A Letter to the Editor

I was mildly surprised to see that Republicans voted against bringing the financial reform bill up for debate on Monday. I mean, I’m used to conservatives siding with big business and the filibuster was wholly expected on both sides of the aisle but to see them vote against such widespread public demand for action was somewhat novel. After all, they’ve never moved to cut Medicare or Social Security – both very popular programs – despite all the invective they usually spew against entitlements and “big government spending.” Politics usually trumps ideology with the GOP if e’er the two meet.

This vote was especially significant to me since I live just outside of Boston and Scott Brown is, sadly, one of my representatives. His campaign platform consisted largely of two rallying cries which were opposition to HCR and job creation. So to see him vote against beginning debate on this bill was striking for the simple reason that the financial and housing sectors are the root cause of the job losses he so passionately laments.

I decided to write a letter to the Boston Globe highlighting this transparent hypocrisy:

Scott Brown was elected for two major reasons: he was against the health care reform law and he was for jobs. When he was proven completely ineffective at stopping the HCR law you’d think that the least he could do would be to fight extra hard to bring jobs and economic growth back to our state and nation. Yet, on Monday, April 26 he sided with the other 40 Senate Republicans in blocking the financial reform bill from even coming to the floor for debate. And make no mistake – the financial reform bill is about jobs and economic prosperity.

In late 2008 we saw the nation plunge into the depths of a recession that we still haven’t emerged from. The national unemployment rate sits at about 9.7% and though there is plenty of evidence that jobs are starting to return and employers are looking to start hiring again, we must ensure that our financial and housing sectors never put us in this position again. The financial reform bill would do many things but most important among them is that it would provide for an organized way to dismantle large financial firms that have failed, something that was lacking in 2008 and one of the reasons for the widely-unpopular bailouts. Under this legislation never again will the taxpayers have to loan these companies hundreds of billions for mistakes that they made for the purpose of saving our own economic skin, mistakes that by all rights they should have borne the consequences of. If financial firms know they won’t be bailed out next time, they’ll almost certainly be more careful in the future. But Scott Brown doesn’t want to debate this.

The bill sets tough new standards on derivatives markets to make them less risky because derivatives are the complicated financial instruments most responsible for investment bank failures. It also creates a consumer protection agency so that banks will not issue the kind of risky or predatory home loans that have too many of our friends and neighbors struggling to pay their mortgage or even working their way through a painful and humiliating foreclosure. If we want jobs and economic prosperity, we need these reforms. But Scott Brown doesn’t want to debate this.

Truly, he doesn’t even know what’s in the bill, at least not enough to voice a credible opinion. When asked by the Boston Globe what parts he objects to, he didn’t know and asked the reporter “well, what areas do you think should be fixed? I mean, you know, tell me. And then I’ll get a team and go fix it.” I admire his can-do spirit but we need someone to represent us who knows what they’re talking about before they take a stance. After that episode, he went on Face the Nation and claimed that the bill would kill jobs in the state but the company who supposedly gave him this information, MassMutual, has said that they told him no such thing. In fact, they say they told him that the figure he cited was the number of jobs lost in Massachusetts because of the financial crash, the very thing he’s clearly not working towards preventing in the future.

I urge all Massachusetts residents to call or write Mr. Brown and demand that he do his homework and put in an honest effort towards one of the most important and pressing issues our government is addressing today. If he’s serious about improving the state of our economy and making sure that there are jobs for the people, the most important thing he can do is vote for this bill. Call or write and tell him to help the residents of our state and not enable Wall Street and big financial firms, who just happened to donate a little over 25% of his campaign funds.

DC Office
(202) 224-4543

Email
http://scottbrown.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/emailscottbrown

– Andrew Worthington

We’ll see if it gets published.

About That Southern Strategy…

Michael Steele, a gaffe machine invented by researchers at Andrews Air Force Base in 1958, has finally said something so potentially damaging to the GOP image that it’s hard to imagine him being able to purposefully do more harm. The direct quote is this:

“We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans. This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties. Their parties walk away from them.

