10th anniversary post: Still sillypants

In contrast to 2013, Washington's Stanton Park remains open

DISCLAIMER: Also in contrast to 2013, I now have a son who works for a federal contractor. So this has become personal!

Ten years ago, I wrote two posts about the U.S. government shutdown, one about the difficulty of knowing when essential conversations about our common life are open and fair to all, and the other a pictorial reflection about being in Washington during the early days of the shutdown. "Some people," said a mother to her daughter explaining why there was a wee fence around Stanton Park, "are being sillypants."

That little girl must be 12 or 13 now, and presumably maturing in an age-appropriate way. That is less clear for congressional Republicans. This week I returned to Washington during another game of congressional chicken over federal budgeting. (I'm not ambulance chasing--really! Both years I was representing Coe College at the October meeting of Capitol Hill Internship Program advisers.) As it happened, the threat of a shutdown seems to have been averted Saturday, or at least postponed for 45 days, and anyhow my trip this year would have occurred too early for another round of shutdown pictures.

Still, as close as we got to a shutdown, with the demolition derby that our national politics has become, occupied the thoughts of all of us who take government people. To paraphrase Lincoln, ours is a government of people, by people, for people--so it will never get things exactly right, it will always leave some if not everyone unsatisfied, and yet it matters a lot to the quality of our lives together. Government is not meant to be a plaything, or a weapon.

After our meeting, I went up to U Street NW clutching the invaluable Frommer's 24 Great Walks in Washington, D.C. [Wiley, 2009... this is walk #15]. Jazz great Duke Ellington (1899-1974 grew up here, and for decades it was a center of black culture, even after suffering much from the 1968 riots.

"Community Rhythms" mural by Alfred J. Smith, U Street station

13th St NW: Young Duke Ellington lived here

13th and T: Adult Duke Ellington stayed here

 

11th and U: This club hosted the greats of 50s/60s jazz

There are other landmarks here as well, including a memorial to African-Americans who served in the Civil War that lists every known participant. There also was (on this day, anyway) a young man in a Civil War uniform, expounding considerably about the war and the memorial.

10th and U: African-American Civil War Memorial

Names on the memorial

11th and U: Oldest black-owned bank in DC

12th and S: Wax Abraham Lincoln with wicks for lighting

U Street has gentrified a lot in recent years.

Some of the multitude of new construction

While I'm normally rather sanguine about gentrification, which does bring wealth and racial integration to places, it's jarring to see it to such a degree in a neighborhood so closely identified with black history. At least that history is being preserved.

U Street, too, is Washington--a place that embodies America's ongoing efforts to build and rebuild the good life. Washington is more than the cartoonish caricature presented by so many politicians, like former U.S. Representative Rod Blum, who served Iowa for two terns in Congress, and who is probably best remembered for wanting to inflict a recession on Washington. 

Once you get away from the Capitol and into the neighborhoods, though, you find Washington is full of people, a lot of whom work for or with the federal government, and who are trying, as we all are, to do their jobs.

10th and U: This too is Washington

Constitution Day: Whatever happened to the separation of powers?

Independence Hall, Philadelphia

On this Constitution Day, we may pause to remember our founding document, the oldest written constitution in existence, while wondering whether this fall's elections will be able to proceed. Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have described the constitutional framework as "a Republic, if you can keep it." Can we?

The separation of powers with checks and balances featured in the U.S. Constitution was a product of the Framers' 18th century worldview. This worldview was informed by both a Biblical understanding of human sinfulness and a rationalist-humanistic understanding of human potential.

Temptation of Christ by Juan de Flandes (1460-1519) (Wikimedia commons)

The Bible taught them that sin was part of the human condition, and that this sin was driven by self-interest. "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God," wrote Paul (Romans 3:23, NRSV); Jesus, the one who did not sin, was nonetheless tempted by the self-concern inherent in his human nature. The Gospel of Luke describes Jesus being tempted in the desert with food, kingdoms, and protection from physical harm (4:1-13)... later generalized in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan into gain, glory, and security, the three motives for people to "invade" each other. Individually we might learn to resist these temptations, but governing the new country would require attention to them, both in the citizens and the government. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.  In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The Framers were confident they could solve this "great difficulty" because they were living in a time of rapid scientific discovery. Scientists in the 18^th century were announcing their findings with increasing confidence (see Hooker 1997).  Isaac Newton’s discoveries led him to describe the universe, in Principia Mathematica (1687), as essentially a set of mechanical processes.  Robert Hooke, Jan Swammerdam and Antony van Leeuwenhook discovered animal and plant cells.  Benjamin Franklin discovered lightning is electricity in 1749. Karl von Linné catalogued all known species—a term he coined—in 1767.  Henry Cavendish discovered the gas hydrogen in 1766, Joseph Priestley oxygen in 1774. The first vaccine, against smallpox, was developed by Edward Jenner in 1796. As knowledge of the natural world increased exponentially, people increasingly believed that many human problems, perhaps all of them, could be solved with the appropriate application of scientific methods.

