Tag Archives: Indiana

A Lot to Cheer About

Indiana proved to be an outlier. Except for the (predicted) victory by Mike Pence–and the fact that Republican extremists will have pretty much total control of Indiana government for at least the next two years–last night was satisfying. And even here, there were bright spots: Mourdock proved that even in Indiana, crazy doesn’t sell. (He should have taken a page from Pence’s book and refused to talk until after the election). Glenda Ritz defeated Tony Bennett, who never learned to play nice with other children. IPS got three new Commissioners who are likely to take the job of improving the schools seriously–and who are unlikely to rubber-stamp Eugene White’s decisions.

The best news was national. I’m still sifting through results, but I’m no longer waiting to exhale. The President won comfortably–a blowout in the electoral vote and a comfortable margin in the popular vote. The Democrats actually increased their margin in the Senate–something that really shouldn’t have happened, given the seats that were in play. And for the first time ever, marriage equality measures won at the ballot box.

It will be a few days until all the details are available, but Republican strategists should have listened to whoever it was who said “demography is destiny.” Or as Lindsay Graham put it a couple of months ago, there aren’t enough old white men to keep the Republican party afloat.

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Questions and Answers

Since Halloween is fast approaching, it seems appropriate to write about something scary. And for scary, little can compare to the Indiana Family Institute’s candidate questionnaire.

It was bad enough looking at the Right to Life questions and Pence and Mourdock’s answers. Both would outlaw abortion with an exception ONLY for the life of the mother. Both support “personhood” legislation that would outlaw most birth control methods.

I thought Right to Life’s questions were scary, but the Indiana Family Institute–which has long supported Pence and which supports him for Governor–has a questionnaire that lays bare a truly terrifying agenda.

Let’s look at their positions on education–if you could still call it “education” after adopting those positions. They want educational choice–defined as “vouchers to send children to any public, private, religious or home school.” (Just ignore that pesky constitution!) They want parents who choose to home school to do so without any new regulations. They want to “redefine” bullying, in order to protect “students who express opposition to the promotion of homosexuality.” (Wouldn’t want to hurt the feelings of those little gay-tormenters they’re raising!) And they want “Academic liberty” for teachers who want to “discuss the problems and weaknesses of evolutionary theory.” (i.e., they want their version of religion taught in science classes.)

Anti-gay bigotry, unsurprisingly, permeates the questionnaire. There are references to the “homosexual agenda.” They want candidates to agree to “standardize” business regulations by overturning local ordinances that protect GLBT people against discrimination in education, employment and housing. They want to pass a Constitutional Amendment limiting marriage to heterosexuals. And of course, they want to protect those little schoolyard bullies.

There are also the more general “morality” issues they want to dictate. They want to prohibit casinos, discontinue state support of the Kinsey Institute (evidently, studying sex is just as immoral as engaging in it) and require dancers in strip clubs to remain 6 feet away from customers at all times.

There’s more, but you get the idea. And next week, there’s a very high probability that we will elect a governor who endorses all of these retrograde positions, and has supported them throughout his entire career in public life. Mike Pence–a governor for the 15th Century!

Now that’s scary!

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Culture War Governor

I see from the morning news that Mike Pence is promising to attack Indiana’s economic woes by focusing like a laser on “protecting marriage.” If the nexus between those things seems a bit…shall we say “attenuated”…he explains that children of intact marriages are less likely to live in poverty.

That’s true enough. The question is whether we elect a governor to address a long-standing social issue with complex causes rooted in social change–social change a Governor is unable to affect (or evidently, in Pence’s case, understand), or whether we elect a chief executive of our state to manage budgets, pave roads, maintain state parks and improve underperforming social service agencies. Those mundane tasks clearly do not interest Mr. Pence.

We all recognize that Pence’s interest in the health of the institution of marriage rests less on his belief that intact families will lead to a better Indiana economy than on his determination to keep GLBT folks from forming those families. If Pence really cared about the health of families, he wouldn’t be waging war against Planned Parenthood, opposing access to contraception, or even more adamantly opposing the Affordable Care Act.  The availability of affordable health care and family planning do have a demonstrable impact on families. Same-sex marriage just as demonstrably does not.

If Pence’s unctuous concern for the state of Hoosier marriages actually extends to the prevalence of divorce, how does he plan to insert the Governor’s office into that issue? Will he make it more difficult for the woman leaving an abusive spouse to exit that relationship? Work toward restrictive divorce policies that keep children in intact, unhappy homes?

There really are public policies that are family-friendly, that support women and children and ameliorate some of the predictable effects of single-parenting. Income supports and social services for impoverished children would make a real difference. SChip has been a godsend to thousands of them. But those aren’t policies Mike Pence has ever supported. In his case, “concern for marriage” is just a euphemism for policies that discriminate against gay people.

