Public Policy vs. Illusions and Delusions

Dave Hoffman suggests that we are "forced by the Internet to nationalize problems", and as a result it is "harder for local communities to experiment with localized solutions to threats to the moral order". I would be more impressed with the argument if the imposition of national solutions on moral issues were a new phenomenon, or if it weren't the "don't tread on me" types who weren't often attempting to impose their own moral conventions upon the rest of us. But certainly, the national media, the 24 hour news cycle, and the Internet have changed the manner and speed at which local issues can become national news.

In fact, we have not been "forced" to "nationalize problems". We live in a society in which some problems that were once treated more uniformly on a national basis have been transitioned back to local mores. For example, obscenity is judged by community standards, and states are free to impose restrictions on access to abortion that were once considered forbidden under Roe v Wade. The Hatch Act and its creation of "right to work" states started the downhill slide of organized labor. We weren't "forced" to nationalize the problem of alcohol consumption during the prohibition era, nor was prohibition a product of the Internet. The anti-kidnapping laws that followed the Lindbergh kidnapping were not driven by the Internet. Behind the determination of what is "best" handled at the state vs. federal level lies a great deal of political gamesmanship that sometimes gets in the way of the formation of good policy.

Josh Marshall argued that suggesting that school shootings might not occur or might be less lethal if small children were trained to mob a gunman, or if schools were not a "feminized setting … in which helpless passivity is the norm" represents the discussion "quickly veering from the merely stupid [Megan McArdle's "mob the gunman" suggestion] to a pretty ugly kind of victim-blaming [Charlotte Allen's 'feminized settings' argument]". McArdle's suggestion is at best impractical and unrealistic, but to be fair to her she was comparing her own bad idea to ideas that she deemed worse - she admitted that her idea might not work, but had a better chance at preventing school shootings than the ideas she was criticizing. Marshall's criticism of Allen's comment is fair. Let's also throw in Mike Huckabee's blaming the shooting on a lack of prayer in schools.¹ That is blaming the victim, and it is ugly.

Hoffman appears to project his own discomfort with firearms onto people like Marshall,

I didn’t grow up with guns in the house, and the idea of allowing a child of mine into a school where the teachers are armed is horrifying. Worse, I think, is the concept that we ought to militarize children – to teach them that they are all on their own, and the state is powerless before the forces of chaos in society.

Marshall did speak of the growing militarization of our society. His comment is a bit cryptic, but he appears to be suggesting that fear of violent crime is resulting in people "seriously or [like McArdle] half in jest - pushing for a use of force race to the bottom".

Marshall's point is valid - even as violent crime has plummeted, fear of violent crime and terrorism has led to an expanded police and military presence in spaces that were far less secure during times when crime rates were significantly higher. I think part of the issue is that the more rare an event becomes, the more attention becomes focused on its increasingly rare occurrence. Marshall is making a public policy argument, that we should take a step back and try to figure out if the militarization is good for society, a good use of manpower and resources, or if it's likely to be effective before we expand it into new areas of society, such as public schools. Hoffman isn't actually addressing militarization - "teach[ing children] that they are all on their own, and the state is powerless before the forces of chaos in society" is not militarization - but more importantly he's not even arguing about how public policy should be formed.

My intervention here is to just to point out that the problem we actually have here is one of discourse – we are forced by the Internet to nationalize problems. This makes it much, much harder for local communities to experiment with localized solutions to threats to the moral order. If a community in, say, Connecticut wanted to ban assault weapon clips (because it made them feel safer – [(]let’s put to one side data on efficacy!), Glenn Reynolds would lead a charge against the liberal fascists. Indeed. Heh. Yes. If a community in Tennessee wants to arm its teachers (because it makes them feel safer – let’s put to one side data on efficacy!) Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan would call them out as conservative fascists. Or loonies. Or winners of the Moore award. And we’d all get to pat ourselves on the back, but no one would actually get the benefit that law is supposed to provide, which is the helpful illusion that we’re more civilized than we actually are, and that we’re actually doing something to push back against the tide.

The thing is, people like Marshall don't "put to one side data on efficacy" because they are interested in facts. They are interested in what works. Hoffman takes several potshots at Marshall,² but all the while misses that the McArdle "rush the shooter" comment was neither a serious policy proposal nor reasonably characterized as a proposal "offered by gun proponents". McArdle was in fact pointing out that some of the proposals being advanced in response to the school shooting, such as banning certain types of firearm or magazines of a certain capacity, would not have prevented the shooting. McArdle tends to get ridiculed in some corners because she has a history of making arguments that are not well-thought out, but her essential approach here is the same as Marshall's. She's not interested in making people feel safe. She's pointing out that your feelings have little to do with what actually does or does not make you safer.

At a basic level Hoffman is correct about a culture clash, although it's not s binary as he suggests. He's correct that a measure that to one person or community might serve as a "helpful illusion that we’re more civilized than we actually are" might differ from, or even be the opposite of, what another person or community would deem a "helpful illusion." If Hoffman wants to argue that communities should be able to create their own "helpful illusions", let's assume within reasonable constraints, he's only going to run into issues where those illusions start to impinge upon the rights of others. There already are schools that allow any teacher with a CCW permit to bring a gun to school.

The problem is that Hoffman is trying to impose his standard for "helpful illusions" onto a policy debate - an attempt to determine what may or may not actually work to prevent (in this instance) school shootings, and the extent to which arguments for measures that offer only illusory benefits are worth implementing, particularly when other civil, social and legal issues are implicated. The policy discussion does not "reduce[] our ability to try out different versions of the good life, and thus diminish[] our capacity live together in peace". In fact, if properly conducted, the policy discussion avoids imposing "helpful illusions" on a nationwide basis, instead implementing only those policies that can be reasonably expected to work, while leaving localities to form their own "helpful illusions" within the aforementioned parameters.
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1. There is a natural human tendency to try to explain away tragedy - to find a way to believe that a horror that happened to somebody else could not happen to you. Huckabee put himself into the same column as the TV ministers who blame local and national tragedies on homosexuality, feminism and the like - and they know exactly what they are doing when they exploit tragedies in that manner.

2. I found Hoffman's essay through a link provided by Jonathan Adler, a call for tolerance that, in context, is rendered odd by his hollow man arguments about mythic "liberal bloggers" who are having a "fevered reaction" and are in "a frenzy" about Megan McArdle's "what if kids mobbed the gunman" column. Adler's a law professor, so I assume he has enough familiarity with the Socratic method to understand that scorn, derision and ridicule, as unpleasant as they can be, do not constitute a frenzied or fevered reaction.

David Brooks and his Milquetoast Moderates

A few days ago David Brooks wrote an interesting column about an imaginary brand of "moderate voter". Oh, not completely imaginary, but certainly rare enough not to be a factor in any given election, certainly not the type to be duped by the partisanship Brooks dribbles into his column. I'm left wondering, did Brooks write this column because he wants to flatter low-information voters who, even at this stage of the game, are undecided and would prefer to embrace the conceit that their inability to decide which candidate to support results from their being deep thinkers wrestling with deep issues? Or is it that he truly believes that there's a significant class of undecided "moderates" who fit his definition, and nonetheless condescends to them in a manner their certain to see through? My guess is that, as with Douthat, it's the former. Don't get me wrong. It's nice to see a major pundit reject the Beltway conceit that "moderate" politicians advancing "bipartisan" ideas are the cure to our nation's woes. Brooks is correct that merely seeking out the "midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there" does not make you a moderate. Regrettably, Brooks' notion of what it means to actually be a moderate is not much better than the conception so often advanced by his peers.

Moderates start with a political vision, but they get it from history books, not philosophy books. That is, a moderate isn’t ultimately committed to an abstract idea. Instead, she has a deep reverence for the way people live in her country and the animating principle behind that way of life. In America, moderates revere the fact that we are a nation of immigrants dedicated to the American dream — committed to the idea that each person should be able to work hard and rise.