Baron Montesquieu, "constitutional engineer" (Wikimedia commons)

Many of the Framers cited the work of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu (1689-1755), whose Spirit of the Laws described a system of checks and balances that made it possible for government to be strong enough to carry out its functions, but not so strong as to become oppressive. The government would be designed by dividing it by function, and then each governmental body would be given leverage over the others. The self-interest in human nature, which Calvinists condemned, would if harnessed work for the benefit of humanity, because it would encourage each part of government to control the aggressive tendencies of the other parts. It's a similar logic to another great 18th century work, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1723-1790); Smith argues that free markets work because individual self-interest is harnessed to produce the optimal supply of goods at the right price. 

The U.S. Constitution divides power/sovereignty not only between parts of government, but also between national and state governments, between mass and elites, and between factional interests in a “great country” (See Federalist 10). Each division was designed so that the natural human motivation to defend individual self-interest would also defend the institution and the collective from excessive power, while exercise of power would require cooperation and compromise. So, bad policies would be filtered out, while good ones could be passed.

Designs can look better on paper than in operation, but for much of U.S. history the system of checks and balances has worked more or less as the Framers intended. Policy making has followed a mostly pragmatic course, abetted by the development of norms and at times the rivalry of political parties. David Mayhew (1991) argued based on an exhaustive survey of enactments that divided party control of the Presidency and Congress posed no obstacle to the frequency or quality of laws passed. In the one bit of academic writing I've done that's gotten a fair bit of attention, Paul J. Quirk and I argued that "because American politicians notoriously look out for themselves more than for their parties, they can often cooperate across party lines" (1994: 539). At the same time, divided government means "both liberal and conservative views are influential and thus that the policies adopted are ideologically moderate" (1994: 550).

By the 2006 edition of the book, we were hedging our bets. Intensified partisanship meant that less was getting passed by Congress, and what was getting done was happening because of the overriding of norms against unilateral executive action--while other norms, like financing the government or holding hearings on Supreme Court nominees, were also overridden for partisan motives.

So, what happened to the Madisonian system? The Framers provided separated powers and selection methods, so that the parts of government would have different interests that they would defend against encroachment from the other parts. They anticipated that in this way individual self-interest could be harnessed for the good of all. Why is it no longer working?

I admit there is no metric for when government is “working” on issues like climate change, health care, trade with China, election security, or for what constitutes “other high crimes and misdemeanors” in the Constitution’s definition of impeachable offense. Should Trump have been removed from office? Should Bill Clinton? Public approval of Congress is running in the mid-20s, which is not good, but pretty much average for the last 50 years. No sideline officials with chains is going to emerge to determine this with precision.

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Republican leader since 2007

AND YET! The 2013 government shutdown, blanket blocking or approving of appointments to the Supreme Court, and ten years of Republican bloviating about the Affordable Care Act without a single committee hearing on a proposal of their own suggest that somehow the incentives for elected officials to take necessary actions are broken. At the same time, Presidents are getting away with stuff, particularly a Donald Trump who cares not for rules-of-the-game written or unwritten (See Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Trump's shakedown of Ukraine is only the most obvious example from the current administration. Republicans in Congress treated Trump’s impeachment as a partisan Democratic exercise, and never took it seriously other than to do what they could to limit the exposure of information and get the whole thing over with. Same goes for Russian interference in the 2016 election, where congressional Republicans boldly ran interference for the President with the Mueller investigation. They have been quiet about the qualifications, statements and actions of Trump’s political appointees, even health officials in a global pandemic, and about the administration's most egregiously inhumane actions.

It's easy for me to demand that congressional Republicans take a stand for the Constitution, norms, ethics, and regular order. The Madisonian system of checks and balances is designed to work on self-interest, not the lofty expectations of someone in an ivory tower. (My office is actually in a brick building that is a mere three stories tall, but a timeless metaphor is a timeless metaphor.) And what do congressional Republicans see when they look at their incentives? The President's approval rating remains low-ish but rock-steady in spite of all--43.1 percent as of this Constitution Day on 538--while it's stratospheric among self-identified Republicans, who predominate in their districts and states as well as among their likely supporters. Their incentives say: work with President Trump, whatever he says or does, institution be damned. And the coronavirus? The heck with it, too, until voters in their districts start preferring preventive action to whatever it is Trump is doing. (See also Frey 2020.)

Political parties, particularly the nationally polarized version we have today, fuse the interests of fellow partisans in Congress the Presidency and the states—not automatically, as witness the variety in state responses to the pandemic—in ways the Framers did not envision. Perhaps they thought the extent of the country could frustrate national combinations, or the diversity of interests at the congressional district level would encourage members of Congress to take a broader view than support or opposition to the current President? Incentives are all on the side of partisan-ideological coalitions now. Good luck, America.

SEE ALSO: 

"Will We Ever Stop Being Angry?" Holy Mountain, 18 October 2018

"The Budget Deal and the Future of Congress," Holy Mountain, 10 February 2018 [note particularly remarks of Molly Reynolds]

Yuval Levin, "Reviving the Congress," National Review, 9 September 2020

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History Tells Us About Our Future (Crown, 2018)

David R. Mayhew, Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigations, 1946-1990 (Yale University Press, 1991)

Paul J. Quirk and Bruce Nesmith, "Divided Government and Policy Making: Negotiating the Laws," in Michael Nelson (ed), The Presidency and the Political System (Washington: CQ Press, 4th ed, 1994), 531-554.

Catherine Rampell, "The GOP Traded Democracy for a Supreme Court Seat and Tax Cuts. It Wasn't Worth It," Washington Post, 21 September 2020

Election 2018 and what happens next

"Young Corn" by Grant Wood (1892-1942). Source: socks-studio.com. Used without permission.

