True Progressivism: Inequality and the World Economy [The Economist's Study]

At long last, a strong and respected voice has raised the clarion call: we should be concerned about the retarding economic effects of inequality. Yes, inequality is not just a social issue; it is, as many of us have long argued, just as much a threat to long-term economic health and growth.

 

The Economist confidently shoulders its responsibility to address the threat of economic inequality around the world, but especially here in the U.S.  I could not have been more relieved to see the topics of inequality, government subsidies to various industries and the wealthy,  as well as reform of social programs, elevated so prominently and with such a sense of immediacy. Its cover story and a special report offer a research-based approach to understanding the nature of the problem and fashioning a new, more responsible progressivism based on it.

 

From the Leaders section editorial:

 

A new form of radical centrist politics is needed to tackle inequality without hurting economic growth.

 

[…] Does inequality really need to be tackled? The twin forces of globalisation and technical innovation have actually narrowed inequality globally, as poorer countries catch up with richer ones. But within many countries income gaps have widened. More than two-thirds of the world’s people live in countries where income disparities have risen since 1980, often to a startling degree. In America the share of national income going to the top 0.01% (some 16,000 families) has risen from just over 1% in 1980 to almost 5% now—an even bigger slice than the top 0.01% got in the Gilded Age.

 

It is also true that some measure of inequality is good for an economy. It sharpens incentives to work hard and take risks; it rewards the talented innovators who drive economic progress. Free-traders have always accepted that the more global a market, the greater the rewards will be for the winners. But as our special report this week argues, inequality has reached a stage where it can be inefficient and bad for growth.

 

---“True Progressivism: Inequality and the World Economy,” The Economist, Leaders section (10.13.2012)

 

That special report includes a summary overview article, “For richer, for poorer,” and eleven supporting articles organized by both topic and regions of the world to reveal what research has led them to conclude and the policy recommendations they feel are necessary. I will not attempt to cover the supporting articles, except for quotes from the concluding two pieces, “Having your cake,” and “Policy Prescriptions.” The others may be accessed directly from margin links in the overview article, “For richer, for poorer.” I often suggest that reading the rest of an article I quote from is worth the time invested. For those who would understand all the pieces of this puzzle, all the steps that lead to their conclusions and recommendations, for those who care to understand this critical and changing area of threat to our economic well-being, this is essential reading.

 

Now let us return to our summary treatment of the Leaders editorial:

 

[Inequality] is most obvious in the emerging world. In China credit is siphoned to state-owned enterprises and well-connected insiders; the elite also gain from a string of monopolies. In Russia the oligarchs’ wealth has even less to do with entrepreneurialism. In India, too often, the same is true.

 

In the rich world the cronyism is better-hidden. One reason why Wall Street accounts for a disproportionate share of the wealthy is the implicit subsidy given to too-big-to-fail banks. From doctors to lawyers, many high-paying professions are full of unnecessary restrictive practices. And then there is the most unfair transfer of all—misdirected welfare spending. Social spending is often less about helping the poor than giving goodies to the relatively wealthy. In America the housing subsidy to the richest fifth (through mortgage-interest relief) is four times the amount spent on public housing for the poorest fifth.

 

Even the sort of inequality produced by meritocracy can hurt growth. If income gaps get wide enough, they can lead to less equality of opportunity, especially in education. Social mobility in America, contrary to conventional wisdom, is lower than in most European countries. The gap in test scores between rich and poor American children is roughly 30-40% wider than it was 25 years ago. And by some measures class mobility is even stickier in China than in America.

 

Some of those at the top of the pile will remain sceptical that inequality is a problem in itself. But even they have an interest in mitigating it, for if it continues to rise, momentum for change will build and may lead to a political outcome that serves nobody’s interests. Communism may be past reviving, but there are plenty of other bad ideas out there.

 

Okay. Having come that far, let’s take a closer look at the economic impact of reducing inequality? I will quote liberally from this penultimate supporting article in the study, the one that deals more directly with the studies and experience that indicate there are inefficient types or aspects of inequality. And while more research is needed for certainty in some areas, others are now quite clear.

A century ago inequality was deemed an essential condition for investment and growth because rich people save more...More recently the focus has been on its incentive effect…Redistribution, in contrast, brings inefficiencies as higher taxes and government handouts deter hard work. The bigger the state, the greater the distortion of private incentives.

That logic remains as powerful as ever. Economic freedom and better incentives boosted growth in China, India and elsewhere. Sweden’s experience shows that deregulation, lower taxes and fewer benefits increase economic dynamism even as they reduce equality. Yet the analysis in this special report suggests that logic is incomplete. Some of today’s inequality may be inefficient rather than growth-promoting, for several reasons. 

