Gasp–An Actual Exhibit of Political Courage!

We have all become used to elected officials who approach their duties with their fingers raised to test which way the wind is blowing, and their ears to the ground to see which way the crowd is going.  As one wag put it, it’s hard to look up to someone in that position. Once elected, all too many of them put being re-elected at the very top of their “to do” list, and conclude that laying low is the best way to accomplish that.

So it was both surprising and gratifying to see Marion County Prosecutor Terry Curry come out against Senator Delph’s ill-conceived and mean-spirited immigration bill.

Curry pointed out the bill’s legal flaws, including the fact that immigration is a responsibility of the federal government. But he went farther, describing the proposal as a waste of resources–not only because a legal challenge would be inevitable, but because the law would further erode the ability of local law-enforcement to focus on their primary duty to ensure public safety.

Curry is correct on all counts, of course. But more importantly, he was willing to speak out against a proposal that would marginalize some of our citizens in order to play to the prejudices and misconceptions of others.

A prosecutor who wants Indiana to respect the Constitution and the law and is willing to say so–how incredibly refreshing!

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When Privatizing Met Public Infrastructure

As readers of this blog know, I’m not a “believer” in contracting-out–what we Americans quaintly call “privatization.” I’m not necessarily opposed to contracting, either–it’s a tool that can be appropriate in many circumstances. Call me an agnostic.

It’s important to examine claims about privatizing, because contracting is too often a form of patronage–a way of rewarding campaign contributors–or, as we’ve seen in Indiana, a way that canny politicians can borrow from the future to provide services that should be paid for from current tax revenues.

When we start privatizing public infrastructure–toll roads and parking meters, for example–it is even more important to ask what the research shows. We know what the politicians who are pushing these deals say; what does the evidence say?

Ellen Dannin is a law professor who is a national expert on contracting, and she has just published an important (and sobering) analysis of what happens when public infrastructure is privatized. In “Crumbling Infrastructure, Crumbling Democracy: Infrastructure Privatization Contracts and Their Effects on State and Local Governance,”
Dannin finds that these agreements typically make the public the guarantor of private contractors’ profits, and ” give private contractors quasi-governmental status, with power over new laws, judicial decisions, propositions voted on by the public, and other governmental actions.”

Well worth a read!


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Stop the Presses! ACLU Supports Christian Athletes

One of the great myths promulgated by the Christian Right is that the ACLU is “anti-religion” and “anti-Christian.” Those bent on demonizing the organization conveniently overlook the many cases in which the ACLU represents the rights of religious folks. When I was Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, it used to irritate me that we got no credit for being principled.

That is mostly because so few people understand what the principles are.

A friend just alerted me to a Virginia news item about that state’s ACLU, which has defended the right of student athletes to tape copies of the Ten Commandments to their lockers.

For people who are constitutionally literate, this position hardly comes as a surprise. If a school allows students to post items on their lockers, it cannot dictate the content of those items (other than forbidding obscenity). The school could constitutionally forbid the posting of anything at all, but if it does allow students to express themselves in that fashion, the  First Amendment’s Free Speech doctrine prohibits the school from picking and choosing among the messages.

If, on the other hand, a public school posts the Ten Commandments, the school is violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, because the school is an agency of government, and government cannot endorse or sponsor religion.

There’s nothing inconsistent here. The point in both cases is to limit the authority of government.

In our legal system, individuals get to decide what they say and believe, free of government interference. That’s the principle the ACLU is protecting, and it isn’t anti-religious. It’s pro-individual liberty.

Who Moved Wisconsin’s Cheese?

In 1998, Dr. Spencer Johnson wrote a best-selling book about dealing with change; he titled it “Who Moved My Cheese?”

I can’t help thinking how ironic it is that Wisconsin—home of the Cheese-heads—is the most prominent example of what happens when political leadership stubbornly refuses to deal with an economic landscape that has changed.

Upon assuming office, Governor Scott Walker immediately made two incredibly poor policy decisions: he rejected federal dollars for high-speed rail, and (as anyone who hasn’t been in a coma this past month knows) he has offered legislation that would revoke the bargaining rights of public sector unions. He has attempted to justify both decisions by pleading state poverty.

It’s tempting to point out that Wisconsin’s fiscal straits didn’t keep the governor and legislature from first enacting generous tax breaks for business, but that bit of political hypocrisy isn’t nearly as troubling as the Governor’s evident inability to understand a simple fact of contemporary budgetary life: it is impossible to balance public budgets by cuts alone. As Robert Russell, a Wisconsin state economic analyst has pointed out, state workers are also taxpayers and consumers.

According to Russell, if Wisconsin public employee salaries are cut through increased withholdings (as Walker is insisting) by an amount large enough to fill the $137 million budget gap, the resulting drop in consumer spending will lead to: 1) a loss of over 1,200 nongovernment jobs; 2) a loss of about $100 million in business sales statewide; 3) a loss of nearly $35 million in personal incomes of nongovernment employee households; and 4)  a loss of nearly $10 million in state tax revenues.

