Tag Archives: politics

Building the Rioters of the Future

August 15, 2011 – 11:42 am

[8/15/2011] I’m assuming you already know that riots broke out in many English cities this week. If not, Wikipedia has a good summary of the basic facts.

But while it was easy to turn on your TV and see video of burning and looting, getting a half-way decent explanation of what it was all about was quite a bit harder.

Everyone agreed that the riots weren’t “political” like the Arab Spring demonstrations in Tunis or Cairo. No leaders presented lists of demands. Mobs didn’t shout slogans, political or otherwise.

The riots also didn’t seem to be racial, exactly. The unrest started in London’s diverse Tottenham neighborhood, but also jumped to mostly white neighborhoods like Croydon. The Irish Times reported:

Those who were taking part in the looting and fighting, or throwing fireworks at the police, were of many shades, ages and nationalities, but they all had something in common: they felt they had little to lose.

Eliminating politics and race left even less likely simple explanations: Prime Minister Cameron seemed to suggest that lots of people spontaneously turned criminal for no reason. Others blamed bad parenting, though it’s mysterious why that would suddenly become a problem last week rather than the week before. Maybe it was “mob mentality” or “mindless violence” — terms that sound more substantive than “I’ve got no clue”, but may not be. And there were the usual attempts to blame technology, which made no more sense than giving technology the credit in Cairo.

To me, the most disturbing aspects the coverage were the journalists who didn’t want an explanation. In this BBC interview, West Indian writer (and long-time Londoner) Darcus Howe tries to raise underlying issues:

What I was certain about, listening to my grandson and my son, is that something very, very serious was going to take place in this country. Our political leaders had no idea. The police had no idea. But if you looked at young blacks and young whites with a discerning eye and a careful hearing, they have been telling us — and we would not listen — about what has been happening in this country to them.

The interviewer then cuts him often, asking if he condones the violence. After a disgusted “Of course not”, Howe tries to talk about police behavior, and how often young blacks are stopped and searched for no reason. The interviewer interrupts to accuse Howe of having been a rioter himself in the past, which he indignantly denies. (“Show some respect for an old West Indian Negro,” he pleads.)

And then time is up. Riots: Are you for them or against them?

The most insightful thing I read about the riots was on the London blog Penny Red. (You may have seen it reposted on AlterNet, Common Dreams, or some other American web site.)

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

As in this week’s lead article, I find myself thinking that people are looking in the wrong direction. Asking why rioters take what they want, hurt people they don’t like, or burn down establishments they resent is like asking Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. (His iconic answer: “Because that’s where the money is.”)

It’s perfectly obvious why people would loot and burn. If you want to get simple, start with the question: Why don’t the rest of us riot every day?

The best answer, I think, is: Because we participate in systems that we believe work better for us and for our loved ones in the long run. We participate in the property system because we also want to own things. We participate in the money economy because we also want to have jobs and buy things. We participate in a system of mutual respect because we also want want to claim respect.

Now imagine that you own essentially nothing, have no job prospects, and are treated with disrespect on a regular basis. What’s the system to you other than a policeman who is too busy to bother with you right now?

Riots may not be organized political actions that make clear demands. But nonetheless they have political causes. If we are leaving people out, leaving them without hope and without any clear way to channel their effort into bettering their lives, then we are building the rioters of the future. When the disorder begins, they will have no reason to restrain themselves.

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After Wisconsin

August 15, 2011 – 11:30 am

[8/15/2011] Democrats fell just short of taking the Wisconsin state senate in the recall elections last Tuesday, picking up two Republican seats when they needed three (and once again falling short in a cliff-hanger due to late-breaking votes from Waukesha County). The two last recall elections (both with incumbent Democrats) happen tomorrow.

Republicans tried to spin this as victory, and the national media largely went along. But the only senators eligible for recall were those elected in 2008, a Democratic year. And if Democrats gain two seats over the 2008 results (assuming they hold their two seats tomorrow), it’s hard to see that as defeat.

So what happens next? The recall of Governor Walker, who is so unpopular he did not campaign in the senate recall elections, will likely still happen when he becomes recall-eligible in January. But the next big test of the ALEC agenda is in Ohio.