If Pence becomes Governor, it is going to be a long four years.

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Fun With Numbers

The Affordable Care Act  maintained existing Medicaid coverage for low income children. Whether or not their parents will have coverage is being left up to the states.
In Indiana, that’s a problem.
As a recent report from the Institute for Working Families explains, right now, Indiana only covers working parents who make up to 24 percent of the poverty line, which comes to $4,581 a year for a family of three. The Medicaid expansion provision in the Act encourages coverage for these low income adults by expanding Medicaid to 133 percent of the poverty line ($25,390 for a family of three).  According to a recent study by the non-partisan Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured–a study which is consistent with Congressional Budget Office’s estimates– 215,803 previously uninsured Hoosiers would have access to care by 2019–if Indiana implements that provision of the Act.
And why wouldn’t we?  The Act provides 100 percent federal funding for the expansion of Medicaid for its first three years, phasing down after that to 90 percent federal funding by 2019.  According to the same study by Kaiser, this will cost Indiana $478 million from 2014-2019 (an average of $79 million each fiscal year).
Interestingly, in a study commissioned by the State of Indiana, the estimated cost (2.58 billion) is approximately 5 times greater than the cost shown by the non-partisan Kaiser study (478 million).
What the Indiana study evidently ignores are the savings involved: Medicaid expansion would save the state substantial amounts we now pay for uncompensated care for the uninsured. We pay those costs two ways: through our tax dollars, and through higher premiums charged to those who are insured. (In fact, according to Kaiser, during the 2014-2020 time period, each insured Hoosier will otherwise pay over $2000 to subsidize the uninsured.)
Let’s try an analogy: let’s say you’ve been taking a bus to work, and you and a couple of friends buy a car. Your share of the car expenses will be 150. a month. The cost to you will thus be 150 per month minus the 40 bucks a month you’ve been spending on the bus. This is a concept called net cost. 
If the state refuses to expand Medicaid, people with incomes between 100 percent and 400 percent of the poverty line will be eligible for subsidies to help them afford coverage in the new health insurance exchanges.  But people below the poverty line won’t receive coverage at all, since the Affordable Care Act assumes they’re covered by Medicaid.
That seems deeply unfair–even immoral.
My question is: why is depriving these people of coverage so important a goal that the Daniels Administration is willing to issue a deceptive analysis of the costs involved?
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The Real State of the State

A former student of mine is a researcher for Indiana’s Institute for Working Families. (I strongly encourage those of you who are interested in evidence about the status of working Hoosiers to visit and like the Institute’s Facebook page.) He was the lead researcher for the Institute’s recently released report, The Status of Working Families 2011. That report, which he shared with me, is a sobering corrective to the political hype that passes for news these days.

The punditocracy has characterized Indiana as an economic “success story,” as a state that weathered the Great Recession better than most. As the Institute’s report makes clear, that rosy evaluation ignores a number of highly inconvenient facts: the state has 231,500 fewer jobs than before the recession (Indiana is among only 17 states that have continued to experience absolute declines in the labor force since the recession began); our median wage for those with a bachelor’s degree is $0.80 lower than the national average (and a mere 14.6% of Hoosiers even have a bachelor’s degree–we rank 42d in the nation); since 2000, the state has seen a 52% increase in poverty.

These and similar statistics in the report are depressing enough, but I think the most significant analysis centers on wages. Although our political rhetoric regularly conflates job creation and wages, they are two very different indicators of economic health, and both sides of that equation are important. We need more jobs, but not just any jobs. We need jobs that pay a living wage.

So how does Indiana stack up?

  • Indiana workers earn 85% of what workers in the rest of the country earn. We rank 41st in the nation.
  • Since 2000, wages have decreased for workers in both the 50th and 10th percentiles (by 3.4% and 10.6% respectively). This cannot be explained by decreased productivity, because productivity increased by over 14% during that same period.
  • Median household income fell by 13.6%–the second largest decrease in the nation. (Michigan was first.)
  • Median family income also decreased dramatically, falling 29.6%
  • Since 2000, Indiana has experienced a 52% increase in poverty.

The current administration believes that low tax rates and decimated unions will attract jobs to our state. Evidence does not support this belief. Businesses relocate to areas offering–among other things–an educated workforce and consumers with the discretionary income to buy their goods. They relocate to environments offering a high quality of life–parks, public transportation, good schools and a reasonable social safety net. These are the very things that suffer when lawmakers care only about slashing taxes and depressing wages.

There’s a reason businesses aren’t moving in droves to Mississippi.

If we continue to starve public education and local government, if we continue to pursue policies that depress wages and make it more difficult for families to escape poverty–if we continue to emulate states like Mississippi–businesses won’t move here, either.

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