A Bigger Pie

I think it was Mark Twain who said “It isn’t what you don’t know that hurts you–it’s what you know for certain that just ain’t so.”

Political debate these days is awash with “facts” that “just ain’t so.” One of those “facts” is that immigrants take jobs from Americans, and that raising the number of foreign-born people we allow to enter the country legally each year would worsen unemployment. A recent study by the Fiscal Policy Institute tells a very different story.

The Institute looked at incorporation figures and determined that immigrants own 18% of all small businesses in the U.S. In other words, more than one in six small businesses is owned by an immigrant. Those businesses employ an estimated 4.7 million workers, and generate some $776 billion dollars in revenue.

That immigrants gravitate to ownership shouldn’t surprise us. You have to be a risk taker to leave the place of your birth and move to a foreign country. Anti-immigrant attitudes make it more difficult for educated and skilled immigrants to find management and professional positions with American-owned firms. So, disproportionately, immigrants start their own small businesses, and small businesses are far and away the largest generators of employment. Small businesses–not massive corporations–are the real “job creators.”

The notion that immigration slows job growth is rooted in a “zero sum” worldview, the belief that the economy is like a pie. In that view, there is a fixed amount of pie, and if you get a bigger slice, mine will be smaller–if an immigrant gets a job, that’s one job fewer for Americans.

The virtue of capitalism is that it encourages people to bake more pie. And that is precisely what immigrants are doing.

Somehow, I doubt that this evidence will make much difference to those who want to raise the gangplank and keep those “others” out. What we know that “just ain’t so” keeps getting in the way of acting in our own best interests.

Comments

Short Story

A couple of days ago, a good friend (male) confided that he’d gone in for his annual checkup, and his doctor had found prostate cancer. Fortunately, it was very early, and the prognosis for full recovery is excellent. His surgery would be outpatient, and he’d be home the next day.

I commented that this was exactly why those annual exams are so important, especially for those of us getting along in years. He nodded his head, and proceeded to share a story.

He has a friend–a tennis buddy–who skipped those check-ups for three years. When he finally went to the doctor, he also had prostate cancer, but it was already stage four. They could slow it down, and give him an extra year–perhaps two. But that was it.

He’d skipped those physicals because he’d been between jobs, and without health insurance.

With all the talk about “Obamacare” and the focus on costs and mandates and political ideologies, we sometimes forget the consequences of our current system for real people. This man will die many years before he otherwise would. Those are years he won’t spend with his wife, won’t watch his children and grandchildren mature and grow, or play tennis with my friend.

If you don’t care about the human equation, I’ll just point out that these are also years he won’t pay taxes, and that the medical costs of treating him at this stage vastly exceed the costs of curing my friend at an early stage of the disease–prevention and early interventions are far less costly than later treatment.

Sometimes, a story tells the story.

Comments

Michelle Bachmann in Pants

It’s two and a half months until the election.

Anyone who may have been harboring a forlorn hope that Mitt Romney might revert to the persona he wore as Governor of Massachusetts can “fuhgeddaboudit,” as they used to say on Seinfeld. He’s not using that famous Etch-A-Sketch to shake up his newfound Tea Party allegiance; to the contrary, with his choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate, he has signaled his complete capitulation to and identification with the furthest reaches of the Right.

What does Romney’s doubling-down tell us about the choice facing the country—and especially the choice facing those of us who aren’t old white heterosexual males?

Let’s look beyond issues of character and personality. Let’s ignore suspicions that Romney has lacked the savvy to assemble a competent staff. Let’s choke down the bile that we taste when we look at his “team,” composed of George W. Bush’s worst leftovers. Let’s even ignore his proposal to end Medicare.

Let’s just look at the policies that Romney and Ryan (the “Rolls Royce” team) explicitly support.

Perhaps you’ve heard, as I have, that Ryan’s voting record is substantially identical to that of Michelle Bachmann. Allow me to share some of the details of that record.

  • Ryan opposed the DREAM Act–legislation that would have allowed undocumented immigrants brought to the US as young children to remain in the country, and provided them with a path to citizenship. Instead, despite his professed identity as a deficit hawk, he supported spending millions to build a border fence to keep “them” out. (Hint: the fence wasn’t between us and Canada.)
  • In addition to his desire to privatize Social Security and eliminate Medicare, he has proposed to give Medicaid back to the states. This would almost certainly mean an end to the payments that currently keep millions of seniors in nursing homes after they have gone through all their assets and savings.
  • The Ryan budget proposes to gut programs that support neighborhood health clinics, to eliminate most student loans, and to slash funds for elementary and secondary education.
  • Ryan wants to de-fund Planned Parenthood, criminalize abortion, and grant “personhood” to fertilized eggs (a measure that would outlaw most popular forms of birth control). In a particularly egregious vote, he supported a bill allowing hospitals to refuse to perform abortions even when those procedures were necessary to save the life of the mother.
  • Adding insult to injury, Ryan has voted against equal pay for women.
  • On GLBT rights, the story is the same. Ryan opposes same-sex marriage and voted twice for a constitutional amendment prohibiting it. He voted to keep same-sex couples from adopting children in Washington DC. He voted against repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And while the Log Cabin apologists will point out that he once voted for ENDA (the Employee NonDiscrimination Act), he later reneged on his promise to do so again, saying he saw no need for “special” legislation.
  • Mr. “Fiscal Conservative” would abolish taxes on Capital Gains—giving wealthy individuals a windfall—and would recoup the lost revenue by cutting programs that benefit the poor and middle class.
  • Ryan also agrees with Romney that we don’t need to fund Amtrak or PBS (bye-bye, Big Bird…), but we cannot take a penny from the Defense budget, or allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire.