Ohio’s SB 5 is the same public-union-busting effort that started the trouble in Wisconsin. Opponents collected a huge number of signatures to get an overturn-SB-5 referendum on the ballot for November. This election will draw the same avalanche of anonymous corporate cash that went into Wisconsin, but so far the polls look good.

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A Week of Down

August 8, 2011 – 11:59 am

It’s been an eventful week economically. The debt ceiling deal got passed and signed, but the stock market tanked and S&P downgraded U.S. government bonds anyway.

For the most part the media has covered this constellation of issues the way they cover anything: What-happened and what-it-means-for-citizens has gotten short shrift, in favor of assessing blame (always awarding it equally to both sides) and trying to predict how this tactical skirmish will affect future elections.

But we’re talking about trillions of dollars here, so it must have some effect on real people. Let’s start there.

What got cut first. “Only” $917 billion of spending cuts have been passed so far, including only $21-25 billion in the 2012 budget. (I’m seeing different numbers in different places; not sure why.) So worries about immediate contraction in the economy (at least from this deal) are overblown. The rest of the $900 billion is cut over the next decade.

Apparently, $350 billion comes from “security” — defense, homeland security, etc — and $567 billion (although this article in The Hill claims $756 billion) from domestic discretionary spending (i.e., not entitlements like Social Security and Medicare). That’s as specific as things have gotten so far. The Hill:

The law does not itemize the cuts, instead leaving those decisions to appropriators. But the size of reductions makes it inevitable they will impact a long list of discretionary programs, including those related to environmental protection, food safety, education and infrastructure.

<sarcasm> Food safety. Just the other day I was noticing that I hadn’t gotten food poisoning lately and thought, “That’s probably something we could cut back on.” <end sarcasm> The long-term unemployed are probably going to suffer too.

The next round of cuts. Boehner, Pelosi, Reid, and McConnell each get to name three people to a “Super Committee” to recommend another $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction by November. Their recommendations will get an up-or-down vote in both houses of Congress, with no amendments.

The problem with agreements like this is that no Congress can force a future Congress to do anything. So the agreement contains automatic cuts that will happen if the $1.5 trillion deficit reduction doesn’t pass. The automatic cuts are supposed to be ugly to both sides, so that they’ll be motivated to negotiate a deal to avoid them.

Republicans are so set against any tax increases on the wealthy that they wouldn’t agree to them even in this automatic deficit-reduction package that isn’t supposed to happen. Their motivation is supposed to come from defense spending cuts.

The painful-automatic-reduction feature of the agreement sets up another hostage crisis in November, with the idea that both sides will have hostages, so no one will get shot. Somehow I don’t find this comforting. Jonathan Chait has compared such agreements to ransoming your child from kidnappers for “$100,000 and your other child”.

The precedent we’ve set. Keep in mind that the debt ceiling has never been used this way before. Most other countries don’t even have a debt ceiling, because it’s redundant: If Congress passes a budget with a deficit, it shouldn’t have to separately authorize borrowing to cover it. (That’s like going to a restaurant with nothing but your Visa card, eating, and then debating whether you’re going to take on this additional debt by signing the receipt.)

In the past, debt-ceiling increases have been opportunities for the out-of-power party to posture about the irresponsibility of the in-power party. But never has there been a negotiation in which the president made concessions to get the ceiling raised. That’s because the debt ceiling is a doomsday device. Nobody seriously believed that the country would be better off if our government couldn’t meet its commitments.  So there was nothing to negotiate about.

But now hostage-taking has become a respectable tactic. Don’t take my word for it, listen to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.

McConnell says this “set a template for the future. … we’ll be doing it all over.”

I keep flashing back to the novel The First Man in Rome. As the story begins, the Roman Republic has few rules but a lot of traditions. In a gradual back-and-forth escalation of advantage-seeking, Marius (the main character) and his enemies violate the traditions — sometimes with justification, sometimes not. By the end, Marius is mounting his enemies’ heads on spikes in the Forum.

So yeah, there is nothing illegal about holding the American economy hostage until you get what you want. It’s just a violation of tradition, something we’ve never done before. But if you go far enough down that road, you wind up with heads on spikes.

The downgrade. Raising the debt ceiling and cutting future deficits was supposed to keep our credit rating up. It didn’t. On Friday S&P downgraded the U.S. government’s bonds from AAA to AA+, which is still pretty good. (Japan is at AA-, and they manage to sell 30-year bonds at less than a 2% interest rate.) The other major ratings service, Moody’s, is maintaining the AAA rating, at least for now.