For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”

Actually, the Southern Strategy isn’t merely an appeal to white males. It is an appeal to white, racist males and took the form of demands for lower taxes, limited government and states’ rights. But don’t believe me. Take it from Lee Atwater, former aide and campaign strategist to Ronald Reagan:

“As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964 and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”“

So, in truth, what Steele has just said is that the bulk of his party’s platform for the last 40 years has been designed to appeal to racists. And about this he is entirely unaware. Thank you, Mr. Steele, for laying bare what a more politically- and historically-aware Republican would never have mentioned.

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

I just couldn’t resist mentioning this little gem out of Georgia. Apparently, the state legislature passed a bill prohibiting microchips from being forcibly implanted into citizens. The take-away punchline from this theater of the absurd is where Governor Barnes spoke about what should have been obvious to the drafters: “if someone holds him down to insert a microchip in his head, “it should be more than a damned misdemeanor.”” That’s right – forcibly implanting a microchip into someone would be a misdemeanor in Georgia, right there next to vandalism and petty theft.

(as an aside, I was immediately struck with the irony that the woman in the story who provided “testimony” before the legislature in support of the bill mentioned a fundamental right to privacy as the basis for outlawing forced microchip implants, something that the Right has aggressively argued does not exist under the Constitution when attacking the Roe v. Wade decision)

Down the Rabbit Hole
Where did this concern over implanted microchips come from? An Internet rumor about health care reform. Never mind that the law, as passed, doesn’t even contain the language that triggered the rumor and that the original language didn’t mandate – or even mention – implanted microchips in any way, shape or form. The Georgia legislators decided to tackle this fantasy problem despite all evidence that they were wasting their own time and the tax dollars of their constituents, a testament to the power of right-wing paranoia.

In the same speech mentioned above, Barnes relayed his concern about a growing trend where Republicans attack problems that don’t exist. You’ve heard of the ‘Birthers’? The Arizona House passed a bill requiring US presidential candidates to produce a birth certificate as proof of natural citizenship before being placed on the ballot as a direct result of their efforts. Remember that video of ACORN employees giving tax advice to a “pimp and prostitute” (which turned out to be heavily edited to make the employees look like they did something they didn’t)? Congress withdrew funds from the group and they have subsequently disbanded as a national organization under public pressure. I wholeheartedly agree with Barnes that this is an issue but, historically, it’s nothing new for conservatives. Reports from the fever swamp have influenced our democracy throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

New World Orders and Communism and Coups (Oh My!)
Consider this political cartoon about The New Deal from The Chicago Tribune in 1934:

This is definitive proof that the specific villains change but the rhetoric and paranoia stay the same; we see the same types of specious arguments coming from far-right authors, “news” sources and websites to this day. The New Deal was real but the illusory threat it posed to our nation was so rage-inducing to some business leaders on the Right that there was actually a coup in the works to overthrow FDR, though it does not appear that the idea got very far. A quick comparison with this article from last year wherein we’re told that Obama was pushing us dangerously close to “The End of America” with New Deal-esque policies and it becomes abundantly clear that political history can be circular.

In the 1950’s there was the infamous Joseph McCarthy who claimed that 159 elected officials and federal employees were Soviet spies. In retrospect, only 9 of these people were ever demonstrated to have any kind of dealings with Soviet espionage for a success rate of 5.6%, which is almost certainly due to random chance and not any kind of insight into communist intelligence gathering. If you cast your net wide enough, you’re bound to catch something.

The John Birch Society was most influential in the 1960’s and their view that

“both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country’s sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world socialist government.‘”

was seminal to modern-day, New World Order conspiracy theories. Membership was at its highest in the early 1960’s when it is estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 people were active in the group. It is still active and remains modestly powerful despite a dramatic reduction in membership.

So that’s some of the history. More recently, we have P. David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry’s Muslim Mafia in which the authors argue that there is a secret underground organization of Muslim activists trying to “Islamize” America. Another “threat” exposed by David Gaubatz: the Council on American-Islamic Relations is (gasp!) lobbying the government. Later that month, four Republican House members called for an investigation into the allegations, as if a quick reading of the documents they stole from CAIR wouldn’t be enough to allay fears.

