Rules of the Game

When you teach political science or public administration, you try to explain to students the importance of systems–the rules of the game.

Most Americans watch political campaigns much the same way as they watch football or baseball–as a contest between two (or more) competitors. May the best team win. We recognize that there are rules, that fouls should be punished and not rewarded, but it all seems pretty transparent.

The rules that govern elections aren’t so easily observed, and partisans work hard to rig them. As the Indianapolis Star observed in an editorial this morning,

“state law also has discouraged voter turnout. Indiana’s polls, for example, close at 6 p.m. on Election Day, an earlier cutoff than in many other states. The early close at the polls makes it difficult for many workers, including those with children to drop off or pick up and those with lengthy commutes to work, to show up on Election Day. Indiana also has been slow to adopt innovations such as early voting centers and Election Day voting centers, which eliminate the need to turn out at a specific polling site on a specified day.

Indiana also presents third parties with a higher threshold for ballot access than many other states. The inability to get their candidates on the ballot discourages would-be voters who don’t fit within Democratic or Republican silos.”

This year, Indianapolis voters saw a particularly egregious example of efforts at vote suppression, when the local GOP adamantly refused to authorize satellite voting centers. The rule is that such changes must receive a unanimous vote from the Election Board, and the Republican member consistently blocked the Clerk’s effort to establish convenient polling places. Initially, he argued that setting up satellite sites would be “too expensive.” When a local union offered to pay the (really pretty modest) cost, he still refused–although if he offered a justification for his intransigence, I didn’t hear it.

Coming on the heels of Todd Rokita’s efforts to make voting more difficult for the poor and elderly, by requiring the sort of IDs that most of us privileged folks–who are more likely to vote Republican-already have, it is hard to see this as anything but a continuation of efforts to make voting more difficult for populations that skew Democrat.

The pious justification for the ID requirement was prevention of fraud (although the only documented cases of voter fraud involved absentee ballots, which were not part of the “reform” effort). There is no justification for prevention of satellite voting centers.

As the Star points out, it’s the height of hypocrisy to bemoan Indiana’s low turnout at the same time lawmakers are doing everything possible to keep people from the polls.

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What’s the Matter with Kansas Now?

Last night in class, one of my students asked me if I was aware that Topeka, Kansas had decriminalized domestic violence, to save the cost of prosecution.

She wasn’t hallucinating.

Who was it that decried a society in which people know “the cost of everything and the value of nothing?” How insane has criminal justice policy become when we spend upwards of 40 billion dollars every year on a drug war to (ostensibly) prevent people from harming themselves, but we won’t spend money to prosecute people who harm others?

What do these examples say about our cultural norms?  One possibility: our puritan impulses to insure that our neighbors are behaving “morally” drive policies from blue laws to censorship to alcohol and drug prohibition; while a still-lingering sexism convinces us that a man sometimes has to “assert authority” over his wife? (Never mind that men can also be the victims of domestic violence).

Social priorities really come into focus when money is tight.

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Did Not! Did So!

Ah, budget battles.

This morning’s Star detailed the back and forth political arguments about whether the Ballard Administration actually made the budget cuts the mayor promised during his campaign. Their independent analysis amounted to: who knows? That’s not a criticism of the reporters–it’s a reflection of the games public managers play.

This actually began back during the Goldsmith Administration. In fact, it could argued that the City’s dicey finances actually began there; I know Ballard blamed Peterson because he inherited significant budget problems, but Peterson himself inherited a true “smoke and mirrors” budget from Goldsmith. (That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have done more to fix it.)

Goldsmith’s clever game was to change the way in which the budget was reported from the relatively straightforward system employed during the Hudnut Administration. When you change budget categories, it becomes virtually impossible to compare apples to apples. (He also touted savings from his own exaggerated “estimated growth” figures–as in “we project that expenditures would have reached X if we hadn’t done Y. What good managers we are!)

In this case, Ballard’s folks excluded federal and other grants and some debt service from the budget calculation, and “voila”–they saved money.

I know I’m talking crazy, but what if we focused less on the relative amounts we spend, and more on what we get for our money? What if we focused less on the tax levy (the total amount raised) and more on how fairly we assess property and set rates? What if we rewarded good management rather than providing incentives to cut corners and push higher maintenance costs to the next guy?

What a dreamer I am…..

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A Step in the Right Direction

The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United should have been a wake-up call for those of us who have been concerned over the growing power of corporate America. Corporations have their place–by shielding entrepreneurs from personal liability, they encourage risk-taking and innovation; I have no problem with the corporate form as a useful business mechanism. (Although I do find it ironic that the growth in corporate hegemony tends to be applauded by people who talk a lot about the need for poor people to exercise “personal responsibility.” Corporations were invented to allow people to escape personal responsibility.)

