Watch This Experiment!

Germany has begun an intriguing experiment. For a period of three years, a  group of people will get €1,200 a month. (At today’s exchange rate, that’s $1,420.) The money is free; the only  requirement is that recipients answer researchers’ questions about what they’re doing with this unconditional income.

As German media has reported,

Officials from the Mein Grundeinkommen (My Basic Income) charity are convinced that an unconditional income for all citizens would solve many current problems. The assumption is that people get more creative and become freer and happier if they don’t constantly face the pressure to earn enough money to get by.

Whether this lives up to reality will be explored scientifically during the project. “We’ll analyze what people are doing during a period of guaranteed material security,” project chief Jürgen Schupp from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) told DW.

Among the questions he’ll look into are: Will the test persons spend all the money or will they save a certain amount? Will they stop working altogether or work less? Also, will they donate money to others?

The experiment will give his team all the answers it needs, says Schupp. Even changes in people’s stress levels can be identified with the help of hair samples, he argues.

During the primaries, Andrew Yang brought the issue into more prominence, but the debate about UBI–an unconditional basic income– has been going on for years. The debate centers on dramatically different predictions of what people will do when they don’t have to do anything. Will receipt of a basic income make people lazy, make them less  apt to work, less productive? Or is a UBI a tool to rationalize current  social  welfare systems (and not-so-incidentally, prepare for an era when automation has eliminated millions  of jobs)?

I  have been  intrigued by  what I see as the promise of a UBI.

What if the United States embraced a new social contract, beginning with the premise that all citizens are valued members of the American polity, and that (as the advertisement says) membership has its privileges? Contracts are by definition mutual undertakings, agreements in which both sides offer consideration. In my imagined “Brave New World,” government would create an environment within which humans could flourish, an environment within which members of the polity would be guaranteed a basic livelihood, a substantive education and an equal place at the civic table. In return, members (aka citizens) would pay their “dues:” taxes, a stint of public/civic service, and the consistent discharge of civic duties like voting and jury service.

With a UBI (in contrast to welfare) there would be no phase-out, no marriage penalties, no people falsifying information, no daunting (and expensive) bureaucracy.

Support for the concept hasn’t been limited to liberals and progressives. Milton Friedman famously proposed a “negative income tax,” and F.A. Hayek, the libertarian economist, wrote “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all, protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income, or a floor below which nobody need descend.” In 2016, Samuel Hammond of the libertarian Niskanen Center, noted the “ideal” key features of a UBI: its unconditional structure avoids creating poverty traps; it sets a minimum income floor, raising worker bargaining power without wage or price controls; it decouples benefits from a particular workplace or jurisdiction; since it’s cash, it respects a diversity of needs and values; and it simplifies and streamlines a complex web of bureaucracy, eliminating rent seeking and other sources of inefficiency.

Hammond’s point about worker bargaining power is especially important. In today’s economy, characterized by dramatically-diminished unions and the growth of “gig work,”  employee bargaining power has dramatically eroded. Wages  have been effectively stagnant for years, despite significant growth in productivity. In 2018, Pew Research reported that “today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago.

If the U.S. had a UBI and single-payer  health  insurance, workers would have the freedom to leave abusive employers, unsafe work conditions, and uncompetitive pay scales. A UBI wouldn’t level the playing field, but it would certainly reduce the tilt. It’s also worth noting that a UBI would have much the same positive effect on economic growth as a higher minimum wage. When poor people get money, they spend it, increasing demand.

Previous experiments and pilot projects have been encouraging;  receipt of a  guaranteed basic  income has not caused people  to stop working, and the money hasn’t  been used  for liquor and sin. Germany’s experiment looks to be larger than the others that have been reported, and it will be interesting to see its results.

Comments

The GOP Platform

As most readers of this blog undoubtedly know, David  Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. These days, he is a “Never Trumper” who contributes to  The Atlantic, and he has weighed in on the GOP’s decision to  forego a platform in 2020.

Frum says  that, despite their reluctance to publish a document outlining  where the party stands, there is, in fact, wide agreement among party members on a number of policies.

The Republican Party of 2020 has lots of ideas. I’m about to list 13 ideas that command almost universal assent within the Trump administration, within the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and Senate, among governors and state legislators, on Fox News, and among rank-and-file Republicans.

As Frum sees it, the question isn’t why the GOP lacks  policies to put in a platform. The question is, why is the party so reluctant to publish the policies that virtually all today’s  Republicans support?  The answer  to that question becomes pretty obvious  when Frum lists the thirteen areas of substantial Republican agreement.

1. The first–no surprise–is reducing taxes on the rich. (That  seems to be the  sum total  of  Republican economic policy.)