Part of that is fair: a moderate of this stripe would be something of an intellectual, and thus would look to and attempt to learn from history. But how in the world does Brooks come to the idea that you can understand the history and underpinning philosophy of our country while rejecting philosophy. Does he think that the thinkers who influenced the path of post-Revolutionary America, for example Montesquieu and Thomas Paine, were historians? That the Federalist Papers are studies of history? What in the world does it mean to "revere" as "fact" the concept that "we are a nation of immigrants dedicated to the American dream" devoted to meritocracy and advancement? And how would Brooks have us reconcile that so-called "fact", which is in fact a philosophy, with... the actual facts on American economic mobility? Brooks continues,

This animating principle doesn’t mean that all Americans think alike. It means that we have a tradition of conflict. Over the centuries, we have engaged in a series of long arguments around how to promote the American dream — arguments that pit equality against achievement, centralization against decentralization, order and community against liberty and individualism.

So a moderate is like... a feng shui interior decorator, always trying to seek harmony and balance? Less concerned with whether a solution is right or wrong, but instead about whether the chairs and tables are correctly positioned? Why... yes, that does seem to be how Brooks views moderation:

The moderate doesn’t try to solve those arguments. There are no ultimate solutions. The moderate tries to preserve the tradition of conflict, keeping the opposing sides balanced.

So a moderate, having embraced the concept that "we are a nation of immigrants dedicated to the American dream", would confront the anti-immigrant sentiments in states like Arizona and... what? Attempt to seek "balance" between his core belief in immigration and people who want to close our borders to pretty much any immigration? A moderate, having embraced the Horatio Alger myth as an American ideal, would confront the facts of inequality and a Mitt Romney-type attitude of "If you don't pay federal taxes, you don't matter to me," by... what? If in fact the moderate embraces the core beliefs described by Brooks, how does he advance "balance" when a political party or candidate openly rejects those core beliefs? Brooks never makes clear what a moderate would do in the present political environment. But he does contend that Romney's latest revision of his core beliefs, his attempt to distance himself from his anti-immigrant, anti-equality rhetoric of only a few months ago, is an aggressive appeal to moderate voters. Well, no, not unless they're stupid. Brooks continues,

[A moderate] understands that most public issues involve trade-offs. In most great arguments, there are two partially true points of view, which sit in tension. The moderate tries to maintain a rough proportion between them, to keep her country along its historic trajectory.

By that measure, President Obama led the nation as a moderate, only to be rebuffed by the opposition party. President Clinton's triangulation, arguably, would also be recast as moderation; or would that be the staking out of the middle ground that Brooks rejects? One way or another, it appears that Brooks has little regard for how moderation of one form or another plays itself out in our political system.

Americans have prospered over the centuries because we’ve kept a rough balance between things like individual opportunity and social cohesion, local rights and federal power. At any moment, new historical circumstances, like industrialization or globalization, might upset the balance. But the political system gradually finds a new equilibrium.

But that balance certainly is not because our nation has been governed by moderates. It's much more the result of our system of government having incorporated serious impediments to dramatic change, and a constitution that forces a significant degree of balance between state and federal power. There's a reason that Brooks does not give one concrete example of a moderate of his conception having led the nation through a difficult time. One who has led our nation at any time. Even one name. It's because Brooks' brand of moderation is a form of intellectualism that does not stand up well to politics. You don't take a policy white paper to a politics fight.

Brooks did qualify his statement about moderation, expressing that in "most great arguments, there are two partially true points of view". But let's take a step back and look at how that played out through American history. For much of our nation's history, it might have been accepted that opponents of slavery "had a point", but we nonetheless maintained and legally enforced chattel slavery. For almost a century afterward, opponents of legally enforced racial segregation "had a point", but we nonetheless maintained and legally enforced racial segregation. Proponents of women's suffrage "had a point", but the larger societal view was that women shouldn't vote.

If somebody were to now advance the position that slavery should be reintroduced or that women should be stripped of their right to vote, Brooks would likely say that those arguments fall outside of the sphere for which there are two partially true points of view. But that's not because of a victory of his brand of "moderate" - the type who would have sought to bring into balance the two competing philosophies. It's because people with what were then extreme political positions worked hard, often at significant peril to themselves, to advance those agendas until they won the public debate, brought about massive societal change, and created a context in which what was once acceptable is now viewed as unacceptable.

Brooks' "moderate" is more of a philosophical traffic cop:

The moderate tries to maintain a rough proportion between them, to keep her country along its historic trajectory.

But sometimes you need to climb off the fence and take a side. Sometimes the "new equilibrium" is what you achieve after upsetting the apple cart, not the sort of careful balancing that Brooks proposes. Sometimes if you embrace that form of "moderation" you end up holding society back or perpetuating a wrong. Sometimes the conceit that you are a "moderate" and "above the fray" is a rationalization or excuse used by somebody who has not though through the issues well enough to pick a side.

Brooks compounds his error,

The moderate does not believe that there are policies that are permanently right.

If that's true, Brooks' moderate is a moral coward. Given that Brooks clearly thinks of himself as one of these "above-the-fray, all-seeing, soloution-seeking moderates", that would certainly be quite a condemnation of self. But if Brooks admits the obvious truth - that there are policies that, once implemented, make it obvious that the policy that came before was wrong-headed, even destructive, his conceit collapses.

Somebody might respond that you need to separate social issues from legal issues - that you can be a political "moderate" of the type Brooks describes while adhering to social views driven by something other than fact or history. The problem with that is, the key problems of our time are driven by an attempt to balance social and economic interests. If you say that reproductive freedoms are a social issue, you're taking the position that the government can pass laws that principally restrict the rights and freedom of women. And how far can one push such a distinction before we're back to talking about segregation or slavery. If you take the position that society owes no duty to the poor, not even to poor children, there's no discussion to be had on how to balance those interests against a balanced budget or low taxes.

Before making that absurd claim, Brooks retreats a bit to his conception of the moderate as an intellectual:

The moderate creates her policy agenda by looking to her specific circumstances and seeing which things are being driven out of proportion at the current moment. This idea — that you base your agenda on your specific situation — may seem obvious, but immoderate people often know what their solutions are before they define the problems.

That's reasonable enough. A moderate would attempt to find solutions based upon fact, not upon ideology. You don't start with the assumption that your solution will fix whatever's wrong - you look at the problem and then try to identify the best tools to fix it. While Brooks goes a bit soft with his notion of balance - this notion that a good "moderate" is always trying to restore and maintain equilibrium rather than rejecting an idea that should be properly placed in history's trash heap, there are issues for which the best we can do is seek some sort of balance suitable to the era. Brooks lists "equality against achievement, centralization against decentralization, order and community against liberty and individualism"; again, those sound arguments largely informed by philosophy, but history will often give you a sense of what is likely to work or to be accepted by the public.

Also, are "equality" and "achievement" actually in tension? Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush could certainly attest to the fact that starting from a position of privilege helps you achieve far beyond what you would be likely to accomplish from the starting point of a typical American. Of the three, George H.W. Bush might even admit that obvious fact. Brooks laments "inequality" in America, but makes no case that you cannot decrease inequality without also reducing "achievement" - one could argue that creating a more equal starting point, not dragging down the top but giving a boost to capable people at the bottom, will significantly increase achievement. But I overanalyze - it appears that Brooks is talking about affirmative action, but wants to tiptoe around the subject matter rather than attacking it directly. (I doubt that he's talking about legacy admissions - those, after all, reflect parental "achievement", right?)

For those of us who favor seeking good policy solutions to chronic problems, there's certainly appeal to the argument that you should start by looking at the facts and then try to find the best solution that's likely to get past the legislature and be signed into law - I'm not certain that Brooks can be arm-twisted into admitting it, but that's how we ended up first with Romneycare and later with Obamacare.

