There’s a Lesson Here…..

No politics today. Just some observations from a consumer, underlining the fact that–despite Americans’ reverence for “entrepreneurship” and the private sector– incompetence is just as prevalent there as elsewhere.

Over the past week, I have had three experiences with service providers. Two of them could learn a lot from the third.

Experience #1 was with the website of Thermador, a high-end manufacturer of kitchen appliances. My husband and I were in the market for a new range and refrigerator. Architects get discounts from some manufacturers –not large, but worth pursuing. In order to determine eligibility for the program, we were directed to the company’s website.

What followed would have made a great comedy sketch. The form we were instructed to complete read: Go to [URL] and click on the link for [X ]. Except there was no such link. Called the company; held for a considerable amount of time because (cough) they were “experiencing unusual call volume.” It turned out that the link didn’t show up if you were using Firefox as your browser. We changed to Safari and clicked; it appeared. We were then told to enter additional information–except, again, there was no visible place to enter it. Another call. The woman who answered said their website only works correctly if you use Chrome as your browser. (And no, nothing on the page said that.)

This is a national company. They manufacture pricey appliances, and could probably afford a competent web designer. Let’s just say I hope they pay more attention to their products than they do to their abysmal website.

Experience #2 involved another appliance. Our dishwasher began making awful noises. We called Epic Appliance Repair, a service we had used once a few years ago; they said to expect the repairman between 2 and 4. I rearranged my schedule and waited. When no one had come by 4:30–and no one had called to say there would be a delay–we called and were told it would be around 6:00 pm. No apology.

Six came and went. No repairman, no call. We called; the man who answered (again with no apology) said “let me check and get right back to you.” He didn’t. After a half-hour, we called again. No apology for not calling back, and no explanation. “We’ll be there at nine in the morning.” Right.

No one came at nine. Or ten. Or Eleven. No one answered their phone, and no one ever came or called. Needless to say, we called a different repair service– one that did come when they said.

Experience #3 was refreshingly different. I wanted my outdoor cushions cleaned before putting them away for the winter, and my regular dry cleaners can’t do those. I went online, found a service called Fire Dawgs, and–through their very user-friendly website, requested a time the next day. (I really expected they wouldn’t be able to come on such short notice, but I was wrong.) Within half an hour, I had a call confirming the time and cost, followed by an email reiterating the information and price.

Twenty minutes before the scheduled time, I got a text–and then a phone call–identifying the workman who was on his way, and giving me an estimate of how long it would take him to get from where he was to my house. He came promptly, cleaned the cushions, charged what I’d been quoted and left. I received an emailed receipt shortly after he left–and an email the next day thanking me for my patronage.

Guess who I’ll use again?

Guess who I won’t.

I’ll admit that I am flabbergasted by #1 and #2. You would think, in this day and age, that large national companies would understand the importance of a user-friendly website that works properly on all browsers. You’d think a company purporting to provide a repair SERVICE would understand that people have lives, and need to be informed when a schedule cannot be met. (You’d also think they might apologize for failing to do so or let you know they weren’t ever coming.)

You might also think they’d want positive reviews and maybe even repeat business…but evidently not. (Some of us do know how to post to Yelp.)

Tell me again how competition guarantees that the private sector will always be superior to those ineffectual government workers…

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THIS is What is so Worrisome

Fareed Zakaria is one of the more astute observers of American politics. Perhaps because of his familial background in the Middle East, where stability is rare and democratic institutions rarer, he has a focus on the institutions and norms that make liberal democracies possible. I remember being really impressed with his 2003 book, The Future of Freedom.

Last week, he had a perceptive and deeply troubling column in the Washington Post. As he began

Two decades ago, I wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs that described an unusual and worrying trend: the rise of illiberal democracy. Around the world, dictators were being deposed and elections were proliferating. But in many of the places where ballots were being counted, the rule of law, respect for minorities, freedom of the press and other such traditions were being ignored or abused. Today, I worry that we might be watching the rise of illiberal democracy in the United States — something that should concern anyone, Republican or Democrat, Donald Trump supporter or critic.

As he points out, what we think of as democracy is really a marriage of two separate systems: the choice of political leadership by popular vote, and laws protecting fundamental individual liberties from both the government and those same popular majorities. Hence “liberal democracy.” Zacharia notes that in several countries, the two strands have separated, with democracy (in the form of the vote) persisting, but liberty “under siege.”