The "rural-urban divide" is a widely-touted way to describe the current trend in American politics, but as appealingly simple as it is, it lacks substance. There's nothing about nearness to corn that makes someone Republican, nor does seeing pavement or high-rise apartment buildings make a person a Democrat.

Democrats made substantial gains in U.S. House elections in 2018, gaining about 40 seats and capturing majority control for the first time since the 2010 elections (and only the third time since the 1994 elections). Their gains actually masked a historically high 8 percentage point in the national popular vote; the national district map still favors Republicans. Democrats had a net loss of two Senate seats, but that could have been a lot worse given where most of the Senate elections were.

2018 U.S. House results (swiped from cnn.com)

Exit polling provided by CNN mostly show continuity in the partisan coalitions that have obtained since the 1980s, with some interesting variations for the Trump era. Nonwhites, especially blacks, remain solidly Democratic, with Asian-Americans voting somewhat more Democratic than Latinx. A number of other demographic trends are seen among whites but not nonwhites: age (younger more Democratic), education (college graduates more Democratic), and religion (less attachment means more Democratic). This probably is also true of other demographic categories that CNN does not break out by race.

Major partisan differences:

white born again or evangelical/not 44 points

gun owners/not 36

white/nonwhite 32

monthly religious attendance/less  21 points

veteran/nonveteran 15

male/female 12

age over/under 44 12

college graduate/not 11

Urban residents voted 69 percent Democratic, suburban 49 percent, rural 42 percent. So the urban/nonurban divide ranks among the larger differences.

As I said, this is pretty similar to the Reagan-era partisan alignment, with college graduates, suburbanites and Asian-Americans shifting Democratic and white non-graduates and rural residents shifting Republican. At the same time, cultural comfort seems to be a factor in where people choose to live (see Bill Bishop, The Big Sort); and economic activity and young professionals have moved "back to the city." America's economic gains in the 2010s have been concentrated in certain places, which are overwhelmingly metropolitan, but far from all cities have seen these benefits.

The resulting divide is not strictly urban vs. rural, but between economically successful and unsuccessful places, overlaid, as American politics inevitably is, by race. As Richard Florida noted in The Rise of the Creative Class, the economic success of a place correlates not only with economic assets but with cultural comfort with diversity (what he called the "Gay-Bohemian Index"). Democrats are drawing votes from nonwhites and from whites who are educated for the 21st century and culturally tolerant. The Republican base is in urban and rural areas which are not economically competitive, where educated young people are leaving. This might explain the strong element of nostalgia in Republican political appeals from Reagan (or even Nixon) on through to Trump. They likely draw from professional groups that are based in resource extraction rather than the knowledge economy. Oil made the Koch Brothers rich; President Trump made whatever money he's made in real estate.

The partisan alignment of government is the mirror image of the situation from 2011-2015, when Democrats held the Presidency and the Senate while Republicans controlled the House. That was a notably unproductive period in U.S. government--featuring as it did the infamous government shutdown--so my best hope for this round is that both parties produce some policy proposals they can argue about in 2020.

(Source: Wikimedia commons)

Whatever the strengths of this analysis nationally, it works pretty well to explain the results in Iowa (for which, alas, we have no exit polls handy). Republican Governor Kim Reynolds was returned to office despite national political winds that were blowing in a Democratic direction. Although Democrats flipped two Republican U.S. House seats, Republicans maintained strong control of both houses of the state legislature, retaining a 54-46 edge in the House despite losing five seats, and actually increasing their Senate edge by three to 32-18. Factors ideosyncratic to individual races aside, this remains a red state for the time being.

But not as red as this map of 2018 results makes it look: an ocean of Republican red with a few islands of Democratic blue! More than half of Iowa's population lives in ten of those 99 counties, which account for 74.5 percent of job growth in this decade, and whose net in-migration balances loss of population in the rest of Iowa.

Nor have the 2010s have not been equally kind to Iowa's ten largest counties:

COUNTY	%DEM VOTE	%GRAD/PROF DEGREES	%WHITE	%COLL GRAD	10-16 JOB GROWTH	NET MIGRATION
JOHNSON (Iowa City)	71.6	24	84	28	12810	in
STORY (Ames)	58.8	19	87	22	4793	in
POLK (D. Moines)	58.2	10	86	29	31048	in
LINN (C. Rapids)	55.6	10	90	26	8131	in
BLKHAWK (Waterloo)	55.0	8	86	24	2635	out
SCOTT (Davenprt)	50.8	11	86	26	6632	in
DUBUQUE (Dubuque)	49.4	9	93	24	5495	in
DALLAS (Waukee)	47.5	12	92	30	17499	in
POTTAW. (C. Bluffs)	41.3	5	95	24	1291	out
WOODBR (Sioux City)	41.1	7	88	25	2310	out

(Source for most of these data: U.S. Bureau of the Census)

Correlations are not perfect, but support for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Fred Hubbell is associated with cities where there are more knowledge workers, more nonwhites, and improved economic conditions. Cities that are hurting and whitest supported Reynolds.