Alas, Brooks cannot resist his usual partisan nonsense,

For a certain sort of conservative, tax cuts and smaller government are always the answer, no matter what the situation. For a certain sort of liberal, tax increases for the rich and more government programs are always the answer.

That is to say there is a "certain sort of conservative" who rejects fact-based solutions in favor of ideology, namely the type who would sign Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge. That would be about 236 out of 242 Republican Members of Congress, and 40 out of 47 Republican Senators. You may as well say "The Republican Party". On the other hand you have this "liberal [who believes that] tax increases for the rich and more government programs are always the answer" who... appears to exist solely in David Brooks' imagination. If Brooks wants us to believe that he, personally, favors fact-driven analysis in pursuit of balance, he certainly picked odd examples.

Brooks tells us more about his brand of "moderate" - being a moderate does not mean being "tepid" and can mean simultaneously pressing for hard change in two directions. It's a "distinct ethical disposition" (ethical, but not philosophical?) suspicious of imbalance not only in others but in herself. (Introspection = good.) Brooks' moderate is suspicious of "passionate intensity and bold simplicity" and admires "self-restraint, intellectual openness and equipoise". Brooks' moderates either don't mind or prefer to be categorized as feminine (I don't specifically recall a column in which Brooks so conspicuously and consistently references his subject as "she")... which, frankly, makes the column seem a bit like a push for undecided women to vote for Romney - the politician he purports to now be "pander[ing] to the moderate mind-set". I guess that's his form of balance - vote for the candidate who has taken every position on every issue and assume that it all averages out?

Brooks tells us,

There are many moderates in this country, but they have done a terrible job of organizing themselves, building institutions or even organizing around common causes.

You could say the same thing of libertarians, except that we can point to actual people who organize as libertarians and say, "That's what a libertarian looks like". For Brooks' brand of moderates, you can assume that David Brooks would be able to at least find himself, but... if he possesses the level of introspection he insists defines his brand of "moderate", he appears to be excluding even himself. More to the point, to organize politically you need to have a common set of beliefs or values, and "everybody else is wrong" isn't going to work. A group of Brooks' moderates might have a wonderful coffee house debate over the issues of the day and where balance properly lies, but they're unlikely to leave their debate having reached a consensus. And by Brooks' definition, at the very next meeting whatever agreement was previously reached goes out the window, because the balance point is constantly shifting.

As with the forces that led to the financial industry deregulation that contributed to the financial industry collapse, sometimes things are already pretty much in balance when one side starts arguing for an extremist position, and it's all too easy for a Brooks-style centrist to believe he's staking out a new middle ground when he's in fact embracing a policy change that throws the system out of balance.

Brooks also embraces the conceit that his form of "moderation" can be played out in words, starting weeks or days before an election, and that if a politicians words feel good as they slither down your ear canal you should ignore all that came before. What actual moderate, informed by history, would trust such a politician? And why, given that Brooks so recently rejected the notion that moderation leads to success in Washington, is Brooks pushing the notion that Romney is a moderate, or at least is suddenly and conveniently putting on a moderate's clothing?

I have no objection to the notion that our system would be more effective if it were more intellectual, more focused on policy, more willing to reject ideology that gets in the way of good policy formation, and to some degree Brooks endorses such a vision. I don't have a problem with the argument that there is a point at which we must balance what we should do against what we can do - that a cost-benefit analysis must come into play. Alas, although one could argue that those philosophies are part of what Brooks argues, he ends up endorsing a sort of fence--sitting, balance-seeking, mythology-driven centrism, uninformed by either a coherent philosophy or an accurate view of history, and in essence endorsing polite acquiescence in a status quo that may in fact be immoral or otherwise unacceptable.

Can You Win Elections With Easy to Understand Policy Proposals

My daughter was recently in a summer camp that concluded with the campers performing a clever little musical comprises of songs from Schoolhouse Rock. Those songs demonstrate how you can present concepts, some of which are rather complicated, in a cute and catchy manner and... well, leave most of the listeners able to sing along with various parts of the songs but still, by way of example, unclear on how bills become laws.

In his latest column, Roger Cohen¹ shares a fair observation about the President. President Obama has given a huge number of speeches, some of which have received considerable praise for their substance, but he rarely includes a take-away. Cohen brings up Bill Clinton, and refers to a simple homily Clinton used in conversation to explain why you need to explain policy in understandable terms ("You’ve got to put the corn where the hogs can get to it").

Like Brooks, Cohen argues that the President needs to explain why we should reelect him:

[T]he big opportunity that has opened up for the president as the Democratic National Convention begins is to do something he has not been very good at: explain in plain language how the United States came to its present pass and how he plans to set the country on a path to growth and jobs again. That in turn will explain why a second term would differ from the first.

Cohen offers an unflattering reaction to the President's budget policy, "Obama’s plan is so long-winded nobody really gets it", but... if I were to call that unfair it would be because it's difficult to find something that I would actually describe as a "plan". Cohen is also fair in observing that many of Obama's stated policies need to be translated into "ideas that pass the policy-wonk test", with the concept being, "If only a policy wonk can understand, forget it."

I have to say that I like Cohen's proposal - to encourage the candidates to lay out their policies in clear, simple terms. Sure, you would have to have a lot of footnotes, more detailed versions for the wonks and analysts, etc., but give the voters something that they can reasonably understand and compare to the other party's proposals. It appeals to my preference to focus on policy, not politics. And, alas, it's not going to happen. At least not directly from the candidates or their campaigns. And if a third party were to scrupulously analyze the candidates' statements, prepare a careful and accurate, understandable point-by-point summary, and publish it, the candidates would probably take issue with at least half of the clarified points - because obfuscation can help you win elections. You can't be everything to everyone if your positions are easily located and easily understood.

Clinton, as Cohen notes, can help, but Clinton's more apt to help with homilies and take-aways than with the translation of complicated issues into simple policy points. One of the most famous lines associated with Clinton? James Carville's "[It's t]he economy, stupid." The line resonated and worked for him, but it did not illuminate.

That said, President Obama's speech at the Democratic Convention provides him with an opportunity to do more than lay out applause lines. He can heed Cohen's advice, and can attempt some amount of public education on the economy. Not just "The other side's ideas are garbage," but a bit of "This is why we're still struggling, this is why Romney's budget ideas are harmful, this is my plan to improve things, and this is why I think it will work." I think Cohen is also correct that the failure of Romney and Ryan to discuss foreign policy - something that they, alas correctly, have determined that most voters don't care about - gives Obama the opportunity to speak clearly of the role of our nation and military in the world, to honor the military, and to articulate a vision for America's future role.

The Republican campaign still largely boils down to, "Vote for us because we're not Obama". If the President makes a strong case for his reelection, Romney will face pressure to do the same thing - and assuming it's not too late, I'm not sure that he has much more to say than, "I'm not Obama".

Update: Dean Baker writes,

[I]t's hard to those who write for major news outlets to notice an $8 trillion housing bubble. This is the story of the downturn and the current "fiscal woes."... In reality, the U.S. has no fiscal woes right now (the interest rate remains near post-war lows), we just have inadequate demand.

I am more sympathetic to Cohen's argument because I did not read it as situational, but as a commentary upon what he would like to see from government in general, much less a "we need austerity in a recession" and much more, "if the government implements sound fiscal policy, we will be better off in good times and bad." The fact that we can presently easily borrow money at a negative effective interest rate is a basis for arguing against forming policy based upon confidence fairies and bond vigilantes, but it's not an excuse for ignoring the long-term. Borrowing will become less affordable, the debt will still need to be serviced, and Medicare is on an unsustainable path.

