Month: August 2017

Minding the Store

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It has been a long time since there was someone interested in governing the United States of America.  For now we are specializing in promotional stunts (essentially all of foreign policy) or deliveries to electoral constituencies (climate change, ACA repeal, white supremacist racism).

Now that we can have no delusions about what Trump represents (pardoning Arpaio was a last straw), the country is in dire need of a way to get through the next 3 ½ years.

So it is worth remembering that there is actually a group in government trying to do something positive for the country.  That is the bipartisan group of senators working to fix problems with Obamacare (e.g. number of plans offered).  Not only is that a laudable activity for itself (whether or not the results get quashed), but it makes you think about other things a bipartisan group could do.   Here is one short list.

– Supreme Court nominees

At this point you don’t have to be a Democrat to recognize that democracy in this country is under threat.  We need to decide that a next Supreme Court justice cannot use the war powers clause or anything else to promote legal tyranny.  That applies to the role of Congress, to delaying or otherwise manipulating elections, and to Presidential pardons.

– Jobs program subsidies

During the election both candidates spoke about a government role in promoting employment in under-served areas (Appalachia, inner cities, etc.).  More recently, Republicans have promoted a deal with Foxcomm that was very heavily subsidized by the state of Wisconsin.

This needs to be a federal program because not all states can do it themselves, because it needs to be planned at a national level, and because a federal program could reduce the leverage employers have in playing off states against each other.

– Infrastructure

This is another area promoted by both candidates in the election.  There are of course significant differences in approach.  But it seems that issues such as selection of projects, rules and roles for private investment, and protection against corruption can be solved if there is a will to do it.

– Taxes

This a controversial area, and Trump’s so-called tax reform is not helpful.   But there is agreement on at least a couple of points:

  1. Real tax reform means eliminating the current maze of special gifts to create a more equitable system and a correspondingly lower basic tax rate. That kind of reform was achieved as a bipartisan effort under Reagan.   It has little to do with proposals currently on the table, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
  2. As part of that effort, there is agreement that the basic corporate tax rate is too high. So that seems a good place to start–when accompanied by item #1.

– Education

Education is one of the most important services provided by government.  Even if De Vos vouchers turn out to be off-limits, there are at least two areas where bipartisan work is possible:

  1. The student loan crisis is a huge burden on a whole generation. This is not because students have suddenly become wasteful in their habits, but because costs of college have risen rapidly even in state institutions.  Government needs to help out.
  2. Government needs to help students and states to navigate the costs and benefits of educational programs. This is not just a matter of fraudulent institutions and sweetheart deals to vendors (although there is plenty of that).   Students need the information to choose for their futures.  And we as a country need to decide what equality of opportunity means for the cost of college.

– Foreign Policy

The only foreign policy we currently have is a disdain for employees of the State Department and a desire to exploit foreign issues for chest-beating electoral gestures.  It is tough to do foreign policy by committee, but we don’t really have a choice.

 

This is by no means a complete list, but we have to recognize that government is in crisis and needs a bipartisan effort even to mind the store.

Limits of Charlottesville

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However depressing Trump’s Charlottesville comments may be, we should not delude ourselves into believing that Trump will be defeated by any matter of principle.

The current situation recalls the uproar over the video with Trump’s lewd comments on women—an uproar that dissipated to nothing.  It remains to be seen how long the new level of outrage will last.  We can’t dismiss Nazism, but we won’t win on outrage either.  We will get nothing but backlash if perceived bread-and-butter issues are left unaddressed.

The main issue has to be the economy–jobs and prosperity–where many myths are still widely-believed.

Too many people believe that giving businesses everything they want is the path to prosperity.  That is historically false and will come back to haunt us:

– The prosperity of this country cannot possibly be based on protected industries making stuff others make cheaper.   Tariffs are no silver bullet to bring back the days of good, union jobs.

– Education and research are primary engines of prosperity.   They are what supports our standard of living and cannot be treated as money stolen from the private sector.