Here is what I believe to be his most important–and worrisome–point:

What stunned me as this process unfolded was that laws and rules did little to stop this descent. Many countries had adopted fine constitutions, put in place elaborate checks and balances, and followed best practices from the advanced world. But in the end, liberal democracy was eroded anyway. It turns out that what sustains democracy is not simply legal safeguards and rules, but norms and practices — democratic behavior. This culture of liberal democracy is waning in the United States today.

I shared similar concerns in a post just last month. As Zakaria writes, we are now seeing what our American democracy looks like when those norms of democratic behavior and honorable public service erode, and populism becomes demagoguery.

The parties have collapsed, Congress has caved, professional groups are largely toothless, the media have been rendered irrelevant…What we are left with today is an open, meritocratic, competitive society in which everyone is an entrepreneur, from a congressman to an accountant, always hustling for personal advantage. But who and what remain to nourish and preserve the common good, civic life and liberal democracy?

I just finished reading an important book that gives “chapter and verse” on how we got to the place Zakaria describes. American Amnesia was written by eminent political scientists Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of U.C. Berkeley, and it details (as the subtitle promises) “how the war on government led us to forget what made America prosper.” I will discuss the book’s research and conclusions in blogs to come, but suffice it to say that their copious documentation amply supports Zakaria’s observations.

We can turn this around, but time is running out.

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An “Existential Moment”

One of the political scientists whose work I follow is Thomas Mann. Mann, a Democrat, has received numerous awards during a distinguished career, but he may be best known for his collaborations with Norman Ornstein, who served in Republican administrations. Their book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks documented the radicalization of the Republican Party and received a good deal of publicity.

Mann has a recent commentary on the Brookings website, in which he characterizes the election of Donald Trump as an “existential moment” The lede sets out the nature and extent of that moment’s challenge:

His candidacy, campaign, victory and actions halfway through the transition to governing, heretofore unimaginable, pose a genuine threat to the well-being of our country and the sustainability of our democracy.

As I write, the immediate concerns are the president-elect’s reactions to the Russian cyber attacks on the Clinton campaign; his refusal to takes steps to deal responsibly with the massive conflicts of interest his businesses pose to his conduct of his presidency; his designation of a prominent white nationalist as his chief political strategist and a trio of unlikely appointees to lead the National Security Council team in the White House who appear to lack the personal qualities essential to their critical role; a breathtaking contempt for the media evidenced by his refusal to hold press conferences and his Orwellian reliance on tweets and rallies to communicate with the public; and an assemblage of Cabinet nominees characterized mostly (though not entirely) by their inexperience in public policy and their contempt for the missions of their departments.

In the remainder of the article, Mann considers whether our traditional checks and balances-the rule of law, a free press, an institutionally responsible Congress, a vigorous federal system, and a vibrant civil society–are healthy enough to provide the counterbalance that will be required. He is not sanguine about the rule of law.

Trump’s choice for Attorney General was rejected by the Senate for a federal judgeship because of racist comments and has a history as a prosecutor more interested in prosecuting African Americans for pursuing voting rights than those trying to suppress their votes. His White House Counsel was Tom DeLay’s ethics counsel and demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law as chair of the Federal Election Commission. The courts play an equally essential role. The egregious partisan politicization of judicial appointments, which reached a nadir with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented refusal to even consider Merrick Garland’s nomination to fill the Supreme Court vacancy during the last year of President Obama’s tenure, has weakened the capacity of the courts to fulfill its responsibilities in the face of attacks on the fabric of our democracy.

The free press, as Mann notes and we all know, is in disarray (to put it as kindly as possible). We live in a “post-truth” media environment, surrounded by spin, propaganda and fake news. If the press is our watchdog, it has been de-fanged.

Congress? Mann points out that the “silence of Republican congressional leaders to the frequent abuses of democratic norms during the general election campaign and transition” has been deafening.

The risk of party loyalty trumping institutional responsibility naturally arises with unified party government during a time of extreme polarization. A devil’s bargain of accepting illiberal politics in return for radical policies appears to have been struck.