First, in countries with the biggest income gaps, increasing inequality is partly a function of rigidities and rent-seeking [political or economic manipulation for uncompensated gain] —be it labour laws in India, the hukou system and state monopolies in China or too-big-to-fail finance in America. Such distortions reduce economies’ efficiency. Second, rising inequality has not, by and large, been accompanied by a smaller (and hence less distortive) state. In many rich countries government spending has risen since the 1970s. The composition has changed, with more money spent on the health care of older, richer folk, and relatively less invested in poorer kids. Modern transfers are both less progressive and less growth-promoting. 

Third, recent experience from China to America suggests that high and growing levels of income inequality can translate into growing inequality of opportunity for the next generation and hence declining social mobility. That link seems strongest in countries with low levels of public services and decentralised funding of education. Bigger gaps in opportunity, in turn, mean fewer people with skills and hence slower growth in the future. 

[…] More recent studies support the idea that inequality can be inefficient. In an influential analysis in 2011 two IMF economists, Andrew Berg and Jonathan Ostry, looked at the length of “growth spells” rather than simply comparing growth rates. They found that growth was more persistent in more equal countries, and that income distribution mattered more for the length of growth spells than either the degree of trade liberalisation or the quality of a country’s political institutions. 

Other researchers have tried to isolate the “unhealthy” types of inequality using the two indices of inequality of opportunity first developed by the World Bank and described earlier in this special report. Two Spanish economists… built an index of economic opportunity for individual American states. They found that states’ GDP growth was inversely correlated with their inequality of opportunity, but not with overall inequality. In a forthcoming World Bank working paper, [it was found] that countries with lower educational equality, as measured by the Human Opportunity Index, grow more slowly. 

This line of research is in its early stages, but a second strand of evidence, which examines the link between inequality and social mobility, is more developed. There are now plenty of studies which use the inter-generational elasticity of income to measure social mobility in different countries. Miles Corak, a Canadian economist, first plotted the results of these studies on a single graph. It is known as the “Great Gatsby Curve” (see chart 4), and suggests that countries with higher Gini coefficients [0=perfect equality, 1=one person has all income; Sweden increased to .24, US increased to.39, China=.42-.48] tend to have lower inter-generational social mobility. 

[…] Perpetuating advantage 

In some ways the link between wider income gaps and lower social mobility is unsurprising. From violin lessons to tutors for tests, richer parents can invest more in their children, improving their chances of getting into the best universities. The meritocratic assumption is that public provision of basic services, particularly education, does enough to counter this advantage to give everyone a reasonable start. That was never true in poor countries with rudimentary social services. Increasingly, it does not seem to be true in rich ones either, particularly America. But the link between inequality and declining mobility is not inevitable. Countries such as Sweden that invest heavily and progressively in public services are more likely to prevent widening income inequality from reducing opportunity. And Latin America shows that investing more in education at the bottom can improve social mobility even in the most stratified places. 

[…] Quite legitimately, different people have different notions of what is fair, and what is the right balance between fairness and efficiency. But whatever their views, there is a reform agenda which both sides should embrace, one that both boosts efficiency and mitigates inequality. 

---“Trade offs: Having your cake,” The Economist (10.13.2012)

Now that we’ve surveyed some of the analysis, let’s look to the last supporting study, the prescriptions The Economist believes are called for by this research, what they call a true progressive agenda, and one which borrows some of the best thinking from both the right and the left.

Bold moves are needed to tackle inequality and boost growth at the same time.

One is to curb cronyism and enhance competition, particularly in emerging markets. Just as Roosevelt broke up America’s trusts (monopolies) and cracked down on political corruption, China, India and many other emerging economies need to do some trust busting and graft-attacking of their own… 

In advanced countries, removing subsidies for too-big-to-fail financial institutions should also be high on the new progressive agenda. That, too, would result in more balanced economies and remove the rents that lie behind a lot of the surge in wealth at the top. Rich countries also need more competition in traditionally mollycoddled sectors such as education. Governments have a responsibility to invest in the young, but also to ensure that teachers have incentives to do their best. 

The sooner the better 

A second priority is to attack inequality with more targeted and progressive social spending. In emerging economies, especially in Asia, that means replacing expensive universal subsidies for energy with tailored social safety nets. It means wider use of conditional cash transfers. Latin America’s models are gradually being copied elsewhere, but there is much farther to go: rich countries would do well to adopt the idea of tying social assistance to individuals’ investment in skills and education. 