2. Cutting taxes has been Republican policy for many years; Frum’s second “plank,” however, is  new. The GOP overwhelmingly subscribes to the belief that the coronavirus is a “much-overhyped problem” that will soon burn itself out. Since  it’s overhyped and “just  a flu,”states should reopen their economies as rapidly as possible. (The casualties that  ensue are a cost worth paying.) And wearing masks is useless.

3.Speaking of “overhyped”–Republicans overwhelmingly believe that climate change isn’t a real problem. They doubt that it is happening, but even if it  is,  they’re confident  that  it will be countered by the technologies of tomorrow. Meanwhile,” regulations to protect the environment unnecessarily impede economic growth.”

4.. China is our enemy, and our relations with China should be  assessed as “zero  sum.” “When China wins, the U.S. loses, and vice versa.”

5. Speaking of foreign policy, our longstanding alliances are outdated.

The days of NATO and the World Trade Organization are over. The European Union should be treated as a rival, the United Kingdom and Japan should be treated as subordinates, and Canada, Australia, and Mexico should be treated as dependencies.

6. Health care is a consumer good,  and people should make their own best deals. The government shouldn’t be involved in making rules  for the insurance market. People who can  pay more should get more, and people who can’t pay  will just  have  to rely on Medicaid, accept charity, or go without.

7. Voting isn’t a right;  it’s a privilege.

States should have wide latitude to regulate that privilege in such a way as to minimize voting fraud, which is rife among Black Americans and new immigrant communities. The federal role in voting oversight should be limited to preventing Democrats from abusing the U.S. Postal Service to enable fraud by their voters.

8. Racism is no longer a real problem, but “reverse racism” is.

9. The courts should  eliminate the notion that a woman has a constitutional right to sexual privacy, or control over her own body.

10. The post-Watergate ethics reforms were too strict, and conflict-of-interest rules simply keep wealthy, successful businesspeople from entering public service. The Trump administration has met all reasonable ethical standards.

11. Build the wall! If immigrants do  manage to enter the country, delay citizenship  as  long as possible.

12. Aside from a few  “bad apples,”  the policeman is your  friend. Lawlessness is a  result  of  groups  like Black Lives Matter.

13. In the face of the “unfair onslaught” against President Donald Trump by the media and the “deep state,” his “occasional” excesses should be excused as pardonable reactions.

Frum  says that this tacit platform works–to the extent it does– by motivating Trump supporters, exciting  the remaining Republican  base. If it were  to be spelled out,  however, even in an abbreviated form, as I have done above, it would invite backlash among a  majority of Americans.

As Frum  says,  “This is a platform for a party that talks to itself, not to the rest of the country. And for those purposes, the platform will succeed most to the extent that it is communicated only implicitly, to those receptive to its message.”

Unbelievable  as it  is, a substantial minority of  voters find these positions rational,  even inspiring. That minority will work for the  election of candidates  wedded to these positions, and  they will vote. Those of us who see  this  “platform” as appalling absolutely  must  turn out in great numbers. We have to defeat the efforts  to  suppress our votes. We  have  to vote  early,  vote absentee,  or mask up and march to our  polling  places  on election  day–whatever it takes.

Get out the vote has never been more important. America’s  future  depends on turnout.

Comments

Two Americas

Remember John Edwards? When  he ran for President in 2004 (and before  his sleazy personal behaviors caught up with him), he ignited a good deal of support with a speech in which  he described  “two  Americas.”  Edwards blamed George W. Bush and the GOP for two Americas he described thusly: “One America that does the work, another America that reaps the reward. .. . One favored, the other forgotten. … One privileged, the other burdened.”

There  are, of course multiple ways of “slicing and  dicing” an electorate. Edwards’ categories are, unfortunately, still pretty accurate.  But in  the intervening years, we  have seen an even  greater chasm develop. As Charlie Warzel put it in a recent  New  York Times newsletter, we have a meaningful percentage of Americans living in an alternate reality powered by a completely separate universe of news and information.

Because it was a subscribed newsletter, I don’t have a  link, but I’m copying  and pasting a couple of observations that resonated with me,  because they go a long way toward explaining the informational environment inhabited by those of our fellow Americans who continue  to support Donald J. Trump.

He began  by explaining that  there are two types of “reporting” by the rightwing media: outright fabrication, and a more sophisticated  approach that “rearranges shared facts to compose an entirely different narrative.”

There is little consensus on the top story of the day or the major threats facing the country. You will have noticed this if you’ve ever watched a congressional hearing and flipped between CNN or MSNBC and Fox News. The video feed is the same but the interpretation of events is radically different.

As he noted, we got a clear demonstration of the phenomenon at the Republican National Convention.