As with the debt-ceiling crisis, lots of blame is going back and forth. Democrats and Republicans are blaming each other, the administration is criticizing S&P, and so on.

Here’s the thing to understand: What bothers S&P isn’t the sheer size of the federal debt. (Again, Japan is much worse fiscal shape, and they’re far from bankrupt.) It’s the dysfunctionality of our political system. If you look at the trends and do the math, our current level of taxation doesn’t cover the expenses of a world empire with an aging population and an inefficient health care system. None of that is unsolvable, but S&P says:

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed.

No one has a plan to disengage our military commitments, the Republicans have drawn a line in the sand against any increase in revenues, and our society is probably not willing to let large numbers of old people die in the streets. So how does that situation resolve? Inflation? Or maybe one of the future fiscal hostage crises goes bad and we actually default.

Given what we’ve just seen, it’s hard to make the case that loaning money to the U.S. government is risk-free.

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Confessions of a Centrist in Exile

August 1, 2011 – 11:27 am

The Center is my home. But I can’t live there any more.

Re-assembling the elephant. Whenever I describe what I’m trying to do with my writing, two ideas rise to the top: First, whatever the subject, I’m trying to find the simplest explanation that is both accurate and sensible. And second, I’m trying to “re-assemble the elephant”.

That piece of my internal slang comes from The Blind Men and the Elephant: Each blind man touches a part of the elephant, and they come up with wildly incompatible descriptions. The elephant is like a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, and a rope. Re-assembling the elephant means taking different people’s experiences seriously, and finding an underlying truth that makes sense of all their accounts.

As a dedicated elephant-assembler, I naturally view myself in the middle, between opposing worldviews. My best work builds bridges: Red Family, Blue Family (which led to magazine articles here and here), explains to liberals how the life experience of people on the religious right leads them to their very different notions of family values. Meeting at Infinity bridges the theist/atheist divide. Supporting My Troop is about the decades-long relationship between a peacenik (me) and a career Marine (my best friend from high school). Spirituality and the Humanist interprets religious language for people of a rational/scientific bent. Change in My Lifetime explains to people younger than me why racism means something different to so many whites older than me.

Defending the Center. In Terrorist Strategy 101, I went a step further. That essay didn’t just explain Bin Laden to Americans, it downgraded the Us-against-the-Terrorists framing in favor of Extremists-against-the-Center, and concluded with an exhortation to defend the Center against both Neocons and Islamists.

Most of all, we Americans need to keep a leash on our own radicals. They are not working in our interests any more than Bin Laden is working in the interests of ordinary Muslims. The extremists on both sides serve each other, not the people they claim to represent. The cycle of attack-and-reprisal strengthens radicals on both sides at the expense of those in the middle who just want to live their lives.

In the face of the next attack, be slow to embrace radical, violent, or angry solutions. The center must hold.

People who started reading the Weekly Sift recently are probably surprised that I ever thought of myself as a defender of the Center. Because although I didn’t even call myself a Democrat until the Clinton impeachment, I’ve radicalized over the last 2-3 years. Now, if I’m explaining why somebody isn’t as crazy as you think, I’m more likely to be talking about Karl Marx than Ayn Rand — or even John Boehner. Most of the bridges I’m building these days go further to the Left, not back towards the Center.

Because I’m not going back. For a long time I didn’t admit that to myself, but now I do. On special occasions I may raise a glass to the Center like a Boston Irishman remembering the Auld Sod, but I’m not going back for a long, long time. Maybe ever.

I’m a native-born Centrist in exile on the Left.

What happened? Two years ago, when I reviewed David Michaels’ Doubt is Their Product, I described it as “a radicalizing book”. Based on many examples over a period of decades, it describes the standard operating procedure of corporations — tobacco companies, asbestos companies, and even microwave popcorn companies — who realize they are killing people.

The procedure does not start with “stop killing people”. That is a last resort, an option to be taken if all else fails. More favored tactics are denial, hiding facts, manipulating research, manipulating public opinion, foot-dragging, lobbying regulators to set unreasonably low standards, and ultimately hiding behind those standards in court to avoid paying damages to victims’ heirs.

