May 29, 2012
Why Politicians Lie — Redux

I’m off again for a while, meaning I won’t have access to a computer for a few days. So, another blast from the past, in honor of the forthcoming campaign … from July 2011.

———————

I know, I know: you’re thinking politicians lie as a defect of character. They lie because they’re liars. So why bother to discuss it?

I want to suggest that there’s a different, more persuasive account for why politicians lie: They lie because we make them lie. They lie because when they lie, we reward—meaning vote for—them. And when they don’t lie, we punish them—by voting for the other candidate—who, of course, lied to us.

My point can be made in a single, dramatic example, although I am sure that many will resist. In his Democratic presidential nomination acceptance address in 1984, Walter Mondale famously said: “Let’s tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

Walter Mondale went on to lose to Ronald Reagan in the greatest electoral college defeat of all time, 525-13.  After his reelection, Ronald Reagan raised taxes multiple times, including a massive shift in tax burden from corporations to individuals as a consequence of the 1986 tax reform act.

Ronald Reagan is considered an icon, even a saint, by many Americans. Walter Mondale became a political punchline and the symbol of a failed Democratic Party.

I know that many will now be saying, “but this is only one case!” Well, sure. But I only have so much time. So let me offer a shot across the bow for cutting off some lines of attack on my argument: before telling me I’m wrong, name for me a recent US politician who has told the American people something hard and unpleasant and then won office. Especially a presidential candidate.

Elections are not a contest between principled persons who say what they believe regardless of the consequences—at least they’re not for the winning candidates. They are contests for public support in which everything Candidate A says that alienates or offends the voters is a leverage point through which Candidate B can try to gain support. In the end, politicians have a choice: say the things voters want to hear and improve their chances of winning, or risk losing by saying things that might be true but that voters don’t want to hear.

We get the politics we demand. We demand being lied to. So we get lied to. The fault, Cassius told Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. The sooner Americans accept this, the better politics they will have.

1:13pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPUuPyMMul_d
(Notes: 85)
  
Filed under: 2012 presidential election lies American national politics american political culture 
May 17, 2012
Sunlight is the best disinfectant

So now comes the news that the owner of the Chicago Cubs has been pitched the idea of creating an anti-Obama ad campaign focusing on Jeremiah Wright — the minister at Obama’s former church who became controversial in the 2008 presidential campaign for exclaiming, “God Bless America? God Damn America!” You can read a report about it here. The notion is to spend $10 million during the Democratic convention to link Obama to Wright, concluding that Wright implanted terrible ideas about America in Obama’s brain, and thus that Obama can’t be trusted to be President as a result.

I don’t want to talk about the inherent inanity of this idea: the idea that Obama is a dangerous radical might have worked before he had been President of the United States for four years, after all, but it is unlikely to change any minds AFTER he’s been president for four years. Likewise, I don’t really want to talk about the racism embedded in this attack: others will, and the “black other” who must be controlled by whites is an old theme in American political life dating back into the slavery era (a point I have discussed before). And I don’t even want to talk about the way this issue demonstrates the outsized influence of SuperPACs in this election: really? One guy can just dump $10 million into an election and we’re okay with that? Really?

No: I want to talk about transparency. See, as disgusting as I think this plan is, I am thrilled to death that I KNOW ABOUT IT AT ALL. Just by knowing whose money it is, and what goals are behind, I can assess whether I find the message credible. I can put the ad in a context from which I can make a judgment. And that’s just wonderful.

One of the worst things about Citizens United, and about American campaign finance law more generally, is that it makes it pretty easy to hide who you are and what you want from the public at large. I can know what a person or donor wants — or at least I can guess. But what does “Americans for a great America” want? What does the “Better America” foundation want?

Alas, Citizens United and current Federal Election Commission inaction make it all too easy to hide interests behind happy labels. Who can be against a group (I just made up) called “Puppies are great!”? (Or “GET ALL THESE DAMN CAT PHOTOS OFF THE INTERNET” for that matter!?)

As a consequence, I don’t know what the people behind these groups want. I can’t make an informed judgment about them — or the candidates and causes they support.