This is by no means a complete list of the kinds of wacky beliefs that have influenced the workings of our government but it gives a good idea of what we’re looking at.

Mainstreaming The Crazy
It’s not the fact that there are people out there with strange ideas that is troublesome – the Left has its own collection of wild-eyed radicals. The trouble is the degree to which far-right-wing lunacy creeps into mainstream politicians and leaders; by contrast, I’ve never heard of any congressional inquiries into the workings of the Military-Industrial Complex and I don’t expect to anytime soon.

Elected representatives like Michelle Bachmann and James Inhofe whip up fear in their supporters with half-baked theories about Census data plots and “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” (a.k.a. climate change). Yes, Mr. Inhofe, it’s totally possible that the vast majority of climate scientists and major scientific institutions the world over are all conspiring together to fool people into believing that the environment is in grave danger for the purposes of…fund raising? Really? I mean, you’d think that holding a fund raising dinner or a pledge drive would have occurred to them as a far more viable option. “Think big” is their motto, I guess.

Stop the Madness
We laugh at these people but bear in mind that US foreign policy throughout the Cold War was partly premised on the idea of a shadowy international communist conspiracy which supposedly influenced the citizens of small nations like Nicaragua and El Salvador into voting for leftist candidates. Obviously, they could never be swayed by the merits of a left-leaning ideology and so we had to support murderous, fascist dictatorships like that of “Papa Doc” in Haiti to save them from themselves (for a disillusioning and exhaustive account of Cold War CIA and military activities, read Killing Hope by William Blum).

If our representatives are pursuing solutions to problems that don’t exist, time and resources which should be devoted to real problems is diminished. If our people are running around obsessed about fanciful threats to their person and freedoms at the suggestion of their leaders, they waste time and effort that could be put to more productive use. I’m sure that many conservatives will say that we need to remain ever-vigilant for threats to the nation or some other excuse for this long-standing propensity to believe the absolute worst about their ideological opponents. I think they need to sit down and think hard about the negative effects they’re having on our society.

Legislating Prosperity

“You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”
– Adrian Pierce Rogers

I hold a degree in Economics. I say this not because I’m looking for respect or admiration but rather so that you can have some perspective on where I’m coming from when I get frustrated with the fact that, at least a few times a week, I see unqualified people expounding on a highly technical subject that requires years of study to have a competent understanding of, something that I worked hard to obtain. To give some sense of how ridiculous this is, imagine that there was a significant section of the general public that believed they had a meaningful grasp of pharmacology without ever even glancing at a textbook. So when I see a polemic like this, from someone trained in Theology, it makes me wonder just where he gets off preaching about Economics.

It’s undoubtedly due to this pervasive overconfidence that we so frequently see such simple – and flawed – arguments from the public and conservatives in particular on the subject of Macroeconomics. Let’s list the arguments Rogers makes:

• liberals want the government to take from the rich and give to the poor
• the government must take from one in order to give to another
• if you engage in this kind of policy, those who are taken from and those who receive will both lose their incentive to work, thus destroying the basis of our economy

His first two points are mostly true but, as we will see, he is seriously mistaken in his conclusion.

The Faulty Premise
Recently, the Lt. Gov. of South Carolina compared those on welfare to stray animals. As vile and offensive as this is (flirting with the idea that the poor are somehow sub-human and devoid of self-respect is only one step away from the call to round them all up for the camps), it provides a useful window into the mind of the far-right. In the alternate worldview of conservatives, those who depend on government assistance are unwilling to provide for themselves and it behooves us to remove the means by which they take advantage of our misguided compassion. This is supposedly in society’s best interest for various reasons: it’s not fair to those who provide said support, our society should not encourage laziness and, most importantly, our economic system will suffer as an direct result of taking resources away from “the most productive members of society” (the wealthy).

The idea is not new. Reagan famously railed against “welfare queens” during his 1976 presidential campaign and long before that conservatives have been dead-set against anything that they see as enabling people to avoid working for a living. Today, almost 40% of Americans believe that “providing government benefits to poor people encourages them to remain poor.” There are myriad anecdotes of people taking advantage of welfare programs and nobody doubts that this does, in fact, happen at least some of the time. But public perception of the scale of the problem and misconceptions about its effects on our society and economy are decidedly out of proportion.