This isn’t what bad corporations do. It is standard procedure. There’s a whole industry of specialists to guide CEOs through the profit-from-killing-people process.

[The more recent Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway tells a similar story about corporate propaganda campaigns on political issues: the ozone hole, global warming, and so on.]

Since then, I have had another lens through which to view current events. Not Left vs. Right, or even Center vs. Extremists, but Corporations vs. Humans.

And that brings me back to my first self-identification. Of all my lenses, which provides the simplest view that is both accurate and sensible?

Corporations vs. Humans. More and more I believe that’s the central struggle of our time.

Bridges to nowhere. Between the corporate view and the human view, there is no bridge to be built, no elephant to re-assemble. The corporate worldview involves no subtle mystery: They see us as sheep and want to consume us. And there’s no point explaining any human worldview to corporations, because they don’t care. They can’t care. It’s not in their DNA. (I wrote this up last December in Corporations Are Sociopaths.)

The point of bridge-building is that people can change their minds. Humans can be a defensive, xenophobic species, but we also are driven to understand each other. Once you understand someone else’s experiences, it’s hard not to sympathize. And once you sympathize, it’s natural to look for ways we can live together and all get some of what we want.

Humans can be hard-hearted, self-interested, and downright evil. But history tells remarkable stories of people who change their minds. Slave-owners and slave-traders may become abolitionists. Male chauvinists may fight for their daughters’ rights. Warriors become peacemakers. Tyrants become liberators. It’s rare, but it happens. No human is so far gone that you can be 100% sure they’ll never change.

But corporations respond only to carrots and sticks, not to new sympathies, new evidence, or new moral understanding. When the tobacco companies figured out that smoking killed people, they defended their profits by arguing that it didn’t. Ditto today for fossil-fuel companies and global warming. Gathering evidence to convince them is a waste of time.

Arguing with humans. Someone is bound to point out to me that all actual arguments are between humans. The TV talking heads, newspaper columnists, politicians, think-tank intellectuals — they’re all people, not corporations. Their minds could change.

But more and more, those people are just tongues. If they say the wrong words, new tongues will say the right words. A corporate-funded politician repeats a sound-bite written by a corporate-sponsored pundit based on the research of an academic at a corporate-endowed think tank. None of those people have any real influence on the message. If you changed their minds, you might convince them to quit their jobs. But you would not change the message, because the message does not come from people.

And so we hear nonsense like this: Defending a House appropriations bill that guts environmental protection (banning the Bureau of Land Management from adding to protected wilderness areas, the Fish and Wildlife Service from naming new endangered plant and animal species, etc. — all regardless of any new events or research) Idaho Republican Mike Simpson said on Tuesday: “Many of us think that the overregulation from E.P.A. is at the heart of our stalled economy.”

Not the mortgage companies who loaned money to people with no assets or income, not the investment banks who packaged those loans into deceptively marketed collateralized debt obligations, not Moody’s and S&P who AAA-rated the toxic CDOs, not the unregulated credit-default swap market that built towers of speculative side-bets on each toxic CDO, and not George W. Bush or Alan Greenspan who failed to regulate any of it. The E-frigging-PA.

This idea enters the public debate not because it makes sense to Rep. Simpson or anybody else — that’s irrelevant — but because the EPA hurts the profits of polluting corporations who spend money on lobbying, electioneering, and other propaganda. No matter what evidence you assemble in its favor, the EPA will still hurt those profits, so it will still be blamed for whatever problem people are currently worried about.

The Center is occupied territory. Tuesday, Paul Krugman blogged on The Cult that is Destroying America, and followed it up in Thursday’s column The Centrist Cop-Out.

What’s destroying America, he says, is not crazy right-wingers. (We’ve always had them.) What’s comparatively recent and more dangerous is the media’s “cult of balance”. No matter what positions the two parties take, they will be covered as if they were equally extreme and irresponsible.

What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

Standing in the middle, seeing reason (or blame) on both sides — that makes sense when you’re arguing with public-spirited fellow citizens who happen to disagree with you. It doesn’t make sense when the driving force behind an argument is a corporation.

Logic will not convince the Ford dealer than you don’t need a new truck; at some point you just have to leave. Similarly, we can’t persuade corporations not to consume us. We have to take their power away. That won’t be a conversation, it will be a fight.

