Connecting a few more dots

(Cross-posted from the League of Ordinary Gentlemen)

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

There’s a part in The Audacity Of Hope, where writing about race, Obama notes that, rightly or wrongly, a significant swath of white people are exhausted, and repeatedly scolding them (even if you’re right) is unlikely to alter the poverty stats. What we need, Obama argued, is a different strategy, one that connects our practical interests with the practical interests of the broader country–less energy on Don Imus and more on Harlem hospital. This sounds like a surrender, but it’s really a re-affirmation of strategy that goes back to Douglass. The point was never to wash white people, (an arrogant pursuit, at any rate) but to free ourselves. My interest in anti-racism is passing. My interest in black people is essential.

As much as I am sympathetic to Ta-Nehisi’s aversion to focusing on anti-racism, I think he is a little too quick to divorce anti-racism from the broader struggle for the practical interests of black people.  That is, if you were going to translate “practical interests of black people” into a legislative program, it would look pretty similar to the platform liberals have been pushing for the better part of a century: universal health care, robust public education, and generous income supports (EITC, unemployment benefits, welfare, etc.).  And so when Obama says that we should connect the practical issues of African-Americans to those of the country, what he means – really – is the opposite: the practical issues of the country are those of black people; and programs designed to benefit the country at large will also benefit (maybe even disproportionately) black people.

But here is where anti-racism and public policy is directly connected.   It’s not just that racial prejudice makes it incredibly difficult to pass legislation that directly addresses problems within minority communities – no, racial prejudice makes it incredibly difficult to pass legislation which directly benefits the majority of Americans.  And most of us know this.  The easiest way to sink an expansion of the welfare state is by attacking it as a give away to African-Americans (or more recently, Hispanic immigrants).  Political scientists have consistently shown that latent prejudice can be “primed” and channeled into a generalized opposition to almost any kind of social spending.  Indeed, the positive relationship between high levels of “racial conservatism” and opposition to the welfare state is one of the closest things to received wisdom that you can find in political science.

More importantly, however, is the fact that actively calling out a racial appeal can serve to defuse its power.  Tali Mendelberg addresses this with considerable detail in her book The Race Card, but it suffices to say that a large part of the power of racial appeals stems from their subtlety.  No one likes to think of themselves as a racist, or even as someone who harbors racial prejudice, and a skillful racial appeal takes account of this by offering a plausible non-racial narrative.  If someone makes the racial narrative explicit (which isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds), it is possible to defuse the appeal, and make its intended targets inclined to reject it.

Insofar that the “anti-racism project” is important, it’s precisely because stopping (or diminishing the force of) racial appeals is an integral part of building support for greater social spending and greater investment in underprivileged communities.  That’s not to say that we should devote much – or any – of our time to the Don Imus’ and Rush Limbaughs of the world, but that advancing the practical interests of the country, and thus the practical interests of black people, requires us to spend real time and devote real energy to pushing against racially negative language and racially negative narratives.

Money on my mind, ’cause money is what I’m thinkin’

(Cross-posted from the League of Ordinary Gentlemen)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post explaining a few possible ways we could raise revenue, in light of the – as of yet accounted for – long-term structural deficits in the Obama budget.  Somewhere in the post, I kind of casually dismissed the idea that we could rein in deficits by cutting spending.  I was criticized a little in the comments, but I thought – and still think – that I had good reason for dismissing the possibility of spending cuts: it’s simply a political non-starter.  And as Bruce Bartlett explains, this probably won’t change any time soon:

Direct presidential control over spending is extremely limited. By law, he must spend every dollar appropriated by Congress. And presidents have no control at all over three-fifths of the budget devoted to interest on the debt and entitlement programs–those like Medicare for which spending is automatic. Even Congress can’t reduce spending for entitlements unless it changes the law governing eligibility and programmatic operations. In other words, Congress can’t just appropriate less money to Medicare. It doesn’t work that way.