Both rich and emerging economies must bring about a shift in government spending—from transfers [payments under social programs] to education, and from older and richer people to younger and poorer ones. Even if inequality were irrelevant, developed countries would need to reform their pension and health-care systems because today’s promises are simply unaffordable. Concerns about distribution and its effect on future growth add impetus: the longer that governments prevaricate about reforming entitlements, the more will be squeezed from investment in the young and poor. 

These days, public investment in education needs to go beyond primary and secondary school. Giving the less advantaged a leg up means beginning with pre-school and includes retraining for the less skilled. In both areas America, in particular, is found wanting. Its government spends barely more than 0.1% of GDP on “active labour-market policies” to get the less skilled back to work, one-fifth of the OECD average. Only half of American children attend pre-school. China plans to have 70% of its children in three years of pre-school by 2020. 

The third priority is to reform taxes, to make them a lot more efficient and somewhat fairer. Critics of inequality often tout higher marginal taxes on the rich. Yet in most countries other than America, government spending is a much more important tool for combating inequality than the tax system. Tax revenue is better seen as a way to fund the state, not a tool to punish the rich. Economists argue about the disincentive effects of higher tax rates. (Messrs Piketty and Saez, the economists who have transformed analysis of income concentration at the top, reckon, controversially, that the optimal top income-tax rate could be as high as 80%.) But no one doubts that there are trade-offs. 

In countries where the state is already large, rebalancing government spending should take precedence over raising more revenue. But given the mess that public finances in most countries are in, more tax revenue is likely to be necessary, particularly in less highly taxed countries such as America. Even there, though, higher marginal income-tax rates should not be the first choice. Instead, the focus should be on eliminating distortions that reduce both progressivity and the tax system’s efficiency. 

The “carried-interest” loophole, which allows private-equity managers to pay (low) capital-gains rather than (higher) income tax on their earnings, is one such sore. So are many tax deductions, from those for charitable contributions to mortgage interest, most of which disproportionately benefit the wealthy. An overhaul of the tax code to reduce corporate tax rates and narrow the gap between individuals’ tax rates on capital and labour income would improve its efficiency and make richer people pay higher average tax rates. Higher property taxes would be an efficient and progressive source of revenue. Inheritance tax could be reformed so that it falls on individual beneficiaries rather than on the estate as a whole, as it does in Germany. That would encourage the wealthy to distribute their wealth widely, thereby making a hereditary elite less likely. 

[…] The most shocking shortcomings are in America, the rich country where income gaps are biggest and have increased fastest. The Republicans are right to say that Medicare, America’s health-care system for the old, must be overhauled. But by slashing government spending on basic services such as education and advocating yet more tax cuts at the top, they undermine equality of opportunity. 

The Democrats are little better. Barack Obama gave his own speech at Osawatomie last year, wrapping himself in Roosevelt’s mantle. Inequality, he said, was the “defining issue of our time”. But his response, from raising the top income-tax rate to increasing college-tuition subsidies, was just a laundry list of small initiatives. Roosevelt would have been appalled at the timidity. A subject of such importance requires something much bolder. 

---“Policy prescriptions: A True Progressivism,” The Economist (10.13.2012)

I have little to add to this bold, well-researched analysis and the responsible set of recommendations that logically follow. The fact that I have long agreed with most of it makes it easier to be a cheerleader, of course.

 

Many thanks to The Economist for bringing this most thoughtful synthesis of research, economic and social wisdom to us at this time when our country, our electorate and our politicians, desperately need to hear it.

 

The Ponds, A Poem by Mary Oliver

It’s been too long since I’ve shared any of Mary Oliver’s poetry, or anyone else’s for that matter. I’ll try to do better. And let me begin with a poem I’d not read from a collection* that I’d not been drawn to. My mistake. It’s a poem about ponds and pond lilies, but just as much, I think, about communities and people, about seeing the brighter light and greater beauty that embraces both the seemingly perfect and the clearly imperfect, the promise of the blooms, each and all, and their eventual passing.  See what you think.

The Ponds, by Mary Oliver* 

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe  

their lapping light crowding the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them— 

the muskrats swimming
can reach out and touch
only so many, they are that
rife and wild.

But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided--
and that one wears an orange blight--
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away--
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled--
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing--
that the light is everything--that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

And shouldn't we all?


*A poem from House of Light (1990)

One More Time: Van Morrison - Caravan

Okay. One more time. Got to do it. A younger Van Morrison. Still the man, then and now.