For three nights, in an shameless display of loyalty to President Trump, the party has conjured up what my colleague Frank Bruni described as an “upside-down vision” of the world. Theirs is a universe in which the coronavirus pandemic is largely in the rear view (on Aug. 25, 1,136 Americans died from the virus) and where, according to Representative Matt Gaetz, radical Democrats threaten to “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door.” A universe where the existential dangers of climate change pale in comparison to those of cancel culture — even as the West is ravaged by blackouts and wildfires and the Gulf Coast is slammed by adevastating hurricane.

We can each pick our own examples of what has come to be called “gaslighting.” and what  I prefer to call chutzpah.

For example,  when Mike Pence addressed the Convention, he spoke movingly  (ok–Mike  Pence is incapable  of speaking movingly, but that was clearly his  intent) about the death of a federal officer in Oakland.  From his remarks, viewers were led  to believe that he was likely killed by Black Lives Matter protesters. 

“People like Dave Patrick Underwood, an officer in the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service who was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California…Dave’s heroism is emblematic of the heroes that serve in blue every day,” Pence said.   
 
As multiple media outlets later noted, although what Pence said was true, what he clearly wanted to imply was  not.

Yes, Underwood was killed while defending a federal courthouse in Oakland in May. Yes, he was serving as part of President Trump’s effort to crack down on the protests inspired by the death of George Floyd. What Pence failed to mention, however, was that Underwood was  killed by two men who’ve  been linked to right-wing extremism, not by protesters.

Americans who reside entirely in the  rightwing media bubble–who get all  of their news  from Fox or Sinclair or Breitbart or Rush Limbaugh, who don’t leaven those  outlets with non-propaganda  sources, occupy a very different reality.

It has become increasingly difficult to stay accurately informed, to  determine which media sources are reputable and which are not, to recognize “headlines” that are really click-bait rather than accurate labels of a story, and to identify the sources that  “spin” even factual articles.  

Until we somehow get a handle on the Wild  West that  is  our current information environment, we will continue  to inhabit two dramatically-different Americas. And until that informational chasm is spanned, we will be unable to work together to eliminate the two Americas identified  by John Edwards.

Comments

Pandemics And Parking Meters

Back in 2011,  Indianapolis (under  then-Mayor Ballard) entered into a  fifty-year agreement with  a consortium called Park Indy  to upgrade and manage the city’s parking meters. At the time, I was  among those who argued strenuously against that agreement.

I  had  two major objections  and two never-answered questions.

The first objection was to the fifty-year length of the contract. Even if the deal had been less one-sided fiscally, decisions about where to place meters, how to price them, what lengths of time to allow and so on have an enormous impact on local businesses and residential neighborhoods. As I said at  the time, these are decisions requiring flexibility in the face of changing circumstances; they are most definitely not decisions that should be held hostage to contracting provisions aimed at protecting a vendor’s profits.

My  second objection was that, under the terms of the contract, downtown developments and civic events would become more costly. More often than not, new  construction interrupts adjacent parking. If the city is managing its own meters, it can choose to ignore that loss of parking revenue, or decide to charge the developer, based upon the City’s best interests. Street festivals and other civic celebrations also require  that meters be bagged, and usually there are good reasons not to charge the not-for-profit or civic organization running the event. The ParkIndy contract required the City to pay ACS whenever  interruptions require bagging the meters and disrupting projected revenues from those meters.

No one could have foreseen a pandemic, of course. That’s the point. When you contract away your  flexibility, your authority to make decisions that are responsive  to  unforeseen events, you end up owing a lot  of money to the private  vendor. Indianapolis closed certain streets to  traffic,  in order to allow restaurants to serve customers outdoors, a move that probably kept some of them afloat during a very difficult time. That required bagging  the meters  on those streets. WISH reports that the city  has already had to pay Park Indy 450,000 under the contract–at a time when the pandemic is wreaking  havoc with city and state finances.

File that  payment under “adding insult to injury,” since, according to periodic reports, the city has never come close to receiving the income it projected when this ill-conceived privatization agreement was negotiated. In May of 2016, the Indianapolis Star reported that the city was reaping only about a quarter of the dollars ParkIndy projected when it paid $20 million for the right to operate the meters until 2061.

Then there  are  my two questions.

As I wrote at the time, why privatize at all? Parking isn’t rocket science. There was never a satisfactory response to the obvious question “why can’t we do this ourselves, and keep all the money?” Why couldn’t Indianapolis retain control of its infrastructure, and issue revenue bonds to cover the costs of the necessary improvements? Interest rates were at a historic low at the time, making it even more advantageous to do so. If the Ballard administration was too inept to manage parking, it could have created a Municipal Parking Authority, as Councilor Jackie Nytes  suggested at the time.

What was the compelling reason to enrich private contractors and reduce (desperately needed) City revenues.

