Politics and specific policies
by Robert Waldmann
At Frum forum Justin Green extensively quotes Jeb Golonkin on how conservatism could be much better if conservatives made specific policy proposals. Sad but true, almost all of the proposals that have been signed into law are by Barack Obama. This is not a rare event. While many conservatives stick to slogans, some try to come up with constructive alternatives to the stimulus (ARRA) and Obamacare (PPACA). I don’t remember where to link but the phenomenon of “Obamacare is horrible and we should replace it with Obamacare” is quite common.
Golonkin’s proposals are in bold, and then another of my comments follows. Recall that the PPACA is Obamacare and the ARRA is the stimulus bill.
Golonkin’s problem is that Obama has been there and done that. Golonkin’s innovative conservative proposals are mostly existing liberal policies.
Golonkin: Somewhere along the way, we conservatives stopped innovating and stopped explaining, preferring instead to fall back to “small government is better.” Well, maybe it is and maybe it is not. But the notion that government is always useless simply does not ring true in a world where people look to the government to provide Medicare, a national defense, FEMA relief, and public education. This being the case, we would do well to start probing for specific policy solutions that affect people in concrete ways. What is the government doing that is hurting small businesses today? What is the government not doing that it could be that could help small businesses?
It is not now organizing health insurance exchanges to remove big businesses advantage in insuring employees, because big business work forces are automatically large pools of policy holders helping big but not small businesses interacting with health insurers avoid the adverse selection death spiral. It would also be nice, above and beyond the call of eliminating a market failure, to offer them subsidies. See ‘healthcare fiasco’.
Golonkin: What about student debt?
How about ceasing to pay banks huge amounts of money to handle simple paper work and divide the savings between reducing the federal deficit and reducing the amount students have to pay on their debt. See ‘healthcare fiasco’
Golonkin: Can we use student loan forgiveness as a way to incentivize bright young people to enter particular fields? We need more primary care physicians if we are going to make this healthcare fiasco work. No one wants to be a primary care physician because primary care physicians get paid less than specialists, which makes it harder for them to pay off their medical school debts. But could we change the way the government reimburses primary care? And couldn’t we partially forgive student loans if borrowers agree to enter into primary care in particular markets for a certain number of years?
See ‘healthcare fiasco’ and click http://bit.ly/Y6ObIP (warning a *.doc will download)
So far all of the bright innovating conservative ideas are provisions of the ‘healthcare fiasco’. Some are not current policy because they are scheduled to start in January 2014, but mr ‘specifics specifics specifics’ didn’t let that little detail prevent him from arguing that a bill which is largely not yet being applied and of which he demonstrates astonishing ignorance is a ‘fiasco’.
Golonkin: What about tax policy: why are we not on the cutting edge of hyper-targeted tax cuts that we can show, with numbers, turbocharge the economy? A wish is not a plan. Wishing that conservatives can show, with numbers, that there are tax cuts that turbocharge the economy doesn’t make it possible. There are many conservative academic economists who have looked very hard for proof that some sort of tax cuts turbocharge the economy. They haven’t shown this, because it is not true. yes many conservatives consider numbers foreign alien and un-American (especially arabic numbers). However there are also conservatives who love numbers and are statistical and mathematical geniuses. The reason they haven’t shown with numbers how wonderful tax cuts can be is that it is impossible to show something false with numbers. The high respect of ‘numbers’ is for their power as tools for convincing people.
Golonkin doesn’t need to look at any numbers to be sure it is possible to show with numbers that some tax cuts are great. This is not the way anyone who knows what data are talks about it. Conservatives, including Golonkin, have the very serious problem of thinking they know the answer before looking at the evidence.
Also I fear that Golonkin believes his hyper targeted tax cut proposal is pro market. It is, in fact, based on his conviction that policy makers (provided they are conservative) can guess better than the market and wisely subsidize particular activities. The pro market position is that tax rates should not be targeted but rather that the playing field should be level.
Golonkin: Why are we not demanding that the government rebuild our cratering infrastructure rather than using taxpayer dollars to invest in projects it hopes will succeed (Solyndra)?
