Zero Tolerance for Absolutism!

Last week, I shared on Facebook that I'd had this crazy idea of making congress and senate terms LONGER. As I continue to observe what passes for discourse in our society and read the comments on various news articles or opinion pieces, it drives me to other crazy ideas.

Today I was reading Robert Reich on what he hoped would be in the president's Jobs Agenda. He had ten ideas that he thought would boost the economy (which is the quickest and most effective way to get the budget under control). Reich has his own opinions, but as former Labor Secretary, Rhodes Scholar, and respected political economist they ought at least to be listened to. When I read the normal commenters pointing out how stupid Reich was and how hopeless his solutions were, I thought that maybe I needed to take them seriously for a minute.

Twenty years ago, Jeralynne and I got to hear Theda Skocpol talking about what she called "Targeting within Universalism" as a strategy for assisting the underclass. The idea is that while there are general benefits that extend to members of a society one can focus specifically within that on particular problem areas. Her view, and those of others like her, have been influential in the progressive approach to government. The argument is that there is a difference government can make to mitigate social situations which benefit the whole society in the long run.

But such a view requires a long-term view and a willingness to allow differential treatment. These are two views that today's rhetoric won't allow. Our current rhetoric has moved to all or nothing. 

• Are we in favor of mitigating global warming or hampering business with needless regulations?
• Will we have a social safety net for those in need or commit to supporting freeloaders
• Should we supporting folks who abused the mortgage industry or provide foreclosure assistance for those upside down?
• Should we privatizing social security and medicare or “don’t touch my benefits”
• Are we committed to an unfettered free market or open to targeted Keynsian economic policy?
• Are we committed to tax fairness or to cutting taxes?

In general, we've bounced around between these polar views. I don't know how to overcome the polarization (and many politicians and pundit have no interest in doing so).

 

So I’ve been thinking about pragmatism and the art of compromise. It’s important to win the long campaign even if one might lose the near-term battle. 

It strikes me that we have some sociological and theological realities that limit our reliance on absolutism. First, Weber made clear that the nature of the bureaucratic form is that it prizes rationality above all Rules are to be followed in all cases. Sometimes, the application of rules for good reason have bad effects. (examples abound – school religion decisions, local decisions about holiday celebrations, an arrow maker in Oregon who gets caught by federal law, environmental impact studies that favor the snail darter). Bureaucracies aren’t effective at dealing with scale. Because they're committed to rationality and equal treatment, we deal with every situation as a potential infraction (which feeds the outrage machine at Fox and other places).

Theologically, we acknowledge that people are sinful. They will act in ways that allow greed, selfishness, and callousness to need to bear fruit (even when hidden behind more benign-sounding rationales). Systems don’t work perfectly because of the limitations of the folks implementing the systems (examples again abound – oil industry regulators partying with industry folks, continuation of ethanol subsidies in spite of profits, over-aggressive rulemakers with personal axes to grind, mine owners who ignore safety citations because they know there aren’t enough investigators).

These sociological and theological challenges become particularly problematic when connected to a “zero-tolerance” approach to government. The zero tolerance approach had great popularity in public schools as it related to sexual harassment, bullying, and weapons. Once again, it doesn’t take long on Google to find examples where the zero tolerance approach yields really bad decisions. 

But this focus on zero tolerance adds to the burden of good government. And it really upsets the commenters I read.

So I've willing to think about things from their perspective (told you it was crazy). 

What if we focus on levels of severity? For example, we could lessen requirements for environmental impacts under normal circumstances but drastically raise the penalties for environmental damage. So BP has its problem in the Gulf and the penalties are so large as to make BP not competitive for years to come. 

We could do the same thing with medicare. We'll be less concerned about "waste, fraud, and abuse" at the outset and let the system do its own thing. But if you commit fraud, you're going to jail for a long time and reimbursing those harmed. 

We could provide mortgage assistance to folks who were impacted by the refinancing craze who found the house underwater (particularly those with ARMs) but incur stiff criminal penalties for owners and bankers who significantly gamed the  system. 

We could allow charter schools as an alternative to public education but if they don't perform investors sacrifice four times their investment (read about Zaccheus in the book of Matthew) that would be dedicated to the public schools.

