Last weekend, just before the election, Sara Robinson posted the following chart in a diary at Campaign for America's Future, "The Myth of the Self-Made American: Why Progressives Get No Respect". It's from a 2008 study reported in a recently published paper, "Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era", by Suzanne Mettler. "The submerged state" refers to tax subsidies and expenditures that work "automatically," as it were, without a visible bureaucrary to administer them. I'll have more to say on this during the week, but for now, just let the following sink in, first the intro of Sara's diary, then the chart:
One of the biggest problems facing the Democrats going into this election is that they're getting absolutely zero respect for everything they've done for the average American over the past two years. Tax cuts, health care reform, financial reform, expanded veterans' benefits, direct funding of student loans -- the list is long, and one that, by rights, should get the Democrats re-elected handily.
The problem is that the average voter has no idea that any of this ever happened. In fact, if you ask most Americans (even a lot of Democrats), they'll tell you that Obama raised their taxes.
This ignorance is on full display at your average Tea Party gathering, which is full of people who will proudly insist that they're entirely self-made. "I did it all myself," they'll snarl, quivering in spittle-flecked outrage. "I didn't get any government handouts. Nobody ever did anything for me -- so why are all my tax dollars going to support those shiftless welfare cheats who aren't willing to work like I did?"
....
Suzanne Mettler, a professor at Cornell, actually documented this effect in a 2008 study. She asked people who'd been the beneficiaries of 19 specific government programs -- including some of the most popular and widespread programs in the country -- whether or not they'd ever used a government social program. Here's what she found:
Those are some pretty astonishing levels of denial. This is the fully-fleshed-out version of "keep the government's hands off my Medicare!" And it's a big problem, particularly given that the narratives of conservative identity reinforce the denial displayed in the chart above. So merely bringing the facts to light is not likely to have much of a positive impact in the rough and tumble of today's fantasy-based political world--although it can in a controlled experimental setting.
This is also the reality-based flip side of the perennial Republican quest for the golden mountain of "waste, fraud and abuse" they've spent the last 30 years searching for in vain in federal, state and local budgets. Well, after 30 years, you'd think they might finally realize there is no such mountaint... except, of course, for the obscenely high tax deductions for affluent & especially obscenely rich taxpayers.
Social Security turns 75 this weekend. And a new poll out from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner--for Democracy Corps and Campaign for America's Future--shows continued strong support for Social Security as well as Medicare in opposition to growing bipartisan elite attempts to destroy the core of the American welfare state. Indeed, more broadly, the poll shows widespread support for the continued vitality of the entire worldview that the welfare state is based on--worldview that values the general welfare and the wellbeing of our entire nation as much as it values the role of individual effort.
And this translates into strong support for federal spending to help the states, as well as a broad range of positions Democrats can win on this Fall.
Here are a few highlights from the online analysis:
Right now, a plurality of 49 percent support providing more funding to states to prevent lay-offs - jumping to 62 percent when told about the scale of public sector lay-offs due to the recession.
Just as many, six-in-ten, give a favorable rating to a plan to invest in new industries and rebuild the country over the next five years as to a plan for dramatically reducing the deficit.
Voters say spending cuts for Social Security and Medicare should not be part of any deficit reduction plan by a wide 68 to 28 percent margin.
Progressive proposals for deficit reduction - ending tax breaks for corporations, raising taxes on Wall Street and repealing the Bush tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 - win large majority support.
By 52 to 42 percent, more voters prefer investing in the future over an alternative proposition for bold cuts in spending - so long as it is combined with deficit reduction over time.
Six-in-ten voters respond positively to a broad narrative focused on resolving our public investment deficit in infrastructure. This message focuses on investments in "roads, sewers, schools, trains, renewable energy and other basic parts of our communities." Such investments would "create jobs, help business compete, improve our communities and generate revenues to pay down the deficit." This message tests better than any other progressive message on investment as well as more conservative messages focused on spending cuts.
After listing the above points, the analysis summarizes:
The pieces are in place to tell the right story and engage voters in a new view of a modern economy based on investments in human capital and long-term deficit reduction. At the same time, there is a reserve of support for short-term government action, even though long-term deficit reduction is crucial.
The main problem, of course, is that the Obama Administration--from Obama on down--has been virtually missing in action. Just look at the chart (split in two for easy viewing on the flip) illstrating the first bullet point above:
At the same time that the GOP is up in arms all across the land over non-exist immigrant crime waves in Arizona and the existential threat of houses of worship in Manhattan, this is what it's doing in Colorado Springs: turning off the lights on civilization.