So I’d like make a modest proposal. Eliminate all campaign contribution limits. They’re essentially a joke anyway. Instead, go for 100% transparency. If you create or give money to a SuperPAC or associated organization, you have to declare who you are. That’s all. You have to cite, by name, every donor and list the amount they gave.

That sounds like a pretty good deal to me: you get to give as much as you want. I get to know who you are.

And if you’re afraid to tell me who you are because you are giving to a cause or a candidate you are embarrassed by, well then let me offer you a piece of advice: don’t give the contribution.

Sunshine, they say, is the best disinfectant.

9:09am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPUuPyLeX_ZB
(Notes: 55)
  
Filed under: 2012 presidential election campaign finance law citizens united SuperPAC American national politics 
May 8, 2012
Hoping For Third

So a few days ago jasencomstock asked me a question to the effect of, “why do so many people like third parties so much”?

The context of his question derived from a series of queries I answered about the prospects of a third party emerging in the United States any time soon. In each case I noted I did not think a credible third party was going to arise in the near future, and explained why. But people kept asking.

So I kept thinking. Not about third parties—I stand by my analysis of why third parties aren’t on the way in. You can see those posts here, here and here. Rather, I kept thinking about the question of why so many people — NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman is perhaps the most famous of them all — want a third party so badly.

Two reasons pop out. First is simple political fantasy. People wish to believe that in a profoundly divided electorate, where large percentages of the population disagree about both WHAT is wrong and HOW to fix it, that someone somewhere has a magic formula that can bridge all the complexity and just make American politics work. The problem with American political life, then, isn’t structural, the result of people pursuing what they understand is their self interest at all costs. Instead, it’s technical: if only “they” would stop dividing us, we would all come together and do the right thing for America.

The second is laziness. What I mean by this is that hoping for a third party is in some ways the political equivalent of punting on third down: rather than get down and fight, one declares one’s prospects hopeless and waits for a new chance to play. Notably, almost no one calling for a new team actually wants to go to the trouble of creating it … they just want it to appear so they can join it. Or at least like its Facebook page. 

The hard truth is that politics in democracies almost always reflect the social and political character of the nation being governed. We are a divided nation. We have political institutions that were designed from their inception to be inefficient and mostly ineffective. We have lost a willingness to compromise and to imagine a tomorrow that is worth shared sacrifice today. The combination is brutal. And no third party is going to make it all go away.

12:29pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPUuPyL6atjo
(Notes: 39)
  
Filed under: third parties American national politics american political culture divided government 
May 7, 2012
Social Welfare and the Life Lottery, or what Mitt Romney Doesn’t Seem To Understand

So it turns out I have really bad eyes. Staggeringly bad. I see double. I’m far-sighted. I’ve worn bifocals since I was six; I have virtually no depth perception. Basically, while each of my eyes works pretty well on its own, they don’t work well together. Which, it turns out, is a problem. I have had an optometrist tell me my eyes are “interesting” all while explaining that I’ve “done really well for someone with eyes like mine.” 

As it happens, my optometrist was right: whatever the state of my eyes I have done pretty well. I am economically productive and professionally successful. I have written or co-written six books and numerous articles and book chapters. (Number seven will be out this summer.) This blog is about to pass its 10,000th follower. I have managed to travel around much of the world, at least reaching Melbourne and Istanbul. My family is healthy and happy … most of the time.

Several things have combined to make all this possible. I worked hard, for example. I made good choices. I deserve some of the credit, and no doubt some of the blame, for how my life turned out.

But only some of it. After all, hard work is hardly the whole story of my life’s successes. I am, for example, the beneficiary of 20th and 21st century medical science. No optometry, no ridiculous prescription glasses. No glasses, no life—at least not a life even close to the one I have built for myself.

And hard work and glasses wouldn’t have done it barring an additional factor: I won the life lottery. What I mean by this is that my parents were themselves glasses wearers and were sensitive to the importance of glasses in their own lives. More, they were middle class and thus capable of buying me glasses as my prescription changed and I grew. 

I have often thought just how different my life would be without all three of these forces coming together. More particularly, I have thought: “what if my parents had not been able to afford new glasses for me when I needed them? what if they simply hadn’t thought it important? how different would my life be, since it is a life entirely dependent on glasses?”