What about federalism? Can “states’ rights” be mobilized to constrain the incoming Trump Administration? Mann holds out some hope, but ultimately concludes

And yet the nationalization of elections and with it the rise of party-line voting has led to a majority of strong, unified Republican governments in the states, some of which have demonstrated little sympathy for the democratic rules of the game. For starters, think Kansas, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. The latter has just pulled off the most outrageous power grab in recent history, designed to reduce sharply the authority of the newly elected Democratic governor before he takes office.

As many commenters on this blog have noted, and as Mann concludes, it really is up to us.

The final wall of defense against the erosion of democracy in America rests with civil society, the feature of our country Tocqueville was most impressed with. Community organizations, businesses, nonprofit organizations of all types, including think tanks that engage in fact-based policy analysis and embrace the democratic norms essential to the preservation of our way of life. The objective is not artificial bipartisan agreement, but forthright articulation of the importance of truth, the legitimacy of government and political opposition, and the nurturance of public support for the difficult work of governance. It is in this sector of American society in which citizens can organize, private-sector leaders can speak up in the face of abuses of public authority, and extreme, anti-democratic forces can be resisted.

I hope we’re up to the task.

Happy New Year….

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Another Unequal New Year?

This is the last day of 2016, a year that most definitely will not be missed. It’s hard to know whether people of good will can make 2017 any better.

The United States will begin the new year by ushering in a President who promises to “make America great again.” Unfortunately, with every utterance and tweet, it becomes more obvious that his definition of “greatness” is an autocratic wet dream unconnected to either the common good or reality.

As discouraging as it may be to admit, the truth is that a significant percentage of the American public is equally delusional, especially when it comes to accurate assessments of the extent of current inequality, and America’s past economic “greatness.”

A 2015 article in Scientific American took a look at both myth and reality. It was titled “American Inequality: It’s Much Worse Than You Think,” and subtitled, “The great divide between our beliefs, our ideals, and reality.”

The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.

Remember this infographic video that went viral several months ago? According to the article, it has been watched more than 16 million times.  I was one of those who was shocked by the distribution of wealth it showed, and I actually follow these matters fairly closely.

The great virtue of the Scientific American article, however, was not in schooling readers about the present chasm between the rich and the rest; it was in puncturing our ahistorical and fanciful belief that in America, success is an artifact of effort and hard work, that anyone willing to invest the necessary grit and determination can “make it,” and that American meritocracy means that entrepreneurial workers are not doomed to remain in whatever poverty or class they are born to.

It’s a lovely belief. The brutal reality, however, is very different.

In a study published early in 2015,

researchers found Americans overestimate the amount of upward social mobility that exists in society. They asked some 3,000 people to guess the chance that someone born to a family in the poorest 20% ends up as an adult in the richer quintiles. Sure enough, people think that moving up is significantly more likely than it is in reality. Interestingly, poorer and politically conservative participants thought that there is more mobility than richer and liberal participants…. We may not want to believe it, but the United States is now the most unequal of all Western nations. To make matters worse, America has considerably less social mobility than Canada and Europe.

This belief in American economic mobility doesn’t simply ignore the immense importance of family wealth and social connections, access to educational equality, and a wide range of discriminatory obstacles and structural social barriers.

Our stubborn belief in an American economic mobility that doesn’t exist creates an unwarranted optimism—an optimism that, ironically, is more prevalent among those at the bottom of the income distribution. And because we are optimistic—because we see opportunities that aren’t really there—we don’t get serious about correcting the social and financial structures that keep poor people poor.

The people who agreed with Trump that America was “great” at some indeterminate point in the past but is no longer so blessed seem to fall into two not mutually exclusive categories: those who resent the advancements of women, people of color and immigrants (America was great when “they” knew their place); and those who believe the mythology of a “lost” American mobility.

What would be great would be to make 2017 the year we began to restore content to our belief in American mobility and civic equality. A girl can dream….

Happy New Year.

 

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Peter the Citizen and “Less Appealing” Indiana

On Wednesday, I shared portions of an analysis of TANF–welfare after “reform”–from Peter the Citizen, a conservative policy analyst who has deep experience with social welfare policies.

Among the many papers he has written on the subject is one I found particularly interesting, because it references poverty and welfare policy in my home state of Indiana–and because Peter’s analysis is consistent with my own understanding of conditions in the Hoosier state.