A comment adds, "he's flat wrong about the necessity of a decade to recover." The comment is true in the sense that it might have been possible to foster a speedier recovery, or that the recovery might accelerate, but given the "facts on the ground", putting a ten year recovery period on the 2008 recession does not, to me, seem unrealistic. The hole Bush's policies dug for the nation made us fall farther and harder than necessary - Cohen seems to be arguing, "Government shouldn't dig us into holes like that, and an illusion of prosperity driven by a bubble is no excuse for bad policy."
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1. A brief note about Roger Cohen - when I saw that I had an unusual amount of traffic going to my last post, in which I was very critical of a Cohen column, I tracked it back to a Blogrunner link on Cohen's page on the Times website. As of this moment, it's still there. I don't want to read too much into automatically generated links but I do know that the Times can manually pull the plug on any link or site that they don't want to include in that section - and the fact that I haven't seen that type of traffic to a link critical of the Times' right-wing columnists suggests (not proves, but suggests) that Cohen has a much higher tolerance for criticism than a lot of his peers. That he's interested in ideas and in being challenged, even by us mean old bloggers. If so, good for him.

Republican Ideas vs. Republican Policies

On a recent episode of Real Time, Nick Gillespie of Reason.tv attempted to goad Rachel Maddow by accusing her of always taking the side of the Democrats, and insisted that she should name a Republican policy with which she agrees. Maddow appeared to have a visceral dislike for Gillespie and rebuffed his challenge. Maher interceded, stating correctly that the challenge was not a fair one. A better response by either, I believe, would have been to point out that the Republican party's better ideas are, at present, largely also held by the Democratic Party, by pointing out that the Republican ideas that are most attractive in principle are the ones they tend not to implement while in office, or simply to say, "You first," followed up with an explanation of why Gillespie's favorite Republican policy isn't all that special.

Gillespie revealed the weakness of his argument, that he was out to score rhetorical points rather than making any substantive observation about Maddow, when he later challenged her defense of the Affordable Care Act, contending that as "RomneyCare" is the inspiration of "ObamaCare" it's a Republican idea. As if it needs to be said, "RomneyCare" is so unpopular among Republicans - at least those outside of Massachusetts - that not even Romney supports it. Also, although I don't watch her show, I expect that Maddow has been a consistent critic of "ObamaCare" from the left. That she sees it as better to the status quo ante is something quite different from embracing its policies. And if we're going to pretend that any idea ever supported by a Republican is a "Republican idea", even if repudiated by the party at large, even if repudiated by the sole Republican who voiced support for the idea, Gillespie's challenge loses what little credibility or meaning it might have had if he chose to connect it to reality

My thought at the time was to take a look at the national Republican Party's website, or at Romney's website, and see which ideas I could endorse. I was reminded of Gillespie's challenge, though, by the low hanging fruit - the Texas Republican Party. Don't get me wrong, I agree that the government should keep its grubby hands off of my multivitamins, and that we shouldn't put aborted fetus parts in our yummy pink slime, but we're scraping the bottom of the barrel....

One of the problems with trying to find "Republican" issues on Romney's website is that he pretty much runs away from any controversy. To the extent that his website shares ideas it's to reassure corporate interests - he's very anti-Union, he has no coherent immigration policy but he favors H1B-type programs for skilled workers. He toes the insurance company line on healthcare reform, the financial industry's line on regulation (i.e., that despite almost taking down the world economy it should largely be unregulated), and the energy industry line on the environment. He's promising to slash taxes for the rich and pretend that he can still move the budget toward balance.

A lot of his ideas are magical - for example, he wants to retrain workers for the new economy, but has no idea for how that can be done either affordably or effectively. He believes that pretty much every foreign policy issue can be solved through sanctions, military posturing, increased military spending, supporting dissident groups even when to do so would be to undermine their goals or to invite reprisal, and if all else fails by antagonizing China and Russia. He likes block grants - after all, why solve a problem when you can punt?

All Romney's "platform" does is reinforce the impression of him as a vacuous man running for office, beholden to the millionaires and billionaires who fête him at their private back yard golf courses. You can find plenty of pie in the sky - stuff most people can agree with, like the notion that everybody should be able to attend a college that is both affordable and that matches their abilities - but what's the point of saying such a thing if you can't also articulate how you will achieve that end. The policies you will create, and how you will pay for their implementation?

I had hoped I might do better on the RNC's website, but their take on the issues is even more evasive and platitudinous than Romney's. Apparently the only place I can find specifics is through a resort to the low hanging fruit offered by the likes of the Texas GOP.

Really, if the question "name a Republican policy you agree with" simply entails embracing a platitude - "I agree that judges should uphold the law", "I agree that government should cut waste", "I agree that regulations that do more harm than good should be repealed", "I agree that kids should have access to quality education" - then it's easy to find points of agreement. But if we move past the surface and start talking policy, it becomes difficult to see how Romney and his party are in fact planning to advance the values they pretend to hold.

The classic example is, of course, the budget - Republicans talk up a storm about balancing the budget and the evils of deficit spending when they're out of power, but can't spend money fast enough when in power. We move immediately from "deficits are horrible" to "deficits don't matter". So I can say "I agree with the 'Republican' idea that we should balance the budget," but if I ask which party is more likely to achieve that goal history tells me that I have to vote for a Democrat.

I can similarly agree with the concept that regulation should not interfere with the efficient operation of businesses, operated in an otherwise lawful and ethical manner, but in practice the Republicans have repeatedly supported deregulation that is affirmatively harmful to the environment and which has caused numerous crises as the deregulated businesses run amok. It also wouldn't be honest to suggest that the Democrats don't share that concept, or that in recent decades that they don't share the Republican tendency to allow businesses to run amok. Agreement with a stated principle is only meaningful to then extent that you can trust the party to enact responsible policies and to maintain appropriate regulations.

I can't embrace Gillespie's conceit that any idea ever supported by a Republican is a "Republican idea" - "You support wage and price controls? Not only are you a socialist, you got that idea from Nixon!" If the endorsement of an idea is to have any significance, I also can't embrace the notion that a "Republican idea" can be divorced from Republican policy. The question seems like an anachronism - twenty, thirty years ago it was easier to both identify ideas that were associated with one party or the other, and to relate those ideas to actual policy proposals. Today it seems like the Republican Party doesn't want to let voters know what it stands for.

We support common-sense health care reforms that would lower costs, preserve quality, end lawsuit abuse, and maintain the health care that Americans deserve.

We believe in energy independence.

We believe that maintaining a world-class system of primary and secondary education, with high standards, in which all students can reach their potential, is critically important to America's future.

We believe a judge's role is to interpret the law.

And I expect that "we believe" that every little girl should have a pony. I expect that Maddow could agree with those "ideas", but her agreement would stand not as a vindication of the Republican Party. If the Republican Party wants vindication, it needs to stand behind its ideas - to articulate actual policies that advance the ideas.

The Childish Nature of American Politics

My, how American loves leadership. The country loved George W. Bush when he "led" us into two completely unfunded wars, costing in the $trillions. The seniors loved George W. Bush for his "leadership" on Medicare, giving them another unfunded benefit projected to cost about 3/4 of another $trillion over the next decade. The nation, most notably the wealthiest 3% of the nation, is angry that G.W.'s unfunded tax cuts might not be extended - who cares about the unfunded $trillions lost to the tax cut, or that the cuts were scheduled by Bush to expire as part of the maneuverings to ram them through Congress without adequate funding or consideration of the future. That is leadership, American style, and the Republicans had his back.

Meanwhile, three items on our national budget prevent us from having any reasonable expectation of a balanced budget in the short- or longer term: Military spending, Medicare and Social Security. Bush, a self-described war president who had launched those two unfunded wars, was interested in increasing military spending. And he just got through making Medicare less sustainable, so he wasn't about to send the contradictory message that it was a pressing financial priority. So he picked the easiest of the three, and a long-term thorn in the side of the Republican Party, and announced a partial privatization plan for Social Security.

