This morning's economic thought to ponder comes via this excellent diary on dailykos. It does take a second of thought to parse, but it's a good point. The focus of the state needs to be on supporting the processes that truly create wealth, like education, and protect us from the brutalities of a marketplace so we can keep taking risks without ruining our lives in the process. It's the high road!
Via Political Animal: this is an interesting post from someone who took part in a focus group of Ivy Leage Democratic Party activists. I'm really curious as to who is running such a thing (and why!), which the author declines to get into. The whole post is a little boneheaded, and has the ring of a very smart person thinking about this problem for the first time:
Take the issue of being pro-market, for example. Not one person at the table listed a commitment to either entrepreneurs or free markets as a core part of the Democratic agenda. Yet everyone at the table was basically pro-market and pro-business BUT believed that America must pay more attention to those left behind by markets and businesses.Given that Republicans always identify themselves as the party of markets and entrepreneurs, could Democrats make any headway with this kind of "yes, but" approach to the subject? But if framing isn't enough, how can Democrats alter the substance of their agenda without simply becoming more like Republicans?
In the final analysis, there was no answer to this question. Even a table full of Ivy League-educated Democratic activists couldn't come up with an answer to the question of what the Democrats want to offer America as a whole, and not just the disadvantaged. But the question itself is important, because it has the potential to force the Democrats to approach every major policy debate from a fresh perspective.
Absolutely this is an important question, and in the final analysis we're going to find an answer to it or continue to lose until we do.
I don't suppose there is much reason to think any particular subset of Democratic activists (Ivy League trained or otherwise) would have sat down and figured out what comes next. One of the problems with the current political moment is that fewer numbers of lefties - people who would ordinarily be bringing in new thinking - are politically engaged. Much of the citizenry has been distracted by the sound and fury of haywire American capitalism, sucked into eddies of techno-utopianism (been there!), run off by repeated exposure to withering blasts of anti-government rhetoric emanating from the right wing noise machine, or some combination of all of these. All three are massively powerful undertow currents in American civilization and there are surely other forces at work as well.
The reasons why some small but not insubstantial portion of those who are left choose to participate in our democracy are sometimes less than wholesome. I'm not necessarily saying that this guy was stuck in a focus group with a bunch of apple polishers, but it's possible. A more charitable explanation could be that they were just all too busy working the campaign gypsy lifestyle to dig into some of the more structural and philosophical issues feeding the ongoing implosion.
But I take strongest issue with the implication that no substantive Democratic alternative economics could possibly exist. It's a question of both framing and substance. Twice in the past week (both here and here) I've had to go into considerable detail chewing out Republicans who accused me of offering nothing more than "the usual liberal establishment talking points" or whatever. Too often we don't engage, but that isn't working. Republican policies haven't even been good for what they claim they're good for (like growth). By God, if we can't come up with an alternative to the supply-side horsepucky they've been shoveling at us for the past few decades, we really don't deserve to win!
I don't know if it's the high road (my preferred term), the moral economy (George Lakoff's), the "we're tired of getting trickled down on" economy or whatever the heck we'll end up calling it, but there is not a shred of doubt in my mind that an alternative exists. Whatever other features it has, I am absolutely certain that solidarity between the lower, middle and large chunks of the upper-middle classes will form the backbone of it, and this is an important tactical consideration to keep in mind.
The kleptocracy this poor country has become is nothing like the best of all possible economic worlds and it is borderline ridiculous (and indicative of how far gone things are) to suggest that it is. This assumption is omnipresent; it's why I can't ordinarily read more than a few pages of the Economist.
This dynamic is especially explicative here in California, where overwhelming majorities of voters are with the left on social issues. Economics is the only reason we lose here. Our wins will be few and far between until we have destroyed right-wing economic policies, frames, narratives and conventional wisdom by presenting a positive and hopeful alternative. I was first assured of our side's capability of delivering on this while hauling across frozen Iowa cornfields in a minivan full of Ph.D (and one Republican!) Dean supporters during the 2004 primary. It might take a while - conventional wisdom isn't replaced overnight. But it will happen.
SEIU, a union that organizes mostly service economy workers, does great work. They were among my favorite folks to work with in Santa Barbara - they seemed to attract very sharp and together organizers with a lot of heart. That attitude seems to be pervasive through their whole organization, and their latest web effort is no exception: check out SinceSlicedBread.com. It seemed like a little bit too cute of an idea at first, but the interaction design is really nice so it works better than I expected it might. And you can win huge piles of money!
I took the opportunity to post this summary of the high road...
For the past thirty years, conservatives have defined many Americans' understanding of practically everything about economics. We need a widely understood progressive and democratic alternative to failed right wing, supply-side economic schemes.Here is one possibility.
Progressive, democratic economics is about expansion: expanding security, expanding opportunity, expanding possibilites, expanding justice and expanding hope. The core moral vision is that society should give everyone the opportunity to develop their own capabilities as fully as possible. The way to get there is to take the high road, which has these six parts:
secure basic freedoms - like housing and health care
invest in the future - schools, basic research and infrastructure
democratize wealth - via strong unions, wage laws and progressive taxes
build the green economy - starting with energy independence
housebreak capitalism - by getting corporate money out of politics
globalize this - provide real leadership and halt the race to the bottom
The high road is the path to an economy that works for everyone!
There are definitely a lot of righties on there, ranging from constructive to angry. Sometimes in the same post even, like the one on mine. After he was done telling me I was full of it, the rest of his critique (which carefully avoided questioning the moral vision) was well thought out and reasonable enough to respond to. Congrats to SEIU for putting together an environment where that sort of interaction happens.
