PPI President Will Marshall today discussed the “Hill Democrats Entitlement Mentality” in a post for Politico’s Arena today.
“House liberals, on the other hand, want to use “protecting Medicare” as a cudgel against GOP opponents in next year’s elections. That’s understandable, but can Democrats really afford to torpedo prospects for long-term debt reduction to win a few marginal House districts?”
Read the full post here.
Graduation season is upon us, but the approximately 1.3 million high school students who dropped out this year won’t be hearing “Pomp and Circumstance.” These dropouts are disproportionately black and Hispanic, and overwhelmingly poor. Since failing to finish school contributes mightily to poverty and inequality in America, increasing high school graduation rates should be an urgent national priority.
Why do so many poor kids drop out? Some dwell on low expectations and a lack of motivation among kids who struggle to learn, get frustrated and eventually give up. But lately researchers have drawn attention to an under-appreciated reason that students drop out: pregnancy. Among dropouts, 30 percent of girls cite pregnancy or parenthood as a key reason they left school. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, only 51 percent of teen moms earn a high school diploma compared to 89 percent of female students who did not give birth as a teen. The picture is even worse for the youngest mothers: just 38 percent of teen girls who have a child before they turn 18 have a high school diploma. For these teens, the task of balancing their education and a baby proved impossible.
Focusing on curbing the teen pregnancy problem will most certainly put a dent in the number of school dropouts. While teen pregnancy often causes students to drop out, being engaged in school can reduce instances of teen pregnancy. Teens who stay in school and are academically involved are less likely to get pregnant than their peers who aren’t as engaged. In other words, dropping out also increases the chances that a teen will get pregnant.
Unplanned pregnancy and childbearing are also implicated in the failure of many young women to finish their college education. Research shows that 61 percent of women who have children in community college don’t finish their degree, and less than two percent of teen mothers who have a baby before age 18 get a college degree by age 30.
The nexus between getting pregnant and dropping out adds yet another example to the dismal catalog of social ills that stem from family breakdown and too-early childbearing. Within three years of having a child, about one-quarter of teen moms go on welfare. Children of teen mothers are more likely to suffer abuse, end up in prison, and drop out of high school. High school dropouts are also more likely to rely on welfare and have higher crime and incarceration rates.
While teen birth rates in the United States plummeted by 37 percent between 1991 and 2009, the dramatic decrease may have fed a premature sense of complacency about the issue. There was actually an uptick of teen pregnancies between 2005 and 2007, when the rate rose five percent. In any case, the teen pregnancy epidemic is far from over. In 2009, about 410,000 teen girls aged 15 to 19 gave birth with the majority being Hispanic or African-American. What’s more, America’s teen pregnancy rate is up to nine times higher than that of most developed nations.
Now some social analysts worry that funding for teen pregnancy prevention will be a casualty of budget-cutting fever in Washington. An especially frightening proposition given that teen pregnancy prevention is already dealing with a short stack. In 2010, Congress appropriated $110 million for evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention programs. Meanwhile, the U.S. spends, nationally, nearly $11 billion each year to remediate the social consequences of teen pregnancy.
Yet House Republicans tried to eliminate this modest $110 million investment for FY 2011.They also tried to cut funding entirely for Title X, which is instrumental in helping provide teens and low income women with contraceptives and reducing the number of unintended pregnancies, teen pregnancies, and abortions. If Republicans are really serious about reducing the deficit, they need to realize that investing in teen pregnancy prevention saves money over time and resist cutting this funding. Because of the overall decrease in teen pregnancy rates, taxpayers saved $8.4 billion in 2008 alone.
The school dropout crisis isn’t cheap either — if graduation rates don’t improve, dropouts will cost us $3 trillion over the next decade. Cutting funding for teen pregnancy prevention means more dropouts, which means losses in tax revenue and more spending on welfare, prison costs, and Medicaid, to name a few.
Progressives ought to “just say no” to GOP efforts to balance the budget on the backs of America’s most vulnerable families. In fact, we’ll save money over the long run by investing more in cost-effective teen pregnancy programs. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has a list of such successful prevention programs here. Investing in them will pay double dividends, reducing both teen pregnancy and mitigating its related ills – including the drop out crisis.