– We are living in a period of extraordinary technology change.   That is altering the nature of work and affects increasingly many people.  It creates twin problems—preparing our population for success and helping people left behind.   Neither will be magically provided by the private sector alone.

Trump’s policies will defeat us as a country and impoverish us as individuals.  One entry got it right in the NY Times’ list of write-in slogans for the Democratic Party:

“Justice, Compassion and Jobs!”

It speaks to the core values and, in the end, it’s the economy, stupid!

(Wynn Schwartz, Boston)

The Phony Issue of Globalization

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Globalization as a phenomenon is irrefutable.   The world continues to become more interconnected by any measure you can think of.  National economies are so interdependent that it’s hard to untangle the threads.

Globalization as an issue is something else.   There is a long list of globalization problems:  it picks winners and losers economically, it makes some people feel like the country has changed out from under them, it destroys the sense of community.

The trouble is that globalization is responsible for essentially none of that.  Our real problem with globalization is how much we can blame on it.

Let’s start with jobs.  We begin with a frequently-cited quote from Harvard economist Lawrence Katz on automation versus globalization for jobs:  “Over the long haul, clearly automation’s been much more important–it’s not even close.”  That gets us part of the way there.  It’s not primarily globalization.  As many studies have shown, Trump’s core supporters lost their good union jobs for many reasons, not just globalization.  (See recent data this point here.)

However, that’s history.   What matters is now, and the jobs story gets more lopsided all the time.   For today, one can say unequivocally that no set of tariffs is going to bring back those good union jobs.   And the future looks worse.  Self-driving cars and machine translation are key indicators of where things are going.   One article about Artificial Intelligence puts it this way: “the A.I. products that now exist are improving faster than most people realize and promise to radically transform our world, not always for the better …  they will reshape what work means and how wealth is created, leading to unprecedented economic inequalities and even altering the global balance of power.”

There is a growing jobs problem, and it’s not globalization.  We’re moving ever faster into a two-tiered society with participants and (increasingly many) non-participants in the technology-driven economy.  But we would rather futz around with NAFTA, because apparently that plays better.   By continuing to blame globalization as the jobs problem, we end up doing crazy things.  We’re actually skimping on education and research!  One thing we really can do for Trump’s core is make sure their kids have futures, but we’re not even trying.  Instead we’ve got a budget plan that vilifies the unemployed without any notion of what jobs are waiting for them.

That’s jobs.  What about alienation, feeling the country has been overrun with immigrants?  Is that really globalization?  There’s a key to that one too:  no one is talking about Swedes and Germans.   It’s Mexicans and—whether we want to admit it or not—blacks.  Just about any study of the last election talks about the importance of race.   “Immigrants” is a keyword; race was always part of it.  Violence after the election was immediately directed against blacks.  With Obama as President, the Republican party has been deliberately stoking racism for years.  Trump just whipped it up into something more obviously ugly.  Globalization is a smoke screen for deliberately-provoked racial hatred.

How about community?  We now have a whole media wing promoting the idea that cultures can’t mix:  Trump’s Mexican rapists and Bannon’s calls for holy war are just starters.  We’ve always had that sort of stuff in this country (Jews, Italians, Irish…), but we’ve always emerged better for what had been vilified.  Human beings have a built-in fear of strangers.   As they get to know each other they tend to get along.   But they can be whipped into a frenzy by demagogues who choose to exploit that fear for their own advantage.  Trump is certainly not the first to ride scapegoating to power.   Globalization is a convenient bogey man.

So globalization itself is not the issue.  What we really have in this country (and elsewhere)  is demagoguery–self-serving lies under the flag of fighting globalization. And the lies are damaging, as they undermine both national competitiveness and individual well-being.

There are no simple solutions, particularly now that so much has entered the legitimized mainstream.  But there is still a good use for “globalization”–the next time you hear someone talking about shafted workers needing government to fight globalization, you know exactly who has something to win!