Van Morrison, Vanlose Stairway, BBC Sessions

Van the Man. Vanlose Stairway. What more can I say?

Winning By Gerrymandering, the Nastiest Politics

In my most recent post, we reviewed Time magazine's illuminating, if dispiriting, look at how presidential campaigns now purposefully deceive and lie, both of them—and why it doesn't hurt them. Today, The Atlantic  takes us deeper into the murky, insidious world of "gerrymandering"—or voter redistricting constitutionally required after each decennial census, and the arcane, furtive, often blunt-force process by which the party with power or influence at the time reshapes the make-up of voting districts to their own advantage. It's all about each party's quest for more "safe seats." Says the Republican redistricting vice chair in the House of Representatives; it is "the nastiest form of politics there is." But let's back up and fill in some background on the issue.

 

Every 10 years, after U.S. census workers have fanned out across the nation, a snowy-haired gentleman by the name of Tom Hofeller takes up anew his quest to destroy Democrats. He packs his bag and his laptop with its special Maptitude software…and departs his home in Alexandria, Virginia, for a United States that he will help carve into a jigsaw of disunity.

 

Where Hofeller travels depends to some degree on the migratory patterns of his fellow Americans over the previous decade. As the census shows, some states will have swelled in population, while others will have dwindled. The states that gained the most people are entitled, under the Constitution, to additional representation in the form of new congressional districts, which (since the law allows only 435 such districts) are wrenched from the states that lost the most people. After the 2010 census, eight states (all in the South and the West) gained congressional districts, which were stripped from 10 others (in the Midwest and the East Coast, as well as Katrina-ravaged Louisiana).

 

The creation of a new congressional district, or the loss of an old one, affects every district around it, necessitating new maps. Even states not adding or losing congressional representatives need new district maps that reflect the population shifts within their borders, so that residents are equally represented no matter where they live. This ritual carving and paring of the United States into 435 sovereign units, known as redistricting, was intended by the Framers solely to keep democracy's electoral scales balanced. Instead, redistricting today has become the most insidious practice in American politics—a way, as the opportunistic machinations following the 2010 census make evident, for our elected leaders to entrench themselves in 435 impregnable garrisons from which they can maintain political power while avoiding demographic realities.

 

--"The League of Dangerous Mapmakers," by Robert Draper, The Atlantic (October 2012)  

That is the context and summary of the what and why questions; now let's explore more about the how question. Just how does the practice and process work? And what was it about the coincidence of the 2010 census and the 2010 mid-term successes of the Republicans that presented them such a unique gerrymandering opportunity? And how did all that work out?

 

And so his cyclical travels take him mainly to states where the Republicans are likely to be drawing the new maps. (In most states, an appointed committee consisting of legislators from the majority party produces the map, which is then brought to the legislative body for a vote. Other states relegate the duties to an appointed commission.) At meetings, Hofeller gives a PowerPoint presentation titled "What I've Learned About Redistricting—The Hard Way!" …He warns legislators to resist the urge to overindulge, to snatch up every desirable precinct within reach, when drawing their own districts.

 

[…] Be discreet. Plan ahead. Follow the law. Don't overreach. Tom Hofeller relishes the blood sport of redistricting, but there is a responsible way—as Hofeller himself demonstrated this past cycle in the artful (if baldly partisan) redrawing of North Carolina's maps—and also a reckless way. So that his message will penetrate, he tells audiences horror stories about states that ignored his warnings and went with maps that either were tossed out by the federal courts or created more political problems than they solved.

 

Already Hofeller has picked out which cautionary tale he will relay during the next decennial tour. The new horror story, he's decided, will be Texas, which stood, this past cycle, as a powerful example of how reckless a redistricting process can become. That mangled effort also provides a stark contrast to the maps Hofeller helped create in North Carolina—drawings that demonstrate how in the blood sport of redistricting, the most cravenly political results are won with calculating prudence.

 

                            *       *       *       *       *

 

As the election returns rolled in on the evening of November 2, 2010, Hofeller had already started gearing up for the next round of redistricting. "I'm sitting and watching, less interested than many in the congressional races," he recalled. "I'm the one saying 'Okay, so we won Congress. The question is, are we going to keep it?' And then what I see is that we gained 700 state legislative seats. The night just kept getting better and better. Things happened in some states"—in terms of controlling whole legislative bodies—"that we never expected. Alabama! North Carolina!"

