The ‘ignorance is bliss’/’ride’em cowboy’ mentality of today’s GOP
by Linda beale
The ‘ignorance is bliss’/’ride’em cowboy’ mentality of today’s GOP
Today’s GOP is dominated by the Tea Party types that are a cross between an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand– the “ignorance is bliss” philosophy– and a 1860s cowboy as depicted in the 1960s western-mania TV shows– the “hell bent on raising a ruckus”/”my way or the highway” mentality. The combination is deadly dangerous for democratic egalitarianism.
On the ignorance is bliss side, see, for one example out of many possible, the “two pending Republican bills that seek to curtail or end vital surveys by the Census Bureau.” Editorial, Stragegic Ignorance, New York Times (May 25, 2013).
As described in GOP Census Bill Would Eliminate Key Economic Indicators, Huff. Post (May 26, 2013), the only purpose of H.R. 1639, the bill introduced by Jeff Duncan (R-SC), appears to be to ensure that the government does not have reliable data on the many important indicators of the health of the economy, from housing and health to crime, employment and the environment.
A spokesman for Duncan declined to explain why the congressman wants to eliminate such data or even whether he understands that the data would be compromised by his bill, which has 10 co-sponsors.
But the proposed Census Reform Act is explicit in its intent to end nearly every survey the Census conducts, mandating the “repeal” of the nation’s agricultural census, economic census, government census and mid-decade census. It would also bar the bureau from carrying out the American Community Survey(ACS), which the House voted last year to end, although the Senate let that measure die.
There is very little done by the government or big businesses that does not at some level depend on the reams of information provided by the Census surveys, from writing regulations and distributing federal services to rolling out new products and finding customers. The ACS is an ongoing survey that collects data every month, instead of every 10 years, so that governments and businesses have current information. Id.
Because it bars the Secretary of Commerce and the Census Bureau from carrying out “any survey, sampling, or questionnaire”, the bill would effectively hamstring the government’s ability to gather any kind of information other than a numerical count of population. Note that this would also include all of the information collected by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, since those statistics are generally gathered through the U.S. Census Bureau. See, e.g., Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey. To get a further sense of the importance of the information provided through the Department of Labor with Census Bureau support, see this page showing the subject categoriesof Labor statistics collected. Some information collected by the Census Bureau is also used by the Department of Health and Human Services, although DHHS surveys are so specialized that the department has an extensive set of specialized surveys that various of its agencies conduct. (Let’s hope Duncan doesn’t notice them, or he will set out to gut that agency, too.)
A similar bill was introduced in the Senate by Rand Paul (R-KY) which specifically targets the American Community Survey–the frequently updated survey that gathers information anonymously and provides a wealth of data about economic trends across the country. See Poe press release; see also Huff Post, Rand Paul, Ted Poe Sponsor Bill that Seeks Religion Law that Already Exists (May 25, 2013) (noting that a 1976 law already ensures that answers about religion on the Census are voluntary, but the Paul/Poe bill gratuitiously includes the same provision again).
Paul claims the mandatory survey is too intrusive–he wants it to be “voluntary”. Voluntary surveys get low participation rates, particularly in some geographic areas. The data needs are universal–having gaping holes where there were too many dropouts to give the survey statistical validity would be a huge problem. But Paul doesn’t care–he’s too busy scoring Tea Party points with anarcho-libertarians who’ve been brought up (since Reagan) to think that “government is the enemy”, while at the same time benefitting from billions in government aid because of these very surveys. And too busy using terms like “protect Americans” (from the Poe Press Release) in hypocritical ways that have nothing to do with protecting anybody but the elite–since the result of not having the ACS survey will be to allow more misleading pronouncements to go unchecked by data. Like Sarah Palin’s ignorant assertions about Alaskan self-sufficiency (when more federal tax dollars go to Alaska than come from it), these anti-tax/anti-government claims are mere posturing that misleads ill-informed people to support policies that favor the elite. As the HuffPost article notes,
[T]he 14 largest counties in Poe’s state of Texas received more than $14 billion in federal funding in 2008 based on ACS data, according to a recent Brookings Institution study. Id.
Without such data, it would be harder to show the failure of the laughable tax-cuts-for-the-rich/austerity-for-everybody-else policies of the rightwing in Congress and in state legislatures. Take, for example, the recent reporting about the way the GOP legislatures that have decided NOT to expand Medicaid will leave the most vulnerable poor in the lurch (yet again) as far as receiving health care that all of us need and most of us take for granted. The better off will receive the benefit intended by Obamacare, but the worst off will remain vulnerable in those recalcitrant states where the GOP runs the show with the “ignorance-is-bliss” mentality. Without the kind of regular information collected by the Census Bureau and in particular the American Community Survey, the government won’t be able to track results of these Red State “experiments” in austerity to show how much like Third World countries their states become regarding poverty, unemployment, and all the other economic indicators provided by the census.