In other words, what if I hadn’t won the life lottery?

Thinking about this question is evocative of what the philosopher John Rawls referred to as the “veil of ignorance” when thinking about things like social welfare programs. He asked us to imagine that we were designing a future social order … but that we were designing it without any knowledge of what our place would be within that future order. In other words, we would not know if we would be well off or bad off. What kind of society would we create then?

Obviously, we can’t start a new society tabula rosa. It’s not at all clear we should. But I have to believe that there are lots of people out there whose lives might have been more productive and expansive than they currently are had they simply done better in the life lottery—had they simply had better access to things like eyeglasses than they ultimately had.

In the end, this is why I support the basics of the social welfare state. It is absurd to decide as a matter of state policy that one’s opportunities in life ought to be limited simply because one’s ability to access basic healthcare is constrained by the limitations of economic class. We are, as a practical matter, telling poorer versions of, well, me, that we as a society have decided not to support their success because it might cost us a little bit of money. 

Of course, I can already hear a conservative counter-reaction. In the background I hear the cries, “just who will pay for the glasses?,” and, “it’s the family’s responsibility!”

That the family ought to be responsible is a point easily dismissed: some can’t afford to, and some don’t want to. So that cry is little more than noise. As for the “who will pay?” question, let me remind you of the notion of economic investment: pay today to gain tomorrow. Or, to do it in the form of a thought experiment: which scenario is likely to generate more success (and more income) for a society? A half-blind person who has skills but can’t develop them because he or she can barely see? Or a person who can see who can develop their skills and talents across an array of social and economic arenas?

I just can’t get over the sense that there are other people out there who have eyes as “interesting” as mine, but whose parents couldn’t or wouldn’t get them the eyecare (or other basic care) they needed. So society should—for its own sake.

3:14pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPUuPyL3DatG
(Notes: 76)
  
Filed under: social welfare policy welfare American national politics 
April 28, 2012
A Quick College Loan Question

How in the world can interest rates on college loans be scheduled to go up to 6.8%?

We borrow the money at basically O%. It’s a no-cost thing to continue to extend loans at 3.4%. My guess is the “cost” of the reduced rate (which, in the ever-delightful game of “screw you and your coalition” politics that so dominates Washington, has caused the Republican-controlled House to “pay” for continuing the lower rates by cutting health services for poor women) is really just the “cost” of losing the payments on loans offered at 6.8% rather than 3.4%.

So the “cost” you’re hearing about is the “cost” of future revenues the government won’t collect from charging higher interest rates on college loans.

Ah, friends: accountants are important. They are also dangerous!

9:34am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPUuPyKT_D2u
(Notes: 40)
  
Filed under: college loans American national politics partisanship 
April 21, 2012
Women’s Work

So as the Ann Romney v Hilary Rosen “debate” continues, and as the “Mitt is cruel to dogs while Obama eats dogs” inanity occupies our attention during this silly season of politicsless politics and a campaignless campaign, I find myself struck by the language that suffuses the issue of women in the workforce. In particular, I am struck by the use of the word “choice” in describing how and why Ann Romney did not enter the paid work force, while many other women do.

Several things hit me about this—most of them wrapped up in the issues that have been addressed in numerous blogs and comments over the days since the Romney-Rosen kerfuffle broke out. But one dimension of the issue I haven’t seen addressed is this: no one ever thinks about men’s work as a “choice.”

Hang with me here: don’t flame me yet. What I mean by this is: it never, ever occurred to me at any point in my male, middle class American life that I was supposed to anything other than get a job and work for the rest of my life outside the home (at least until/if retirement). Instead, the only question was: what job would I get? Fortunately, by a process of experimentation and hard work, I ended up in a job for which I am well-fitted, fairly happy, and in which I have a remarkable degree of freedom and security. But the underlying question was “what job will I get?,” not “will I work?”.

What strikes me about this is the assumptions embedded in the notion that women “choose” to work. That notion rests on a very ancient attitude: that women live in the home in which they are raised until they get married, at which point in time they are cared for by their husbands. Work is “chosen” only in the sense that a woman might work for a while before her marriage, or before she has children, but the underlying assumption is that she works until marriage or children and then either quits or “chooses” to work.