 

It seemed like Reconstruction all over again for the GOP. Because the Republican tsunami coincided with the 2010 census, Tom Hofeller's party was suddenly able to redraw many of the 435 congressional maps to its own partisan advantage.

 

Without asking for guidance from Hofeller or other veterans of the trade, delirious party officials predicted that after all the connivances were set in motion, the GOP would be able to reward itself with an additional 15 safe House seats before a single vote was cast in the 2012 elections.

 

It hasn't quite turned out that way. Partly this is because Democrats understood the stakes and went to extraordinary lengths to blunt the assault. In California, the Democrats (according to e-mails obtained by ProPublica) successfully swayed a newly formed independent citizens' redistricting commission, through an intricately coordinated guerrilla operation that will likely accrue them six or seven new seats. In Republican-controlled Florida, Nancy Pelosi—in relentless pursuit of the House speakership she lost after the 2010 midterms—helped fund the successful "Fair Districts" referendum to ban partisan redistricting. The measure seems to have persuaded Florida map-drawers to exhibit some self-restraint, and thus a number of surefire Republican seats were wiped from the boards. Of course, Pelosi has not suggested that the Fair Districts concept be applied to states where her party wields legislative control, such as Maryland and Illinois, where the Democrats further cut into the GOP's gains by drawing nakedly partisan maps that simply vaporized Republican-held districts.

So, we're starting to get a sense of how intensely the political parties attend to this furtive process, the pre-game game of drawing the playing field so that the pitch of it more clearly assures victory for their candidates—and how well they understand how this pre-game game is played. So much, so well, that they have party teams, chairmen, and full-time strategists working on it. Now let's look at some in-the-trenches examples of just how it works, and especially that Texas example Mr. Hofeller is so eager to share.

 

By July 2011, Hofeller had helped produce what a Democratic operative ruefully terms "exceptionally smart" maps—ones that, assuming they survive a lingering court challenge, may very well install a 10–3 GOP stronghold in place of the present 7–6 Democratic congressional majority.

 

Hofeller already knew North Carolina, the focal point of several landmark redistricting cases in which he'd testified, well. The Tar Heel State has a history of election discrimination and is therefore one of the jurisdictions covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that electoral maps be approved by either a federal court or the Justice Department. (Like all other states, North Carolina is also covered by Section 2, which forbids discriminatory practices more broadly.) Hofeller and the other Republican mapmakers therefore took particular care not to "retrogress" the racial makeup of the districts represented by the African-American Democrats G. K. Butterfield and Mel Watt—since doing so would have meant running afoul of the Voting Rights Act.

 

Instead, he reserved his chief mischief for the remaining districts. Hofeller and his cohort hoarded several of Raleigh's white precincts and moved them into the 2nd District, which had been held by Democrats for 108 of the previous 110 years, until a former intensive-care nurse named Renee Ellmers rode the Tea Party wave to an upset victory in 2010. The new drawings would give the neophyte Ellmers a safe Republican district to last at least at decade. Recognizing that North Carolina's many Democratic voters had to be put somewhere, the mapmakers shoveled as many as possible into the Democratic districts of Watt and of David Price, a former Duke professor who represented the liberal bastion of Chapel Hill. Most of those Democrats, however, were stripped from the districts of the moderate Democratic incumbents Mike McIntyre, Larry Kissell, and Brad Miller. In the Democrat Heath Shuler's 11th District, the mapmakers simply gouged out the progressive core, Asheville, and affixed it to the 10th, the state's most Republican district over the previous 60 years. The new maps have made quite an impact. Shuler and Miller have announced that they will not seek another term. McIntyre (whose house has now been drawn out of his own district) and Kissell are widely viewed as among the most imperiled Democrats facing reelection in November.

 

Progressive groups immediately filed suit challenging the North Carolina maps, contending that the state deliberately diluted minority voting power. Hofeller happens to be an old hand at redistricting litigation, and the maps will probably survive into the next decade. Still, legal battles have been the other major factor in diminishing the Republican Party's success.

 

Given that blacks and Latinos tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic, Republicans have often taken pains to maximize their control of the districts in a way that does not violate the terms of the Voting Rights Act. But the new census results have presented the GOP with a particularly confounding puzzle—one that lies at the center of this cycle's redistricting controversies. On the one hand, the biggest gains in U.S. population over the past decade have been in two Republican-controlled states: Florida, which thereby received two new congressional districts, and Texas, which was granted a whopping four.