What can be done for those areas of the country that face being left behind? Clara Hendrickson and colleagues from the Brookings Institution suggest improving digital skills in lagging area, helping small businesses gain access to capital, extending broadband access to rural areas, and targeting national development assistance to ten potential growth "poles." They also suggest helping those stuck in underperforming areas to relocate (Hendrickson, Muro and Galston 2018). Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith commends the advice of James and Deborah Fallows' book Our Towns to support universities, welcome immigration, and develop public-private partnerships (Smith 2018). For more ideas, see my July piece, cited below.

Even in a Democratic year, voters in Iowa's lagging areas outnumber those in growing areas, and Iowa will have unified Republican control of government for the forseeable future. Statehouse Republicans owe their supporters answers to the problems of our "struggling regions" (Noah Smith's term). These may yet emerge in the next legislative session, after years of playing to the crowd by defunding Planned Parenthood, banning abortion after six weeks, and banning sanctuary cities, while cutting taxes and state services. I'm not hopeful--Reynolds made her final campaign push in the company of over-the-edge U.S. Representative Steve King, who also served as her campaign co-chair--but I will be watching the next legislative session with particular interest.

SEE ALSO:
Paul Krugman, "The New Economy and the Trump Rump," New York Times, 20 November 2018, A23
Erin Murphy, "Is Iowa Not a Presidential Tossup State?" Cedar Rapids Gazette, 19 November 2018
"What is the Future of Iowa's Small Towns?" Holy Mountain, 3 July 2018

Will we ever stop being angry?

(Source: Wikimedia commons)

Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) has a new book out, subtitled "Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal." Three weeks before the midterm elections, Sasse seems to be speaking to a weariness in at least some corners of America with the fraught, angry, tribal nature of our national politics. Perhaps, reader, you are one of the weary ones? I certainly am, being the sensitive sort who readily relates to the Framers' concern with the "tumults and disorders" that surround elections. Or perhaps you enjoy being angry? A few years ago, a Cedar Rapids activist allowed, "I have low blood pressure. When I get mad, I feel good." The problem for me is, these days election campaigns are always going on, especially though not only because President Trump is a bottomless well of offensive inflammatory remarks. He is a symptom, not a cause, of our present discontents.

A colleague walked into my office yesterday, observing that people on the left and the right are contributing to the public anger. At that time I rose to the shiny lure of "false equivalence," but I think if we're going to be productive here we need to jump quickly past the assignment of blame. Besides, to some degree anyway, he's right (Frenkel 2008).

Maybe I'm besotted with economics, but I think a good way to start understanding people's actions is to look for the incentives that drive them. Politicians, whose career success depends on winning elections, will take the stances and pursue the measures that will get them comfortably reelected; if they don't they are likely to be replaced by somebody who does that better. In the 1970s and 1980s, we used to think that mostly meant competing with the other party for the majority of the public in the center of the political spectrum. But as voters have sorted themselves ideologically--they're typically all left or all right on a wide range of seemingly-unrelated issues--there's less of a middle to compete for. (Voters have also sorted themselves geographically, so individual representatives often come from more politically homogeneous districts, and so their main danger is not from the center but from within their own party... so their electoral incentives are against compromise.) In a bipolar political universe, you try to rally your base, and you fear the other side's base. Besides, strong emotional appeals are more likely to encourage donations and volunteering, which are the vital forces of any competitive campaign. (See R. Kenneth Godwin, One Billion Dollars of Influence [Chatham House, 1988], ch. 3).

Whichever came first, the polarized public or polarizing politicians, they have a reinforcing effect on each other. The red meat that Party A rationally throws to its base is going to anger followers of Party B, and provide them greater amounts of their own red meat. Those who remain in the center, those who once provided a moderating influence in politics and government, are either leaving in disgust, or choosing the "lesser of two evils" and contributing to the success of the extremists of either Party A or Party B. News media and websites, following the examples of the interest groups Godwin studied, find market niches by appealing to strong partisans with more partisan appeals. This too contributes to the roaring bonfire of public anger.

What I'm describing, with my dime-store game theory, is a political world where anger pays and moderation does not, with the byproduct being increasing levels of anger on both sides. Think of an alternative where a player can choose an uncooperative strategy with a 50% chance of complete success and a 50% chance of complete failure, or a cooperative strategy with a higher chance of partial success--say, 75% chance of 75% success. (Obviously, I'm making these numbers up.) Based on expected value, you'd choose the cooperative success unless you estimated the chance of partial success with the cooperative strategy even slightly lower--say, 70% chance of 70% success. Or if we added another rule whereby the uncooperative had unlimited chances to play and the cooperative had to quit after one turn.

(Source: totalmedia.co.uk)

If, as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich advises, we think of people with different politics than ours as "sick" and "traitors," we would also get some utility in preventing them from attaining any of their "destructive" and "corrupt" goals. There's no such thing as joint gains in a world where I view anything you gain as inherently a loss for me (not to mention America). That needs to be factored into our game as well.

Is anyone, in this sort of world, likely to be constrained in their statements and actions? Could there possibly be incentives to counteract those which are provoking ever-higher levels of anger?

The country has, occasionally, come together in recent years, most memorably after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Bipartisan coalitions in Congress have formed around certain necessary actions, like economic stimulus during the 2008 recession, or avoiding government shutdowns. But these were momentary emergencies, and the impulses to cooperation proved short-lived. My sense is the default state of political affairs, even in these times of great uncertainty, is going to be laden with anger, stoked by partisan rivalry.