That's hardly surprising, of course. It's what conservatives have been doing for hundreds of years now. The "Tea Party's" roots aren't in Boston Harbor, they're with the Southern slaveowners, who saw no need for them to be taxed to pay for other people's roads and schools.
At the same time, however, it's important to keep in mind that it's not individual conservative voters who want to do these things. The organized conservative political movement is highly unrepresentative of the views of the broader range of conservative citizens--as well aptly demonstrated by the large numbers of Tea Partiers fiercely clinging to their Medicare benefits last year, even as they denounced 1990s-style Heritage Foundation "Health Care Reform" as "socialist".
But don't just take my word for it. Look at some 30 or so years of data from the General Social Survey (a few of the data series the points below are based on are much shorter, but most either started in 1984 or 1972). I'm presenting two views of the underlying data in this diary--with a close-up on the most concentrated area of data for each of the two views.
The first view maps the overall level of support on the Y-axis against the liberal-conservative consensus on the X-axis. To explain: These questions are asked in the form of whether we're spending "too little," "about right" or "too much" on any number of different national spending items." For the purposes here, I count the "too little" or "about right" answers as expressing spending support, and I measure that for all respondents. "Consensus" is measured by taking sub-totals for self-identified liberals and conservatives, and seeing how much overlap there is for all three questions. Thus, for unpopular items, the consensus is predominantly that we're spending "too much", while it's the opposite for the popular items.
What we see is that most spending items are quite strongly supported--close to 66% (two-thirds) or more--and that the level of liberal/conservative consensus for most items is 80% (four out of five) or more:
Taking a closer look at the more concentrated area of the chart, we see relatively high levels of consensus for roads, and one of two measures each for crime-fighting and combating drugs. These are typical indicators of so-called "night watchman state" spending, which even ideological libertarians support. But note that Social Security and spending on national parks also enjoy more than a 90% consensus, and support levels of over 93%. While we can certainly see differences here, the fact is that all these items are pretty damn popular, and the level of consensus is pretty damn high. If you're looking for evidence that the vast majority of conservatives are up in arms against such spending, you won't find a trace of that in this multi-decade polling record:
Another way of slicing the data is to map liberal support on one axis against conservative support on the other:
If you've been paying attention this past decade, it won't surprise you to learn that the country's policy elites are in the midst of a destructive, well-nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by the degraded standards of the Washington establishment, the growing panic over government debt is shocking....
....we face a joblessness crisis that threatens to pitch us into a long, ugly period of low growth, the kind of lost decade that will cause tremendous misery, degrade the nation's human capital, undermine an entire cohort of young workers for years and blow a hole in the government's bank sheet. The best chance we have to stave off this scenario is more government spending to nurse the economy back to health. The economy may be alive, but that doesn't mean it's healthy. There's a reason you keep taking antibiotics even after you start to feel better.
And yet: the drumbeat of deficit hysterics thumping in self-righteous panic grows louder by the day....
This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation--if it can be called that--about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable--Saddam Hussein--became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that "serious people" were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost....
Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity-about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it.
If you're playing checkers on a checkerboard, but your opponent is playing chess, it's only a matter of time until you lose. And that's the problem in fighting against the enemies of Social Security and Medicare who are rallying around the flag of so-called "fiscal responsibility" this week. The attack on these two popular programs is part of a decades long war-a game of chess, if you will-that all too few of us understand.
Earlier in the Virtual Summit, Kim Wright provided a hint of what it's all about by calling attention to Cato Institute document from 1983, when the very immediate prospect of Social Security running out of money lead to the creation of the Social Security Trust Fund:
The Cato Institute described their long-term strategy (implemented after the last major Social Security reform in 1983) this way:
So here we are. As promised, the American people have been bombarded with a steady stream of pronouncements that Social Security is bankrupt, broken, or just too expensive. In truth, what these folks really mean is that they don't [want] Washington to honor its obligations to the Social Security trust fund.
Cato's "Lenninst strategy" also included building up a cadre of those who stood to benefit from privatization--some just a little, others enormously:
What we must do is construct a coalition around the Ferrara plan [for gradual privatization], a coalition that will gain directly from its implementation. That coalition should consist of not only those who will reap benefits from the IRA-based private system Ferrara has proposed but also the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public.