More recently, of course, society has acknowledged that many women are raising children or otherwise living on their own—something that has always been true but not publicly admitted. Thus many women “have” to work. But again, the logic is “have” or “choose”: women wouldn’t or shouldn’t work, and only do so because some external factor “makes” them.

What is missing from this discourse is the sense that women might work because they want to: because they have skills and talents that can only be expressed and developed in exchange with colleagues and professionals. Work outside the home is, for such women, an expression of their identity. It is as much who they are as it is who I am.

It’s time to stop talking about women “choosing” to work or “needing” to work. It’s time to talk about how work outside the home is part of life, just as work inside it is. That’s what a discourse of equality looks like.

11:04am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPUuPyK1fGTs
(Notes: 91)
  
Filed under: Ann Romney Hilary Rosen American national politics 2012 presidential election american political culture women's rights work 
April 16, 2012
Taxmaggedon: January 1, 2013

People should know this. From David Leonhardt, New York Times

—————-

ON Jan. 1 of next year, the federal tax bill for a typical middle-class household — making in the neighborhood of $50,000 — is scheduled to rise by about $1,750. This increase, which would come from the expiration of both the Bush tax cuts and the Obama stimulus, would follow a decade of little to no income growth for many people. As a result, inflation-adjusted, after-tax income for the median household could fall next year to its 1998 level, in spite of the continuing economic recovery.

The middle-class tax increase is just the beginning of budget changes set to take effect at the start of 2013. Poor families would see their taxes rise somewhat, too. Total federal taxes for top-earning families would rise by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Spending cuts would also take effect, squeezing domestic programs — education, transportation, scientific research — and the military.

All in all, the end of 2012 will be unlike any other time in memory for the federal government.

The tax increases and spending cuts are the result of Washington’s having previously kicked the can down the road, to use a phrase that is popular here. Rather than pass a plan to cut the deficit, policy makers have put off tough decisions. With the Bush tax cuts, lawmakers deliberately made them temporary, to avoid running afoul of budget rules intended to hold down the deficit.

Not surprisingly, leaders of both parties now say they are opposed to letting the changes happen on Jan. 1. Economists are also frightened of what such a sharp shift in government policy might do to a still fragile economy. Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, has referred to the various expirations as “a massive fiscal cliff.” Congressional aides, quoted in The Washington Post,call it “taxmageddon.”

The problem, as always, is that the two parties cannot agree on what changes should take place. The combination — of political stalemate and potential economic cataclysm — will create an extraordinary period after this year’s election. A lame-duck Congress and Mr. Obama, either re-elected or defeated, will have less than two months to agree on an alternative plan, or the tax increases and spending cuts will take effect….

Optimists — yes, there are still some — say that the prospect of the tax hikes and cuts could finally nudge the two parties to the kind of deficit solution that many experts prefer. It involves sweeping tax reform that would close loopholes, reduce marginal rates, simplify the tax code and perhaps even lift long-term economic growth. Such tax reform has always been easy to put off, but the compromises it requires may end up being easier to accept than taxmageddon.

YET there is still a basic contradiction with which most politicians and voters have yet to grapple, the same contradiction that has helped create this strange situation in the first place. Talking in exasperated tones about the importance of fiscal responsibility is easy. Cutting the deficit is hard, because it involves unpopular tax increases or unpopular spending cuts — and huge cuts if the solution involves only spending, not taxes, as many Republicans urge.

Either way, the changes will affect the vast majority of Americans, given that the deficit reflects a basic disconnect between the government we have and the taxes we are willing to pay. Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare may become less generous. The Pentagon may no longer be able to get just about whatever it wants. Taxes may have to rise from their recent levels, which have been lower, as a share of the economy, than at any point in 60 years. That could mean higher rates. Or, if tax reform actually happens, it could mean smaller tax breaks for health care, housing and retirement savings.

The looming end of billions of dollars in popular government benefits may seem ridiculous. And the fact that Washington keeps delaying a serious deficit plan until another day may seem equally ridiculous. But they make perfect sense in a country where hypothetical solutions are a lot more popular than any actual ones.

Nothing highlights the paradox quite like tax reform.