Yes how about spending more on infrastructure ? Nothing like the ARRA but spending on infrastructure. How did Golonkin manage to avoid the phrase ‘shovel ready’ ? He is now calling for the ARRA. Also he doesn’t recognize that hyper targeted tax cuts are using taxpayer dollars to invest in etc. It doesn’t matter if the money is called a tax cut or a subsidy or even the market value of a CDS (loan guarantee) as in the case of Solyndra. The policy he advocates and the policy he mocks are implementations of the exact same reasoning.
Golonkin: Why are we not pushing pay for performance in the healthcare system AND in our education system?
Pay for performance in the healthcare system. See ‘healthcare fiasco’ and click
http://www.lifehealthpro.com/2011/04/29/ppaca-hhs-starts-medicare-performance-payment-syst
pay for performance in education recall the ARRA and google ‘race to the top’
Golonkin: Workfare?
Workfare was introduced under Reagan and tightened later. This is the system before the welfare reform of 1996. It was learned that it costs more to give welfare recipients money and make them work than to just give them money so states backslid and it never amounted to much. It is an experiment that all agree failed.
Golonkin: Some of these ideas are useless, some of them might have legs, but the point is: specifics, specifics, specifics.
So we see what happens when a conservative tries to think of constructive policy proposals. There is the wish that conservative claims be ‘shown with numbers’ plus Obama policy after Obama policy after Obama policy.
I think Golonkin should spend more time and effort on understanding the enemy. He might discover that the enemy is not the enemy but rather what he dreams conservatism might one day become.
The shocking thing is that this pathetic display of ignorance is described as “particularly fine work” by non movement conservative Mark Adomanis in Forbes in a post entitled “Epistemic Closure in Action …”
Golonkin is not the example of epistemic closure. He is considered a “particularly fine” example of how some conservatives are working to overcome epistemic closure. The detail that the conservative in question has new conservatives ideas which are almost all either in the PPACA or the ARRA and that he doesn’t know this, does not make the Galonkin essay an example of epistemic closure.
Rather it is an example of how some conservatives are trying to overcome it and understand liberals before denouncing us.
I am tempted to type “pathetic” but I don’t pity them, I fear them. They are very numerous and their blind ideological arrogance makes them dangerous.
Note, the two conservatives in question are Green and Golonkin.
cross posted with Robert’s Stochastic thoughts
Robert
my first reaction was “I’ll take it.”
but i am also guilty of urging liberals to take some conservative “ideas” and understanding at least why they are politically successful, and maybe learning from them something about policy… such as a little modesty in advocating gummint solutions to everything. and even more modesty in attacking the basic values (you might call them superstitions) of the people you claim to want to help.
but i think you are right. there is no actual thinking going on here, and it may just be their side feeling for a way to capture liberal “ideas” to win more votes. the basic policies (favors for the rich) will not change, and of course actual thinking will not take place. but words like “epistemic” will help them feel just like intellectuals.
as for “it is impossible to show something false with numbers. The high respect of ‘numbers’ is for their power as tools for convincing people. “
this is nonsense. the whole Social Security debate is based on “numbers” that are designed to fool people. if if the numbers chosen are strictly accurate, they are selected to be misleading. what does 44 Trillion Dollar Unfunded Deficit! really mean? well, it turns out to mean something like eighty cents per week per year increase in taxes might be required to pay for something the people absolutely need… food in old age… if they are going to be living longer.
sorry. there are no magic answers here. we will have the continued war… or appearance of war… between “interest” groups, conducted mostly in sound bites.. or “sounds like..” (another word for “logic”). and the only hope you and i have is to find ways… words… that convince those with the power (whoever they are) to try things our way, and not sabotage them before they have a chance to work, in order to discredit the ideas behind them.
Conservatives don’t have ideas. They have a “proto cognitive itch” as John Holbo explains in this seminal blog post from 2003.
http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html
Their project is social not economic. They believe in a vague way that if the social thing was structured to their liking then the economic things would just work out.