In this particular paper, Peter was responding to an article attributing the “success” of welfare reform to the fact that such reforms have made welfare “less appealing.” (I suspect that many recipients would be shocked to discover they were accepting help because they found it “appealing.”) His rejoinder is worth reproducing at some length.

TANF is best viewed on a state-by- state basis and digging deeper suggests that there are limits to Winship’s argument about making welfare “less appealing.” Some states have tried to focus on real “welfare reform” (to the extent they can given the limitations of TANF’s block grant structure and dysfunctional federal requirements), while others use it primarily as a slush fund and have adopted very harsh policies to push families off the welfare rolls. Using a simplistic pre-post approach, one can easily compare states over time based on the harshness of their policies. (Note: This is not the evaluation approach I prefer, but it seems to resonate with conservatives.)

Robert Doar, now at the American Enterprise Institute, says he ran a “model” TANF program in New York – both at the state level and in New York City. (Doar’s bio states: “Before joining the Bloomberg administration, he was commissioner of social services for the state of New York, where he helped to make the state a model for the implementation of welfare reform.”) Doar is proud of New York City’s track record in reducing poverty:

In America’s biggest cities, more and more Americans are now living in poverty. From 2000 to 2013, the poverty rate in America’s 20 largest cities grew by 36 percent, to an average of 22.7 percent. Nationally, the poverty rate has risen too, from 11.3 percent in 2000 to 14.8 percent in 2014.

But there’s one stand-out exception to this phenomenon: New York City.

Over the last decade, New York City’s poverty rate has defied national trends by declining. While New York once suffered one of the highest poverty rates among the country’s large cities, today it boasts one of the lowest…

Indeed, Doar presents data to show that between 2000 and 2013, the percent change in poverty in New York City was minus 0.9 percent – the lowest in the nation among major cities, followed by Los Angeles and San Diego (plus 3.6 and plus 7.5 percent, respectively). At the opposite end of the spectrum, with the largest increases, were Indianapolis (81.5 percent), Charlotte (67 percent), and Detroit (57.9 percent).

Notably, both New York and California (the states with the top three cities) have much more appealing TANF programs than Indiana, North Carolina, and Michigan (the states with the bottom three cities) and they have become relatively more appealing over time. New York and California didn’t eliminate the entitlement (an important component of “welfare reform” for conservatives), they don’t impose full family sanctions or enforce the federal 5-year time limit (California removes the adult’s needs after 48 months but children continue to receive benefits; New York simply continues assistance with state funds.) Both states have among the most generous benefits, paying over $700 a month for a family of three. In contrast, the states with the cities in the bottom three have lower benefits ($272 to $492 a month for a family of three), do impose full-family sanctions and do enforce the federal 5-year limit and two have shorter time limits (24 months in Indiana – for adults – and 48 months in Michigan – for the entire family).

While Indiana, North Carolina and Michigan were “less appealing” in 1996 (and 2000) than both California and New York, they have become much, much less appealing over time. For example, between 1996 and 2014, the TANF-to-poverty ratio (the ratio of families receiving cash assistance per 100 poor families with children) fell from 101 to 65 in California and from 79 to 40 in New York. The declines were much larger in Indiana (61 to 8), North Carolina (74 to 8), and Michigan (88 to 18).15 The maximum benefit for a family of three fell 23 percent in real terms in California and 10 percent in New York; compare that to Indiana (-34 percent), North Carolina (-34 percent), and Michigan (-30 percent). TANF is failing as a safety net everywhere, but much more so in some states than others.

I’ve written before about the United Way of Indiana’s description of ALICE families (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) and the huge gap between what those families need simply in order to survive and the public and private resources available to them.

There’s a lot of faux concern about “welfare dependency” expressed by people who are quite comfortable themselves. What those people worry about is “takers” getting too comfortable with those appealing “handouts”.

Peter the Citizen uses the term properly, to describe people who depend upon social welfare programs in order to survive.

There are many things policymakers could do to decrease that real-world dependency: raise the minimum wage, reinstitute Reagan-era tax brackets, eliminate the ACA in favor of “Medicare for All”…and jettison a self-satisfied ideology that equates poverty with a lack of moral fiber and “middle-class values.”

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