11:43am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPUuPyJmXU3q
(Notes: 17)
  
Filed under: taxes tax games 2012 presidential election American national politics tax reform 
April 12, 2012
An Historical Comment on Health Care Benefits

As discussion of the Obama health care law heats up again, now that the primary seems decided for the Republicans, I thought I’d throw out a piece of information that not a lot of people appear to know, but that seems relevant to the issue:

Have you ever wondered why you get health care benefits from your employer, rather than buying them on your own (like you do your house and your car) or getting them as part of a national package of benefits (like pretty much every industrial/postindustrial democracy other than the United States)? It turns out the answer is an accident of history.

Prior to WWII, basically no one had a health care benefit plan in America. If you got sick, you paid your bill out of your savings and earnings. In rural areas, doctors took barter—the infamous chicken, for example. After all, there wasn’t all that much doctors and hospitals could do for you in the days before penicillin, and you weren’t going to linger for weeks and months in a hospital before you died. Paying for care was “manageable,” to use that loaded term.

That changed during WWII. As men got drafted in their millions, vast labor shortages broke out across the nation—at exactly the time labor needs increased to produce the weapons of war. In part, the labor shortage was met by the infusion of women into the paid workforce, but regardless of women’s contributions to the labor pool, labor shortages were endemic throughout the war.

Elementary economic theory notes that anything scarce tends to go up in price; the same is true for labor. When labor is scarce, employers seeking workers raise their salary offerings to attract labor from other jobs.

However, in WWII wages were frozen. Employers couldn’t compete for labor with salaries. So they competed on benefits—including, notably, health care benefits. They couldn’t pay you more directly, so they gave you more indirectly.

The principle of employer-provided health care benefits stuck after WWII. Unions negotiated generous packages; white collar workers wanted at least as much; and the modern system of employer-provided health care benefits became the established norm—just a few decades after a time when no one would have had any health care benefits at all.

Note that this was never the case in the rest of the industrial/post-industrial democracies.They decided to make national health care benefits part of their national mission after WWII because just as they had borne the suffering of the war together, they believed it was right to provide care in a collective, state-centric way. Hence they built national, non-profit health care systems, not employer-derived, for-profit systems.

In the US, of course, we now live in a world where there is so much health care, and that health care is so expensive, that we are frightened of living as my grandparents basically did, and my great-grandparents certainly did: paying for our own medical care on an as-needed, fee-for-service basis. Instead, as an accident of history, we are all just a job loss or poor job opportunity away from being without good insurance for health care. Which ought to scare pretty much, well, everyone in the United States.

2:39pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPUuPyJYKkl3
(Notes: 53)
  
Filed under: Health Care health care costs American national politics American political development Welfare State national health care 
April 9, 2012
Silly Libertarians

Well, it finally happened: I finally read a libertarian post so silly I couldn’t resist a response.

To simplify, the libertarian in question claimed that no decision was legitimate unless he had consented to it, and that no prior decision could compel his compliance as he had not consented to it.

There are at least three profound things wrong with this argument: it’s wrong on its face; it’s wrong on social institutions; and it has no promise for building a real world social order. Let me take each in turn.

First, as to the premise: it’s just wrong. For example, I have an 8 1/2 month old son, and I make decisions for him all the time that are entirely legitimate and (probably) appropriate. Likewise, we generally don’t advocate letting crazy people kill themselves, or allowing gunmen to walk into crowded rooms and open fire. There are all kinds of circumstances in which one legitimately has one’s right to make a specific decision taken away, and in which one’s freedom to consent to an act (such as your incarceration) is denied. A blanket statement “never” is, well, silly.

Now, anticipating the objection that what the person meant to say—but didn’t, even in a follow up post—was that all RATIONAL people should have absolute freedom of choice, let me state that the politics of determining who is and isn’t “rational” are fraught with bias. Ask any woman in history who was denied the right to vote on the grounds that they were “emotional” not “rational,” or any ex-slave who was deemed (by their former masters) to be too “child-like” to be a full member of society. “Rational” is a lovely word. It’s also a tool of repression. 