The question at this point is not whether Bush's plan was a good idea. It was poorly conceived - or, I suppose, well-conceived if you would have been among the money managers who received a government license to skim a percentage off of people's private accounts as "compensation" for your services. The question is not whether private accounts would have produced a greater return than treasury bonds. If you weren't already aware that it's foolish to believe that the stock market only goes up, the financial industry collapse and current recession should have set you straight. The question is, what price will the public pay for reform? What happened when the Grandpa Simpsons of the nation (that is, all of them except this one) got wind of the notion that somebody might be trying to cut their Social Security, the Republicans who had been so happy to push through Bush's $trillions in unfunded tax cuts and expenditures scurried for cover.

Some cynicism is appropriate here. Had Bush been serious about Social Security reform, in the sense of making the books balance for the indefinite future, he could have found enough Democrats to support reform. It's been done before - some minor tweaks to contributions, payouts, and the age at which you are eligible for partial or full benefits, and suddenly the program is projected to be sound for another century. Bush preferred to keep the system in a state of crisis, or more correctly something that could be misrepresented as a state of crisis, to make people believe that change must occur, and that it must occur quickly. Because it appears that about the only time you can get the public behind something that might involve even slight sacrifice is when you are dealing with imminent catastrophe. Bush's goal was not to fix the Social Security system, it was to undermine and privatize that system.

But what happened to any sense that you can lead a society toward an improved long-term outcome through some modest, short term shared sacrifice or adjustment, rather than waiting for that crisis? Absurd? Take a look at Ruth Marcus:

I write this from a perspective of sympathy with Obama's aims and overall support for his performance over the past two years. But Obama's dismissive analysis omits the non-emergency choices he made - primarily to press for and, in the end, muscle through the passage of health-care reform - and the ensuing discomfort of voters.

Discomfort that is entirely understandable, even to those of us who supported health-care reform.

Marcus speaks of how various Obama Administration ideas created "perceptions of intrusive government", but elides any mention of the intentional distortions that fueled those misperceptions. The health care reform plan that she sees as "too much" for the American people to take, of course, is similar to the Republican counter-proposal to the Clinton plan from twenty years ago, and is almost identical to the plan implemented for Massachusetts by once and future Republican Presidential contender Mitt Romney. "Cap and trade" was similarly a Republican idea, once championed by John McCain and supported in the tentative Democratic legislation by Lindsey Graham. The auto bailout started under the Bush Administration, and the larger financial industry bailout was also a continuation of Bush policies. By the time of the election, anybody paying attention was aware that the auto industry "takeover" had turned out to be a remarkable success.

So Marcus appears to be saying that as long as there are groups willing to play off of the public's fears and insecurities, even if it means portraying as frightening the very policies they once endorsed, and even if it means refusing to work for better solutions in order to obstruct reforms they concede are necessary, it's best to do nothing. The Obama Administration was not acting like G.W. on Social Security reform. It repeatedly reached out to and included Republicans in the drafting of its legislation, and to entice Republican support and contribution. It's possible that had the Republican Party been less interested in obstructionism, something they correctly anticipated would help them in the 2010 election, and more interested in forming good policy, we would have passed a better healthcare reform bill without the public misconception that this is a big government bill that's going to destroy health insurance as we know it.

If you look at the few Republicans who are willing to articulate a healthcare policy, you tend to see the Newt Gingrich brand of reform - eliminate comprehensive health insurance in favor of catastrophic coverage and health savings accounts. If you come down with cancer, you're covered. If you develop a chronic health condition, you had better either be born rich or keep your job because you're going to pay for that out of your "savings". What if your salary is to meager to allow for any appreciable contribution to your health savings account? Well, that would be your problem, wouldn't it. And do you know how we get to that system from the one we have? By forcing a crisis. The bad news for the Republican Party arising from the modest healthcare reform bill is that it forestalls catastrophe, and creates a framework through which an alternative to the Gingrich-style system can evolve without the current system first reaching the point of catastrophic failure. So yes, they ginned up hysterical opposition to a center-right reform bill and are screeching about repeal. But in the view of Ruth Marcus, all of that is President Obama's fault - it's too scary when the government tries to act in a grown-up manner and prevent things from reaching a crisis point.

Fareed Zakaria was on Real Time last week, and reminded Adrian Fenty that it's better to serve one term in office with real accomplishments than to serve multiple terms with little to show for it. Even though he's among the first to trumpet his own accomplishments, Fenty didn't seem comfortable with that idea. (What's the first thing a politician thinks of when he wakes up in the morning? How to get reelected.) But Zakaria's point is valid, and it's one I wish our political leaders were mature enough to internalize. It would also be helpful if our political press weren't so happy to cover the horse race instead of the issues and, after egging on the mud-slinging and "objectively" refusing to separate fact from fiction, weren't so quick to blame the politicians who try to show actual leadership, make tough decisions, and prevent crises for getting ahead of the American people.

Wretched Public Policy Arguments

If Paul Krugman is correct, it becomes more understandable why editorials from AEI "scholars" seem so often to be wretched, weak in analysis and careless with facts.

In discussing the [David] Frum firing [by AEI], Bruce Bartlett asserts that AEI has muzzled its health-care experts, because the truth is that they agree with a lot of what Obama is proposing.

Sort of an, "If you don't have anything nice to say for the benefit of our corporate sponsors, don't say anything at all"? Ensuring that your most knowledgeable experts either toe the corporate line or remain silent?

Update: "They’re hiring Jonah Goldberg and Marc Thiessen." As I was saying... wretched.

Broder Confuses Budget Decisions With Public Policy Decisions

The use of committees to allow Congress to avoid making tough decisions? Hardly a new idea. Congress has used this method to obtain recommendations on base closures¹ that must be accepted or rejected as a package, in lieu of debating and deciding the issues. It may not be a particularly courageous way to tackle the issue or deal with special interests or the concerns of Members of Congress whose states are affected, but... we're talking about Congress, so you do what you have to do.

But the idea of expanding this concept to the entire budget, eagerly embraced by David Broder, implicates a much broader set of concerns. It's not simply a context where Congress has decided the larger issues, such as recognizing that savings can be obtained and efficiencies realized by consolidating military bases, and the committee is left to work out the details. There are huge public policy decisions involved in setting tax rates, funding various government programs, and cutting or eliminating funding for various programs and initiatives.

The one barely possible benefit from this predictably futile partisan bloodbath is the opportunity it could offer to leverage support for a long-standing bipartisan effort to force Congress to confront the hard steps needed to put the nation on a safer fiscal course.

That chance was highlighted last week when Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana and nine other moderate Democrats wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asking that the debt-ceiling increase be tied to passage of bipartisan legislation creating a deficit-reduction commission whose recommendations would have to be quickly enacted or rejected by the House and Senate as a package.

But this proposal has nothing to do with "hard steps". Sorry, Senator Bayh, but if you were serious about this you could easily team up with your fellow "moderates" and draft up a proposal to balance the budget over a given number of years. Does Broder truly not realize that the reason Senators like Bayh want to delegate that task to a commission, reserving to Congress only an "up or down" vote, is that he doesn't want to be held responsible for either making the tough calls himself or for the consequences of those calls?

It's pretty easy to form a bipartisan commission that understands a mandate to recommend base closures that serve the nation's financial goals without detriment to its military goals. But larger tax and spending issues are much more complex, and have significant policy elements and ramifications. You can almost hear Broder's voice trembling with excitement:

But the odds are against [proponents of the commission]. Because such a commission is likely to propose both cuts in popular entitlement programs and tax increases whenever the country comes out of the current recession, those members on the ballot next November, including Reid and Pelosi, would much rather avoid any discussion of such steps.