Alan I. Abramowitz of Emory University, whose book The Disappearing Center (Yale University Press, 2010) is as good an account of political polarization as any, concluded that partisan-ideological polarization is not going away any time soon.... Even if efforts at bipartisanship are sincere and not mere window dressing, the differences between the two parties on almost every major domestic and foreign policy issue are so great and the numbers of moderates in both parties are so small that reaching any agreement will be almost impossible (p. 169). Given that, the more direct route for either party to achieving its policy goals is to win unified control of the Presidency and Congress. Given how nationally competitive the parties are nationally, this prospect is always within reach for both Democrats and Republicans. Case in point: Republicans control the Presidency and Congress today, but Democrats have designs on capturing the House next month, and think about how little would have had to change in 2016 for Democrats already to have control of the rest. This alone motivates both sides to gin up their respective bases, which raises everyone's blood pressure.

Once in control of the levers of government, the prospect of losing control is always just around the corner, too. So the incentive is to act quickly around issues that unify the base, rather than working to achieve common solutions.

If there is hope from either side to lead us out of this vortex of anger, it would probably have to come from the Democrats. (Bear with me here--I'm not just being partisan!!) Republicans are heavily invested in President Trump, vicious rhetoric and reckless disregard for the truth notwithstanding. Moreover, Democrats are the "party of government," in domestic policy at least, so have more to lose when government doesn't work.

It is pleasant to imagine a Democratic President in 2021, using their position to lead the country back together. They could seek policies on issues of common concern; offer policy concessions to Republicans; and include members of the opposition in key appointments. But President Obama did all these things, and look where it got him--and the body politic. It's easy to imagine additional items Obama might have pursued--malpractice reform in the Affordable Care Act, for example--but it's hard to think of successful approaches to national leadership that haven't already been tried.

I think we're stuck with this situation for a long time. Eventually something may come along that really shakes things up. That will bring its own trauma, of course. In the meantime, individuals are best advised to do what they can to avoid the crazy, and to avoid adding to it.

SEE ALSO:
Elizabeth Bruenig, "The Left and Right Cry Out for Civility, But Maybe That's Asking for Too Much," Washington Post, 16 October 2018: similar topic and worth a read, though it addresses public expression rather than public attitudes
"What's the Matter with Congress?" Holy Mountain, 30 May 2013: review essay of recent works on political polarization.

(Source: themindfulword.org)

The budget deal and the future of Congress

"Political Drama" by Robert Delaunay (1885-1941)
at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

There's a positive tone in town right now, thanks to the budget deal worked out by the Senate Republican and Democratic leaders that not only prevents another shutdown, but funds the government through March 23, which makes it that much longer before we have to endure more brinksmanship. National defense, the Children's Health Insurance Program, disaster relief and the opioid epidemic get two years of funding.

It's not a great deal, being pretty much a logroll that provides additional spending for both parties' priorities. This will, of course, further aggravate the budget outlook already set askew by an irresponsible tax bill in December. The budget deal adds to the Keynesian stimulus begun by the tax cut, at a time when stimulus is clearly not indicated, and stock markets took another dive Thursday. Representative Dave Brat (R-VA), a member of the Freedom Caucus, is perfectly correct to call it a "Christmas tree on steroids" (Sullivan and Lee 2018). On the other hand, given the Freedom Caucus's enthusiasm for that tax cut, it could be taken as sour grapes that they weren't going to get their way on everything.

It's no news to you that Congress hasn't been impressing anyone for quite awhile. After a brief blip up into the 20s last winter, public approval ratings have settled back to the 15-20 percent range where they've been for nearly a decade. Congress as a group has rarely been wildly popular, but it's important to remember that the current numbers are low by historical standards, at least for the 75 years of national public opinion surveys.

My read on the quagmire at our nation's Capitol, previously explored in a number of posts listed below, is rooted in incentive structures. Ideological polarization and geographic sorting mean that neither Democratic nor Republican legislators have much incentive to seek constructive solutions to public problems. Core partisans are suspicious of bipartisan solutions, and there aren't enough swing voters in enough states and districts to counteract that. Accurate representation of their constituents gets them re-elected, but it also tends to stalemate or at best zero-sum solutions.

Ian Shapiro (from yale.edu)

So I was intrigued earlier this week to hear Ira Shapiro, a scholar and author as well as president of Ira Shapiro Global Straegies, LLC, highlight the importance of leadership at a forum celebrating the release of his new book, Broken: Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country (Brookings, 2018). He argues the decline of the Senate as a deliberative body is decades old, but suddenly accelerated in the middle of the last decade. "It's no accident," he said, "that the accelerating downward spiral of the Senate coincided with Mitch McConnell's time as leader." Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), Democratic leader from 2005-2017, was no prize, either: "Their joint legacy would be a broken Senate."

Source: flickr.com

McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, became the party's Senate leader in 2007, and Senate majority leader after Republican successes in the 2014 elections finally recaptured control of the chamber late in the Obama administration. Shapiro gave three examples of McConnell's norm-busting, counter-productive leadership style:

• After helping pass economic stimulus in fall 2008 when George W. Bush was still President, he "suddenly became against everything" once Barack Obama was inaugurated. Was he more concerned about how Obama's approval rating might affect Republican electoral fortunes than he was about the economy?
• His 2016 refusal to consider anyone Obama nominated to the Supreme Court after Justice Scalia died
• The unproductive handling of health care repeal in 2017

Shapiro clearly sees leadership style as a key causal variable in the current state of Congress. He concluded by pronouncing himself optimistic, anticipating the day when the 75 or 80 Senators "who know what the Senate is supposed to be and hate what it is now" step forward and "actually put country first."