The Left is not totally free of corporate corruption, but it is the only remaining place to fight from. The Right is completely co-opted. Its frames, sound bites, ideologies, and pseudo-facts are corporately generated and would collapse without the media/academic infrastructure that corporate money buys. And to be in the Center is to collaborate, to pretend that the corporate how-to-serve-man cookbook is a viable plan for the future.

The Center is my homeland, the Jerusalem I will always hope to return to. But for the foreseeable future it is occupied territory, and I refuse to collaborate. So I will stay here, in exile on the Left.

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The Dog Whistle Defined

July 25, 2011 – 11:02 am

I’ve been ignoring Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy because the voters are. But this campaign video is worth watching purely for educational purposes. If you’ve ever wondered what the term dog whistle means, this is it:

According to Wikipedia, a dog whistle is “coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience.”

The targeted subgroup here are evangelical Christians. The general public will find the intro (where Pawlenty and his wife testify to their faith) dull but unobjectionable. The Pawlenties believe in something; good for them. Most will get bored and stop watching. But this lengthy testimony tells Evangelicals to get out their codebooks to decrypt phrases that will follow, like:

  • people of faith. If you’re a Muslim, Jew, liberal Christian, or even a Catholic, you may think you’re a person of faith. You aren’t. Evangelicals do not use people of faith in this ecumenical way. To them, the phrase is a synonym for evangelical Christian.
  • God. Similarly, you may think that the Pawlenties are talking about your God. They aren’t. If you worship somebody other than the Lord Jesus Christ (as He is envisioned by conservative Protestants), you don’t believe in God.
  • nation under God. Not the ecumenical meaning (that America is united under a larger truth rather than divided among warring sects). Instead, this means that only a government dominated by right-wing Christians is legitimate.
  • the Founders. Not the historical politicians who wrote the Constitution. The Founders are latter-day prophets who were inspired by God to create a Christian nation. They wielded a divine authority similar to Moses or St. Paul.
  • faith in the public square. Rather than every American’s right to profess his or her beliefs in public, this phrase refers to the special right of Christians to commandeer public resources to promote their religion.

So later, when Pawlenty says:

The separation of church and state was intended to protect people of faith from government, not government from people of faith. … I think the Founders of this country made it very clear: We were founded as a nation under God. … So it’s very clear what roadmap they put out for us as it relates to faith in the public square.

codebook-holders hear him agreeing that Evangelicals have inherited the prophetic authority of the Founders. America is their country, the power and resources of the government are theirs to use, and the rest of us should be grateful for their tolerance, such as it is.

Evangelicals want to hear that message from a candidate, but Pawlenty knows he’ll offend the general public if he says it in so many words. Hence the dog whistle: They hear it; you don’t.

Another dog-whistle to the Religious Right is Rick Perry’s 1-minute invitation to “The Response“, a “call to prayer for a nation in crisis”.

This event will sail under most voters’ radar, because it sounds just like the prayer breakfasts and days-of-prayer that politicians are always associating themselves with.

But true believers will hear something different. Perry has modeled the Response after what “God called the Israelites to do in the Book of Joel”. If you haven’t read Joel lately, you probably don’t realize how apocalyptic it is. Invoking Joel implies not just that America is having hard times, but that God is smiting us for our sin.

Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.

Given that the Response is hosted by the American Family Association, we can guess what that sin is: tolerance of homosexuality.

A little of that apocalyptic flavor comes through in the official Response promo video, which most voters won’t bother to watch.

And then there’s the Response’s page of “endorsers”. (The Endorser link from the home page was dropped after it started getting attention, and then the page disappeared altogether.) Chances are you’ve never heard of them, but they include some of the most dangerous religious nuts in the country.

Here Mike Bickle, for example, warns his flock about “the Harlot Babylon movement”, which is “preparing the nations to receive the Antichrist”.

I believe that one of the main pastors, as a forerunner to the Harlot movement — it’s not the Harlot movement yet — is Oprah.

Oprah is the forerunner to the forerunner to the Antichrist. Who knew?

Another official Response-endorser, C. Peter Wagner, believes that the Japanese Emperor has had sex with a Sun Goddess/Demon, and that this event had real consequences for the Japanese economy.