Here, Broder highlights two things: First, that he imagines the budget commission will be composed of people who share his own policy goals - apparently focusing on increased taxes for the middle class and the slashing of programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that significantly benefit the middle class and poor. Second, that politicians shouldn't be held responsible for the consequences of "balancing the budget" by deferring significant policy decisions to what amounts to a black box - they know what goes in, they get to see what comes out, but have no input or control into what happens in the interim.

Were specific members proposed for this committee, Broder would likely either be much more excited ("They really do agree with me!") or horrified ("They want to balance the budget by increasing taxes on capital gains, having a robust estate tax, closing tax loopholes for the rich, a one-time wealth tax on the rich, by taxing corporate profits diverted through offshore companies as if they're domestic, slashing the military budget....") His support anticipates the former - and he's probably correct, that Bayh and friends have an eye on new or increased taxes on the middle class and the slashing of popular entitlement programs, but lack the backbone to simply come out and make those proposals.

Seriously, what if the committee came back and said, "To maintain Social Security and Medicare spending, and to ensure their full funding for the indefinite future, we recommend that the military budget be halved, that funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be reduced by 1/3 per year until totally eliminated in three years, and that funding for the Army be eliminated with all of its bases and facilities closed," Would Broder still be pretending that this proposal is merely about crunching numbers, and not a delegation of serious policy issues with significant short- and long-term ramifications for the country?

It must be nice to know, in advance, that no matter what Congress does it will always be somebody else's ox that gets gored.

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1. These recommendations come from the bipartisan Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commissions (BRAC).

The Cure Is the Disease?

In terms of healthy (or should I say unhealthy) political discourse over healthcare reform, at MedRants, Dr. Centor diagnoses a problem:

So we have a debate similar to religion versus science. We have beliefs that no reasoned argument can address. We have an impasse in the debate, and thus we cannot reason our way to a solution.

He adopts the argument that it's a myth that the fight is won or lost over the quality of reason, and prescribes a solution,

The Democrats should change their strategy, because they cannot win on logical debating points.

He's far from the first who has made that claim, but happens to be the one I've most recently read. But really, if he were in an angry debate with another doctor who insisted that a gangrenous limb be treated with the mere application of a Band-Aid, would he truly abandon logic, fact and science? What's his proposal for winning debates on the merits without actually debating the merits? Punch the other guy in the nose?

Seriously, if the response to malicious distortion, lies, and dishonest "branding" of healthcare issues is for the other side to drop into the same gutter, how can you even begin to tell who has the better argument?

I think Rick Perlstein makes a much more sound observation In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition,

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

He notes a kernel of truth behind Dr. Centor's point,

Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson¹ would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.

Not so long ago, "a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as 'extremist' - out of bounds"; now "it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest". We have a failure of the Republican Party and a failure by the media - so who's to blame? Who needs to change? It must be the Democrats.

As usual, Seth Godin provides a good insight:

The screaming is a key part, because screaming is often a tool used to balance out the lazy ignorance of someone parroting opposition to an idea that they don't understand....

If you want to challenge the conventional wisdom of health care reform, please do! It'll make the final outcome better. But if you choose to do that, it's essential that you know more about it than everyone else, not less. Certainly not zero. Be skeptical, but be informed (about everything important, not just this issue, of course). Screaming ignorance gets attention, but it distracts us from the work at hand.

Godin suggests that the "screaming" approach to discourse " is ineffective, short-sighted and threatens the fabric of the tribe." He's right. And perhaps somebody comment that I needn't qualify this statement, but if we really follow Dr. Centor's advice and give in to the screamers, we're doomed at best to a future of bad policy and dysfunctional government.
________

1: He's alluding to an incident he previously described,

When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."

Nobody Wants To Know The Truth

I'm an advocate of premising social policy on sound research and analysis. You try to find out what's working in other places, and build on those ideas. You monitor your own implementations of those ideas to be sure that your policies are, in fact, working. Ideally, you can build on working ideas, revise or eliminate ideas that aren't working, and make things better.

But what happens when those who implement policies, and those who are affected by those policies or by potential changes in those policies, either don't care about implementing the best public policy solutions or are afraid of what they will uncover if they shine a spotlight on existing policies or the alternatives? One of the most obvious contexts where you can see this phenomenon at work is in K-12 education. When "reforms" come, they're often ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants, "this sounds good"-type reforms, that may or may not last. But most of the time, there appears to be little to no interest in achieving actual reform or improvement. Sometimes you get the worst of both worlds - a reform agenda that doesn't appear to be concerned with quality, and which may in fact be rooted in a political agenda that is something quite apart from ensuring quality public education.

For example, advocates of charter schools are often strong advocates of standardized testing of children in public schools, but they often seek to exempt charter schools from those testing requirements. That prevents a direct, side-by-side evaluation of charter schools and public schools in the same district. Ideally you would be able to track individual student performance, year by year, through their entire progress through the grades. That allows you to compare schools and classes not only by the performance of students at the end of a year, but also to compare the quality of students going in. If schools accept public funding, why shouldn't they have at least that much accountability? For that matter, shouldn't we be taking a similarly hard view at this type of data that already should be available in public school settings?

It isn't just the supporters of charter schools who don't get behind mandating across-the-board testing. It's also many proponents of the status quo. When you don't have the data that supports a side-by-side comparison, it's easier to argue that the status quo is better than (or at least as good as) the alternative. Teaching schools don't appear interested in collecting and analyzing data that might suggest that teaching certificates aren't superior to accelerated or alternative certification programs, or even in comparison to uncertified teachers. Teacher's unions don't necessarily want to see data that suggests that contract standards for hiring, promotion, and assignment to schools and classrooms aren't optimal or may impede good classroom learning.

A related example of this phenomenon in action comes from Teach for America. TFA has been around for about two decades, so there's been ample opportunity to develop good data. To some degree that could be done internally - TFA could develop performance tests to be administered at the start and end of the school year, to help gauge student needs, performance, and improvement in performance over the course of a school year. A school district interested in comparing general teacher performance to TFA corps member performance could administer those tests in its regular classes - or, conversely, it could develop or license tests and require their use across the district. Instead, even when students are being tested and it appears that performance could easily be tracked down to an individual level, that seems to be regarded as something to avoid.

Thus, TFA can announce on its website that a study "confirms... that corps members have a positive effect on student achievement relative to other teachers, including experienced teachers, traditionally prepared teachers, and those fully certified in their field", based on weak data from a single state, North Carolina. Skeptics can point to the amount of guesswork involved, trying to connect students to classroom teachers by who proctored an exam, trying to gauge what happened in a classroom based upon a year-end test with no start-of-year data, the exceptionally small sample size of TFA teachers, the omission of any schools below the high school level, the differences between North Carolina's demographics and those of the most vexing school districts, such as DC or New Orleans....

My point here is not to criticize TFA or corps members. With the résumé of a corps member, not a certified teacher, I've substitute taught in public schools. I've seen some terrific teachers, and others who (despite "years of experience") sleepwalk through their workday. I've seen how different a classroom experience can be between schools, and the role SES, parental involvement, and administrative competence can make. I've also seen how much easier it can be to teach high school than to teach middle school. With no wish to make this an excessively broad generalization, as some schools have severe order and discipline problems that continue through high school, I found teaching grades 10-12 to be a relative cakewalk as compared to teaching middle school, with ninth grade being something of a transition.

I found it to be at times quite difficult to explain what, to me, was an elementary math concept to a seventh grader. I didn't have a similar problem communicating with kids in tenth or eleventh grade. That is to say, when I was out of the context where teaching skills were most crucial, where I had lesser concerns about maintaining classroom order, where the kids understood their lessons at a more adult level, I could be highly effective. I didn't necessarily feel ineffective at other grade levels, but there were times when it was obvious that I lacked the skill set necessary to be more effective. Ideally, had I been a professional teacher, I would have learned some of those skills during my coursework and teacher training. (I say "ideally" because I've had certified teachers tell that, at least in the programs they attended, training in classroom management came almost as an afterthought.) Oh, sure, I would likely have also developed my own set of skills "on the job", had I continued to teach in a classroom for the next few years, but I have no illusions that, for me, it would have been a particularly easy or natural process. Given my druthers, I would have stuck with grades 10-12.

