I continue to be amazed by how blatant right wing hypocrisy has become.
The most recent example (okay, one of the many recent examples) occurred last week in Washington. House Democrats offered a motion to cut the budget by putting an end to taxpayer-funded subsidies to large oil companies. Rep. William Keating (D-MA) offered the motion on the House floor saying “let’s stop sending taxpayers’ money to the most profitable companies in the world.”
Republicans voted unanimously against the motion, defeating it by a vote of 176-249. Those would be the same Republicans who are constantly talking about the need to reduce the deficit. Evidently, what they mean by “reduce the deficit” is “reduce the deficit to the extent we can do so on the backs of middle-class taxpayers.”
And speaking of talks and walks, it will be interesting to see what Indiana Governor Mitch “Social Issues Truce” Daniels does when the anti-immigration bill hits his desk.
Daniels has certainly talked the talk of fiscal responsibility. Lately, in fact, he’s “talked the talk” incessantly, as he clearly is positioning himself to run for President. The Indiana business community, Indiana’s Mayors (with the curious exception of Greg Ballard), Indianapolis’ convention bureau and many others–including Mitch’s former employer, Eli Lilly & Company–have all argued that Senator Delph’s bill would hurt Indiana’s economy and intensify the state’s fiscal woes, and Daniels clearly knows that they are correct. In any sane world, the Governor would veto the bill. But in order to have a shot at the Republican nomination, he has to play to the prejudices of the far right zealots who have for all intents and purposes captured the party.
We know he can talk the talk. It will be interesting to see if he can also walk the walk.
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!
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.”
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.
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.