 

But on the other hand, most of each state's new residents are African Americans and (especially) Hispanics. In Texas, the population has swelled by 4.3 million over the past decade. Of those new residents, 2.8 million are Hispanic and more than half a million are African American. While those groups grew at a rate of 42 percent and 22 percent, respectively, the growth in white Texans was a meager 4.2 percent. In other words: without the minority growth, Texas—now officially a majority-minority state—would not have received a single new district. The possibility that a GOP map-drawer would use all those historically Democratic-leaning transplants as a means of gaining Republican seats might strike a redistricting naïf as undemocratic.

 

And yet that's exactly what the Texas redistricting bosses did last year. Shrugging off the warnings of Tom Hofeller and other Washington Republicans, the Texans produced lavishly brazen maps that resulted in a net gain of four districts for Republicans and none for minority populations. The entirely predictable consequence is that the Texas maps have spent more than a year bouncing between three federal courts, including the Supreme Court. The legal uncertainty has had national ramifications. It meant, for example, postponing the Texas primary from March 6 until May 29, which cost Texas its role as a prominent player in the Super Tuesday presidential sweepstakes—a very lucky break for the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, who likely would have lost the state to Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum.

 

But the chaos produced by the overreach in Texas isn't anomalous. Rather, it is very much in keeping with the new winner-take-all culture of redistricting, an endeavor that has somehow managed to grow in both sophistication and crassness, like an ageless strain of cancer that inhabits a host body for so long that the two seem inseparable, even as the former quietly destroys the latter from the inside out.

What, then, are the implications for democracy in America? What does it mean in terms of the equal protection and influence of each person's vote? Based on what we've covered so far, it is understandable that some well-informed insiders see the aggressiveness of redistricting as having reached a point that undermines our democracy and notably diminishes the voting power or influence many minority voters, effectively disenfranchising them. Let's consider the reflections of a veteran of the process who is very much concerned for where the unfettered and unapologetic aggressiveness in this arcane but central process has taken us as a democratic country and representative government—and how far it has taken us from the protective intent of the founding fathers and drafters of the constitution.

 

During his last few years in the House, John Tanner of Tennessee pursued a lonely quest to interest his colleagues in a redistricting-reform bill. Tanner was a co-founder of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who were all but wiped out in 2010, the year Tanner himself decided to head for the sidelines. He had introduced his bill first in 2005, when the Republicans controlled the House, then in 2007 and again in 2009, when Democrats were in charge and Nancy Pelosi was the speaker. "She and Steny [Hoyer, then the majority leader,] said, 'That's a good idea, we'll take a look at it,' " he recalled with a smirk. "But the hard left and the hard right don't want it."

 

Tanner says that redistricting's impact has evolved over time, from simply creating safe seats for incumbents to creating rigid conservative and liberal districts, wherein the primary contests are a race to the extremes and the general elections are preordained. "When the [final] election [outcome] is [determined] in the party primary—which now it is, in all but less than 100 of the 435 seats—then a member comes [to Washington] politically crippled," the retired congressman told me. "Look, everyone knows we have a structural deficit, and the only way out of it is to raise revenues and cut entitlements. No one who's reasonable thinks otherwise. But what happens? The Democrats look over their left shoulder, and if someone suggests cutting a single clerk out of the Department of Agriculture, they go crazy. Republicans look over their right shoulder, and if someone proposes raising taxes on Donald Trump's income by $10, they say it'll be the end of the world. So these poor members come to Washington paralyzed, unable to do what they all know must be done to keep the country from going adrift, for fear that they'll get primaried.

 

"It's imposed a parliamentary model on a representative system," Tanner went on. "It makes sense for Democrats to vote one way and Republicans to vote another in a parliamentary system. It's irrational in a representative form of government. So what that's done is two things. First, it's made it virtually impossible to compromise. And second, as we've seen in this past decade, it's damn near abolished the ability and responsibility of Congress to hold the executive branch of the same party accountable. The Bush years, we were appropriating $100 billion at a time for the Iraq War with no hearings, for fear that [those would] embarrass the administration. Hell yeah, that's due to redistricting! The Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration became part of the same team. We're totally abdicating our responsibility of checks and balances."

 

Of course, Hofeller and some other redistricting experts are quick to dismiss or play down the impact or entrenchment of gerrymandering's polarizing role and results, or to emphasize other factors at play. Some points worth considering are made. You can be the judge of just how dominating the role of gerrymandering is, and whether that makes you feel any better about it.