In some ways, this approach could fit in nicely with the celebrity culture of the media. We could make Bernie Madoff stories over everyone listed in the last paragraph and let Nancy Grace interpret their trial every night.

This crazy idea is actually related to the psychology of reinforcement -- one can get good results by random reinforcement with HUGE rewards or punishments. (I once argued that I could take attendance only once a semester but if you were missing you'd drop two letter grades -- it would work but I've never had the guts to try it.)

So I'm willing to explore alternatives to my preferred solutions. Can the other side please do the same? Can we declare a moratorium on our talking points for two years to get the economy back on its feet?

Time to Blame the Messenger

It's been two months since my last post. Too much packing, moving, unpacking, and settling in for much writing on issues of civil discourse. I learned how much this little blog plays a cathartic role: when I can name something and write about it, I actually feel more optimistic about the future. Without the writing, I was mad, just below the surface, too much of the time. Of course, it didn't help that this period of (mostly) quiet stewing coincided with one of most ridiculous periods of dysfunctional government we've seen in decades. I'm truly worried that the strategies that played out over the past two months in Washington will be the new baseline for future strategic encounters. Here is a must-read article in today's Washington Post that makes clear that this debt ceiling fight was not the result of the accidental calculus of negotiating with varied interest groups in the government but was Intentional and Planned For since the 2008 election.

I am deeply troubled by the mendacity of our elected representatives. I had an exchange with the office of my new congressman where I encouraged a reasonable, balanced deal. He sent out a stock reply that 1) accused the president of wanting a clean bill (while not acknowledging weeks of negotiation on a compromise deal), 2) said that holding the line on the debt ceiling was important to control spending (while not acknowledging that the debt ceiling was related to past spending), and 3) said that "families cut budgets" (while not acknowledging that most families have deep struggles with credit card and home equity debt). I responded that we didn't agree but he that he owed it to his constituents (not just the Republicans) not to engage in misleading reports.

But in the week since the deal was reached (to say nothing of the 48 hours since S&P acted), I've been redirecting my quiet anger from politicians to the media figures that enable them. It's time to lay blame where it belongs -- politicians do what they do because the press not only allows it, but actively encourages it.

Friday night, NPR was doing their normal "week in politics" report. Melissa Block was speaking with Joy-Ann Reid, a "liberal commentator for the Miami Herald" and Jennifer Rubin, a conservative blogger for the Washington Post. Both commentators recrafted their answers to fit their pre-existing talking points. When asked to react to the polling data that showed most people preferred to see taxes raised on those making over $250,000, Rubin said that other polls showed that people didn't want to tax small businesses. The interviewer then asked Reid to respond. But Rubin had made a basic error of logic. A Venn Diagram of a) people making over $250K and b) small business owners would show some slice of an overlap but they're not at all the same thing. Rubin knows that. So does the interviewer. So why did she let it go unchallenged? She did let Reid respond and critique the point (and she did a good job) but it leaves the image of folks who simply disagree. Talking points occur on the democratic side as well.

In addition to these "two views on politics" stories, you get the mindless charade that is the Sunday morning talk shows. I've commented before that I'm a fan of Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post. I admire his attempt to introduce reality in the midst of talking points and I like his sense of humor. He performs the thankless task of recording the talk shows and blogging on what was said. What he really does is point out how empty this kabuki theater is every week. But the news on Monday will involve, at least in part, what so-and-so said on Sunday morning. The talk shows have become vehicles of message management (the public statements on Sundays made the actual negotiations on a debt deal that much harder). But we can't expect anything of substance to come from these shows because they follow the same format at the NPR story. Meet the Press asks John Kerry and John McCain to come on as guests. What are the odds that they will 1) say anything new, 2) take each other's points into consideration, and 3) reach some kind of common way forward? Each week Politico gives an update on who's supposed to be on the four talk shows. I don't know why we bother because the same people are disproportionately represented. How much expertise can John McCain, Lindsey Graham, John Kerry, or Dick Durbin have on the relevant issues? Are these the only voices? What about other senators who have more pragmatic streaks? There are 100 to choose from. Maybe we should share the wealth. Even then, it would only work if David Gregory showed the strength to ask good questions and not make everything about Obama's re-election.

