Weekly Audit: Your Vote, Your Economy-Why Today's Election Matters to Your Pocketbook
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Election Day is finally here, and control of the House and the Senate hangs in the balance. The differences between parties could not be more stark. Republicans have promised to repeal health care reform and slash government spending for social programs, all while preserving tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Some of the more radical ideas bandied about this election season-by conservative candidates with a decent shot at winning-include privatizing social security and eliminating the Department of Education.
Beck says his 8-28 rally will "reclaim the civil rights movement." On the May 26 edition of his radio show, Beck claimed that the civil rights movement "has been so distorted and so turned upside down. It is -- it's an abomination what has happened." He said that his rally would "be an iconic event" and that "this is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement." Beck also stated that though, at the rally, "we're not going to talk about the issues of illegal immigration or anything that's happening in Washington," the attendees of the rally "will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place.
Well, not exactly. In fact, you guys were on the other side. And not just way long time ago. You've always been there and you still are. I'll have more words on this later. But I want to start off the day with cold hard numbers showing quite clearly the persistence of conservative opposition to the civil rights movement. To do so, I'm going to depend on the most reliable indicator of conservatism on the group level, and that is opposition to domestic spending. To establish that point--as well as its connection to hostility to civil rights--I'll need to provide some background data first.
Operational Conservatism & Racial Animus
It's long been established that the core of conservatism in the US is opposition to social spending, aka "operational" or "pragmatic" conservatism--and that this is correlated to opposition to black political power. These were two of many important findings in Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril's landmark 1967 book, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion, based on surveys done by Gallup in 1964. I wrote about this back in early 2006 at my old blog, Patterns that Connect, in a post, "Conservatism As Identity Politics--Pt2: Hard Core Data ". (It was cross-posted at MyDD, but the charts are no longer there). Free and Cantril used three measures of libgeral/conservative ideology--self-identification, a set of questions devoted to ideology as they understood, and a set of five questions dealing with federal aid to education, Medicare, the Federal housing program, the urban renewal program, and the government's responsibility to do away with poverty.
The ideological spectrum was based on the following (from the book):
Ideological Spectrum (Statements presented with respondents asked to agree or disagree):
1. The Federal Government is interfering too much in state and local matters.
2. The government has gone too far in regulating business and interfering with the free enterprise system.
3. Social problems here in this country could be solved more effectively if the government would only keep its hands off and let people in local communities handle their own problems in their own ways.
4. Generally speaking, any able-bodied person who really wants to work in this country can find a job and earn a living.
5. We should rely more in individual initiative and ability and not so much on governmental welfare programs.
This scale over-estimated ideological conservatives (for one thing, all the conservative answers were "yes" and we now know that other things being equal, people will answer "yes" rather than "no"), but there's little doubt that it did reflect something real, even if exaggerated: plenty of people with conservative sentiments none-the-less support the welfare state. This was neatly shown by comparing all three specturms:
And further clarified by this graphic comparison of the ideological and operational spectrums, which shows that almost all ideological liberals are operational liberals, while even a substantial plurality of ideological conservatives are operational liberals:
(Was going to write something different, but think that this piece with Matt's original post (check out the entire piece at MyDD) and Rep. Pingree's project sum up what I think about tax day today. - promoted by Adam Bink)
One of my favorite posts by Matt Stoller back at MyDD was one in 2007 on April 15th- tax day- titled Paying for America, regarding how taxes are an investment in the public infrastructure of America. He writes:
Our tax code is the DNA of our nation's moral compass. I am proud to pay taxes because I take pride in America, and paying some tiny burden to keep our society running is an extremely small price to pay for being able to call myself an American citizen. The old expression 'you get what you pay for' is apt for all sorts of situations.
The Teabagger types- and often, the general public- view taxes and spending as wasteful "pork" (of course, only until Rep. Slaughter back home obtained money to improve the local farmer's market, in which case everybody thought, "oh, well, that's different..."). One of many problems is that there isn't much understanding of why the money is being spent, along with a lack of coverage around the project in other parts of a state or region.
During the No On 1 campaign, I had the pleasure of working closely with Karin Roland, the campaign's online director. She's now back working for Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME), and helped put together a cool transparency project on funding requests to Pingree's office. Every organization submitting a request is required to submit information and film a short video, which is posted on YouTube, explaining why the funding is important for Maine's first district. All of the requests are posted on Pingree's website with the sponsor's information listed and the amount requested, and people can leave comments. While members of the general public may find funding requests they think are wasteful, that may not always be a bad thing, and I think overall it will broaden the public's perception of the how and why of public investment, and perhaps build greater support.
Below are two examples- one funding request to address the shortage of physicians in rural Maine through scholarship funding, and one from the University of Maine to explore the potential of tidal power for renewable energy/jobs purposes.
Hopefully these kinds of projects result in greater public support for what Matt's talking about- paying for America.