 

Tanner's bill (which fellow Blue Dogs Heath Shuler and Jim Cooper reintroduced last year, to similar non-effect) would have established national standards for redistricting and shifted the map-drawing duties from state legislatures to bipartisan commissions. Such commissions already exist in a handful of states, while Iowa relies on nonpartisan map-drawers whose end product is then voted on by the state legislature. Tom Hofeller points to the California citizens' commission as evidence that politics will inevitably find its way back into the process. "There's no such thing as nonpartisan," he told me.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hofeller insists that the dire consequences of his vocation are overblown. "We've had gerrymandering all along, so there's no proof that that's the cause of all the polarization," he told me. "I'm here to tell you that there are two other major factors that are much, much more prevalent than redistricting. One is the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week news media, where you only get noticed if you're extreme. And the other is McCain-Feingold, which pushed a great deal of money to the extremes." In limiting the size of financial contributions to national parties, the campaign finance–reform law encouraged donors to funnel their cash to opaque outside groups. (See James Bennet's cover story on this subject.)

 

"That's part of the problem," Tanner conceded when I asked him about the super-PAC ads flooding the airwaves. "But you can trace how the members got here back to gerrymandering. I don't give a damn how much money you spend. These guys are gonna be responsive to the people that elected them, to avoid a party primary. And so they come here to represent their political party, not their district or their country. That attitude has infected the Senate, too. Look at Orrin Hatch," he said, referring to the veteran Utah senator who fought off a primary challenge from an ultraconservative. "Now you'd think he was an original member of the Tea Party. It makes you sick to see him grovel."

 

Some redistricting experts argue that Americans have polarized themselves, by gravitating toward homogenous communities, a demographic trend observed in Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing's 2008 book, The Big Sort. But, says one Texas Republican map-drawer, "redistricting has amplified the Big Sort by creating safe Republican and safe Democratic districts. Look at Texas. If you count [Blake Farenthold's] 27th as the result of a fluke election, the [racially polarized West Texas] 23rd is the only swing district in the state." In this sense, the only difference that the new maps will make is that instead of one swing district out of 32, there will now be one out of 36. As to what this portends, former Texas Congressman Martin Frost, a Democrat, told me, "I won't mention anyone by name, but I know certain Republicans in the Texas delegation who would be inclined to be more moderate, if they didn't have to fear a primary challenge."

 

After considering it all, I'm guessing that you are not much uplifted or comforted by this story, this more aggressive, hyper-partisan mode of gerrymandering--and that you likely had no idea it was going on to this degree. And the dismissive views, or contributing factors noted by some professionals probably don't make you feel a lot better about it, either. If you want to read more on the history of gerrymandering, which actually goes back to the earliest years of the republic, or on troubling examples of the practice of these dark arts by modern political party machines, then do read the entire article. It's long, but as informative as it is distressing.

Link:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-league-of/309084/2/ 
 

Red Liars, Blue Liars: Fact-Checking Obama & Romney

I have long advised friends of all political persuasions to fact-check (FactCheck.org) every important statement their candidate or the opponent offers as true—not just the opponent's questionable "facts," but their candidate's, too. Because they all mislead and lie, all of them, Romney and Obama included. But most folks don't fact-check—or if they do, it's just the opposing candidate's misstatements they check or read about. Why? Here's one big reason from this article:

 

‘We don't collect news to inform us [about issues or candidates]. We collect news to affirm us [and our views],' explains Republican pollster Frank Lutz...'It used to be that we disagreed on solutions...Now we don't even agree on the problem.' All this contributes to an environment in which, for some voters, unwelcome facts are simply filtered out and flushed away.'

---“Blue Truth, Red Truth,” by Michael Scherer, Time (10.15.2012)

 

The full article really is worth reading, including reviews of a lot of misleading and untrue things that Obama and Romney have said. Have I got you yet? No? How about this from the beginning of the article?

 

So it goes in the world’s most celebrated democracy: another campaign day, another battle over the very nature of reality. Both of the men now running for the presidency claim that their opponent has a weak grasp of the facts and a demonstrated willingness to mislead voters. Both profess an abiding personal commitment to honesty and fair play. And both run campaigns that have repeatedly and willfully played the American people for fools, though their respective violations vary in scope and severity.

[…] But the perpetrators usually remain a step ahead of the cops. ‘It’s like the campaigns are driving 100 miles an hour on a highway with a posted speed limit of 60, but the patrol cars all have flats,” says Mark McKinnon, a Republican ad man for the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and John McCain. “There was a quaint era in politics when we were held accountable for the truth and paid consequences for errors of fact. No more.’