There are some small positive steps forward in the media world. A week ago, Don Lemon of CNN was interviewing Senator Rand Paul. Lemon attempted to get Paul to actually answer the question that was asked before moving to his stock speech. Paul was offended that Lemon interrupted him, but I admired with Lemon was up to. But there's so much further to go than that.

Why has the media become all about what politicians have to say? How did they become the talking point reflector? Fifteen years ago, James Fallows of The Atlantic (then of US News), wrote an insightful book titled Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. He anticipated the growth in punditry (reporters serving as TV "contributors"), the move of media from newsgathering to entertainment, the corporatization of media enterprises, and reporters wanting to "break a story" rather than engage in reporting. (An example of the switch: during the month of July, Headline News showed great gains in ratings among cable news programs because of the Casey Anthony trial -- a sad story that might have belonged in the local paper but was in no way national news!).

If the media were doing what I want them to do, all the reporters who contributed to the Post story (some of the finest names in national, political, and business reporting) would have been reporting on the strategic pursuit of ideology of the "Young Guns" in the House as it was happening. But they'd be accused of shaping the story if they did that. But that's why they got into the business. That's the downside of the access to power. You have to tell the truth as you see it (and not just after the fact).

If the media were doing what I want them to do, we wouldn't be interviewing politicians or pundits or even economists about what they thought about policy options. If we're interested in job creation, let's spend the time interviewing people who expanded their workforce in the face of the economic downturn -- how did they do it and what can be replicated? We'd talk to city officials about infrastructure needs and how deferred maintenance is rarely good policy. We'd talk to demographers about the impact of the baby boomers retiring, including how many are retiring early and well. (I've been trying to learn the impact on social security when the Baby Boom "bulge" is replaced by the smaller cohorts that follow -- we hear all the time about too many retirees for the workforce, but is that a temporary problem as I suspect or a permanent one? -- but we rely on "common wisdom" instead).

If the media were doing what I want them to do, we'd interview the very homeowners who are facing foreclosure. What percentage did, in fact, make poor choices and what percentage are victims of the housing bubble? And does a commitment to justice mean that poor choosers are thrown on the street when their corporate counterparts get assistance?

If the media were doing what I want them to do, we'd know more about the changing nature of modern society -- and not delivered in the "this will kill your children" mode. We know about differential birth patterns in various racial, ethnic, or class groups but not its implications. We know about declining manufacturing but not its impacts. We know about religious diversity but not about how to live beside those with a different faith (or none at all).

These are the stories we should be hearing. But we aren't. That's why I've laid blame in the media's lap. Politicians will do what politicians do. But the media has exacerbated the situation. If the media hadn't played that role so well, perhaps S&P wouldn't have focused so much on "political brinksmanship" that was the reason they gave for the rating downgrade. Maybe "political brinksmanship" isn't possible without an abetting media.

I know this was very long and has a different tone from my normal blogs. I'll get back to my regular voice in the near future. As I said at the beginning, there's this cathartic thing going on and I feel a little better. Thanks for letting me express my inner Howard Beale.

A Very Geeky Look at Jobs

It would be great fun to comment about Anthony Weiner's Twitter account. Sarah Palin's claims about Paul Revere (followed by her claim that she didn't misspeak and her followers attempts to adjust Wikipedia to get those bells in there with Revere warning those British) are equally ripe for comment. Mitt Romney says he "Believes in America"and thinks that "the Obama experiment"didn't work, which could also benefit from some careful analysis.

I will leave the commentariat to blather about those things and try to focus on the one item Americans actually say they care about (hint: it's not Obamacare, the Deficit, Medicare, or Pensions). Consistently, polls have shown that people are concerned about jobs in America. Politicians are pointing fingers but nobody has any real proposals to make a difference.

Last Friday the media was buzzing about the employment report. After several months of significant private sector job creation, May was a relatively weak month. Jobs were created but not enough to offset the rise in population. Right away, stories showed up about how this would affect Obama's reelection chances. Someone came up with a statistic that no modern president has been reelected when the unemployment rate was over 7.2% which then got repeated as gospel. An introductory statistics class tells you that you can't predict from such a small number of cases. This is analogous to describing how Ichiro bats in late innings of games in June with a man on second.