* Defined as Medicaid and Department of Health and Human Services. General "health care" numbers from Pew poll used.
Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to all types of spending cuts. Outside of the State department and NASA, which account for less than 2% of all federal government spending, at least five out of six Americans do not want to see the federal government cut spending in any other area.
More than five out of six Americans are opposed to cutting 98% of the federal budget. Most don't want to cut the remaining 2%, either. Keep that in mind whenever you hear politicians calling for spending cuts, and polls claiming that voters want spending cuts.
Budget documents provided by the Obama administration show that in Fiscal Year 2009 50% of all federal spending went to national defense, Social Security and Medicare. When the cost of veterans affairs are included, that number grows to 53%. Five percent (5%) paid interest on the federal debt, and 42% was used for everything else in the budget.
However, a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that only 35% of voters believe that the majority of federal spending goes to just defense, Social Security and Medicare. Forty-four percent (44%) say it's not true, and 20% are not sure.
Voters claim, in the abstract to want spending cuts. However, they don't know what the government spending money on. When given a possible list of cuts, Americans overwhelmingly reject them all (with the possible exception of NASA).
Though the Pentagon finally took responsibility for the Afghan civilian deaths in last month's Farah province airstrikes, we're only seeing minor adjustments toward a deeply flawed military strategy in need of a complete overhaul.
Late last week, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said US troops were responsible for civilian casualties in the May 4 airstrike, during which B-1 bombers unleashed three 2000 lb bombs and five 500 lb bombs on a village compound, killing up to 140 Afghan civilians. Following Mullen's admission, Gen. Stanley McChrystal announced plans to limit the use of these deadly airstrikes in populated areas. Meanwhile, McChrystal will also issue orders in the coming days to disengage from combat whenever possible in order to reduce the number of civilian casualties. According to McChrystal's spokesman, Rear Admiral Greg Smith, "Even if you are receiving fire from a structure, the first question you have to ask is: 'Can I de-escalate the situation by removing my force or relocating it'?"
Shouldn't commanders on the ground have been asking themselves this question all along? And why has it taken military leaders this long to restrict airstrikes to more uninhabited areas? Either McChrystal's plans signal a genuine shift in military strategy, or we're just seeing a PR maneuver on McChrystal's end--an attempt to save face because the soaring civilian death toll could quickly become inversely proportionate to the war's popularity. I'm betting on the latter, considering McChrystal's predecessor, Gen. McKiernan, tried a similar tactical shift last year when US airstrikes resulted in an inordinate number of civilian deaths. As I noted last week, this could easily be part of the Pentagon's plan to take greater control of the media narrative regarding the war.
Either way, it's time for action, and just in time for Afghanistan Exit Action Day.
Even those in the White House have admitted the stimulus bill probably isn't enough to do the job. But this was just a single bill. More work will be done in most every bill passed by congress this year.
And yes, I really do mean most every bill. Remember those efficiency numbers everyone posted last month? Tax cuts for the rich do almost nothing but more money for the poor and middle class do a lot. Even if you are revenue neutral, every policy choice that directs money away from the richer and towards the poorer people helps the economy. The health care money put aside in Obama's budget, for instance, will be a big stimulus itself.
Although I'm not quite so sanguine as Mark (state budget cuts are going to be a bitch to offset), this is a very important point. In rightwing mythos land, every tax cut is always good for the economy--the product of not really thinking through all the effects it will have, including the opportunity costs of not putting that money to potentially much better uses. But in reality, money that goes to poor people does a helluva lot more good.
That's only the first step, however, as can be seen in this blog post Paul Krugman wrote back in mid-January:
Somewhere in America, a man loses the job he has held for more than thirty years. Somewhere in America, a woman cleans out the office she had occupied for close to a decade. Elsewhere in the United States, a teen unsuccessfully tries to find work. He knows he needs to help his Mom and Dad; each toiled in the factory that closed just down the street. A young woman searches for a professional position, just as she has for the two years since she graduated form the University. Each of these individuals is not startled by the headline, Economy Shed 598,000 Jobs in January. All ask, where have the "experts," Economists, and elected officials been?
If you click over to Opensecrets.org, you might see this little promo:
click it, and they say:
For the first time ever in U.S. history, the candidates for president have raised more than $1 billion. To find out where all this money is coming from, click on the candidates' names below and explore the options to the left.[...]
Never mind that the figures don't include September's haul, the problem here is the pervasive economic sin of doing absolute value comparisons between eras.
It's the same silly reason that All Time Box Office lists like this one make it appear that Titanic and Pirates of the Caribbean did better at the box office than E.T. or Gone With The Wind. It's easy to top the list with the same number of ticket sales at say $14/person versus the $2-4 it probably cost to see a movie in 1982. I'm pretty sure the concept of inflation is now considered common knowledge so I think it's time we stop pretending it doesn't exist.
Some context inside on past election spending in context.
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