 

Of course, the real issue is that there are no “cops.” No one appears to care much about it. If there are cops it is the on-line, print and broadcast media that offer more and more fact-checking as part of their reporting. But many media outlets have a clear political point of view or are uneven in the depth and breadth of fact-checking coverage. That’s why nonpartisan on-line services like Fact-Check.org or Snopes.com are so important. But are they? Why don’t they make a difference in people’s views? Well, my provocative first pull-quote, moves us in the right direction. But then there is a lack of any clear rules or penalties, right? And neither political candidates nor their supporters appear to want them.

 

No Consequences

So what explains the factual recklessness of the campaigns? The most obvious answer can be found in the penalties, or lack thereof, for wandering astray. Voters just show less and less interest in punishing those who deceive. The reasons may be found in the political fracturing of the nation. As some voters feel a deeper affinity for one side or another in political debates, they have developed a tendency to forgive the home team’s fibs. No matter their ideology, many voters increasingly inhabit information bubbles in which they are less likely to hear their worldview contradicted.

 

Okay, if we think about all that, it has the ring of truth to it, doesn’t it? And we might even recognize a little bit of that in ourselves—just a little, maybe? And, maybe, campaign managers and strategists know this just as well as the pollsters like Mr. Luntz. Let’s keep going.

 

The Fact-Checking Movement

Campaign strategists, especially at the presidential level, know well just how easy it is to fool the public. No ad goes out without significant data from polls and focus groups to ensure its effectiveness. Glenn Kessler, who writes the Fact Checker column at the Washington Post, tells a story about the head of a super PAC who chewed him out after Kessler called him on a deceptive ad. ‘This was after he was screaming at me about something I had written, and he laughed and said, ‘I actually don’t give a hoot what you say, because these ads work.’

 

But the fact-checking movement has actually had little effect on the party faithful or the way campaigns are run, including misleading statements and lies wherever, whenever, they serve the cause. And then there is the already-famous statement by Mitt Romney’s pollster.

 

Indeed, the 2012 campaign has witnessed a historic increase in fact-checking efforts by the media, with dozens of reporters now focused full time on sniffing out falsehood. Clear examples of deception fill websites, appear on nightly newscasts and run on the front pages of newspapers. But the truth squads have had only marginal success in changing the behavior of the campaigns and almost no impact on the outside groups that peddle unvarnished falsehoods with even less accountability. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” explained Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, echoing his industry’s conventional wisdom.

 

What, then, does this imply about the character of our strongest candidates for the highest office in the land—in some real sense, the leader of the free world? What does it make us suspect about the process of government they will lead? And since it is apparent that most all candidates for the congress—and state government, too—have adopted the same amoral approach to their “dialogue” with the electorate and the citizenry, how does

that make us feel about this 21^st-century version of democracy, our government of, by and for the people? Let’s finish up with a few quotes from the end of the article.

 

The Question of Character

The great irony in this curious chapter in American politics is that both campaigns have made telling the truth a central message and a core qualification in each man’s case to be President. In the run-up to the first of three debates in October, both campaigns charged that deceptions by the other guy would be a window into his essential character. “He’s trying to fool people,” Romney told reporters on his plane. “Facts will matter,” said Obama aide David Axelrod in a memo in response.

[…] But when politicians speak of truth telling in such high-minded terms, they risk hypocrisy. In the final weeks of September, Obama seemed to acknowledge this risk by admitting in an interview with CBS News that his campaign sometimes goes “overboard” and that this is something that “happens in politics.” Romney has refused to waver. “We’ve been absolutely spot on,” he told CNN.

[…] But when the final book is written on this campaign, one-sided deception will still have played a central role. As it stands, the very notions of fact and truth are employed in American politics as much to distort as to reveal. And until the voting public demands something else, not just from the politicians they oppose but also from the ones they support, there is little reason to suspect that will change.

 

I repeat, how does that make us feel about this 21st-century version of American democracy? Is this anyone's right-minded vision of a proper democratic electoral process or, in turn, government of, by and for the people?


http://swampland.time.com/2012/10/03/blue-truth-red-truth/

 

Genetics, Personal Politics and Public Policy

For decades research has reemphasized the deterministic power of genetic
endowment, and the conditioning effects of one's environment. But in more
recent years, the dominance of genetics has been ascendant in influence
according to the most credible research. And further research evidence
indicates that our political and social policy inclinations are
significantly influenced by the presence or absence of various genes in our
individual genetic profile. If this is at all of interest to you, read on.

Link to the review article in The Economist on-line:
http://www.economist.com/node/21564191?fsrc=nlw%7Chig%7C10-4-2012%7C3671086%
7C36652682%7CNA