The May report could have been affected by seasonal factors. Professor Karl Smith, filling in while Ezra Klein was on vacation, said that this was a result of gas prices being high (before their recent decline). A number of other sources claim that the auto slowdown by Japanese manufactures also played a role. Austan Goolsbee went on the Sunday morning talk shows and said that we "shouldn't make too much of one month's jobs reports". All of these economists are right, of course. We've got to move out of the instant evaluation of absolutely everything and get back to taking the long view.

Here's the geeky thing. Recently, the Washington Post ran an interactive graphic showing the changes in employment from January 2007 to the present. You can see it at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/business/unemployment-where-are-the-jobs/index.html?hpid=z2.

The first page presented here shows that most of the decline in cumulative non-farm employment occurred between July 2008 and July 2009. Since July 2009, employment has been relatively stable with a slight upward tick. But what's fascinating about this graphic is that it lets you break down employment by "supersectors" and "subsectors". It quickly demonstrates the intuitive notion that the jobs recovery is uneven.

There's a button on the upper right of the graph that lets you look at the supersectors. When you click on those, you learn that some sectors are doing better than employment as a whole. Government hiring is up slightly (the census), as is leisure services. Financial services runs a little behind. Mining and Logging run way ahead. So does Education and Health Services. Manufacturing lags behind, losing 15% of its 2007 level. Construction takes a huge hit, losing a whopping 25% of jobs.

When you have the graph of a "supersector", you can click on its curve and it will break out "subsectors' within that. Doing this shows that while Mining and Logging is up, Logging is way down. In the Professional and Business services category, management is up from 2007 while administrative assistants and sanitation workers took a big hit and are slowly recovering (still down 10%). The Financial Sector is off about 10% with real estate hit a little worse than financial services. People who build and finish those houses are significantly worse off than those who sold and financed them. In the area called Trade, Transportation, and Utilities, retail and other trade is down about 5% while utilities remained level. The information sector is down overall, with newspapers and media downsizing, but new web companies show a 25% gain over 2007.

I have had great fun taking apart these numbers and trying to make sense of them (told you it was geeky). Here is what I learned:

1. There are some areas that won't be recovering quickly. The loss of construction and logging is significant and it's hard to imagine what will take its place. The building boom masked a larger problem we had as semi-skilled jobs left manufacturing.

2. While it doesn't break out this way, it's pretty easy to separate upper-class jobs from working-class jobs. In the vast majority of cases, the lower the occupation on the social class hierarchy, the more jobs have been lost since 2007.

3. The areas that are down are NOT those areas most often impacted by upper class investment. These are structural issues and not simply cyclical issues. Lower taxes and decreased regulation may allow some of the flexible industries like finance to expand,  but don't affect jobs overall (just the jobs politicians are most familiar with)

4. But the free market strategies will not fix the structural problems. Those will require an infusion of funds to support the structural realignment -- the "auto bailout" for GM and Chrysler being an ideal example. Infrastructure investment would directly meet the skill sets of the manufacturing workers, construction trades, and even loggers. Such an action could provide support to folks who (as Bill Clinton liked to say) "work hard and play by the rules" while the structural changes work their way through the system.

You can dispute the value of "big government" investment and call it socialism if you want, but the numbers actually do speak for themselves.

That's all my geekiness for today. You can now go back to being outraged at Anthony Weiner or reading about Paul Revere's Midnight ride..

A May 22nd Hope for the Church -- Seeing the Kingdom of God

So we’re apparently still here. In spite of billboard warnings, immense news coverage, countdown clocks, and lots of commentary, 6:00 PM came and went yesterday pretty much like any other Saturday evening. On the one hand, the prognostications of Harold Camping and his followers went the way of earlier predictions of the end of the world. Just like the group covered nearly 60 years ago by Leon Festinger and friends, the group feels successful in warning the nations even if the timing wasn’t what they expected. The response to these predictions seems to be ridicule, headshaking, and lots of “I told you so”s – and that’s just speaking of the Christians on my Facebook Friends list! The response from comedians, pundits, and “new atheists” will be much more vicious.