As it turns out, of course, the "other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public"--Wall Street--turned out to be almost entirely responsible for the current financial crisis--a crises that impacts the long-term health of Social Security far less than it impacted those institutions themselves. The difference is, of course, that due to its enormous political clout Wall Street has managed to save itself--temporarily at least. Social Security--not being a wealthy special interest--remains far more vulnerable, just like Medicare, Medicaid and all other programs that "only" benefit the American people at large.
Still, even a full awareness of what Cato proposed, and how well the follow-through has conformed to its vision doesn't fully explain the nature of the chess game. To understand that, we need to turn to the creation of Europe's first modern welfare state by Otto von Bismark in the 1880s, and to Gosta Esping-Andersen's classic 1990 study, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.
Obama's sudden lurch to the right is all in accord with one of Versailles' most treasured, and most bogus narratives, the claim that America is a "center-right" country, and thus that it's both natural and necessary for any Democrat to attack the party's base and trample the things it believes in. After all, they're just a bunch of DFHs, whose views are hated and despised by real Americans (who read David Brooks religiously to know what they should think).
I'll have more to say about the center-right premise in another diary...
Well, this is that diary. I want to go back to the same data source I used before, the General Social Survey (GSS), which is the most thorough long-term survey of American public opinion, administered 26 times since 1972. The GSS is the gold standard when it comes to American public opinion research, and is cited more frewuently by social scientists than any other data source except the US Census. The data I've drawn from it relates to social spending, and it shows remarkably consistent findings across all the times it has been administered. There are fluctuations, to be sure, but even when the public is in its most conservative frame of mind, support for these programs remains remarkably robust-and not just among liberals and moderates. This data provides undeniable evidence of conservative support for welfare state social spending.
The first thing I'm going to do is look at a combined index of spending preferences, a slightly different one than the one I used in my earlier diary, since this one includes Social Security, which the GSS did not start polling for until 1984. Since then, majority of extreme conservatives (self-identified 7 on a 1-7 scale) said we were spending too little on a combined measure (call it NatWelfComp) of whether people think we're spending too little, too much or about right on seven different areas-Social Security, welfare, "improving [the] nation's education system," "improving & protecting [the] environment," "improving & protecting [the] nations health," "improving the conditions of blacks," and "solving problems of big cities." The number of extreme conservatives who thought we were spending too little on one or more programs (net: i.e. "too little" on two, but "too much" on one is a net of "too little" on one) was nearly twice the number of extreme conservatives who thought we were spending too much: 59.3% to 30.7%. This can be seen in the last column of the chart below:
Of course it's obvious that we do an aboslutely terrible job of keeping families with children out of poverty. We do okay in the marketplace, but once it comes to government policies, everyone else leaves us in the dust. We barely lift a finger.
But what I found a bit surprising (I hadn't realized it before) was that, for all our focus on single-parent families as a focus of attention regarding poverty, America's social policies are much less effective in dealing with poverty in two-parent families. Of course, it's true that poverty rates are much lower in two-parent families to begin with. But for any two groups of poor families, one with a single parent, the other with two, our social policies will lift nearly three times as many single-parent families out of poverty as two-parent families.
And this got me thinking about a recent comment--I thought it had been by Peter Beinart, but my quick Googling attempt failed--that liberals needed to be taught they, too could be wrong, just like conservatives, as they had been wrong about welfare reform. Now, of course, it's an article of faith in Versailles that welfare reform was a great success, that liberals opposed it, and that liberals were all wrong. But the chart above suggests, "not so much." So I decided to take a closer look at the recent trajectory of poverty rates. Tables of what I found on the flip.
As a country, we are on the brink of a substantial, long-term increase in social investment that will move our economy much closer to the mixed, and substantially larger public welfare models, of Canada and Western Europe.
It's my position that the arguments Chris marshaled are significant, and deserving of attention, but that they don't really show such a victory, but only the potential for it.
In Part 1, I laid out four reasons for taking this position, and argued that turning potential into reality would depend, in part, on getting a clearer picture of how spending had varied in the past, how it was projected to change, and how the US compared with other countries. I dealt with the US record in Part 1. Now it's time to compare us to other countries.
