What Kind of Equality?

Yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion on equality. The panel was part of the 10th Annual O’Bannon Institute for Community Service, held at Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington.

Our panel’s charge was very broad: we were supposed to discuss “equality” and consider America’s progress toward achieving it. In addition to me, the panel included a retired Pastor who heads the Bloomington Human Rights Commission, a social worker who founded and runs an organization called “Fair Talk” focused on equal rights for GLBT folks, and an 86-year old former football star who was the first African-American recruited by the NFL.

Beyond sharing stories from our different perspectives, we confronted a question: what do we mean by equality? No two people, after all, are equally smart, equally good-looking, equally talented or hardworking. What sorts of equality can we reasonably expect to achieve?

At the very least, we agreed that all Americans are entitled to equality before the law. Laws that disadvantage people based upon race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—laws that treat people differently simply based upon their identity—cannot be justified. America’s greatest promise has been that our laws treat individuals as individuals, and not as members of a group. As a country, we are making progress toward that goal. The progress is halting, and the culture sometimes lags, but we’re getting there.

That’s the good news. The bad news, as the pastor reminded us, is that inequalities of wealth and power in this country are enormous and growing. The wealthiest Americans not only control a huge percentage of the country’s resources, their wealth also allows them to exercise disproportionate political power. America is in real danger of becoming a plutocracy.

I hasten to assure my readers that there weren’t any socialists on that panel; no one was advocating class warfare or massive redistribution of wealth. We all understand the benefits of market economies, and recognize that inequalities are inevitable in such systems. The problems arise when the inequities become too large, and when they are seen as the product of privilege and status rather than entrepreneurship and/or diligence. It is then that they breed social resentment and create political instability.

America is doing a reasonable job of leveling the legal playing field. But you can’t eat legal equality, you can’t pay the rent with it, and it won’t cure cancer.

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Just the Facts, Ma’am

From the rhetoric routinely employed by politicians trying to curry favor with voters, you’d think Americans were struggling under a massive tax burden. You’d also think service delivery and taxation were unconnected–that we can all have our cake and eat it too. (Just ignore that decaying bridge…and by the way, it might be a good idea to hire a private security guard, seeing as how we can’t afford to hire those extra police officers we need…..)

The next time one of our legislators is crying crocodile tears over our high levels of taxation, you might share this study.

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Polarized Perspectives

When Margaret Thatcher died earlier this week, articles on her legacy reflected the very different political filters of those doing the reflecting. Much as Reagan’s legacy has been distorted by highly selective recollections of his tenure by critics and worshippers alike, the real Thatcher got buried somewhere between “she saved Capitalism” and “she screwed the poor.” Both perspectives begin with a belief that Thatcherism was equivalent to current Republican philosophy, with its insistence on reducing both taxes and spending. However, as Bruce Bartlett noted a few months ago in the New York Times,

Although she cut the top personal income tax rate to 60 percent from 83 percent immediately upon taking office, the basic tax rate was only reduced to 30 percent from 33 percent. And in 1980, the 25 percent lower rate of taxation was eliminated so that 30 percent became the lowest tax rate.

More importantly, Mrs. Thatcher paid for her 1979 tax cut by nearly doubling the value-added tax to 15 percent, from 8 percent. Among those who thought Mrs. Thatcher was making a dreadful mistake was the American economist Arthur Laffer. Writing in The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 20, 1979, he excoriated her for taking with the one hand while giving with the other.

“The Thatcher budget lowers tax rates where they have little economic consequence and raises tax rates where they affect economic activity directly,” he complained.

In the 1982 forward to the British edition of his American best-seller, “Wealth and Poverty,” George Gilder was also highly critical of Mrs. Thatcher for failing to cut either taxes or spending: “The net effect of the Thatcher program has been a substantial increase in taxation on virtually all taxpayers.”

The “fiscal conservatives” who exhalt Reagan are similarly loathe to mention the fact that the Gipper raised taxes. Several times.

In fact, Americans are so polarized that they sanitize and cherry-pick real history–the messy realities in which real people had to operate, make compromises and mistakes, and in which they often championed contradictory policies. The same people who read the bible and the Constitution selectively bring that idiosyncratic approach to history–highlighting that which confirms their pre-existing biases and ignoring inconvenient inconsistencies.

The extent of our contemporary polarization is a matter of some debate. It is certainly true that we have historical precedents for American divisions and our very different world views.(Civil War, anyone?)  But a recent report at the blog Daily Kos is sobering. The site announced that it had computed voting results by Congressional District, and was making that information available to anyone interested in congressional-level analysis.