Republicans are crying foul over Democrats’ resort to “Mediscare” tactics to win an open House seat in New York. Democrats are chortling because they think the GOP’s heretofore unstoppable austerity offensive may have met its Stalingrad.
All this is diverting to aficionados of partisan thrust-and-parry in Washington. But the rest of the country may be less amused. By adhering to unbending, absolutist positions on Medicare and taxes, could Democrats and Republicans be cracking open the door to a serious third party challenge in 2012?
On Tuesday, Democrat Kathy Hochul won a traditionally Republican House seat in upstate New York in a special election. She relentlessly linked her GOP opponent to Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan for making deep cuts in Medicare while preserving the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Many Democrats now see this as the winning formula for next year’s elections.
Ryan complained yesterday that Democrats are “shamelessly demagoguing and distorting” his plan. It was hard to feel any sympathy for the earnest House Budget Commission chairman, however, since Republicans in 2010 spent millions on ads shamelessly blasting Democratic candidates for backing the proposed Medicare cuts in Obamacare. There’s actual double hypocrisy at work here, since Ryan’s Medicare proposal works through the same health exchanges Republicans find so objectionable in Obama’s plan.
Being called a demagogue by the party of death panels and death taxes is like being called ugly by a crab.
Nonetheless, Democrats need to resist the temptation to pay back their opponents in kind. They need to retain the flexibility to slow down Medicare’s cost growth, which as Bill Clinton said yesterday at the Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit, is the sine qua non of any serious proposal to reduce federal deficits and debt.
Medicare spending is by far the biggest driver of federal spending growth. Together with Social Security, it represents nearly one-third of federal spending. According to the Social Security and Medicare Trustees, the government is slated to transfer over $3.4 trillion in general revenues to Medicare by 2020. This problem needs to be tackled now, even if it complicates Democrats’ ability to run on “Medagoguery” in 2012.
Meanwhile, “progressives” aren’t helping by running a ridiculously over-the-top ad showing a Ryan look-alike pitching a wheelchair-bound granny off a cliff. True progressives believe in solving the nation’s core dilemmas, not fetishizing the status quo. Cutting the nation’s debts down to manageable size will require both higher revenues and lower rates of entitlement spending growth.
If Democrats and Republicans can’t produce a fix along these lines, they practically invite the 2012 version of Ross Perot into the race.
Presidential politics was again the focus of Wingnut World last week, as conservative opinion-leaders took the opportunity to savage Mitt Romney for his adamant defense of the Massachusetts health reform plan, while mulling over the decision of controversial fellow-traveler Mike Huckabee to stay on the sidelines in 2012.
Romney took the calculated risk of delivering a self-hyped “major speech” on health reform at the University of Michigan, apparently in hopes that a definitive statement on the subject would flush out and eventually diminish conservative anger at him on the subject before Republicans actually begin voting next year. It certainly flushed out negative opinions on the Right. Even before the speech was delivered, Romney took a pounding from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which rightly predicted he would refuse to back down on the wisdom of backing a state reform plan that included an individual insurance purchasing mandate and other features associated with “ObamaCare.” The title of the op-ed says it all: “Obama’s Running Mate.”
The speech itself was a hodge-podge of arguments and rationalizations. Romney alternated between what progressive health wonk Jonathan Cohn called an “inspiring” defense of his reasoning in signing the Massachusetts law, and less-than-compelling claims that the law had no implications for national health policy. The conservative commentariat has long since rejected as inadequate his “federalism defense” that “RomneyCare” was a system designed for Massachusetts only, which is unsurprising since the individual mandate is the specific target of a host of state lawsuits aimed at overturning ObamaCare. Moreover, the proto-candidate’s effort to change the subject to what he would propose as president after a theoretical repeal of national health reform legislation drew virtually no attention, probably because he simply endorsed every conventional conservative gimmick of recent years—a tax credit for the purchase of individual insurance policies, preemption of state regulation of private health insurance via interstate sales, and medical malpractice reform.
Only time will tell if Team Romney is right that hostility to RomneyCare will burn itself out, much as John McCain’s many past heresies against conservative orthodoxy were ultimately forgiven in 2008, leaving Republican elites to focus on his superior “electability.” But Romney’s not off to a very good start. Among his tormenters after the speech were the editors of National Review, who gave him a crucial endorsement in 2008. After rejecting Romney’s federalism argument that an individual mandate was acceptable at the state level, his one-time fans at NR made this brutal assessment of the political thinking behind the speech:
We understand that Romney does not feel that he can flip-flop on what he had touted as his signature accomplishment in office. But if there is one thing we would expect a successful businessman to know, it is when to walk away from a failed investment.