But this isn’t the only time a fringe individual has been raised to prominence by media and internet coverage. Way too much time has been spent on Terry Jones and his burning of the Quran and his visits to Dearborn, Michigan to protest Sharia Law among Dearborn’s Muslim population. The Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas and the Phelps family are rightly portrayed as a negative and hateful force that have taken to protesting military funerals as a statement of God’s rejection of “the gay agenda”.

We can also list the politically connected religious voices – James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, William O’Donnell. These folks can be counted on to speak to current events on behalf of the Christian Right and their views accepted by media figures with little counterargument.

Then there are the popular television evangelists – the happy talk of Joel Osteen, the moral uplift of T.D. Jakes, the fall and return of Ted Haggard, the impact of Ken Copeland. These are folks who receive intense media attention and symbiotically feed on media attention.

What does all this mean? I want to suggest that our national fascination with celebrity has long bled over into our understanding of religious life. But what are we to make of Christ’s instructions that those who desire greatness should serve others? What of James’ instruction not to look for the place of honor but to serve others? The Kingdom of God is hard to find in the midst of celebrity (think camels and needles). 

But it is nontheless true that “the Kingdom of God is at hand”. It exists in the local congregation that provides support to a family suffering due to extended unemployment. It occurs when Christians come alongside the developmentally disabled just to let them know they are loved. It occurs when prayers are lifted for those who lost loved ones, even if the loss were due to Aids. It occurs when a pastor sits down over coffee with someone and explains how Grace overcomes ones past and introduces that one to the Love of Christ.

My hope and prayer on this “Day after Rapture Day” is that we’d look for the Kingdom of God where it can regularly be found. That somehow, the attention of the media and the critics would turn from the celebrities to everyday folks. Folks who, in spite of our human limitations and occasional blindness, manage nonetheless to look out for “the least of these my brethren”.

That's where our focus should be. It doesn't make for great video or look good on a billboard, but it's always where you find the Kingdom at work.

I Think Newt May Be Right

Wednesday, Newt Gingerich announced his candidacy for the 2012 Republican Nomination for President. Not really a surprise -- he's been talking like a candidate for some time (which means making polarizing comments that break down immediately upon reflection -- think of the islamacist atheist conspiracy) and he's not getting any younger.

Now, Newt isn't Trump. He does have some background as a self-developed (and developing) intellectual. What he does share with The Donald is an annoying tendency to put himself as the lead character of any story. This causes him to play fast and loose with that thing we call The Truth. The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler wrote his FactChecker blog about claims Newt made in his announcement. It earned Newt "four Pinocchios" on Kessler's scale.

As an academic, I'm particularly upset by Newt's misstatements. After all, he taught history at the University of West Georgia for eight years. Academic Freedom or not, history professors should have a healthy respect for facts.

Yesterday's LA Times had a detailed story about Newt's claims in his Sean Hannity appearance. Of course, he framed it with Fox News blather about "unfair treatment" -- "Obama, the Republican candidate said, however, has the advantages of the presidency, support from the 'left-wing media,' and the backing of labor unions and billionaires like George Soros." Now, this is easy to rebut simply by naming the impact of the Citizens United decision, Andrew Breitbart, the Koch brothers, the Tea Party movement, The Club for Growth, and Karl Rove's American Crossroads group (that's off the top of my head). Truth -- special interests and balkanized media are on both sides of most political races. As a historian, Newt should be able to acknowledge this systemic reality of politics.

But there was one thing in the Time story that grabbed me. Newt made the following claim:

“I know how to get the whole country to resemble Texas,” he said. “President Obama knows how to get the whole country to resemble Detroit.”

Newt has very clearly stated the plain truth of modern national politics!

Since we're headed to Jackson, Michigan in about six weeks, I've been following much of what's going on there (and especially Detroit). I won't take the time to completely unpack the implications of Newt's comment but it's easy to sketch the broad outline.

Detroit has suffered for many years of high levels of income inequality, racial antagonism, white flight, and short-term policy. It was already weakened when it was struck by a major shift in our manufacturing economy as auto plants downsized and/or departed. There wasn't enough economic diversity to absorb that change. Yes, the population has declined (both in real numbers and in terms of suburbanization). Yes, there are large swaths of the city that are abandoned.