And finally,  why ACS –the company that is the primary partner of ParkIndy. There had already been extensive publicity about ACS’ performance problems in Chicago; there was also troubling information about the company’s track record in Washington, D.C., where an audit documented mismanagement, overcharging, over-counting of meters, and the issuance of bogus tickets (ACS got all the revenue for tickets). The audit  found  that Washington had lost $8,823,447 in revenue and experienced a twenty-fold increase in complaints from the public.

The  only answer I  could  come up with was that the Ballard Administration got an  up-front infusion of cash which helped it hold  the line on taxes while Ballard was  in office–and who cares about the future? 

This was actually something of a modus operandi for Ballard.  An academic paper I co-authored  with a colleague  shared the results of our investigation into the convoluted structure of  the city’s sale of its water and sewer utilities. The highly sophisticated financing scheme for the sale had the effect of shifting costs to utility rate-payers that should properly have been assumed by taxpayers.

There’s a saying among politicians: to elected officials, “long-term” means  “until the next election.” 

And I  used to think that “fiscally responsible” meant “pay as you go.” I was  so naive…

Comments

That Was The Party That Was

Norm Ornstein speaks to me. From his books (It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, with Thomas Mann, and One Nation After Trump, with E.J.  Dionne  and Thomas Mann) to his principled fight against gerrymandering,  I have admired both his intellect and his principles.

And in his recent essay in the Atlantic, he gave voice to my own political distress.

I have been immersed in national politics in Washington for five decades. Over my time here, as an academic, a congressional staffer, a think tanker, and a commentator and public figure, I have gotten to know and worked with a wide range of key actors in politics and policy. I have seen up close the changes in our politics and culture. Nothing has been more striking or significant than the transformation of the Republican Party, from a moderately conservative party to a very conservative party to something else entirely.

One sign of this change? A five-term Republican congressman from Colorado, elected in the Tea Party wave in 2010 and now a Trump loyalist, was recently defeated in a primary by a candidate who runs Shooters Grill, where servers are encouraged to carry firearms, and who has indulged the QAnon conspiracy theories and who is now endorsed, not repudiated, by the National Republican Congressional Committee. Another? The current buzz surrounding Tucker Carlson as the party’s hope in 2024—even as he takes sudden leave from his show to go fishing, after one of his writers was tied to racist and misogynistic posts on an internet message board.

Those of us of a. “certain age” would agree with Ornstein that “old-time” Republicans would be appalled by the party’s ethnic and anti-immigrant animus and deliberate efforts to stoke racial division. Although  the GOP has always had a rightwing, nativist fringe–just as the Democrats have always had a collectivist fringe– when I was Republican, they were, for the most part, consigned  to that fringe.

The party of Nixon, with all its pathologies, created the Environmental Protection Agency, proposed a health-care-reform plan as sweeping as the later Affordable Care Act, and considered offering Americans a guaranteed annual income on a par with Andrew Yang’s universal basic income. The party of Reagan, which tried to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and which slashed taxes in 1981, precipitating ballooning deficits, also cut deals with Democratic Representative Henry Waxman to bolster Medicare and Medicaid; championed bipartisan Social Security reform in 1983; and supported tax increases in 1982, 1983, 1985, and 1986 to offset the earlier cuts and reduce the deficits. The party responsible for Iran-Contra is also the party that championed democracy and moved in concert with Democrats to create the National Endowment for Democracy, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute.

Many of  the Republicans with whom Ornstein worked exemplified  “institutional patriotism,” which he defines as a concern for the integrity of Congress as an institution, and a commitment to checks and balances.

Unfortunately, they were unable to transfer those values to succeeding generations, or to overcome the regional shift in American party politics, the rise of manipulative leaders, and the growing influence of extremist tribal media.

Ornstein tells us what we all know: that whatever it is that has taken the place of that GOP “has thrown away its guiding values and embraced its darkest instincts.”

It has blown up long-standing norms in the Senate, creating divisions that outstrip anything I have seen before; done nothing about rank corruption in the White House and the Cabinet; accepted the politicization of the Justice Department and lies from the attorney general; avoided any meaningful oversight of misconduct; and failed to curb attacks on the independence of inspectors general.

The article goes into considerable detail about Ornstein’s political biography–the Senators and staff with whom he worked, and the ability that afforded him to see public servants up close, to evaluate their sincerity and integrity. I encourage  you to click through and read it in its entirety.

But the sentence that really resonated with me was the following:

Plenty of the Republicans I dealt with in the past were fierce partisans, including Dole and John Rhodes. But when pushed, they put country first.

When the sniveling sycophants beholden to the conspiracy theorists and bigots that make up today’s GOP “base” are pushed, they put their own prospects above country– and arguably even above the long-term best interests of their party.

Comments