What they don’t or can’t acknowledge even to themselves is that they do not want widespread prosperity. Today’s fetish for austerity and “pain” is central to what they want, period, for the majority.
Read the above post and then stop imagining that economics is a core part of conservatism.
addendum to the above post
Why do conservatives not want widespread prosperity? Because prosperity allows people to be independent. It weakens the power of authority, from families to employers. It makes people less fearful, more willing to leap across the big top as Holbo says. It makes them act less conservatively. To be a bit more crude it makes them less obedient, less willing or able to know and accept their place.
For the conservative the current aristocrats, always the current ones, are the people deserving of prosperity and wealth because they alone will not squander it. They are the “makers”, the producers in the current parlance. So it ever was with conservative and ever will be.
rapier
i have been trying to find a way to say that for years.
it explains a lot that is otherwise hard to understand… like why they want to kill Social Security when they don’t pay for it.
and why particularly they want to raise the retirement age. they can’t stand the idea of “the help” not working or looking for work.
i suspect some of this has to do with an upbringing in which “not working” was extremely discouraged by their own parents. you don’t get rich by not working. so it’s not necessarily a wrong idea
but it turns neurotic as we see in Alan Simpson and in some unguarded remarks by Pete Peterson.. especially when applied to others who have no chance to get rich and need a little holiday from the drudgery of working for someone else.
The Holbo analysis is the best way to start and understand this stuff. They, conservatives, don’t want widespread prosperity. That defeats their social objectives and ideals. Oh sure they want prosperity in theory, but in practice it makes women, kids, workers, most everyone more ‘liberal’, less willing to be obedient, subservient.
One devastating extension of this is that the white southern ‘good old boy’ culture is actually based upon the good old boys knowing their place. White southerners were always poor, blacks poorer yet but in their ideal they all knew their place.
De Tocqueville addressed this and proposed that people were and would be happier if they simply accepted their class, their place. In some sense that may be right I suppose one may argue. But you can’t do that outloud in America and get away with it. That is ultimately a foundation of Conservative thought too but they can’t even admit it to themselves.
Thus their positively schizophrenic economic ideas.
that’s probably true
but i think white southerners knew their place… they did not have what it took to get rich, but they did have the “place” to get emotional satisfaction by dominating blacks.
we see the power of “dominance” in middle managers everywhere. they know their place, but they get off on keeping the “workers” in theirs.
the blacks in the south were kept in their place by guns and ropes. different kind of dynamic. in the North, then, workers could hope to rise by their own efforts. Another different dynamic.
They, we, still haven’t given up that hope, but it looks less and less realistic to me.
Maybe it has as much, or more, to do with distinguishing between rich conservatives and the others whom we see attending town hall meetings and anti abortion demonstrations, etc. Weathy conservatives have good reason to want to maintain the economic status quo. They have the wealth and they want to keep it that way. The wealthy conservatives don’t really distinguish between economic fact and fiction. What ever economic concept will help to maintain their own economic status is a part of their ideology. Wealthy conservatives are pandered to by much of the political class who also have no personal investment in ideology beyond a concepts financial value.
And then we have all the other conservatives without so much wealth, or any wealth for that matter. They are the true social conservatives. When one has little
or limited wealth it becomes important to imbue one’s own ideology with greater importance. One’s own social concepts take on greater importance. Suddenly the social status quo takes on greater importance. New ideas are unwelcome. The wealthy conservatives aren’t focused on maintaining the social status quo, but they understand that social concepts are the basis for conservative cohesiveness and the mechanism for controlling the thinking of all conservatives for the purpose of social, and thereby political, control.
Jack
probably true, but it probably isn’t the result of any conscious awareness of “social policy”
more likely “the rich” try, as individuals, to protect what they’ve got. and if a politician tells them he’ll cut taxes, that fits in with their own short term “needs.”
but similarly, the “poor” are trying to protect what they’ve got. which they see as “family.” and the politicians who tell them the other side is going to destroy their families gets their vote.