But a quick review of the local news shows that Mayor Bing has a plan for turning the budget deficit into a surplus within five years. And they'll do that without abandoning the needs of its citizens. They want to buy up abandoned properties to do major infrastructure improvement. Ford had a great year. GM and Chrysler are making money, working on repaying their government debts, and expanding their workforces (the problems in Japan has returned the big three to a position of strength). There's much more to do, but the mayor (and the Republican governor) are trying to address issues of infrastructure, appropriate regulation, and business development (it will take a few years to see if the governor's budget gambles will work).

Newt wants to make the country like Texas. Texas has suffered several lawsuits for the inequality of educational opportunities across the state. Governor Perry wants to eliminate all issues that inhibit business development. The State school board is exerting revisionist history in elementary textbooks. There are strong nativist sentiments and concerns over illegal immigration (in a state with some of the fastest growth in Hispanic populations). Recent reports of the Texas miracle find that the state's well-being is maintained by short-term gimmicks (the oft-ridiculed stimulus package has allowed the balanced budget). They execute more folks in their prisons than nearly any other state.

Detroit (a city Newt compares to a state, but I'll let that go) has real serious issues. They got them through a combination of events beyond its control and failure to deal with those issue that were clearly present. In other words, a lot like our national debates about jobs, infrastructure, and demographic demands. Texas, which recently threatened to secede from the US, is a state that holds ideology over pragmatics. That blindness is what made Molly Ivins so great to read for so many years.

The road in Detroit will be hard and will never be what we remember (although the right didn't like Detroit in its heyday). But the path in Texas is a dark one. Increased inequality, increasing demands by a minority who feel power slipping away, environmental concerns that go unaddressed, and a burgeoning prison population resulting in even more of a two tiered society.

So, I have to conclude that Newt let his guard slip and told the truth. It may be the only time his vaunted analytical abilities led him to such an obviously correct conclusion. I won't hold my breath waiting for the next one!

Andy Kohut Thinks I'm a Solid Liberal

I was planning on posting earlier this week, but like many folks I was busy processing the news of Sunday night. Finding the proper balance between joy and Christian love is pretty hard. I did reflect on some generational aspects of the event you can see in my other blog.

So now I'm back to politics and civil discourse. The Pew Center for the People and the Press (led by pollster Andrew Kohut who regularly appears on NPR and PBS) just released results of a new study that suggests eight types of voters: Staunch Conservatives, Main Street Republicans, Libertarians, Disaffecteds, Post-Moderns, New Coalition Democrats, Hard-Pressed Democrats, and Solid Liberals (they also have a group that doesn't vote at all). There's an online quiz that's supposed to tell you where you fall. Needless to say, I came out as Solid Liberal.

It seems to me that there are three driving forces in the survey (which, as Niki says, forces unreasonable options -- more later). One dynamic involves a belief in the ultimate fairness or unfairness of systems. If you believe they're fair, you wind up in one of the first three categories. If not, you wind up Solid Liberal. A second dynamic has to do with economic well-being. Saying you're struggling puts you in either the Disaffected or Hard-Pressed category. The third dynamic has to do with social issues (primarily homosexuality and tolerance of the non-religious). Those folks are Libertarians or Post-Modern.

I actually like the three forces even if I think the quiz needs work. But the notion that people are locked into these philosophical positions strikes too close to home when one sees what's happening in Washington. In the long term, we need a long-term approach to deficit reduction that will actually work instead of playing to political posturing. In the short-term, the debt ceiling needs to be raised.

So what do we do? Well, the House passed the Ryan budget that has no chance of passing the Senate or getting a presidential signature. Harry Reid suggested making a test vote in the Democratically controlled Senate. The House just passed HR3 to forbid abortion funding (on top of the current bans on abortion funding). It has no chance in the Senate and won't be signed.

Why do we do this? Because political campaigns have taken over the government. HR3 had a two-fold purpose -- let the base know that they were heard (to keep them interested and invested) and, more importantly, to create a public record that will show up in grainy black and white commercials in 2012 ("Rep. XXX voted to allow federal money to kill babies".) I don't mean to only focus on the Republicans. Reid was willing to call a vote on Ryan's Medicare proposal for the same reasons ("Senator XXX voted to take health care away from your grandma".)