The problem isn’t with the existence of corporate entities, the problem is with confusing these artificial constructs with human beings, and awarding them rights. There’s a reason we call our individual liberties “human rights.” When the Supreme Court essentially ruled that corporations and labor unions could give unlimited amounts to political candidates and causes, and justified that ruling as “free speech,” most observers–certainly this one–considered the decision both ill-considered and extremely dangerous. When the Senate refused to pass a measure requiring disclosure of such contributions, the floodgates seemed permanently open. We are going to see unprecedented sums spent by the 1% to influence the 2012 elections, and distort the electoral process.

The influence of money on our government has been well documented, and the picture isn’t pretty, but I was heartened to see President Obama taking at least a small step toward limiting the wholesale purchase of policy.

It has been reported that the President is drafting an executive order that would require companies pursuing federal contracts to disclose political contributions that have been secret under the Citizen’s United ruling. Despite howls from the usual suspects, this is a modest “good government” measure that does not violate anyone’s free speech rights. If a company wants to do business with government, and receive payment from our tax dollars, we the people have a right to know whether that business has been contributing to lawmakers and/or government officials who will influence those contracting decisions.

It’s not enough–we need to reign in the increasingly common use of obscene amounts of corporate money to gain political advantage. But it’s a start.

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Politics and Policy: A Cautionary Tale

I’m sharing my next column for the IBJ, which expands upon my earlier post, and considers the policy issues that the Litebox blunder illuminate.

How did we get from “Enterprise Zones” to Litebox?

Back in my Hudnut Administration days, I remember enthusiastic discussions about Enterprise Zones–a new tool promoted by then-Congressman Jack Kemp to encourage investment in depressed areas of the city. The idea was to offer tax incentives to businesses who were willing to locate in such areas and hire the unemployed who lived there.

It was a great—if reality-challenged—idea.

It didn’t take long for Carmel and other affluent bedroom communities to begin competing for those employers by offering incentives of their own. I don’t know whether those original Enterprise Zones still exist, but I do know that state and local governments are all falling over themselves to lure companies with ever-more-lavish inducements, courtesy of their taxpayers.

Which brings us to Litebox.

Amid great hoopla, Mayor Ballard and Governor Daniels announced the award of major incentives to Litebox, a company promising to create 1200 new jobs. Its sole proprietor was man who not only turned out to have no history of entrepreneurial or business success, but who also has multiple unpaid tax liens and judgments against him in several states.

The story makes vividly clear how slapdash the City’s vetting process has been, and how politically motivated the decision to announce this “job creation” success was. (Really, in the age of Google, this level of incompetence is incomprehensible.) But the story makes a bigger point, albeit implicitly, about the entire policy of cities “buying” jobs by offering financial incentives to companies that promise to move and/or expand.

The obvious arguments against such efforts are familiar: it puts government in the position of helping some businesses but not others, which troubles those of us who believe in real markets; and it is a zero-sum game overall, since the company that moves from Ohio to Indiana is not creating more jobs–it is simply moving them from one place to another.

But the Litebox fiasco points up another problem with these programs. Even if competent people are running them, they are unlikely to know enough about the technologies and economic realities of very different industries to make truly informed decisions. The same technological and cultural changes that increasingly challenge tech businesses and that make investment decisions risky even for savvy and highly knowledgeable experts, make it virtually impossible for government officials to accurately gauge the viability of tech business deals. (In this case, reporters quoted industry sources who pointed to “ridiculous” assumptions in the Litebox business plan, but in most cases, the miscalculations are more difficult to spot.)

As a recent Indianapolis Star article reported, citing several examples, even companies with sound performance histories and none of the obvious red flags that were ignored in the Litebox example routinely fail to deliver the jobs that are promised.

When you add in the inevitable politics involved–the temptations of cronyism, the huge pressures to score political points, to look like you are delivering on your campaign promises–it’s no wonder that the jobs frequently don’t materialize.

It’s long past time to re-examine these programs and the policy assumptions they’re built on. It was probably inevitable that the use of tax and other incentives would not be limited to truly depressed areas; I was among those who failed to appreciate that inevitability.

Here’s a truly radical suggestion: what if we took the tax dollars that are currently being siphoned off to these favored businesses and used them to create a city that people want to live in? What if we decided to compete not with handouts, but with a superior quality of life?

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