The Economics of Social Welfare in Reality
Yes, liberals advocate redistribution of wealth to a certain extent. But, contrary to many conservatives’ belief, this position does not arise from an aversion to work, coveting the fruits of others’ success or a fundamental misunderstanding of our economic system. Before I continue, however, it is important to understand that what we’re advocating is not “legislating the poor into prosperity.” Rather, social welfare policy is designed to benefit the population as a whole and does not focus primarily on bettering the lot of one group over another. The idea is supported by many prominent economists and has a solid basis in economic theory.

In 2005 for their Paris conference, the ESIP produced a survey of the scientific literature concerning the effects of welfare on economic growth. Their closing remarks on the subject highlight the degree to which there is contention among economists:

“according to some, social welfare will discourage saving and investment, will be harmful to employment and its funding would burden the territory’s competitiveness. However, others reject these arguments and insist on social welfare’s input into growth by, among other means, supporting demand. enriching the human capital and encouraging risk-taking. Furthermore, it is clear that countries that currently enjoy a high level of social welfare, also benefit for an economic performance that exceeds the world-wide average.”

If anything, one can safely say that even relatively high levels of welfare do not have the kind of massive dampening effect on the economy that Rogers believes they do. Jonathan Chait at The New Republic made a great catch when he used an article in National Affairs (which was supposed to demonstrate chilling effects on economic performance as a result of social democratic policy) to illustrate how the data actually make a reasonable case for social democracy and, by extension, social welfare.

The claim that welfare recipients have little incentive to find work is also extremely tenuous if not outright false. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published information in June 2009 showing that 46% of two-parent families and 33% of all families on welfare in 2006 were actually employed and supplemented their inadequate income with welfare benefits. Single-mother families in the lowest income quintile on welfare received, on average, about $4,500 per year in welfare benefits alongside their average earnings of about $2,550. I don’t think anyone would say that a combined $7,050 is attractive enough to keep someone on welfare when a job paying $7.25/hr (the federal minimum wage) would supply more than double the income, $15,080 per year for a 40-hour week, largely tax-free. Truly, this paltry amount cannot even be considered adequate to support the beneficiaries and their dependents, a sobering reality in the face of claims that welfare leads to dependency.

Further evidence that welfare recipients actively look for work despite their benefits is found in the knowledge that “the majority of families who ever use welfare do so for relatively short periods of time, but…will eventually receive welfare for relatively long periods of time.” In reality, welfare recipients tend to cycle in and out of employment but often fail to find stable, long-term opportunities.

The Benefits of Redistribution Policy
Though the benefits of existing social welfare programs are debatable, it is well-established that higher levels of economic inequality lead to slower economic growth and a fraying of social cohesion. To wit:

“World Bank research shows that the less equal a country’s distribution of assets, the slower its economic growth….[and that] countries with very unequal asset distribution should try to improve the access of the poor to productive assets….our research does not support the widely held view that governments must choose between equality and growth. The most effective policies will be those that simultaneously promote both.”

I’ll point out that the World Bank is hardly a bastion of liberal thought; they routinely demand privatization of public services as a precondition for loans to struggling nations, among other staunchly conservative positions.

Moreover, there are many other important reasons beyond economic growth to support policies that promote greater economic equality including that “people are much more likely to trust each other, measures of social capital suggest greater community involvement, and homicide rates are consistently lower.” A society that reduces economic inequality enjoys faster economic growth, lower crime and a heightened sense of community. If this is not enough of a reason to pursue policies that attempt to remedy the situation, I don’t know what is.

Conclusions
While highly controversial, social welfare policy is not as simple and intuitive as many would believe. We can certainly have an ideological debate about whether it is fair to those who subsidize the policies but, looking at the research, it becomes easy to see the regular admonishments against social welfare policy as promoting reduced economic performance and a shiftless population for what they are: a position with roots in ignorance. So the next time you see or hear someone with no background in Economics proselytizing about the effects of social welfare policies, it’s probably a good idea to remember that the subject is best left to the experts.