That is what the Rolls Royce team has to offer. It is as mean-spirited and radical a set of proposals as we have seen in my lifetime—not to mention thoroughly unworkable and unrealistic. (When Paul Krugman and David Stockman agree that Ryan’s package of proposals are a “fantasy” and wouldn’t begin to balance the budget even if enacted, that’s a pretty good sign that it isn’t a serious effort.)

So we have a choice: “Mitt the Twit” running with Michelle Bachmann in pants, versus Obama and Biden.

I’m hiding under my bed until it’s all over.

Comments

The Big Con

My husband and I were discussing the Council’s current standoff with the Ballard Administration–a dispute triggered by Ballard’s refusal to share budget information with the Council and other elected officials. That conversation brought back memories from our days in the Hudnut Administration; the then-Controller, Fred Armstrong, made himself available to Councilors, Department heads, the media….pretty much anyone who was interested in the intricacies of the budget. Fred would go on and on, explaining the numbers, funds, sources…

I don’t think anyone understood a word he said. I know I didn’t. It was the classic “bury them in bullshit,” and he was great at it. (He was also an incredibly competent public servant.)

Fred knew that most people don’t understand public finance. Our widespread fiscal ignorance is why Paul Ryan has been taken seriously, despite a budget that David Stockman, among others, has described as a “fantasy” and “devoid of credible math.” (Stockman, for those of you too young to remember, was Ronald Reagan’s very conservative Budget Director.)

Today’s candidates are counting on our ignorance of the most basic axioms of taxation and government revenue. It isn’t just that–as a colleague of mine put it recently–half of them clearly don’t know the difference between a marginal and effective tax rate. It’s that they engage in wishful, magical thinking.

Yesterday, I saw an ad for Mike Pence in which he promised to cut taxes “across the board,” and to establish an office of regulatory affairs that would resist federal regulations and return federal dollars.

I can’t decide if Pence is really that stupid, or he just thinks voters are.

There are legitimate issues around regulation–what is enough, what is too much. Reasonable people can differ over their assessments of particular rules. There is a pretty broad consensus that banking regulations were too lax, and that lack of oversight led to the Great Recession; there are certainly other areas where ham-handed regulatory policies have been distinctly unhelpful. But taking a position that all regulation is bad and must be resisted is insane. What about nursing home regulations that protect grandma from abuse? What about food and drug regulations that keep dog feces out of your beanie-weenies, or water purity standards, or building codes, or….Well, you get the point.

And how about that “cutting taxes across the board” and “sending the money back to the feds” promise?

Just how does our “I wanna be your governor” Pence propose to fund anything Indiana needs? Federal dollars pay for our roads, augment our (increasingly inadequate) police forces, and provide medical care for the indigent. They feed schoolchildren and support special education programs. Federal dollars fund small businesses (yes, it turns out that even the angry guy in the anti-Obama commercial who insists that he and his sons built their business all by themselves had an 800,000 SBA loan). The federal government funds 33% of Indiana’s budget; if we sent that money back and cut taxes, Indiana’s government would come to a screeching halt.

The Ryans and the Pences of this world are counting on our ignorance. They are con men, hustlers secure in their (unfortunately reasonable) belief that voters don’t know where their tax dollars go, don’t recognize when they themselves benefit from government programs, and have no idea how their government works or what it does.

Con artists are successful because they tell us what we want to hear, because they promise us we can have something for nothing. The ugly truth is that the people who fall for the con are the people who want to believe they can get something for nothing.

Pence and Ryan are as reputable as that Nigerian banker who will send you a million dollars if you can just front him a few thousand.

Comments

The Drug Culture

Since Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel, there has been a renewed focus by the chattering classes on the role of “culture” in creating social norms. (Romney attributed the fact that Israel’s economy is more robust than that of the Palestinians to a superior “culture.” It caused quite a stir.)

Culture certainly plays a significant role in all societies, albeit not in the linear and highly simplified fashion Romney implied.  Often, being immersed in the culture as we are, we miss the connections.

I thought about the unappreciated ways in which we reinforce cultural cues yesterday morning, while I was dutifully doing my time on the treadmill. The television was in real-time (no TIVO at the gym!) and one commercial after another implored me to talk to my doctor about [insert name of drug here]. The purple pill, the pill for COPD and the cure for a raft of other initials and acronyms for ailments I don’t have.

There are a lot of appropriate reactions to the onslaught of medical ads with which we are all inundated daily. One of my pet peeves is the amount of money being spent by pharmaceutical companies at the same time they defend charging big bucks for medicines by citing research and development costs. The last numbers I saw suggested that the 5+ billion dollars annually being spent on advertising to consumers actually exceeds those R and D outlays.

But yesterday, it suddenly hit me that the message being conveyed–intentionally or not–isn’t the relatively innocuous (if expensive) “buy my aspirin” but “have a problem? Take a pill.” Thinning hair, low “T”, anxiety, trouble sleeping, gas….you name it, there’s a pill for it. An easy fix for whatever ails you.

These messages overwhelm the other ads, the ones imploring parents to talk to their children about the evils of drugs. How believable are those solemn discussions, when teenagers see their parents and grandparents being medicated and over-medicated? How are they supposed to respect the (highly artificial) line between the “good” pills (legal) and the “bad” drugs (illegal). I did a fair amount of research on drug policy a few years ago, and was astonished to discover that nowhere in the convoluted labyrinth that is drug prohibition is there a definition of what constitutes “abuse,” or an objective distinction between use and abuse, or a bright line between narcotics that are illegal and those that are routinely prescribed.

Here is an experiment anyone can do: turn on your television for an hour, and count the number of commercials for drugs. Watch how those ads portray people before and after they take the product being peddled.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, people were constantly being urged to stop worrying and take a drug called soma. ““You do look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma.” Soma was described as having “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” 

Sounds eerily familiar…..

Comments