Since the night that the present emperor slept with the Sun Goddess, the stock market in Japan has gone down. It’s never come up since.

And of course there’s John Hagee, whose endorsement John McCain had to renounce in 2008 because of Hagee’s anti-Catholic bigotry. His picture was also up there on the Endorsers’ page.

Rachel Maddow collects more of this kind of insanity from Perry’s endorsers/allies.

It’s not clear yet how many of these people will appear on stage with Perry at the Response. But their followers know that Perry’s event is their event. You should know it too.

The Response-hosting AFA is not just ideologically conservative, it is partisan for Perry. Tuesday, the AFA’s Bryan Fischer wrote that Michele Bachmann’s migraines “make a Rick Perry candidacy both inevitable and necessary.”

Liberals, interestingly enough, are not the ones piling on this issue. “I thought Hell would freeze over before I defended Michele Bachmann,” Dana Goldstein writes.

The Texas Observer describes Perry’s connections with the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement founded by the same C. Peter Wagner. The movement’s leaders talk about “infiltrating” government because “the church’s vocation is to rule history with God.”

Contrast Pawlenty’s and Perry’s dog whistles with Herman Cain, who just lays it out there for everyone to see, as during this interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: You’re saying any community, if they want to [can] ban a mosque?

CAIN: Yes. They have a right to do that. That’s not discriminating based upon religion.

And draws this response from Minnesota’s Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison:

It’s reprehensible that [Cain] just will not relent with this bigotry and that he actually thinks it’s going to enhance his chances to get the Republican nomination. If I were a Republican, I would be outraged.

But by talking in code, Pawlenty and Perry make no headlines and leave their opponents nothing to quote.

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Digging into the Deficit

July 25, 2011 – 10:58 am

At the heart of the debt-ceiling debate is the question: How did the deficit get so high? It’s really pretty simple: We cut taxes, and healthcare got expensive. It all boils down to the next two charts.

The first chart refutes John Boehner’s mantra: “Washington has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.” We’ve got both.

spending and revenue

[Source: economist Jared Bernstein, who says he got it from the Office of Management and Budget. Here at the outset, I should justify the scales. I think there are only two legitimate ways to track government spending through time: as a percentage of GDP or inflation-adjusted per capita. A common conservative trick is to show raw revenues/expenditures tracking ever upward, which just proves that the country is getting bigger.]

Revenue (in blue) peaks just before the Bush tax cuts take effect, and then takes a second plunge when the Great Recession starts in 2007. Spending (red) is in a slow downward trend from the beginning of the graph until 2000. There’s a bump in 2000-2002 that could be blamed on a recession. (Recessions not only increase safety-net spending like unemployment insurance, they lower GDP. So spending-as-a-percentage-of-GDP gets a push from both sides.) But spending stays up (probably due to the Iraq War) during the tepid “Bush Boom” of 2003-2007, before jumping again when the Great Recession hits in 2007.

The second chart focuses entirely on spending.

health care spending

[Source: Christopher Conover at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who attributes his numbers to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. This chart is about total government spending — state and local as well as federal — so the percentages of GDP are higher than in the first graph. It also goes back much further. The big spike is World War II.]

Conover notes:

Between 1966 and 2007, the entire increase in the size of government relative to the economy resulted from growth in tax-financed health spending.

And Matt Yglesias draws the obvious conclusion:

[G]rowth in government spending is overwhelmingly not the consequence of grasping liberals coming up with evermore things for the government to do. Instead, the government has for a long time shouldered responsibility for health care finance, and health care is very expensive.

So a more precise statement of the deficit problem is: We have a revenue problem and a healthcare spending problem.

Now let’s dig deeper into revenue. This chart shows revenue by type of tax:

taxes by type

[Source: The Department of Numbers blog. The vertical scale is percentage of GDP.]

Income tax stays within a range, with a blip up to create the Clinton surplus, and then a dive from the Bush tax cuts. (BTW: Unless you are willfully blind, it should be obvious that tax cuts do not increase revenue.) When this chart ends in 2007 we’re near the bottom of that range.  Payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare — in yellow) go steadily upwards, while corporate taxes go steadily downwards from nearly 6% of GDP under Eisenhower to less than 2% now.

OK, so at the very least we have a corporate tax revenue problem.