This is not how people live. It's not how we solve problems on a daily basis (you know, "how families deal with household issues".) Tom Toles of the Washington Post made clear today exactly how outrageous this behavior is:


Back to the Pew report -- We should be able to have discussions about reasonable regulation that protects the environment. Does this mean that snail darters win out over farmers? Not if we can demonstrate that there aren't unintended effects of losing the snail darters (Star Trek IV remains the quintessential example of unintended consequences!). In an emergency, do we break a levee and put fertilizer and other pollutants in the Mississippi? Yes, if the costs of not doing that are too great.  Can't we acknowledge, as I wrote in my last post, that racism has limited choices for people that still matter without thinking that means that folks are sitting around waiting for government handouts? (The OK state senator did back down from that claim but my point is that it didn't need to be said in the first place!).

I could keep doing this with the various aspects of the Pew quiz or with current policy options. Isn't it clear that we need an appropriate level of tax revenue to provide the right level of government and that maybe we could look at changing tax incentives for large farms, energy companies, multinational corporations, and maybe even limit (or at least means test) the home mortgage interest exemption?

I'm currently reading Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation by James K. A. Smith of Calvin College. I'm only about a third of the way through it, but Jamie' s point is that the Christian College focus on "worldview" becomes an overly intellectualized argument that doesn't deal with the formation of heart or character.

I really am coming to believe that our focus on political philosophies, even those suggested by Kohut, is not productive. Like Jamie argues, it allows us to give the "right answers" but doesn't accomplish change. Perhaps if we were less focused on whose political view was in ascendancy and focused on rethinking our pragmatic strategies, we'd be further along. What if we defined our intended outcomes first (e.g., affordable health care for senior citizens) and then consider all the possible means to get there?

This has been fun to write. In spite of my quiz answers, I'm no longer a Solid Liberal. I'm a Radical Pragmatist. I think I can live with that quite happily. Maybe I'll work on a survey.

The Problem of "Common Sense" Solutions

It's been a busy few days for budgets, finance, and government. Just over a week ago, negotiations between the House, the Senate, and the White House resulted in a tentative deal to keep the government operating for the balance of the fiscal year (although it wouldn't have passed the House without Democratic support). President Obama gave a wonderful speech on Wednesday clarifying some of his fiscal priorities. Yesterday the House passed the Paul Ryan Budget blueprint for 2011 with all Republican votes except 4. And of course, this weekend is the tax deadline (it's Monday because of an obscure DC holiday).

I've complained before about the rhetorical frame, "What the American people want" and no doubt will again. It's a selective argument that doesn't consider the diversity of opinion and sometimes, as Ezra Klein of the Post points out, doesn't pay any attention to popular opinion at all. In the case he describes, the "American people" want Medicare left alone.

My new complaint is "common sense solutions". This is a regular offering, particularly on the right. (The left would do well to stop over-engineering policy, but I'll address that another time.) Examples abound: make medical insurance portable across state lines, reduce regulations that inhibit business, put more money in the hands of the job creators. But I have two problems (at least) with these arguments. First, I'm currently reading a wonderful book titled, Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer) by Duncan Watts. The subtitle is "How Common Sense Fails Us." Watts devotes the first half of the book to demonstrating why common sense does a terrible job of explaining, estimating, or predicting. It's all related to how well we can control variables. Without control, we wind up making ad hominem arguments. Since they are not testable, they wind up being statements of faith and not explanations.

For example, it's argued that regulations are inhibiting business innovation, stunting job creation, and forcing companies overseas. Why? Because companies that go overseas say so. But Watts wants us to consider the companies that thrive in regulatory environments as well. Perhaps the companies that go overseas simply had corporate cultures that looked for loopholes whereever they can find them (last time I wrote about GM not feeling obligated to Flint and about GE getting a tax refund). I could deconstruct insurance across state lines, malpractice reform, greenhouse gas control, and oil drilling in much the same way.

My second critique of the "common sense" argument stems from its "Colbert-like" sense of faith. The common sense critique of policy is strangely absent of any data or at the very least avoids a careful consideration of assumptions made or alternatives foregone. Watts has a great chapter describing Strategic Flexibility, a practice of discussing alternative scenarios to allow assumptions to be uncovered. But too much of the common sense proposals are simply assertions that sort-of work as talking points.  When you begin to explore those assumptions against real data, they don't wind up looking common nor do they make much sense.