Going into a little more detail on this, the SF Chronicle's Sunday story on the middle class squeeze almost got it right. Here's what they missed. They ran this graph:
which clearly shows the top 5% pulling away like crazy from everyone else. But the real story is that that curve repeats itself the higher and higher you go into the data. The best description of this I've found is from David Cay Johnston's Perfectly Legal; the chapter that describes all this happens to be available for download (.pdf). Income growth for the bottom 99% of Americans from 1970 to 2000 averaged +$2710, which comes out to a raise of a whopping $1.35 an hour (assuming 40 hour weeks with two weeks off, which are just a dream for most folks now).
Meanwhile, the top 0.1% of taxpayers - in 2000, this was about 13,400 people - had income growth of +$20M and change, or more than ten thousand dollars an hour. It seems unbelievable, but this is what the numbers say. Here's another take on this data, it's an illustration of the chart found on page 37 of that pdf...
The ramifications of all this are a little tough to see. Just as the poor are invisible (modulo the occasional hurricane), so are the rich. However, one place they're showing up is in elections, including this special election in California. We'll have more on this later in the week, but in the meantime, here's yet another illustration of this effect.
A couple weekends ago, Jen and I went for a hike to a place called Five Lakes, which is sort of half way between the Alpine Meadows and Squaw ski areas near Lake Tahoe. While hiking, we came across what looked like a new ski lift, maybe one connecting the Alpine base lodge to the ridge that separates it from Squaw...
but we were wrong. As it turns out, that land is privately owned, and the owner of it has apparently decided to build his own private ski lift. Next time you hear a Republican whining about how oppressive taxes on the rich are, think about the guy who is building his own private ski lift.
The principle of taxing people according to their ability to pay that underlies progressive taxation goes back to before the founding of this country, and there are a small number of people in who clearly have the ability to pay a lot more than they are now. The rest of us are really tired of getting trickled down on.
Here's another particularly tough problem:
The plight of middle-income Americans is sometimes overlooked because the official poverty level, which the federal government has based since 1965 on three times an "economy" food budget, does not account for hikes in housing, energy or health care.
The reason this is tough isn't because it's so difficult to fix - it wouldn't be. It's just tough politically, because whoever's watch this gets fixed on is going to see what looks like a gargantuan jump in inflation! But we have to do this, because the amount of money that Californians (and many Americans) are spending on these neccessities have all gone completely bananas. Econometrics problems are a big deal; they're one of these almost hidden things that have a huge effect on people's perceptions and the policies put into place by the people they vote for.
Unbelievably, the LA Times has come out this morning with an endorsement of Prop 75.
This is yet another example of an increasingly disturbing trend that has liberals turning their backs on organized labor - without whom the causes in which liberals believe would be that much worse off: education, health care, the environment.
In their argument, the Times admits that Prop 75 is being pushed by right-wing partisans in an attempt to weaken Democrats, while at the same time asserting that this measure won't "take public unions out of the political game."
Oh yeah?
Take a look at what has happened in other states where right-wingers aligned with Bush have pushed similar initiatives:
"Unions all over the country have an investment in this fight because they know that if they can no longer raise money for Democratic candidates and causes, there is no other group on the left that can amass the kind of political war chests that Republicans raise," says Elizabeth Garrett, a law professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who tracks state initiatives.Such has been the case in the state of Washington, where passage of a similar law in 1992 - by 72 percent of voters - led to a precipitous drop in political contributions from teacher union members in the first year: from 48,000 contributors to 8,000. When Utah passed a similar law in 2001, only 6.8 percent of teacher union members allowed their dues to be spent on politics.
The Times also naively states that they can endorse this measure because it's public employee unions, and that if the right were going after private unions, as they did in 1998 in California, the Times would oppose that. The obvious reason being that it is ludicrous to say you are going to restrict how unions can raise money but not corporations. But the point here is that once Prop 75 is in effect, those fighting for the public interest will be so weakened that any number of unfair and right-wing initiatives will be able to pass in California with much greater ease.
Make no mistake about it, Prop 75 is dangerous. We must defeat it. We must not buy into the same conservative arguments of "it's my money." Those are the same arguments that produced tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of Americans while millions of people suffer in poverty, and millions more struggle to make ends meet.
It's not *just* your money. It's your share of the wealth our society has created - wealth that wouldn't exist if we didn't all work together.
So while we can often count on the L.A. Times to get things right, there are plenty of occasions in which we can't. Remember, they also endorsed Pete Wilson in 1994.
Well this is disturbing. It's widely reported this morning (see rtumble) that the Governor is trying to get the CA League of Cities on board with Proposition 76, the school budget limits and imperial Governorship initiative, even though it would obviously be completely insane for them to do so. He's trying to play off the same fears that drove support for last year's Proposition 1A, namely that the state will raid local budgets at will when times are bad.
For better or for worse, Prop 1A passed, so the Governor isn't exactly being straight with the league here. Beyond that, the main reason the cities would be insane to support this is that it's going to lock in austerity budgets (like what we're experiencing now), for the entire state, forever. (or at least until we overturn it, like Colorado is having to do with TABOR, a similar bill passed by Republican extremists in their state ten years ago).
It's complicated, but think for a second about how national, state and local budgets are all chained together. Money is constantly going back and forth between all of them. So with the national fiscal picture a complete shambles due to President Bush's "bash,break and borrow" strategy, it has cascading effects all the way down to individual cities. Now the Governor wants to lock that policy in place in this state, and he's trying to get the league of cities to vote against their best interests by scaring them and playing to their parochial interests. It should be interesting to see how this gambit of his turns out.
Addendum: Jen's got an even better post on this over at PowerPac today. This was a case of unpremeditated coordination; sometimes one look at rough & tumble is all either of us needs!
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