Perhaps the most notable statistic to emerge from this endeavor is just how few “crossover” districts there now are—that is to say, seats represented by a Democrat in the House but carried by Mitt Romney on the presidential level, and vice versa for Republicans sitting in seats won by Barack Obama. There are just nine of the former variety and 17 of the latter, for 26 crossover seats in total. Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics says that this is the smallest number since 1920, which underscores how polarized elections have become in recent years in the United States.

There’s an old saying to the effect that the victor writes history. It’s hard to say who will write ours, but the odds are that the results will be skewed.

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Red and Blue, Ends and Means

I have posted previously about ends and means, about the fact that the American constitution is a prescription for process. The central premise of our system is a respect for individuals’ right to have different life goals, different ends–what the Greeks called telos. When citizens are expected to differ on fundamental questions of purpose and belief, what is needed is a set of rules governing their common lives, a process making peaceful and respectful coexistence possible.

The Constitution is thus a structure enabling a  “live and let live” philosophy.

This emphasis on process, on means, has been widely acknowledged by political scientists. In the political theory literature, there has been a lively debate on the question whether this emphasis is sufficient to produce “thick” bonds between citizens, but that debate has rested on a shared recognition of the American approach as procedural.  We are, as the saying goes, a nation of laws.

In that context, Rick Perlstein makes a point about today’s political parties that is well worth pondering.

We Americans love to cite the “political spectrum” as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. But left and right today are not opposites. They are different species. It has to do with core principles. To put it abstractly, the right always has in mind a prescriptive vision of its ideal future world—a normative vision. Unlike the left (at least since Karl Marx neglected to include an actual description of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” within the 2,500 pages of Das Kapital), conservatives have always known what the world would look like after their revolution: hearth, home, church, a businessman’s republic. The dominant strain of the American left, on the other hand, certainly since the decline of the socialist left, fetishizes fairness, openness, and diversity. (Liberals have no problem with home, hearth, and church in themselves; they just see them as one viable life-style option among many.) If the stakes for liberals are fair procedures, the stakes for conservatives are last things: either humanity trends toward Grace, or it hurtles toward Armageddon…

For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures—means—is the core of what being “principled” means. For conservatives, fighting for the right outcome—ends—even at the expense of procedural nicety, is what being “principled” means. ..

as the late New Right founding father Paul Weyrich once put it, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Which was pretty damned brazen, considering he was co-founder of an organization called the Moral Majority.

Now, of course, for over a decade now, the brazenness is institutionalized within the very vitals of one of our two political parties. You just elect yourself a Republican attorney general, and he does his level best to squeeze as many minority voters from the roles as he can force the law to allow. And a conservative state legislature, so they can gerrymander the hell out of their state, such that, as a Texas Republican congressional aid close to Tom Delay wrote in a 2003 email, “This has a real national impact that should assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood.” Or you lose the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election but win in the electoral college—then declare a mandate to privatize Social Security, like George Bush did.

Which only makes sense, if you’re trying to save civilization from hurtling toward Armageddon. That’s how conservatives think. To quote one Christian right leader, “We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means…If the method I am using to accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method.

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Words and Meanings

I regularly use this space to take right-wingers to task, but those on the Left deserve similar treatment when they engage in similar behaviors.

Ever since reports that Obama’s budget included a “chained CPI” for Social Security, liberals have been screaming about proposed “cuts” to Social Security. My inbox has been flooded with pleas to sign this or that petition, to call my Senators and Congressional Representatives, and generally to make it known that these “cuts” cannot be justified.

As I understand it, what the President has proposed is changing the metric currently used to calculate Social Security cost of living raises. The CPI index being used has been criticized as an inaccurate indicator, resulting in larger raises than are needed to keep up with a rising cost of living. This change in the yardstick for calculating those raises will result in lower Social Security “bumps” or increases going forward.

That is not a “cut”–at least, not in my vocabulary. It is a recalculation that will result in smaller increases in the future–lower expectations for growth.

Now, I am not an economist, and I don’t play one on TV. I have no independent ability to evaluate arguments about the relative merits of the indexes involved, although several people whose judgment and expertise I respect appear to agree that the current index is inaccurate. If they and the President are wrong, then critics have a perfect right to object to the proposed change on that basis. But advocates of the status quo do themselves no favor by mischaracterizing the proposal and mounting a hysterical assault.

When NRA supporters refuse to consider background checks because that is “really” the first step toward a registry that will then be used in an effort to confiscate all the guns, we rightly accuse them of irrational behavior. When progressives respond to a suggestion to change the way we calculate benefits by characterizing it as a hard-hearted assault on old people and the first step in dismantling the social safety net, we engage in similarly overwrought behavior–and risk being dismissed for the same reason.

Argue for or against the use of the new metric, but leave the hyperbole at home.

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