Consider the claim: "We're broke!". By any indicator of national finance, we aren't broke. People get paid, services are provided, etc. What we face is a situation where our indebtedness takes an increasing proportion of our budget. What this claim really means is that if we continue in our current pattern and nothing changes, we won't be able to handle future debt payments. By the way, in business this is called "leverage" which is a practice of taking on short-term debt for long-term gain. As the movie Inside Job illustrates, in the decade before the housing bubble we allowed banks to increase their debt to asset ratios from 3 to 1 to 100 to 1. This is what the successful businesses do (you know, the ones so inhibited by regulations.) But there's a huge difference, even at the family level, between "we can't keep doing this" and "we're broke". For all those folks who've lost jobs and houses, it's an insult to use this rhetoric.

But isn't panic called for? Not if we look at the data. We're in this situation because of a number of factors. I'll name five: 1) the unbudgeted costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2) the Prescription Drug benefit that was passed with no offset, 3) the costs of the interventions in the financial sector to avoid a depression, 4) the increased impact on government services caused by the retirement of the front edge of the baby boom generation, and 5) the impact of the recession itself measured in suppressed tax revenue. Now, at some point #1 will end (or at least get budgeted), #4 will be a challenge for awhile but will get better if we control health costs as the baby boom is replaced by the generation following, and #5 will improve as the economy continues to grow. The Drug benefit gets absorbed in the Affordable Health Care Law and the misnamed "bail-outs" are not repeating expenditures.

Here's a very concrete illustration of where the common sense rhetoric fails upon examination. It is often claimed that the tax burden on the "job creators" prevents them from hiring new employees at a time when we need to boost the economy. The first challenge to this comes from looking at job creation prior to the Bush-era tax cuts. Job creation was robust because the economy was expanding in the late 90s (which is what created the surplus). But the second issue comes from breaking apart the logic of what is being claimed. The top-end tax cut was 3% (by the way, excuse a rant here while I point out that when these rates go back up, that was what the Republican administration passed in 2001 -- it's not a tax increase, it's a sunset clause as proposed.) Now, let's assume you are one of those folks worth $1,000,000 in taxable income (remember, that's after all your deductions). What's the impact of that 3% increase? It's easy math -- it comes to $30,000 per year. Like the bit that Amy Poehler used to do on SNL, REALLY? You aren't hiring new employees because you had to pay an additional $30K in taxes? Actually, it's puzzling to take that in the other direction. What are you, Mr. Millionaire, doing with your extra $2,500 per month? Another trip? At least the Republican budget cuts the top end rate down to 25% which would result in significant savings for those in the top brackets (with dramatic impacts on federal revenues).

Here's a related example: we often hear that we don't want to inhibit "small business, which is where the jobs get created." But when you look at actual data of who makes up a small business and whom is impacted by tax issues, they aren't the same people. Glen Kessler is the Fact Checker at the Post. Here's his take on the small business question. It's interesting that he manages to avoid calling people liars, only because they were so careful in how they constructed their sentences!

Here's a final example. It's "common sense" to hold federal outlays at some fixed percentage of the total revenue. Why? And who decides what number? Matt Miller wrote an interesting piece in the Post yesterday that shows how arbitrary both this position and the specific number used happen to be. In light of the wars and the baby boom, it makes sense to argue that we need a higher percentage of spending (by 2 or 3%) while we manage the transitions I described above.

As always, REALLY talking about these issues requires us to be more truthful about our assumptions about government and finance. If you believe that we have to get out of the entitlement business, the current (temporary) financial crisis provides cover to do that. (I'm still having a hard time figuring out what entity will pick up the slack after medicare funding is slashed but costs remain, but Ryan's is a philosophical position some find great value in). If I assume that our collective society is strengthened by looking out for "widows and orphans" and their contemporary equivalents as the Bible instructs, then we have to include that in our planning.

At the very least, we need to pay attention to the actual data, consider alternative scenarios (remember gas prices are high because of uncertainty and not lack of domestic drilling), and speak the truth.