Shapiro was joined on the panel by Molly Reynolds, a fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, and author of Exceptions to the Rule: The Politics of Filibuster Management in the U.S. Senate (Brookings, 2017). She presented the evidence for the causal role of institutional incentives, in which senators' and voters' "ideological positions make it much more difficult to work collaboratively." Morover, partisan competition for control has increased since the era (1960s & 70s) that Shapiro used as his baseline for Senate performance. As a result, we see both parties staking out ideological positions, and using Senate procedures to thwart the other side, eschewing compromise in favor of "getting [or trying to get] policy done that is close to their own ideological positions." Individual senators, too, use procedures--like holds, which used to be rare but now are as common as dirt--to enhance their own reputations. There've always been such individuals--Wayne Morse and Jesse Helms leap to mind--but there are many more of them. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul's mini-filibuster Friday morning is only the most recent example. Reynolds shares Shapiro's discontent with the current state of the Senate, but concluded with a question rather than a hopeful statement: "How do we work within the existing set of incentives to change behavior?"

A third view, identified with political scientists like Morris Fiorina, is that partisan polarization among the electorate was created and manipulated by elites (see also Zingher 2018 and his co-authored article with Michael Flynn in the British Journal of Political Science). If polarized politics resulted from choices, can elites choose to move past it? Or, as I gloomily suspect, is this monster going to be harder to destroy than it was to create?

The panel was organized and hosted by William Galston, Ezra K. Zilkha chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. I once appeared on a panel with Galston, in 2009, which makes me feel one degree of separation from something.

VIDEO of the event is here: https://youtu.be/zB8XZrGxqoU 

SEE ALSO:
"Shutdowns and Sillypants (and the Statler Brothers)," 8 October 2013
"Deliberation and the Shutdown," 3 October 2013
"What's the Matter with Congress," 30 May 2013

The Republicans' tax revolt

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) celebrates passage (swiped from nytimes.com)

There can be no more caviling about the accomplishments of the Republican-led federal government in 2017: the tax bill that cleared December 20, and was signed by President Donald J. Trump two days later, represents major policy change. Unfortunately, in addition to achieving some legitimate objectives the bill pushes policy in some very dubious directions.

First, the good news. The bill includes a long-overdue overhaul of corporate taxation. The U.S. relies to an unusual degree on business taxes, and the complex provisions of the tax code had pushed the top rate (which nobody really pays) far above that of other advanced democracies. The current bill closes some loopholes and reduces the top tax rate from 36 to 21 percent, making American business taxation more transparent and possibly more internationally competitive. Some advocates expect this to result in more hiring with higher wages. (I'm dubious, given that corporate profits have already been doing well for most of this decade, far outpacing wages.) The provision is not revenue-neutral, but could have been offset with higher individual rates. (It wasn't.)

I'm also fine with what's happened to the home mortgage interest deduction: the amount of debt on which interest is deductible was reduced from $1,000,000 to $750,000 for homes purchased after 2017, and nearly doubling the standard deduction drastically reduces the amount of people who will take it. This provision of the code has inflated prices, encouraged communities to sprawl and individuals to over-build (see Zuegel 2017 and Williamson 2017); the presumption that homeowners make better citizens was dubious from the start.

Other positives: Using chained CPI to make year-to-year adjustments should more accurately reflect the impact of inflation on taxpayers, even though it will mean lower benefits from, say, the Earned Income Tax Credit.... The child allowance has been increased for the first time in awhile, to $2000, albeit offset by eliminating personal exemptions. For low income filers, $1400 of that credit can be refunded in a sort of "negative income tax"... And some ideas got removed from earlier versions: reducing or ending tax credits for historic preservation, as well as provisions affecting higher education like taxing tuition benefits for employees of colleges and graduate student fellowships. (Maybe those last are neutrals rather than positives, since nothing was changed.)

If the bill had gone only that far, it might have been more widely supported, in and out of Congress, although that's hard to say given Washington's toxically partisan divide. But the sponsors had to go and:

