Adding Up the Costs of Conservatism, at Last

Ezra Klein's op-ed in yesterday's LA Times helps illustrate the way the Bush administration has effectively begun to turn the way Americans think about government -- and not in the direction it wanted them to turn.

Klein's piece is a defense of goverment services and investment, not just at the level of high-profile programs like Social Security, but the array of smaller-scale services from police work to schools. As Klein demonstrates, it's these local services that really suffer most from neglect and under-capitalization in a conservative era:

Conservatives talk a lot about government failure, but over the last few years, it's really we who have failed government, depriving it of the revenue, the conscientious management and the attention needed for it to succeed. Undercapitalize a pizza joint and your customers will taste the poor ingredients, become frustrated by the long waits and grow repulsed by the grimy environs. Staff it with your unmotivated drinking buddies and the service will falter, as will the quality of the product. It's no way to run a pizza place, and it's certainly no way to run a government.

But that's exactly what we've done. With Proposition 13 and the famous California tax revolt, and with presidents whose entire domestic programs amounted to mindless tax-cutting, and with Congresses that have been happy to pass cuts and stack deficits, we have systematically deprived the government of the revenues it needs to provide basic services, even as we've come to need it to do so much more.

The Bush administration has only added to the problem.... Not only have we spent more than $500 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan and untold more on homeland security measures, but we've created, in Medicare Part D, the most expensive new entitlement since President Johnson signed the Great Society into existence. We've also increased education spending through the No Child Left Behind Act.

And during all this, tax cuts have robbed the Treasury of $200 billion in revenue; the need for a two-thirds majority in the Legislature impeded the flexibility of California to raise state taxes to compensate, while Proposition 13 continued to handicap our municipalities. All that money has to come from somewhere. And the "where" isn't the high-profile initiatives that the media is watching — the Medicares and Social Securities (although they may suffer too) — but from the smaller, less-noticed, but critically important programs and departments that millions rely on.

Substantively speaking, the grand conservative ideological crusade "against" government has never been about achieving any real transformation of American political economy; it has been a mechanism for profiting politically from the periodic tax revolt, and it has been an excuse for a malign neglect of public services. There has never been a libertarian paradise on offer, just cynicism and deterioration (Rick Perlstein has been doing a great job of documenting that deterioration as manifested in unglamorous but critical areas like water infrastructure and food safety).

Proposition 13 is emblematic of the way this dynamic has operated since the 1970s: a middle-class tax revolt savages what was once the finest education system in the nation, and lingers as a poison in the public bloodstream for decades thereafter. Little by little, Americans have allowed their public infrastructure to be defunded and their governments -- local, state, and federal -- to be restrained from dealing with the attendant problems.

But Bush has been such a disaster for conservative politics that, despite his own administration's intention to win the ideological war once and for all, he may finally have pushed Americans to the point where we are forced to make a decision about government. After so many years of creeping disinvestment, Bush's catastrophic misrule may, at last, have woken us up to the cost of the conservative scam.

Labels: conservatives, Ezra Klein, government

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:34 AM 0 comments

  Report from the Huckabee Front

In the comments to the third part of my Summit series - the Huckabee episode - a minor discussion flared up over the odd lack of any available evidence that Martha the schoolteacher ever existed. A few of us Kossacks have done some digging and found nothing - and the Arkansas journalists we've contacted have drawn similar blanks. She's impervious to Google, Lexis Nexis, and local journalistic memory.

Which doesn't mean she doesn't exist - it's just strange. I assume the Huckabee campaign can point me in the right direction, so I'll give them a call. Meanwhile, here's an interesting little thread on the matter over at the Arkansas Times blog.

The Times post also notes this attack on Huckabee by the conservative Club for Growth. Whatever's up with Martha it does appear that the Governor has been telling some tall tales when it comes to taxes:

In his recent response to the Club for Growth’s presidential white paper on his gubernatorial record, Governor Huckabee touts his $80 million tax cut in 1997, but fails to explain the multiple tax hikes he signed or allowed to become law during the rest of his tenure, including a $377 million sales tax hike in 2004 (Los Angeles Times 02/07/04). ... “This really isn’t very complicated,” said the Club’s President, Pat Toomey. “Taxes were higher when he left office than when he entered. On balance, that makes him a tax hiker.”