This ostrich-with-tits-head-in-the-sand mentality makes sense only if the ideas you support are purely ideological ones, for which data is irrelevant. As Maurine Haver, head of Haver Analytics, noted to a reporter:
[T]here is a fundamental divide between people who are interested in solid, reality-based data and those who are not. “If you know what you think, you don’t need information to help you assess what’s going on,” she said. “The people that need information are the people who use it because they really want the truth, not people who think that because they believe it, it becomes the truth.” Id.(paragraphing changed and italics added).
Of late, that seems to be the position of the Tea Party reps in Congress, like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and too many others. And they don’t care about the ensuing harm to ordinary folk from their efforts.
Need more proof of the ostrich-plus-cowboy mentality? Just look at the fight breaking out in Congress between Ted Cruz and the rest of the Tea Party cohort with the somewhat more sensible GOP members like John McCain over the debt ceiling. Kusskin-Shoptaw, McCain, Tea Party Senators Squabble over Debt Ceiling Procedures, Bloomberg.com (May 22, 2013).
Once again, the Tea Party is willing to run the United States off a cliff over an artificial fiscal limit that is, in the actual economic scheme of things, meaningless except as a stage for such masquerades about fiscal responsibility concerns. The Party of No wants to Know Nothing to disguise its “bankrupt the US to get at the liberals” ideology in the sheep’s clothing of a fake “we care about economic responsibility” policy initiative.
Freedom does NOT reside in allowing brute force economic might to set the rules. Freedom is having government institutions that work and are subject to the will of the people. So that when 81% of the American public want gun check legislation, Congress listens to the people instead of to the well-funded NRA. So that when a majority of the American people don’t want corporate funding to be siphoned to campaigns behind the closed doors of erroneous 501(c)(4) status, IRS employees are allowed to do their work to find “parties” that are circumventing politicking disclosure requirements rather than being hung out to twist in the wind under a fake “scandal” created by the ideological anti-tax right. So that when agencies allocate resources or describe results of economic legislation, they have accurate data to do so. Freedom does not rest in willful ignorance.
Linda:
Minor correction, it is the “Party of ‘No’rquist.”
I really hope Linda’s legal writing is better than these rambling commentaries.
FWIW, Linda works in the most corrupt city/county in the country, which has been led 98% or so by Democrats for about 40 years. Perhaps she could address that just once.
STB:
Allow me to answer this again. Detroit’s problems with corrupt are no different than what has happened in other cities such as Chicago where I grew up.
I would suggest there is more to this than just corruption causing the decline in Detroit. Other cities faced similar corruption and somehow managed to survive in spite of it. The city that worked under white Mayor Richard Daley had its years of corruption and managed to survive.
Intertwined with corruption there are other key and more important elements to this decline in the status of Detroit which I have posted on before and I will reiterate here again. With a very clear economic basis; I can say without Detroit, those wealthy and white neighborhoods surrounding it would never have come into being and would be little more than truck farms today. In WHITE FLIGHT” TO THE SUBURBS: A DEMOGRAPHIC APPROACH ;Frey was able to confirm partially his hypotheses.
Perhaps, you also missed the legal story of Milliken vs Bradley? This court ruling and the resulting deterioration of Detroit adds to Frey’s points. This ruling closed the door on Detroit early on and well before corruption became a synonym for Detroit. What was allowed to happen in Minneapolis St.Paul was closed to Detroit. I can not think of many other rulings having such a disastrous impact other than Marquette Nat. Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp or the Untied Citizens ruling. Economically Detroit was cut off from the rest of the state through arbitrary state policy and the court system. One can wonder why or just assume NIMBY when it comes to race.
Recognizing that segregation was also extremely prevalent in Detroit’s school system, and that largely black schools performed much more poorly than largely white schools, the Detroit Board of Education passed an order in 1970 that would have bused white children to black schools, and vice-versa. A locally based recall campaign followed, and the state passed a law that voided the plan and kept school districts under neighborhood control.
Later that year, the NAACP sued the state and the school board in federal District Court, arguing that, as in Brown v. Board of Education, separate was not equal, and that the policies of the state and school board had deliberately kept the school system segregated. The case was entitled Milliken v. Bradley.
The district court found in favor of the NAACP and ordered the school district to draft a desegregation plan. The city presented the court with three different Detroit-wide plans, all of which the court rejected. The court then ruled that it was not possible to desegregate the Detroit Public School System without including the suburban communities. The city was ordered to submit a “metropolitan” plan that would eventually encompass a total of fifty-four separate school districts, busing Detroit children to suburban schools and suburban children into Detroit.
On appeal, however, the Supreme Court ruled against the NAACP. Even though the organization had presented evidence of housing segregation that operated on a metropolitan level, Chief Justice William Burger claimed that “the case does not present any question concerning possible state housing violations,” and Justice Potter Stewart, who cast the key fifth vote dooming a metropolitan remedy, asserted that housing segregation was caused by “unknown and unknowable causes.”