In other words, lower wages and fewer workers translate to less tax revenue and consumer spending. Since even the most modest tax increases appear to be politically untenable these days, the only option likely to generate sufficient revenue is economic development and job creation.

Which brings us to high-speed rail.

The policy arguments for high-speed rail are familiar to most of us: our highways are increasingly congested and enormously expensive to expand; we can’t abate environmental pollution or reduce dependence on foreign oil without offering viable alternatives to the automobile; long commutes translate into lost productivity, costing businesses billions each year.  Urban planners argue that rail is essential if we are to address the problems caused by urban sprawl and make our cities more livable. Groups trying to save America’s small towns argue that those towns will disappear without fast, convenient inter-urban transportation.

All true, and all reasons to support mass transit within–and high-speed rail between–cities.

What is less noted and equally important, however, is the job-creating potential of high-speed rail. Last fall, California voters approved $10 billion dollars for a rail project linking San Francisco and Los Angeles; more recently, the San Francisco Business Times ran an article highlighting the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s projection that 450,000 permanent jobs would be created by the project in addition to the 160,000 new jobs needed to plan, design and build the system.

The Christian Science Monitor estimated that the Obama Administration’s $8 billion initial investment in high-speed rail will produce 320,000 jobs and generate roughly $13 billion in economic development benefits, “including construction and operations jobs, as well as manufacturing and supply chain opportunities. By increasing mobility while decreasing congestion and sprawl, high-speed rail makes our country more competitive while simultaneously spurring economic development.”

Waging a war on public unions—however ideologically satisfying—will not help Wisconsin’s economy. The cheese is on the high-speed train, and thanks to the Governor, that train has left Wisconsin’s station.

What Drives Me Crazy

A couple of days ago, I got my ever-thinner print version of Newsweek, and began leafing through it. I came to an article by one Niall Ferguson (“Niall Ferguson Solves the Debt Crisis”) I don’t know who Ferguson is, although I’ve seen his name here and there, but obviously, if he has a solution to the “debt crisis,” (the precise nature of which was conveniently undefined), I wanted to know what it was.

And what was it? Privatization, which–he blandly assured readers–“has been a huge success nearly everywhere it’s been tried.”

When I came to that sentence, my husband called from another room to ask me why I was making that strange noise.

Let me explain why Mr. Ferguson’s article made my head explode. I have spent a reasonable percent of my time in academia studying privatization, and have written a number of (peer reviewed) articles on the subject, and it is clear that Ferguson is, shall we say, confused. The first clue is his reference to Margaret Thatcher’s successes. I agree that much of Thatcher’s privatization effort was successful and sound, but what Thatcher called privatization was very different from what Americans mean when we use the term. Thatcher sold off assets (steel mills, for example) that most economists would agree should never have been owned by government in the first place. And she sold them, to private owners who were left to own and operate them, pay taxes on any profits, and go under if they failed. These assets were no longer on the British government’s balance sheets, for good or ill.

This is significantly different from the situation in the United States, for two reasons. First of all, we were never socialized to the extent that England and many European countries were, so our governmental units–with very few exceptions–do not own property that is extraneous to the mission of government. We don’t have publicly owned steel mills or coal mines or other assets more appropriate to private ownership to sell off. Ferguson cites Mitch Daniels’ “lease” of Indiana’s public highways with approval; I think many of us would argue that public roads are hardly in the same category as steel mills.

That allusion to Indiana’s Toll Road brings us to the second difference between British and American practices: what we call privatization in the U.S. isn’t really privatization. We use the term to mean “contracting out.” If we have potholes to fill (and right now, boy do we!) we ask private asphalt companies to bid on filling them–we don’t expect government to manufacture its own asphalt and use its own employees to do the job–but we don’t expect government to sell the streets and allow the market to determine which ones get paved, either.

I didn’t intend to turn this post into an academic lecture/rant, but I get so tired of pompous pundits who don’t bother to do any homework, who don’t bother to define their terms, blandly prescribing simple fixes for complicated issues they clearly do not understand.  If Ferguson is advocating that we sell off government assets, he needs to distinguish such outright sales from the “leases” and “contracts” that Americans are familiar with, and he needs to identify the assets that he believes should be privately rather than publicly owned. (I’d be quite willing to sell off sports stadiums, but I’d fight a proposed sale of libraries.) If we ever have that discussion, I think it is highly unlikely that we’d find enough stuff to sell to retire the national debt.

And just for Mr. Ferguson’s information, privatization (defined as contracting out) has not been a “success nearly everywhere.” I’d be happy to supply him with citations to multiple studies demonstrating quite the contrary–but somehow I doubt he’d be interested.

Who said “It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that just ain’t so”?

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