Even if the president’s party controls Congress by a wide margin–as is the case today–getting agreement even on popular measures, such as expanding health coverage, is very, very difficult, as we are seeing. One reason for this is that the Constitution gives the minority party influence disproportionate to its numbers in the Senate. Thus even though Republicans only have 40 seats, they have been very successful in blocking Obama’s health care reform initiative.

How much more strongly do you suppose 40 Senate Democrats would fight a Republican effort to massively cut spending if party control were reversed? What is the likelihood that every Republican would stand in unity for highly unpopular spending cuts that threaten the health and well being of millions of Americans? Just look at the so-called Blue Dog Democrats who are making life difficult for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi despite having a 78-seat majority. There undoubtedly would be an equally large group of Red Dog Republicans fighting every specific budget cut no matter how small.

I’ve made this point a hundred times before, but it’s worth repeating: ultimately, we are going to have to face up to the fact that the only way to put this country on a sustainable fiscal standing is by having more, and higher, taxes.

Few people actually care about partisanship

(Cross-posted from the League of Ordinary Gentlemen)

Unlike quite a few of my liberal fellow-travelers, I think Megan McArdle is a pretty decent econ-blogger.  That said, she tends to stumble a little bit when it comes to political prognostication:

I now put the chances of a substantial health care bill passing at 75%, and the chances of the Democrats losing the house in 2010 at about 66%. [...]

I think that ramming through the bill on a party line vote makes it very likely that the Democrats will lose the house in 2010; the American public doesn’t like uniparty votes, especially on something this controversial.  A lot of liberals have gotten angry at me for saying this, but it’s not a normative statement; it’s an observation.  IF the Republicans had been willing to push forward on a controversial bill with no Democratic cover, we’d have private social security accounts right now.  But they weren’t, for a reason.

Megan’s right to say that the American people don’t particularly like party-line votes (which is why Obama found success railing against them and other forms of “partisan excess”), but she’s wrong to think that this has any bearing on the public’s electoral preferences.  For the most part, voters are completely uninterested in the details of legislative action; in the eyes of most voters, how something is passed matters far less than whether something is passed.  That is, voters regularly express their preference for bipartisan legislation, but in practice, they could care less about who is responsible for what.  You can see this in how voters apportion blame/success for failed/successful policies: that the Iraq War was a thoroughly bipartisan enterprise had absolutely no bearing on the electoral consequences of the war.  The war was started by a Republican president, and as such, voters hold the Republican Party responsible for its failures.  Likewise, welfare reform was a political winner for Democrats despite the fact that it was largely a Republican initative.

If Democrats ram a health care bill through Congress, I really doubt that it will have any impact on their electoral fortunes, especially if the bill is successful in the short-term.  In that case, any concerns about partisanship will be eclipsed by the fact that Americans really really want health care reform.  Insofar that accusations of partisanship can ever be effective, it’s when the party in question is already unpopular.  Voters will readily accept excessive partisanship as an explanation for failed policies, even if their original dissatisfaction had more to do with the failed policies than it did with any concerns over partisanship (see: Obama 2008).

Soft bigotry, meet low expectations

(Cross-posted from the League of Ordinary Gentlemen)

After I read Ross Douthat’s column this morning, I tweeted that I was nominally on board with his attempt to massage George W. Bush’s reputation.

Three hours, two cups of coffee, and a nice helping of sense later, I think I can safely say that my original assessment was a little…off.  First, here’s Douthat in his own words:

America has had its share of disastrous chief executives. But few have gone as far as Bush did in trying to repair their worst mistakes. Those mistakes were the Iraq war — both the decision to invade and the conduct of the occupation — and the irrational exuberance that stoked the housing bubble. The repairs were the surge, undertaken at a time when the political class was ready to abandon Iraq to the furies, and last fall’s unprecedented economic bailout.