Now let’s look at income tax. Conservatives make a big deal about how much tax the rich  pay — more than ever, by just about any measure.

tax burden of the rich

But that’s mostly because they are raking off a much higher percentage of the total national income. (In 50 years, when one guy is making all the income, he’ll necessarily pay all the income tax. Wouldn’t you hate to be him?)

In fact, the effective income tax rate (i.e., what they actually pay) has dropped considerably for the very rich, even as their income has shot up.

income and tax rates of the rich[Source: Ezra Klein, who attributes it to the economists listed at the bottom of the graphic.]

So: We have a problem getting revenue from corporations and the rich, and a healthcare spending problem.

Finally, let’s delve into that healthcare problem. Part of it isn’t a problem at all. As a society, we’re spending more on healthcare partly because the healthcare industry has better products than it used to.

A century ago, hospitals couldn’t do much more for you than a dedicated family member could do at home. Today, they can. People who a generation ago would have died in their 50s from heart attacks and cancer are surviving into their 80s and dying in nursing homes. It costs more, but personally, surviving into my 80s is precisely what I want to spend my money on. The option to buy a longer life is an opportunity, not a problem.

But there is a related problem: Compared to other countries, we’re not getting what we pay for.

Americans spend more, live less

[Source: University of California Atlas of Global Inequality. This data is from 2000, but things have only gotten worse since then, as the next chart will show.]

For all our healthcare spending, we live about as long as Cubans — four years less than the Japanese, and even two years less than our Canadian neighbors. (You might picture the Japanese living some spartan lifestyle we’d find unacceptable. But Canadians?)

And while all nations are spending more on healthcare — because everybody wants a longer life — the U.S. is pulling away.

rising American costs

[Source: Ezra Klein. The vertical scale is inflation-adjusted dollars per capita.]

And that’s the worrisome issue: If we’re on a higher exponential-growth path than everyone else, eventually healthcare spending will swamp the rest of our economy.

Total cost vs. government cost. Maybe you noticed I pulled a switch: The last two charts have been about total healthcare spending, not just government healthcare spending. Only about half of our healthcare spending goes through the government (Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Administration, etc.).

If you think that government healthcare spending is the whole problem, then you do what Paul Ryan proposed: Replace Medicare and Medicaid with capped private health-insurance subsidies. The cap can be wherever the budget needs it to be, so the government-spending problem is solved.

But if total healthcare costs stay on their exponential path, they swamp the economy anyway. Eventually the government subsidies are tiny compared to the real cost of healthcare, and middle-class people start dying of curable diseases because they can’t afford treatment.

To an extent, it already happens. The U.S. performs badly in what public-health professionals call amenable mortality — i.e., preventable deaths.

preventable deaths by country

Now, I can’t see any democracy allowing middle-class people to die for lack of care, so either we’ll scrap democracy or government will end up paying for care no matter what Ryan’s projections say. And that’s why I focus on the total cost of healthcare.

Single-payer. Paul Ryan believes dialing back government funding will slow the rising costs, but his justification is a combination of wishful thinking and just-so stories about the market. The countries that get better results do the exact opposite: Virtually all their healthcare spending goes through the government.

All the evidence of actual countries tells us this: Government healthcare is more efficient than private healthcare.

In the private part of our healthcare system, the easiest way to make money is to shift costs to somebody else  — insure the people who don’t get sick — not lower the cost of care. (Ryan’s plan is similar — it shifts costs from the government to individuals.) Only single-payer systems, where there is nobody to shift costs to, deal with the real problem.

So the long-term answer to the healthcare spending problem is paradoxical: Extend Medicare to everybody.

In the short run, it will essentially double government healthcare spending. (Done right, this would be invisible to both the federal deficit and your personal budget. What you pay now in health-insurance premiums you would instead pay as taxes.) But in the long run, a single-payer system would get our costs (and outcomes) in line with countries that do healthcare much better than we do.

Summing up. So that’s my answer to the long-term deficit: End the Bush tax cuts at least for the wealthy and maybe for everybody (because the economy did fine with the Clinton tax rates). Close loopholes until corporate taxes get back to Eisenhower-era levels. And move to a single-payer system to get healthcare costs under control.