• skew the individual cuts to the wealthy. In part that's because the wealthy pay most of the income taxes in America, but that's not true of all taxes. (ITEP 2017 shows the distribution of tax payments by income level, and how that would have been affected by an early version of the 2017 tax bill.) This exacerbates an already-widening income and wealth gap in America. The skew does appear worse if you include the expiration of individual cuts after ten years, which was included to make the bill fit under budget caps, so a lot of opposition analysis focuses on 2027 numbers. In fact those cuts may or may not expire, but if they don't, they will clearly worsen the bill's impact on the deficit (discussed below.)
• double the estate tax exemption, which was absurdly high even before Republicans tried to end it in their 2001 tax cut. The ability of the very rich, some but not all of whom got that way by doing socially-productive things, to pass on huge fortunes to their heirs, all of whom got that way simply by coming out of the right vagina, is absolutely contrary to an opportunity society. We're making the world safe for aristocracy, pure and simple. And since whites got several centuries' head start on making money, this approach does racial harm as well.
• expand pass-through provisions, by which individual income can be taxed at the lower business rate. This option is not available to typical working people, of course, only to those in a position to declare themselves independent contractors. A special provision related to real estate partnerships will provide substantial benefits to the Trump family as well as Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), a late convert to the yes column, all of which is giving cynics a field day.
• retain the obscene carried interest loophole, whereby the income of financial wizards is taxed as capital gains rather than income, and therefore at a much lower rate. This has cost the government $18 billion over the last ten years, besides which it irrationally favors financial wizardry over any other work. Hello-o-o, 1 percenters!
• run as much of a deficit as they legally could claim. The official estimate of revenue loss, $1.4+ trillion over 10 years, assumes a substantial economic stimulus effect, which as I said may or may not result, and steady and considerable economic expansion throughout the period. Otherwise the impact on the deficit is substantially worse. Fiscally stimulating the economy at all in the eighth year of a bull market with the country at or near full employment is hard to justify. The capacity of the federal government to deal with future events (natural disasters, security threats, economic downturns, funding for retirement and health care programs, maintaining infrastructure), not to mention regular disruption in our high-tech economy, has been damaged, which is inexplicable. In the near term, higher deficits would trigger funding cuts for Medicare and Medicaid.
• add legislative matters to the bill. Republicans have repeatedly attempted over the years to repeal the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act and open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, without success. Both are included in this bill. The ACA change cuts health care policy off at the knees--"We have essentially repealed Obamacare," President Trump proclaimed Wednesday--roiling individual insurance markets, without any recourse for the most vulnerable.
• do all this in an all-fired hurry, without so much as a committee hearing. Senator John S. McCain (R-Arizona) complained last summer about his leadership's abandonment of "regular order" in considering legislation. This bill was a most egregious example, but he supported it anyway.

The tax bill does some good, but considering its effects on vulnerable individuals as well as American society as a whole, it does a lot more bad.

DATA STUDIES
Tax Policy Center: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/distributional-analysis-conference-agreement-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act/full
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy: https://itep.org/finalgop-trumpbill/

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah et al.: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3089423

American Planning Association: https://www.planning.org/blog/blogpost/9140260/
US Treasury Dept: https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Documents/TreasuryGrowthMemo12-11-17.pdf 

SEE ALSO:
William G. Gale and Leonard Burman, "Congress Missed an Opportunity to Reform the Corporate Tax," Up Front, 26 December 2017
Alejandro Ortiz and Kathleen Powers, "So, What's in the Tax Bill?" Vote Smart, 13 December 2017

Health care (II)

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky,
principal architect of the Senate Republican health care bill

Senate leaders are trying to get to a vote in the next few days on the latest version of the Republican health care act, dubbed the Better Care Reconciliation Act. The bill is intended to repeal the Affordable Care Act of 2010 ("Obamacare"), while minimizing political damage to Republicans by preserving some of its more popular features.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Monday released its assessment of the effects of the bill: the number of insured Americans will decline by 22 million in 10 years, while the federal deficit will decline by a total of $321 billion. The deficit reduction could in theory be greater, but the bill also repeals the tax increases on upper brackets included in the 2010 law (Kaplan and Pear). The CBO did not to my knowledge assess whether the law would fulfill President Trump's April promise that individual premiums and deductibles, which have risen pretty steadily for more than 30 years, would be "much lower," but a collection of health economists and policy experts consulted by The New York Times predict many people will face substantially higher deductibles, or premiums, or both. Rodney L. Whitlock, a former Senate Republican policy assistant, thought deductibles would reach "almost assuredly five digit" territory (Adelson).

Obamacare was passed after more than six decades of effort to pass a national health insurance bill that had previously yielded government health programs for the elderly (Medicare, passed in 1965) and the poor (Medicaid, also passed in 1965) as well as a series of bloodied presidents who attempted broader approaches. The policy window was open only because Democrats briefly had a "filibuster-proof" Senate majority of 60-40, and because provider groups were willing to negotiate with the administration which they had not been in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was President. A few Republicans were involved in policy talks in the summer of 2009, but withdrew coincident with the rise of the grass roots conservative movement known as the Tea Party.

President Harry S Truman (1945-53) advocated an early national health program

Health care policy efforts were sustained by the persistence of three problems:

1. Lack of insurance. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 15 percent of non-elderly Americans lacked insurance in 2013, a proportion that had been pretty consistent dating back to the 1980s. They weren't always the same 15 percent, as people cycled in and out of employment or eligibility for Medicaid, so the percentage of people with inconsistent access to insurance was somewhat higher. Lack of insurance is associated with major health problems, shorter life expectancies, inconsistent care and financial stress.
2. Under-insurance. This is harder to measure, but a large population had health insurance that didn't actually cover what they ultimately needed, due to limits on benefits, exemptions for pre-existing conditions, or what wasn't covered by the policy to begin with. This has contributed to the rise of crowdfunding appeals to pay for unanticipated health care expenses.
3. Rising costs. Health care inflation had been running well ahead of the consumer price index at least since 1980, when health care spending amounted to about 1/12 of U.S. gross domestic product. It is now about 1/6 of GDP, placing financial stress on consumers, businesses that provide health insurance for their employees, and governments at all levels.