Both fixes remain controversial. But for the moment, both look like the sort of disaster-averting interventions for which presidents get canonized. It’s just that in Bush’s case, the disasters he averted were created on his watch. [...]

And perhaps his best decisions, on the surge and the bailout, were made from the bunker of a seemingly-ruined presidency — when his approval ratings had bottomed out, his credibility was exhausted and his allies had abandoned him.

This is not a blueprint that future presidents will want to follow. But the next time an Oval Office occupant sees his popularity dissolve and his ambitions turn to dust, he can take comfort from Bush’s example. It suggests that it’s possible to become a good president even — or especially — when you can no longer hope to be a great one.

I’m not sure how much of this is the fault of the medium rather than the messenger, but I don’t think Douthat quite grasps the gravity of President Bush’s mistakes.  The Iraq War wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill piece of unfortunate, but easily corrected, policy.  It was – and is – a strategic and humanitarian disaster of the highest order.  Over the course of six years, the United States has squandered trillions of dollars, destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and done almost irreparable damage to Iraq’s social fabric.  In retrospect, the surge was a welcome breath of pragmatism from the Bush administration, but even with that (limited) success in mind, it’s incredibly difficult to say that President Bush “fixed” anything.

The same goes for the financial crisis.  While there’s plenty of blame to go around for the collapse of the housing market and subsequent collapse of the financial system, it’s fair to say that the Bush administration deserves a fair amount of blame for stoking the “irrational exuberance” that in turn stoked the housing bubble.  What’s more, the twin collapses have yielded a tremendous amount of suffering, especially among the poor and working-class.  Since the recession officially began in December 2007, the country has had a net loss of about 5 percent of its non-farm payroll, the brunt of that borne by the most economically insecure members of our society.  The bailouts and TARP were certainly good moves by the administration, and should be recognized as such despite their flaws, but again, to say that those make up for the initial failures is a bit of a stretch.

And I guess that’s my main complaint with Douthat’s column.  To borrow a phrase from President Bush, what Douthat has written is a classic example of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”  Saying that we should applaud President Bush for taking steps to salvage his disastrous presidency is like praising a roommate for cleaning up a bit after trashing the apartment.  Not only should the place never have been trashed to begin with, but cleaning up after oneself is a matter of course and not particularly praiseworthy.

Update: I left out a pretty critical part of the Douthat column.

links for 2009-09-21

• The Week Magazine – News reviews and opinion, arts, entertainment & political cartoons
  "In short, even when democracy "works," it does not necessarily provide the benefits that proponents of democracy promise—which is one more reason Washington should simply remove democratization from its list of foreign policy priorities."
• Op-Ed Columnist – Reform or Bust – NYTimes.com
  "It’s not just that taking a populist stance on bankers’ pay is good politics — although it is: the administration has suffered more than it seems to realize from the perception that it’s giving taxpayers’ hard-earned money away to Wall Street, and it should welcome the chance to portray the G.O.P. as the party of obscene bonuses.

  Equally important, in this case populism is good economics. Indeed, you can make the case that reforming bankers’ compensation is the single best thing we can do to prevent another financial crisis a few years down the road.

  It’s time for the president to realize that sometimes populism, especially populism that makes bankers angry, is exactly what the economy needs."

links for 2009-09-20

• Analysis: You Have No Idea What Health Costs – washingtonpost.com
  "Imagine if people who touched a hot stove felt only a small fraction of the pain from the burn. That's pretty much what's happening in our health-care system. It hurts enough that we would prefer it to stop, but the urgency is lost.

  That's the dilemma for Washington wonks trying to fix this mess: They look at the numbers and see health-care costs crushing our economy, overwhelming our government, swallowing our wages. But the public isn't feeling it. Virtually no one cuts a $13,375 check for health care. Most pay 27 percent of it, or even less. The surest way to cut health-care spending would be to make people shoulder more of the burden directly, as opposed to hiding it in taxes and lost wages. But that's about as popular as a puppy pot roast."