So again, here, I see TFA demonstrating a strong interest in claiming credit based upon weak data and analysis, but not trying to collect strong data or facilitate compelling analysis. I see school districts employing TFA corps members doing nothing to evaluate how the corps members compare to certified teachers. I see advocates of teacher certification and tenure suggesting that reliance upon TFA results a high level of churn among entry level teachers, causing harm to students who would benefit from having experienced teachers. But I don't see anybody advocating the type of study that would sort out and answer some of the persistent questions about TFA, teacher certification, and teacher effectiveness.

It really does amaze me sometimes that, with all of the money this nation pours into education (not to mention the combined spending of the world's other nations), there's so little apparent interest in determining which curricula, classroom management techniques, and approaches to teaching particular subjects (e.g., reading, foreign language, math) are the most effective. I once crazily hoped that having teacher colleges sponsor charter schools might provide a laboratory for education innovation and reform. Oh well.

A Statutory Special Needs Trust?

The Washington post describes proposals for tax-free savings accounts for the disabled:

Several pieces of legislation have been introduced in Congress to create tax-free savings accounts for people with disabilities....

Although they differ in some details, these measures would allow parents, other family members or those with disabilities themselves to put money into special accounts; the savings would grow tax free and would not be taxed when withdrawn to pay for qualified expenses.

The Post sees a potential danger:

The account proposals provide that money deposited in the accounts not count against eligibility. The trick is to permit parents to provide some extra help for children with disabilities without encouraging wealthy people who could easily pay for health care and other needs to sock away large sums in these accounts while moving family members onto government benefits.

Of course, the wealthy can already take full advantage of "special needs trusts". There is no reason these accounts would need to be more generous than existing special needs trusts, either in terms of how much they can hold or the circumstances under which money may be paid out, save perhaps for a cap on tax-exempt contributions. With a decent law, people who lack the resources or sophistication to engage in special needs planning will simply be able to open a statutorily defined disabilities savings account, and get a similar set of benefits to those already enjoyed by the wealthy.

A Clash Of Faiths

On one side, the inimitable Michael Gerson,

But compassionate conservatism has come under criticism for a variety of reasons. For some, it is fundamentally at odds with fiscal conservatism -- no social priority is deemed more urgent than balancing the budget. For others, it is a violation of their vision of limited government -- the state's only valid purpose is to uphold markets and protect individual liberty. But by drawing these limits so narrowly, such critics would relegate conservatism to the realm of rejected ideologies: untainted, uncomplicated and ignored. And by leaving great social needs unmet, they would grant liberalism an open field and invite genuine statism.

On the other side, (sort of) free market advocacy from Daniel Larison:

How tiresome it is to hear that “social needs” are unmet because government is not involved in meeting them, or that government must be involved if those needs are, in fact, unmet. If they’re unmet, they’re probably unmet because someone whining in the name of “compassion” forty years ago complained that the government wasn’t doing enough, so the state usurped the proper social functions of existing institutions that have since withered and died from neglect and lack of support, and now all we are left with is recourse to still more government.

A big part of the problem with "compassionate conservativism" is that it was a lie from day one, with perhaps Michael Gerson being the only living person not to have come to terms with that fact. The term represents typical G.W., attempting to depict himself as a centrist who will reinvent the social safety net to help people climb out of poverty, coupled with a promise to dole hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of federal dollars into religious organizations. He didn't mean the first part and, as far as I can see, for G.W. the second part was solely about getting votes. I've seen no evidence that G.W. cares about the efficacy of vouchers (and in fact "No Child Left Behind" and voucher programs appear calculated to prevent direct comparison of public schools to private schools, by doling out money to private schools while exempting them from NCLB's testing requirements and standards).

But what of Larison's cult of the free market? What social support network is he imagining, flourishing some forty years ago, but that has now disappeared? It's a fiction presented as fact.

That's not to say that the government has not stepped into places where charities, particularly religious charities, once dominated. Counties offer free and discounted medical care that one might have historically received through a hospital founded by a religious group. Poor people get food stamps (or should I say an EBT card) rather than queueing outside of the Salvation Army offices or some other soup kitchen. Housing subsidies and government funded shelters have largely replaced charitable shelters.

But when you look at why this happened, it was due to the failure of private and religious charities to meet the needs of an industrialized society. Giving full respect to the significant charitable efforts made by many people and organizations before the dawn of the so-called "welfare state", there was no glory day when the needs of all of the nation's poor were well-met by charity. Religions and charities did not shutter workhouses and orphanages, in favor of keeping families together. Religions and charities did not bring about universal public education. Religions and charities still do operate hospitals - but for most of us, the bill isn't any smaller than it would be at a private or public hospital, and they would be overwhelmed and bankrupted if they were to open their doors to the nation's poor with no charge and without requesting reimbursement through Medicare and Medicaid. Moreover, the government can administer programs evenly across states or the entire nation, where charities did not and cannot. In short, we're dealing with two issues: The fact that the world Larison depicts as an ideal never existed (and never will), and the fact that society has changed from the days when charities and religious organizations could partially fulfill the needs now served by government.

The question of whether it is better to serve up charity with a religious sermon or a dose of shame, or if it is better to leave charity to hands that can deny relief to people deemed "undeserving" (whether because they're not seen as making a sufficient effort, or because they're of the wrong faith or perhaps even ethnicity) is apart from the question of whether private charities and religions could take the place of public social assistance in a modern industrialized society. They cannot. You want to talk about ending dependence? I'm all ears. But it's a separate issue.

Gerson seems to recognize the failure of non-state actors, arguing that fiscal conservatives, "by leaving great social needs unmet, ... would grant liberalism an open field and invite genuine statism." Where he devolves into the comical is in the idea that the "alternative" is for state and federal governments to tax their citizens then pass the money along to third parties to administer in a "charitable" manner. There's no evidence presented, nor argument given, that this approach saves money, increases efficiency, or reduces dependency.

Larison objects to the continuation of dependency, arguing,

However the program or initiative is designed, it will always be another form of dependency and another means to concentrate power in the state by creating these bonds of dependency on government initiatives. How insulting to listen to someone who has never blinked at proposing spending other people’s money on the problems of people he has never met mock fiscal responsibility, and then claim that those interested in the profoundly moral effort to not pass on our debts to our posterity supposedly believe that balanced budgets are the top “social priority.” What is Michael Gerson’s top social priority? It seems that gratifying his undying need for atoning vicariously through good works that he isn’t doing that are paid for by wealth he isn’t creating in places he will never go is his top priority, and woe betide the moneychangers who block him on the path of righteousness!

Well, a big part of the problem probably starts with turning this into a religious debate, dictated by unseen forces emanating from our WWJD bracelets. The fact is that as long as there have been churches, there have been collection plates. Shall we discuss tithing, which at times and places in history was little different from a tax? What churches offered straw polls to let people decide where and how they spent the collected money? Save for individual efforts and those of small groups, something that cannot take the place of large-scale social programs, this has always been about paying money to third parties who decide if and how it will be expended for the benefit of the poor.

The dichotomy Larison implies - and it's a false dichotomy - is that we have a choice between balancing the budget and providing public assistance to the poor. We can also balance the budget by increasing taxes or cutting other areas of spending. So if we're going to speak of a "profoundly moral effort to not pass on our debts to our posterity", we must ask why the most "moral" solution is to put social spending on the chopping block, while preserving current levels of corporate welfare, military spending, and those provisions of the tax code that are exceedingly favorable to the rich, or instead of raising taxes to cover the difference. Larison argues,

Instead of a supposedly libertarian Christ, Gerson offers us Christ the social worker, which is an appropriation every bit as unpersuasive as the other caricatures he rejects, and the disciples of this social worker have an unerring ability to be extremely annoying.