This diary is an interlude between Parts One and Two of "US Public Spending In Context", a two-part response to Chris's diary, "Long-term, Center-left Victory on Public Spending Highly Likely". While I generally agreed with Chris's reading of signs, I thought what they pointed to was merely potential. My intention was to take a closer look at US spending, past, present and future, and in comparison with other welfare states. Part One looked at US spending in its own terms, while Part Two will look at it comparatively. This interlude is intended to discuss a bit of the theoretical framework that's become increasingly common for international researchers to use.
Although attempts to analyze and categorize welfare state began as far back as the 1950s, the commonly-recognized watershed work was the 1990 book, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism by Gosta Esping-Andersen. While others have criticized his work, and more different types have been suggested, there seems to be no discarding of his basic accomplishment, only additions and revisions, whereas earlier efforts have primarily been mined for spare parts. In this diary, I'm going to focus primarily on a 2001 paper that contains a much more sophisticated re-analysis that ends up largely confirming the Three Worlds hypothesis in one sense, before exploring another sense in which two of the worlds appear to meld, leaving only two distinct worlds. I will also make some reference to other approaches. My basic perspective is that there is no one "right" model of how many "worlds" there are, but that the "Three Worlds" model is particularly useful for relating the US to how mature Western European systems work.
As a country, we are on the brink of a substantial, long-term increase in social investment that will move our economy much closer to the mixed, and substantially larger public welfare models, of Canada and Western Europe.
While the arguments Chris marshaled are significant, and deserving of attention, I do not believe that they show what they promise, a "Long-term, Center-left Victory on Public Spending". But they do pre-position us for intelligently discussing, and eventually advancing that possibility. The reasons I say this are simple:
(1) Notwithstanding decades of movement conservative rhetoric, public spending does not necessarily directly equate with center-left politics. Increasing and destigmatizing public spending are helpful to center-left politics, but not necessarily synonymous to it.
(2) What is most significant is welfare state core spending-broadly speaking, spending on health, education, retirement and welfare.
(3) Also significant--though much smaller, and less easily identifiable in big-picture budget data--is what can be called welfare state periphery spending, primarily infrastructure and the environment.
(4) But a significant amount of government spending--along with other government activity--does not go to enhance the general welfare, and certainly not to help the disadvantaged. It goes to help those who already have a great deal of wealth and power, thank you very much.
Thus, I will argue, the task before us is to recognize beneficial government spending, and to support it, to recognize detrimental government spending, and to oppose it, and to discover new forms of government spending, or combinations of old forms that will be even more beneficial than those that already exist. The growth of government spending that Chris points to is potentially quite helpful. But that's only potential. It's up to us to ensure that the potential is realized. And to begin that process, we need to become more aware of how that money is already being spent, and with what consequences.
Let's begin by first taking a look at the broad spending categories, how they've varied over time, and how they're projected to change. Then let's compare the US welfare state with other examples, to see how well it functions, and how it could do better. The rest of this diary will be devoted to the first task. A followup will deal with the second one. In between, I'll post an interlude diary that will provide some background in terms of different types of welfare states.
In 1990, Gosta Esping-Andersen published a book, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism which sought to explain the similarities of modern welfare states amidst their evident diversity. Esping-Andersen presented a three-fold theoretical construct of basic types: the conservative welfare state, typified by Germany, which aims to consolidate the existing social order and its hierarchical relations in various ways, the liberal welfare state, typified by English-speaking countries from Britain to the US and Canada to Australia and New Zealand, which aims to deal with imperfections in the market system with minimal interference to the basic system, and the social democratic welfare state, which aims to provide maximal protections for all. A good, relatively brief overview can be found in an online student paper here.
Esping-Andersen's typology can help shed significant light on current political debates, and provide a more nuanced understanding of the various different ways in which, for example, Obama's politics can be progressive in one sense, yet conservative in another.
Obama's sudden lurch to the right is all in accord with one of Versailles' most treasured, and most bogus narratives, the claim that America is a "center-right" country, and thus that it's both natural and necessary for any Democrat to attack the party's base and trample the things it believes in. After all, they're just a bunch of DFHs, whose views are hated and despised by real Americans (who read David Brooks religiously to know what they should think).
I'll have more to say about the center-right premise in another diary...