  (tags: economics politics healthcare)

links for 2009-09-18

• Psychology of poverty and temptation – Chris Blattman
  "Abhijit Banerjee presented a new paper here yesterday, written with MIT colleague Sendhil Mullainathan. They look at a number of seemingly unusual behaviors by the very poor–from exorbitant rates of short-term borrowing to the low take-up of small, high-return investments. Impatience cannot explain the patterns, they say. The impatience approach also requires the poor think differently than the rest of the population.

  Another view: we’re all impulsive and impatient in the same way, but over a narrow range of goods that are quickly and cheaply satisfied. If you’re poor, these temptations are a big fraction of your income. If you’re even somewhat wealthy, they are not. Temptations are declining in income."

links for 2009-09-17

• Eunomia » If Sports Ruled The World
  "If sports ruled the world, as Henninger’s title reads, people who openly defy and violate the Geneva Conventions would be hauled before international tribunals and sentenced to many years in prison, and their apologists in the press would be hounded from decent society as the enablers of criminality that they are. As we all know, this has not happened and will not be happening, in part because of people like Henninger, who pretend to decry chaos and rule-breaking while regularly endorsing it in practice when it is done in the name of anti-terrorism and security."

links for 2009-09-16

• Why Small-Government Proponents Champion Medicare – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com
  "If the tax system is wildly wasteful and public services are mediocre, then there will be little public enthusiasm for expanding the size of the state. Can this explain why some advocates of limited government have become the archdefenders of Medicare’s largess? After all, if health care stays enormously expensive, then this will surely limit Americans’ appetite for expanding the entitlement to health care."
  (tags: economics policy taxation)

Our Three Party Democracy

(cross-posted from the League of Ordinary Gentlemen)

Creepy admiration for China’s authoritarian government aside, the main point of Tom Friedman’s most recent New York Times op-ed is actually pretty sound: the United States has become something of a neutered one-party democracy.  That is, for those interested in governing – at least on the national level – the Democratic Party really is the only game in town, as the conservative movement’s staunchly anti-government approach has left us with a Republican Party as hyper-ideological as it is lacking in policy expertise.  But because our political institutions are designed around consensus, this makes it incredibly difficult for a single party – even one with clear majority support – to make an enact policy, as consensus requires a good-faith governing partner, which the Democrats simply don’t have.  Of course, this is made all the more problematic by the fact that the nation is facing challenges – nuclear proliferation, climate change, fiscal unsustainability – which require much broader action than what our institutions are actually capable of.

The only thing I’d add to Friedman’s analysis is Chris’ observation – made in the comments – that it is a little inaccurate to describe the Democratic Party as singular or unified in any ideological sense.  In reality, or at least as far as congressional Democrats are concerned, the Democratic Party is more of a loose coalition between a broadly center-left party (based in the Northeast and the West Coast) and a broadly center-right party (based in the Rust Belt, and rural areas throughout the West, Midwest, and the South).  For liberals, this isn’t particularly good.  Under a functional legislative system, where majority rule was given deference, this wouldn’t pose too much of a problem; the center-left party could rely on the center-right party to help craft and pass broadly acceptable legislation (while the right-wing party languished in irrelevance).  The way it stands however, the right-wing party has pretty significant veto power over nearly every piece of legislation, which effectively means that any given piece of progressive legislation has to go through two conservative filters.

To take it back to Friedman’s point though, the fact of our tri-party legislature acts as yet another obstacle to one-party governing, since there simply isn’t enough ideological cohesion and group loyalty within the Democratic Party to pass anything approaching ambitious legislation.  The real solution, of course, is a complete restructuring of our legislature into something approaching a Westminster-style parliamentary system, with multiple member districts and executive branch drawn largely from the legislature.  However, since that is also incredibly unlikely, we’ll probably have to look for other ways to make Congress more responsive to the majority party (like eliminating the filibuster, or revamping the committee system!).