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Meet ALEC

July 18, 2011 – 11:28 am

The Republican landslide of 2010 swept into office governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Scott of Florida, Rick Snyder of Michigan, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, and John Kasich of Ohio. All replaced Democrats except for Scott, who replaced moderate Republican Charlie Crist.

All five of these governors ran fairly vague campaigns about cutting waste and shrinking government, but after the election each hit the ground running with a detailed and radically conservative agenda — coincidentally, the same agenda.

Some of that agenda was predictable from campaign rhetoric: budget cuts in education and medical care, tax cuts for corporations, and loosening regulations that protect consumers and workers from corporations. Voters may not have guessed the specific cuts from the ads they saw, but anybody who has been paying attention knows that when Republicans say “waste” they mean schools and medical care. And when they say “growth” or “jobs” they mean give-aways to corporations.

Strangely, though, much of the one-size-fits-every-state agenda wasn’t even hinted in the campaigns: breaking the state employee unions, for example. It is predictable that governors who want to cut education will drive a hard bargain with teachers. But in November nobody was talking about taking away collective bargaining rights or de-certifying unions. And then suddenly in February they all were.

Just as suddenly, the new governors were talking about making it harder to vote. And harder to sue. And easier to carry concealed weapons. Similar plans to start or expand private-school voucher programs appeared.

Hardly anybody ran on those issues. But on Day 1, Republicans were ready to move on them.

Even the predictable parts of the unified agenda were being pursued in suspiciously similar ways. All over the country, conservative governors decided to go big, hit hard, and push their opposition to the wall. At one point Illinois was hosting refugee legislators from both Wisconsin and Indiana.

This level of similarity would make sense if there had been some public Contract With America II that they had all signed. But there wasn’t.

Clearly, governors (or leaders of Republican legislatures in states with Democratic governors) were not calling in their local advisors and having independent conversations that all happened to reach the same conclusions.

The hidden common thread was the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC). ALEC is an organization where corporate representatives and conservative politicians meet together in secret to draft legislation that the politicians can then take back to their home states. American Radioworks claimed in 2002 that about 1/3 of state legislators are ALEC members.

ALEC has existed since conservative activist Paul Weyrich founded it in 1979, and it has been written about for years. The American Radioworks piece described how the private prison industry works through ALEC to build their market by increasing prison sentences.

But [Corrections Corporation of America] does more than chat up lawmakers at ALEC meetings. On top of its membership dues and contributions to help pay the bills for ALEC meetings, the prison company pays two thousand dollars a year for a seat on ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force. That panel writes the group’s “model” bills on crime and punishment. Until recently, a CCA official even co-chaired the task force.

… Among ALEC’s model bills: mandatory minimum sentences; Three Strikes laws, giving repeat offenders 25 years to life in prison; and “truth-in-sentencing,” which requires inmates to serve most or all of their time without a chance for parole. ALEC didn’t invent any of these ideas but has played a pivotal role in making them law in the states, says [Edwin] Bender of the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

The piece ended with a quote from William Dickey, the former head of Wisconsin’s prison system:

I’ve always understood political people as having differences of opinion — tough on crime, soft on crime. But I’ve usually thought that whatever views were being held in that debate, they were sincerely arrived at. And to discover that there’s a group pushing criminal justice policy not because it’s in the public interest, but because it’s a way to make money, is disappointing to me.

But that’s just one industry. Recently we got our first look at the full scope of ALEC’s activities when the Center for Media and Democracy got its hands on 800 pieces of model legislation ALEC has written. You can find them on the web site ALEC Exposed.

The major pieces of the Walker/Scott/Snyder/Corbett/Kasich agenda are all there. (For example, the model “Public Employee Freedom Act” contains the union-busting provisions, and the “Voter ID Act” the vote-suppression provisions — including the ones that make no sense, like saying that an expired driver’s license does not establish your identity.)

There is, I rush to point out, nothing illegal about this. Any one can write model legislation and try to get a legislator to propose it. Liberal groups do it too. What is sinister, though, is the secrecy. Corporations have managed to remove their fingerprints from the laws they have written.

Whether an environmental group is pushing higher pollution standards or an polluting industry seeks lower ones, the public has a right to know where its laws are coming from, and what interests are being served.

You get an idea of the founding philosophy of ALEC from this 1980 clip of founder Paul Weyrich: “I don’t want everybody to vote. … Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

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