The governor also wildly exaggerates his record, claiming he cut taxes “nearly 100 times,” but the Arkansas Times demonstrates the absurdity of this claim: “By claiming to have cut taxes 94 times, Huckabee fixed a standard for what is a tax cut: every little exemption, credit, deduction or tax break of any kind. By that standard every governor [over] the past 60 years cut taxes numerous times (01/30/07).

The Club for Growth, of course, is the NKVD of the anti-tax crowd, charged with purging enemies of the wingnut people from within Republican ranks. And one can't help but feel a bit of sympathy for Huckabee, who was caught in the same quandary most Republican governors find themselves in: forced to deal with the messy consequences of their own party's irresponsible federalist policies, which dump spending problems on the states where they can be ignored by Congress but not by the local statehouse. Hell, Pat Toomey was at the same Summit, soaking up the ideological deliciousness of being a purist unburdened with actual power.

Ezra Klein recently explained the problem facing Republican governors:

The Gingrich Revolution trumpeted its renewed federalism, enhancing state authority over everything from welfare to Medicaid. States can’t deficit spend, so handing them once-federal responsibilities under the rubric of a restored federalism promised to shrink the expansiveness, generosity, and responsiveness of government services. Federalist lipstick? Meet small-government pig.

But it’s not easy being a service-slashing ideologue on the state level. “Republican governors tend to be more liberal than Republican senators and congressmen,” Dreier explains. “Governors can see the consequences of federal cutbacks and unfunded federal mandates. They see the consequences of letting cities deteriorate. They have to pay for the Medicaid patients. They have to pay for the consequences of housing cuts.”

So Republican governors operate in tension with Republican congresses. They need federal appropriations to invest in infrastructure, keep their fiscal status sound, and provide popular services their party finds ideologically objectionable. As Bush’s budget director, Mitch Daniels was a supply-sider so committed that Grover Norquist named him 2002’s “Hero of the American taxpayer.” But after becoming governor of Indiana, he promptly broke Norquist’s heart by raising taxes. Daniels, a crestfallen Norquist cried, “was closing Indiana for business!” Which is to say, he was governing.

So maybe Huckabee's record is just collateral damage in the Beltway Republicans' war on reality. I can't really fault him for that.

But it sounds like he has been less than truthful about his tax record, which is a shame. We should be wary of presidential candidates prone to making up stories.

Labels: American Prospect, Arkansas Times, Club for Growth, Ezra Klein, Mike Huckabee, Pat Toomey

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 8:58 AM 0 comments

  Edwards Digs In

Ezra Klein has a good post on the Edwards announcement. He's kicking it off as a literally grassroots (shovel in the ground) kind of civic populist effort.

Edwards stopped in at Daily Kos today, which was nice to see.

Geniuses in the American newsmedia have already begun with the "He Says He Cares About Poverty but He's a Multimillionaire" angle (as if it's better to vote for multimillionaires who ignore poverty). Certainly he could be vulnerable to this kind of thing if his campaign is widely seen as a rich guy doing charity for poor people.

I haven't analyzed his rhetoric in the same systematic way as I've done with Obama, so I can't say yet if he seems to be developing a message to transcend that pitfall. Though he did respond to a question about it with an interesting comment at DKos:

You have to talk about our moral responsibility to each other. Second, you can focus on the benefits for all Americans -- a stronger middle class, a stronger economy, etc.

But also -- we all need to be talking about that-- not just candidates -- and work together to create a culture of responsibility.

There's a there, there, I think. But we'll have to watch how he develops it. Klein notes Edwards's relative lack of emphasis on the "Two Americas" theme this time. Clearly - and fortunately - he's not abandoning his economic populism. But perhaps he's searching for a more expansive way of expressing it.

Labels: 2008, Daily Kos, Ezra Klein, John Edwards, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:28 PM 0 comments