Second, as to the way social institutions work, the simple fact is that by the time my son is of an age where he might choose to be, god help us, a libertarian, he will have benefitted from a vast array of social goods and services that depended on inter-generational commitments of time and labor and money. He will have drunk, bathed and played in untold gallons of safe water. He will have breathed safe air and eaten food that (basically) was safe. He will have not been electrocuted each time he turned on a light switch—which delivered power across an array of regulated mechanisms over large spaces of territory. And he will have enjoyed much, much more. Here’s the thing, though: all of it—ALL OF IT—will have been organized and paid for at least by his parents’ taxes and fees, his grandparents’ and fees, and his great-grandparents’ taxes and fees. 

The simple fact is that if you wish to have any kind of structure, institution or practice that lasts more than the time it takes two people to exchange whatever good or service they are exchanging, then a commitment beyond a one-to-one agreement is necessary. This need only grows more significant and more complex and social organizations expand in size and scope. Of course, as an adult one can choose to live outside these social orders: go and become a hermit. But if you wish to enjoy the benefits of society, you have to pay some of the costs of society. At least in a democracy you (ideally) get to have some say over those costs.

Third, on what should we do instead, let me say that I have never, ever heard a libertarian even vaguely hint at an answer to this. I have seen an endless number of “the government sucks” posts from libertarians but not a single answer to the question: how do I get electricity in a libertarian world? Where everyone has to consent to everything all the time? How do I get safe water? How do I make NASA and a national park and, yes, how do I make sure that actual enemies don’t attack? 

It’s one thing to critique the way the US does these things now. Indeed, I do it all the time. But it’s quite another to think through an alternative. And I have never seen a libertarian do this in even a vaguely compelling, real world way. Until you can answer these questions, and address my first two points with more than a mocking tone and a fantastical story, please, libertarians, I beg you:

stop claiming no decision or action taken by anyone else can ever be legitimate over you in any way. Just stop.  

10:07am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPUuPyJMcJlg
(Notes: 172)
  
Filed under: libertarian American national politics american political culture ideology ideology and politics ideas and politics 
March 28, 2012
Feeding Frenzy

Let me offer a brief moment of fellow feeling for two people who are not high on people’s “friend” lists right now, and for another group that is enjoying a great deal of sympathy but is also facing a great deal of pressure right now.

The people/groups in question are Trayvon Martin’s family, Jason Russell (of KONY 2012 (in)famy), and yes, George Zimmerman.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Zimmerman is in the wrong in Trayvon Martin’s death, and Jason Russell brought the attention he got on himself. Trayvon Martin’s family has been thrust into the spotlight quite unexpectedly.

But whatever the circumstances, I do think we ought to note that all of them have been subjected to a media feeding frenzy that none of them were ready for. Trayvon Martin’s family went from grieving the loss of their brother/son/cousin to symbols of racial politics … in milliseconds. Jason Russell hoped for some attention … and then became a symbol of everything evil about western colonial legacies in, again, microtime. And even if you believe, as I do, that George Zimmerman ought to face a jury for what he did to Trayvon Martin, it is also true that he, too, has been turned into a symbol by the modern media frenzy—an evil symbol of racialist abuse according to most; a victim of leftist politics according to others.

My point in this brief comment is this: no one—and I mean NO ONE—is ready for the shift from ordinary life to center of the media world that can happen today in fractions of seconds. No one’s life—and I mean NO ONE’S LIFE—can sustain the kind of scrutiny these people face … all of a sudden. No one’s psyche—and I mean NO ONE’s PSYCHE—can see itself turned from whatever self image it has to a symbol and a pawn in a media frenzy determined by how fast one group can tweet or blog or link some “insight” about the case. 

It would be nice if we would remember that Trayvon Martin’s family, and Jason Russell, and yes, even George Zimmerman, are people, not props in a media firestorm. We won’t, of course. In fact, all George Zimmerman can hope is that something outrageous happens soon, so the feeding frenzy will focus its attention on the “new” thing, as it has focused on him after Jason Russell and Robert Bales (the accused murderer in Afghanistan). Which is really quite a thing, if you think about it.

11:32am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPUuPyIi28Zf
(Notes: 44)
  
Filed under: media criticism george zimmerman Robert Bales jason Russell Trayvon Martin American national politics 
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