Well, this is that diary. I want to go back to the same data source I used before, the General Social Survey (GSS), which is the most thorough long-term survey of American public opinion, administered 26 times since 1972. The GSS is the gold standard when it comes to American public opinion research, and is cited more frewuently by social scientists than any other data source except the US Census. The data I've drawn from it relates to social spending, and it shows remarkably consistent findings across all the times it has been administered. There are fluctuations, to be sure, but even when the public is in its most conservative frame of mind, support for these programs remains remarkably robust-and not just among liberals and moderates. This data provides undeniable evidence of conservative support for welfare state social spending.
The first thing I'm going to do is look at a combined index of spending preferences, a slightly different one than the one I used in my earlier diary, since this one includes Social Security, which the GSS did not start polling for until 1984. Since then, majority of extreme conservatives (self-identified 7 on a 1-7 scale) said we were spending too little on a combined measure (call it NatWelfComp) of whether people think we're spending too little, too much or about right on seven different areas-Social Security, welfare, "improving [the] nation's education system," "improving & protecting [the] environment," "improving & protecting [the] nations health," "improving the conditions of blacks," and "solving problems of big cities." The number of extreme conservatives who thought we were spending too little on one or more programs (net: i.e. "too little" on two, but "too much" on one is a net of "too little" on one) was nearly twice the number of extreme conservatives who thought we were spending too much: 59.3% to 30.7%. This can be seen in the last column of the chart below:
On Wednesday, Matt wrote a diary, "Obama's Consolidation of the Party", that got quite a bit of notice, not just here, but elsewhere across the blogosphere. Mike and Chris both weighed in to compliment Matt and add a few thoughts of their own.
But I called it "A Rather Strange Post", and the time has come to elaborate further on why I said that--not so much focused on what Matt said, but on what he's describing, and the challenge of making sense of it.
Matt set up his post by saying:
Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship.
He went on to talk about "Voter Registration," "Obama Organizing Fellows," "Money: MyBarackObama.com," "Field: MyBarackObama.com," and "Message and Politics: MyBarackObama.com." A recurrent them throughout the post was how Obama had managed to centralize power, while largely ignoring and/or marginalizing (other?) progressive groups and constituencies.
I only took on part of my concerns in my comment, the heart of which was questioning Obama's non-partisan schtick:
Like it or not, the aspiration to create a non-partisan politics is at odds with the very structure of our political institutions, from the winner-take-all single-member districts that define most of the legislative bodies in the country, to the electoral college. Also, like it or not, where one party systems do exist, the result is invariably tyranny.
There are, of course, powerful yearnings to be free of partisan strife. There are also powerful yearnings to eat so much ice cream that your [sic] burst.
I got deeper into historical specifics in responding to Chris's post when I wrote:
A Return to the Failed Policies of the Early 1900s
As I wrote several months ago--Obama is an early-20th Centrury progressive, not a post-Vietnam one. The former focused a great deal on process, and trusted that substantive equity would naturally follow. The downside of this is that these policies have already been shown to fail.
I'm not saying that they didn't do anything good. But I am saying that they were inadequate to the scope of the problems they faced, which meant that they failed in the long run--if not sooner.
Time to flesh this all out, in hopes of encouraging a more enlightened debate.
This past week, Ron Paul's fundraising got the attention of various bloggers, and occassioned a column by Glenn Greenwald, "The Ron Paul phenomenon". In the letter section, I brought up the issue of Paul's nativist, extremist and racist associations, drawing on work by David Neiwert and Sara Robinson of Orcinus. And I ran into the standard Ron Paul defense:
Ron Paul has argued against racism. He is on record saying that it is collectivist nonsense. He should get the benefit of the doubt. It is also worth noting that he never advocates any policies which disproportionatley benefit one group at the expense of another. He clearly insists that all people have equal rights.
That's not an argument against racism. That's an argument against "collectivism" and a form of denial that he and his kind could possibly be racists.
Furthermore, it's an easily refuted view.
I went on to cite some cross-tabs that I had quickly run on the National Election Survey database, showing that feelings towards blacks were negatively correlated with support for "collectivist" policies, such as government health insurance, government activism to creat jobs, and federal spending on poor people and child care. Here I'm going to expand on that response, and underscore how Paul represents a very significant aspect of one the most significant ways in which racism has rearticulated itself as anti-racism. Indeed, this attempt goes even farther, as we have seen in phenomena such as the phony "Civil Rights Initiative" pushed by Ward Connerly in California a few years ago. This new new racism not only tries to present itself as anti-racism, it tries to present anti-racism as racism, as we'll see on the flip.
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