The impact of the case was enormous. According to Gary Orfield and Susan E. Eaton in their 1996 book Dismantling Desegregation, “By failing to examine housing, the Court gave neighborhoods that had successfully segregated their housing an exemption from school desegregation requirements. City neighborhoods that had not excluded, blacks, on the other hand, faced mandatory desegregation.” The court effectively blessed suburbs with all-white schools as “refuges for whites fearful of minorities moving into their schools,” Orfield and Eaton wrote. More generally, according to Dismantling Desegregation, the “Supreme Court’s failure to examine the housing underpinnings of metropolitan segregation” in Milliken made desegregation “almost impossible” in northern metropolitan areas. “Suburbs were protected from desegregation by the courts ignoring the origin of their racially segregated housing patterns.”
Detroit’s tax-base had already fallen significantly by 1970, while the suburbs were experiencing strong growth. In his 1976 State of the State address, then-Governor Milliken proposed that the Detroit area adopt a similar model. “There was a recognition that the unequal patterns of growth were going to continue unless something was changed,” said Robert Kleine, who served as the director of the Office of Revenue and Tax Analysis for the State of Michigan under Milliken.
But Milliken’s plan was never even taken up in the state legislature. According to Kleine, suburban municipalities were deeply resistant to the idea. He acknowledged, too, that no one advocated strongly on behalf of the proposal from the city, and that Milliken did not press the issue in the face of that resistance and apathy.
Had such a system been adopted, however, “What would have happened of course is that all the growth in the region, which was mainly in [neighboring] Oakland and Macomb Counties, would have been shared with the City of Detroit,” Kleine said. “That would have meant somewhat less revenue for some of the suburbs, but they would have done just fine. But Detroit would have had a substantial amount of additional revenue.”
As Remapping Debate has reported, the decline in Detroit’s tax base represents the greatest challenge to the city’s ability to sustain itself. It has responded to the loss in revenue by cutting services down to bare-bones and by raising taxes to the highest levels in the state. Kleine said that a regional tax-base sharing system would have mitigated the problem’s Detroit has faced with revenue.
Additionally, Orfield added, a fragmented system of taxation encourages individual municipalities to compete with one another by lowering taxes. “That competition has been very destructive in Detroit, because the city has had to keep its tax rates high to maintain services, while the suburbs have been able to draw people and investment out of the city by lowering taxes,” a process that encourages sprawl. WHITE FLIGHT Squandered Opportunities Leave Detroit Isolated In effect, the city has been isolated from the belt of suburbs around it by law, by race, by education, and by economics. Due to isolation, the city can not compete with the suburbs around it and grow its tax base to improves its schools and infrastructure leaving it little more opportunity than the destruction of abandoned buildings and a shrinking city limit. Finally STB; if anything, the author has the strength in character to live in Detroit which many of us would not choose to do being safely snuggled into our suburbia utopia.
Rusty
If you have a legitimate critique to offer regarding Linda’s post then do so. To suggest that the post is poorly written is to say nothing. Be specific regarding the flaws that you’re suggesting are throughout the post. Or can’t you come up with any real criticism given the truth of the issue that Linda discusses in the post? The post addresses a serious threat to the collection of data about our country and economy. It highlights yet another impractical adventure on the part of the Congress under the leadership of a political party at war with the government it controls to a large extent by its majority in the House and its uncooperativeness in the Senate.
Your remarks about Detroit, or for that matter any failings that might be laid at the feet of a Democrat have nothing to do with Linda’s thesis. The Congress is under siege from its own members. Ignorance has become the rule for debate. Your flippant comment is an example of that ill advised approach to political debate.
Jack
actually Rusty, and Run, make a point that I don’t know how to make without sounding like a racist. Let me just suggest that you can’t force people to be intelligent, or kind. To the extent that liberals cannot come up with clever solutions that don’t involve terrifying people in their deepest fears… prejudices… they give away the government to those who exploit those fears.
I would bet real dollars that the same people who wouldn’t put up with bussing, would put up with “equal financing.” I could be wrong about that, but it’s what I would try. And with equal financing we would hope that the situation would gradually change so that the moderately (very moderately) well off would have less to fear from the desperately poor.
Then I hasten to add that I am not sure we can hope for much change from the voters. At first I thought that voting machines had rendered the people’s real opinions irrelevant, but then Obama showed us how people could vote in great numbers for a better policy, only to win the election and lose the policy.
And just so you don’t take me seriously, i am more than half convinced that the government is in the hands of nihilists.. if that’s the word for people who don’t care about other people, or the country, who would in fact … perhaps unknown to themselves … want to see the world fall into chaos with the maximum suffering to others as a kind of revenge for their own personal disappointments.
Rusty is absolutely right. This is a rant. Every other sentence is a unsupported insult of everything conservative.
It reads like a comment of a deranged person, living on the streets, off her meds, than than a main post.