The existence of these three problems created substantial obstacles to opportunity in America. In a country that prides itself on meritocracy, the ability to rise is handicapped when accident of birth dooms some of us to inferior health care, not to mention housing, education and so on.

The ACA, for both practical and political reasons, eschewed national health insurance for patches on the existing system (which is not only well-established but fiercely defended by the provider groups that had defeated earlier policy efforts). Roughly based on the approach taken in Massachusetts a few years earlier, it created incentives for employers to offer insurance benefits, virtual markets for individuals in each state ("health care exchanges"), subsidies for individuals and small businesses, and expansion of the Medicaid program. It mandated minimum "essential" coverage in all policies, that everyone have health insurance, that coverage could not be denied for pre-existing conditions, "community rating" for all regardless of age sex or health status, and that children could remain on their parents' health insurance until they were 26. All these emphasized access rather than cost control, though there were some aspects of the bill that sought spending efficiencies.

President Barack Obama, for whom the Affordable Care Act
of 2010 was a primary legislative achievement

Opposition was characteristically virulent, based largely on philosophical and political reasons. Some worried that government would become too large and powerful. There was also reflexive opposition from the Republican Party in Washington and most states that they controlled. Dozens of votes were taken in Congress to repeal all or part of Obamacare, but tellingly, in six years no hearings were ever held on what if anything should replace it once it was repealed. Republicans nationally proved a lot better at winning elections and talking the program down than at designing policy, and thus arrived at their moment of victory quite unprepared.

Serious health care policy makers note Obamacare needs fixing:

1. Costs continue to rise, after a hiatus early in the decade which may have been a fluke, or may have been a temporary effect of the severe recession which dampened demand for just about everything. Health care inflation didn't start with Obamacare, but is unsustainable and will doom the program even if nothing else does.
2. Insurance exchanges have had an uneven record in practice, even after the initial enrollment bugs were worked out. Many counties have one or zero companies offering policies to individuals, which doesn't provide consumers with any benefits of competition. A more stable basis for the program would surely help.
3. Millions of people have been added to insurance rolls, but millions more remain outside. The proportion of uninsured non-elderly Americans dropped from 15 percent in 2013 to 10 percent in 2015, but still, 10 percent. Weak penalties for not buying insurance were probably understandable early on, but the "introductory rate" era is past and they must be strengthened if coverage of the long-term ill is going to be sustainable. (See comments by Dan Mendelson, president of Avelere Health, on Morning Edition Monday.)

A full repeal of the ACA would require 60 votes in the Senate to break a certain filibuster, so Republicans are pursuing only those changes that have budgetary impact in a "reconciliation" approach that cannot be filibustered. The Republican-controlled House passed the Affordable Health Care Act on May 4, 2017, without committee hearings and before the CBO had fully analyzed its effects. It was blocked in the Senate. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell revealed the somewhat different Senate version on June 22, also without committee hearings while pushing for a quick vote. Reservations within the Republican caucus, however, have prevented a vote thus far.

President Donald J. Trump has not been involved in the policy making process,
and his statements on health care have been vague and contradictory

The Republican approaches are less overtly assaults on the ACA structure than the "repeal" rhetoric of the last seven years would have predicted, but the dry-sounding policy changes may lead to the same effect. Sarah Rosenbaum of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University charges: "A terrible blow to millions of poor people is recast as an easing off of benefits that really aren't all that important, in a humane way" (Ornstein). Rather than ending Medicaid expansion, for example, the current bill phases out the additional national support to states, which along with spending caps would create a strong disincentive for states to continue it. Medicaid spending caps would have the effect of reducing federal spending on that program, which is administered by states although primarily funded by the federal government (Adler, Fiedler and Gronniger).

Ending mandates on policy coverage, having insurance and community rating would lower the costs of policies for some, while driving it up for others. Moreover, without the individual mandate the viability of the mandate for pre-existing conditions would be doubtful, though the Senate bill has added a "lockout" provision requiring a six-month waiting period for getting insurance if one has let previous coverage lapse. What Brookings analysts concluded about the House bill--In general, enrollees who are younger, have higher incomes, or live in low-cost areas are most likely to be better off, while enrollees who are older, have lower incomes, or live in high-cost areas are most likely to be worse off (Brandt et al.)--is probably true of the Senate bill as well.

If access to health care is to remain part of our common life, it requires more than holding the line on repealing the Affordable Care Act. It requires advocates, because the complex set of system patches created by the ACA could be starved of funding more easily than it could be repealed by law. ("Perhaps let OCare crash and burn!" tweeted the President Monday morning, noting repeal is "Not easy!") Ensuring access while controlling costs is surely difficult, though the parties and interests in this ongoing policy process are making it more difficult than it needs to be, given the experience of other industrial democracies. That means seriously addressing the market failures (information, competition, merit goods) endemic to privately-produced health care. I don't know if that's even possible in such a polarized political environment, but signs of unrest in the states offer some hope.

EARLIER POST: "Health Care," 4 May 2013

DATA FROM KAISER FAMILY FOUNDATION
"Health Insurance Coverage of Nonelderly" (2013-2015)
"Premiums and Tax Credits Under the Affordable Care Act vs. the Senate Better Care Reconciliation Act," 23 June 2017

POLITICAL ANALYSIS: Nate Silver, "Mitch McConnell Isn't Playing 13-Dimensional Chess," FiveThirtyEight, 27 June 2017