want it), or just to broaden the scope of the Affordable Care Act, have receded from prominence.

We may be distracted by other policy failures, but the problem remains–and it is as acute as ever, if not more so.

Researchers at the Commonwealth Fund compared the health-care systems of 11 high-income countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The United States has the worst health-care system overall among 11 high-income countries, even though it spends the highest proportion of its gross domestic product on health care, according to research by the Commonwealth Fund.

“We’ve set up a system where we spend quite a bit of money on health care but we have significant financial barriers, which tend to dissuade people from getting care,” said Eric Schneider, the lead author behind the findings and senior vice president for policy and research at the Commonwealth Fund, which conducts independent research on health-care issues.

The researchers identified five metrics of a well-functioning health care system: access to care, the care process itself, administrative efficiency, equity and overall health-care outcomes.Norway, the Netherlands and Australia were judged to be the top-performing countries overall.

The high performers stand apart from the United States in providing universal coverage and removing cost barriers, investing in primary care systems to reduce inequities, minimizing administrative burdens, and investing in social services among children and working-age adults, the Commonwealth Fund found.

The latter is particularly important for easing the burdens on health systems created by older populations, according to Schneider. “These sort of basic supports throughout younger age groups reduce, we think, the chronic disease burden that’s higher in the U.S.,” he said.

Since I have a son who lives in Amsterdam, I was particularly interested in the description of the Netherland’s high-performing system. The researchers found that it was a “well-organized system of locally placed primary care doctors and nurses who provide care on a 24/7 basis”–a system that keeps minor problems from turning into major ones.

The U.S. doesn’t come close. (As a former graduate student, a hospital administrator, told me years ago, we don’t have a healthcare system in the U.S.; we have a healthcare Industry.)

The United States was rated last overall, researchers found, ranking “well below” the average of the other countries overall and “far below” Switzerland and Canada, the two countries ranked above it. In particular, the United States fell at the end of the pack on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity and health-care outcomes.

The article noted that the inequities in America’s healthcare, together with our inadequate primary care, put the country in a much weaker position when it came to confronting the pandemic. That fact–together with the GOP’s advocacy of vaccine denial–may account for the fact that the U.S. has the second-highest COVID death rate among the eleven countries in the study.

America’s healthcare industry is costly in both lives and dollars.

Spending on health care as a share of GDP had grown in all of the countries the Commonwealth Fund surveyed, even before the pandemic. But the increase in the United States has “greatly exceeded” those of other nations. The United States spent 16.8 percent of its GDP on health care in 2019; the next highest country on the list was Switzerland, at 11.3 percent of GDP. The lowest was New Zealand, which spent roughly 9 percent of its GDP on health care in 2019.

Meanwhile, health care in the United States is the least affordable.

I hate sounding like a broken record, but this is what happens when racism drives decisions about the social safety net. Political scientists and sociologists confirm that–in addition to the profit motives/special interests of insurance companies and Big Pharma–the fact that White Americans don’t want “their” tax dollars spent on medical care or other social benefits for “those people” has prevented us from installing a less-costly and vastly more effective medical system.

We keep filling in that swimming pool…

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Policy And Procedure

So here’s the problem: as Paul Krugman recently noted in his weekly newsletter, Will Rogers oft-quoted line — “I am not a member of any organized political party; I am a Democrat” —is still accurate.

Today’s Republican Party has morphed into an ideological monolith, mainly constructed around racism and a visceral rejection of the “other.” That has led to a Democratic Party that encompasses, and must appeal to, pretty much everyone else–from the sane centrists fleeing what has become of the GOP to the moderate left to America’s version of the far left. In order to win elections with such a coalition, Democrats have to satisfy multiple constituencies. (As Krugman also observed, there’s a positive side to this reality–“this makes it harder to sell your soul, because it’s not clear who you’re supposed to sell it to.”)

The monolithic nature of the current GOP has helped it hold power despite the fact that we have literally mountains of research attesting to the fact that the party’s priorities are widely–sometimes wildly–unpopular. But (as a political scientist friend of mine recently explained over coffee) we fail to appreciate the extent to which Republican electoral successes are also a consequence of the filibuster.

Bear with me.

Even moderately honest observers realize that GOP legislators routinely put partisan advantage over the common good of the country. What we fail to appreciate is that most Democratic lawmakers–not all, certainly, but most–truly do try to put country first. (Granted, that doesn’t mean that the policies they pursue are necessarily correct, or that their motives are always pure.) Part of putting country first is protecting Americans from some truly awful policies that Republicans want to impose.

Democrats defending the filibuster point to precisely that function. They argue that in an inevitable future, when Republicans gain control of the Senate, Democrats will need the filibuster to keep the GOP from enacting damaging policies. As my friend pointed out, that impulse–to protect the country from policies that are broadly harmful and unpopular–actually helps the GOP.

He provided two illuminating examples.

In Indiana, when the Republican Governor and legislature passed a bill that would have allowed merchants to discriminate against LGBTQ customers, the blowback was intense, and the effort ultimately failed. The law was “clarified” to avoid its obvious goal. The very public nature of the response also “educated” a lot of people who don’t follow politics–and in the more urban parts of the state, at least, did the GOP no favors.