You can make a strong libertarian case for prioritizing a balanced budget and cutting social welfare benefits first, but spare me any argument that it's dictated or even supported by Christ's teachings.

Prisons, Mental Health Policy and Incarceration Rates

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, we're reminded of this prison's extremely high incarceration rates and the resulting costs to states. The Detroit Free Press explains the cost to Michigan:

Before the nation hits two in 100 behind bars, which seems inevitable, it's time for a national debate on corrections and criminal justice policies that will lead to a more rational, humane and cost-effective system. The nation has gotten far too little for its enormous investment in locking people up. Violent crime rates are higher than they were more than three decades ago, when tough-on-crime policies, including mandatory sentencing laws, created a prison-building boom.

States can no longer afford to divert so many resources from education, health care and other pressing needs. Michigan, for example, with one of the nation's highest incarceration rates, spends $2 billion a year on corrections, or 20% of its general fund. It is one of four states spending more on corrections than higher education. In today's economy, spending more on prisons than college is a recipe for failure.

If you've been reading this weblog for a long time, you have a sense of my position on this - "... before we get "tough" on them by throwing away tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on their repeated stints behind bars, perhaps we should take a long and hard look at what we are doing and, for those cases where it isn't working, what we can and should do differently." Our nation's legislators irresponsibly toss billions of dollars at prisons without any sense of whether incarceration works, or whether there are more effective or more cost-effective alternatives.

A while back, an interesting graph was put up at the Volokh Conspiracy, illustrating our nation's prison and mental institution incarceration rates. Short of saying "correlation is causation", the illustration makes it hard to miss a connection between the closing of state-funded mental hospitals and the exploding incarceration rates in jails and prisons. I'm not arguing for reopening state mental hospitals and mass "mental health" incarceration as an alternative to prisons. But I am saying this: We had a lousy mental health policy that was followed by a paradigm shift (community-based mental health, self-determination) that was not adequately funded and supported, followed by misguided budget-slashing in states like Michigan which closed many of the state's remaining mental health facilities, followed by a willful blind eye to the fact that jails and prisons were filling up with people who were mentally ill, and otherwise untreated or given a lot less community-based support than they need.

I'll renew my call for evidence-based public policy.

Subsidizing Poor Building Decisions

As we again see the catastrophic consequence of developing flood plains into cities and villages, the question should arise - should the government be subsidizing this type of development? Granted, to some degree this is a special case - New Orleans wasn't constructed in the modern era, and greater public expense can be justified in relation to historic towns and villages. But why are we spending billions of dollars in an effort to transform flood plains into buildable lots? Why are we spending billions providing subsidized insurance - or with the government stepping in to provide insurance for buildings which are otherwise completely uninsurable - rather than letting market forces prevail?

Would it be wrong to declare, in relation to properties destroyed in this catastrophe, that property owners will be able to collect on their insurance policies, but if they choose to rebuild in their present location they won't be eligible for future insurance subsidies? To follow the model started under the Clinton Administration, by moving people out of areas particularly vulnerable to flooding? Or even to offer a relocation subsidy (particularly to people too poor to otherwise move out of inexpensive properties situated on flood plains) to encourage people to move to less vulnerable areas?

Would it be politically impossible, given that better public policy would impede the ability of the wealthy to get subsidized insurance for their coastal vacation properties?

Evidence Based Public Policy

In the field of medicine, a great deal of attention has been paid in recent years to evidence-based or science-based medicine, in which doctors attempt to apply the following steps to medical diagnosis and treatment:

1. Accurately define the medical condition;
2. Investigate the medical literature, ferreting out that which is scientifically valid and clinically relevant; and
3. Apply the best available evidence and science to treatment of the medical condition.

This approach is not perfect, and counter-arguments include the allegation that it underestimates the value of clinical experience, and that it can be misleading to apply epidemiological techniques to diagnosing and treating the conditions of individual patients. Also, as the available evidence may be insufficient, it may be premature to attempt to discern an evidence-based solution. But, whatever the drawbacks, significant advances can result from the application of evidence-based medicine, and from the aggregation of data which can be used to evaluate and improve the efficacies of various treatments in particular populations of patient.

In our nation, we ostensibly have a federal system, where states are free to experiment with their own solutions to problems, and where the good solutions can be emulated by other states. The reality, it seems, is a bit different, with state legislatures often seeming inclined to jump on a public policy bandwagon rather than looking at what in fact works, and the federal government finding a variety of means to impose its will on the states. And significant changes in public policy often result not from evidence of what might work better, but from raw political ideology.

Now, whether or not they are willing to admit it, everybody has prejudices and political perspectives which color their opinions on various issues of public policy. But what is more important? Being true to a political ideology, or finding the best possible solution for a public policy issue? Too often, our nation seems to prioritize ideology. I think it is long past time we focused on the science and evidence, and where inadequate that we focus on improving the body evidence and scientific knowledge we require to form the best solution. Granted, it is easier to shortcut the thinking process by declaring your ideology as a sufficient reason to support or oppose a particular policy. But if you have to experiment on society, I would rather turn to the evidence.

Reliance On Lawsuits

A few months ago, David von Drehle wrote a piece in the Washington Post, raising some good points about the tendency of certain factions on the political left to rely upon litigation to achieve what they cannot necessarily accomplish at the ballot box.

Half a century after the triumph of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark desegregation case, reliance on constitutional lawsuits to achieve policy goals has become a wasting addiction among American progressives. The recent battle over gay marriage, in courts and at the ballot box, demonstrates that liberals today are more adept at persuading like-minded judges than they are at persuading undecided voters. Over the past 40 years, while progressives were winning dozens of controversial court cases on issues ranging from abortion to school prayer, the Democratic Party failed nine times out of 10 to win a majority of the votes for president.

Today, being right on top of things, in the National Review Online, Neil Gorsuch takes note of von Drehle's column:

There's no doubt that constitutional lawsuits have secured critical civil-right victories, with the desegregation cases culminating in Brown v. Board of Education topping the list. But rather than use the judiciary for extraordinary cases, von Drehle recognizes that American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education.

Of course, there is a counter-point in relation to groups such as the ACLU, who use litigation not to win popularity contests, and certainly don't hesitate to litigate issues where popular opinion is against their client (many of the ACLU's members, for example, opposed the right of the KKK to march through Skokie, Illinois, and many resigned their memberships over its choice of client), but because there is literally no other means of protecting those constitutional interests. And not even the NRO is willing to attack liberals and progressives for advancing the civil rights movement through litigation - although their ideological peers at the time were not so taciturn on the issue.

But the more interesting aspect of this, at least from where I stand, is the complete absense of any mention of the use of litigation by the political right to advance its own agenda. The army of lawyers, for example, the Republicans had stationed across the country on November 2, ready to scurry into court to litigation election issues. Which, of course, would have been a repeat of the lawsuit filed in the name of George W. Bush, to stop Florida's courts from applying their own interpretation of their own constitution and election law to an election recount. But the better examples probably come in "property rights" cases, where the right has used litigation to chisel away at state and local zoning ordinances, environmental protections, and land use regulation. Or the near-invisible litigation that chisels away at the rights and protections of individuals, often in the name of "originalism" or "strict construction" of a statute, to effect changes in the law that a Republican legislature would be loathe to present as an election issue.

I personally believe both the political right and left should spend less time going to court, a lot less time trying to mislead the public or misrepresent the other side's agenda, and that their political representatives should spend a lot less time getting their palms greased by lobbyists. But... what are the odds?