The more recent example is the Texas anti-choice vigilante law. For a number of years, pro-choice voters have relied upon the courts to protect their right to reproductive freedom, leaving them free to vote on the basis of other issues. It remains to be seen how much the outrage over the Supreme Court’s refusal to step in will motivate voters, but at this point, it looks like Texas Republicans have handed the Democrats a powerful issue.

My friend’s point is simple: let the GOP enact their pet policies, many if not most of which research tells us are very unpopular. Don’t use the filibuster to protect the party from the consequences of its own venality. Yes, the country will initially suffer the results –but the likely negative reaction will, once again, “educate” voters, clarifying the importance of registering their disapproval with their votes.

Obviously, there are other structural elements of our electoral system protecting an unpopular GOP from losses it would otherwise incur–as enumerated in this story in Vox. Gerrymandering and the Electoral College are huge hurdles, as is the growing tendency to view political party affiliation as part of one’s tribal identity, and to vote on that basis rather than on reaction to policy. But the less-recognized use of the filibuster as a mechanism to keep Republicans from enacting a toxic agenda is counterproductive.

Also, since it is a rule made by the Senate, it ought to be easier to eliminate. Someone needs to “educate” Manchin and Sinema.

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The Cost Of Luring Jobs

Over the past decade or so, like this blog, Americans’ political discussions and debates have focused on national issues and the increasing gridlock in Washington. There are several reasons for that. The decline of local journalism has meant that local issues that might trigger local activism are increasingly less likely to be covered, while more national media highlights the growing dysfunction of the federal government. And many of the challenges we face are national–or global–in scope.

Although it’s understandable that local policies tend to fly “under the radar,” that doesn’t make those issues unimportant. For one thing, individual citizens who are powerless to change goings-on in Washington can affect many local issues.

Governing Magazine recently focused on one such issue: economic development.

The article pointed out what even casual observers have long suspected, and what the data confirms–most state and local governments approach economic development in costly and unproductive ways. The article’s subhead really sums up the conclusion: “Governments can’t seem to stop offering huge incentives to corporations, even though it’s clear they don’t have much effect on companies’ decisions. Does paying $288,000 for one job really make sense?”

The rather obvious answer to that question is no. But economic development officials are responding to the pandemic by doubling down–ignoring overwhelming evidence and instead doing more of what they know. (This situation reminds me of America’s long, counterproductive drug war. As I said in a speech some years ago, if a doctor performed a hundred identical surgeries and every single patient died, would you insist that the proper response was to have him do more of them? The logic is the same.)

Seeking to create jobs and help their local economies climb out of the pandemic recession, state and local officials are raising the ante on subsidies to big corporations. But if history is any guide, ever-increasing tax breaks and other economic development incentives will likely lead to slower — not faster — growth. Given that state and local governments have already been wasting $95 billion every year in an economic race to the bottom, more subsidies will just dig the hole deeper.

The article highlighted North Carolina’s largest-ever subsidy: $865 million for an Apple research and development center promising 3,000 new jobs. But Apple would probably have chosen North Carolina in any event–without those subsidies.

Smart companies like Apple understand that the real long-term attraction is not subsidies so much as the great economic foundation North Carolina has built: investments in top-notch research universities, a tech-ready workforce and a business-friendly environment. North Carolina is indeed a perfect place to locate a cutting-edge research center. Site Selection magazine has consistently ranked it as a top state for business climate.

Interestingly, when Apple located a facility in Austin, Texas gave the company about $10,000 per job. North Carolina promised some $288,000 per job.

Research tells us that only one in eight subsidies effects a change to a location or expansion decision, and that some 90 percent are a complete waste of money. Companies happily accept the money, but their decisions are based far more on the availability of a talented local workforce, region-specific advantages and access to supply chains and customers.

For example, Google and Fidelity Investments recently announced expansions to their existing operations in the Research Triangle — without asking North Carolina for subsidies. Both emphasized the area’s skilled workforce as the primary draw.

The consensus of academic research is that corporate handouts don’t create broad benefits for the community providing them. That’s because subsidies motivate wasteful corporate investments and create public funding trade-offs. Every dollar spent on subsidies is a dollar that can’t be used to improve infrastructure, education or public safety, or to cut taxes on smaller businesses and households.

This expensive and unnecessary fiscal competition between local units of government adds absolutely nothing to the national economy–after all, nationally, moving enterprise A from city B to city C is a zero-sum exercise. And as the article notes, paying companies to move to your state siphons off funds that could be used for things that actually make your state attractive to those companies–like a first-rate public education system that not only turns out a skilled workforce, but is an amenity valued by the management folks who would be locating in your state.

The evidence shows that one of the most persuasive “subsidies” a state can offer is an attractive quality of life.

When policymakers ignore evidence, when they make decisions on the basis of ideology–or worse, when policy decisions are simply the result of “we’ve always done it this way” or “everyone else does it this way”–the costs aren’t limited to the dollar amount of the subsidies.

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