This is in synch with the advice Romney has been receiving from Sen. Jim DeMint of SC, another key 2008 supporter who is vastly more influential today.
Later in the week, conservative chattering class attention was diverted to Romney’s 2008 nemesis, Mike Huckabee, who stage-managed an announcement of non-candidacy on his Fox show Saturday after touching off an orgy of confused speculation about his plans by issuing a variety of mixed signals.
His Saturday show was quite a spectacle. It included a derisive panel discussion of Romney’s health care speech, a bizarre interview with right-wing rocker Ted Nugent—who discussed his proposal to unleash the Navy Seals to “secure” U.S. borders with mega-violence—who then took the stage to perform “Cat Scratch Fever” with Huck on bass, followed by a videotaped benediction from Donald Trump. Near the end of the show, Huckabee faced the cameras and detailed all the reasons he should run for president, before divulging that God had persuaded him otherwise via prayer.
For all the hype and the alleged divine intervention, Huck’s decision was precisely what the conventional wisdom had long predicted, mainly because of his palpable reluctance to give up the Fox show and a new-found personal wealth to go trudging through the pot-luck dinner circuit of Iowa once again. At fifty-five, Huckabee is also young enough to consider running in 2016 or even later.
Assessments of the impact on the 2012 race of Huckabee’s non-candidacy have been mixed, but there’s a general consensus that it provides an opening for other outspoken social conservative in Iowa, while limiting the southerners in the field to the not-very-southern Newt Gingrich and African-American Herman Cain. In both respects, this could be very good news for smart-money favorite Tim Pawlenty, who is by all accounts out-organizing his rivals in Iowa and is clearly acceptable to the Christian Right and can now seriously contemplate a breakthrough in southern states beginning with South Carolina.
Speaking of Tim Pawlenty and South Carolina, a fascinating subplot in the presidential contest has been unfolding after Gov. Nikki Haley demanded that all the candidates side with her in attacks on the National Labor Relations Board, which has at least temporarily stopped the relocation of jobs by Boeing from Washington to SC in the wake of disputes with the machinists union. Haley, it should be noted, has trumped the usual conservative bashing of public-sector unions by arguing that private-sector unionism is incompatible with economic growth (she appointed a “management” labor attorney as her state labor department chief with the explicit mission of keeping unions out of the state to the maximum extent possible). Pawlenty won the race to first kiss Haley’s ring on the Boeing issue, though the other candidates are quickly following. This helps reinforce the impression that Pawlenty’s strategy—ironically, much like Mitt Romney’s in 2008—is to supplement his “moderate-governor-of-a-blue-state” background with an effort to do whatever he is told by conservative activists. He hasn’t turned them down yet.
As progressives pounce on Rep. Paul Ryan’s new budget proposal, they should also give the man a little credit. The plan he unveiled today is a daring attempt to define an actual conservative governing philosophy. That’s a big improvement on the reactionary and crotchety anti-government platitudes served up by the Tea Party.
And while progressives will rightly reject Ryan’s overall plan as draconian and unfair, they ought to keep an open mind about some of its most audacious elements, especially his ideas for controlling public health care spending.
For better or worse, the House Budget Committee Chairman has produced a coherent vision for limited government. It would sharply cut domestic spending, returning it to 2008 levels, reduce federal deficits by more than $4 trillion over the next decade, and hold federal spending below 20 percent of gross domestic product. It would further roll back the state and buttress “individual responsibility” by repealing Obamacare.
Ryan embraces President Obama’s Fiscal Commission proposal to cut tax expenditures and use the proceeds to bring the top individual and corporate income tax rate down to 25 percent. But unlike the commission’s approach, which commits a chunk of the savings to deficit reduction, Ryan makes his revenue neutral in obeisance to the Prime Ideological Imperative of today’s GOP: taxes must never, on any account, be raised.
Ryan’s most controversial proposals are also his most intriguing. In what he describes as a continuation of the bipartisan welfare reforms of the 1990s, he would convert Medicaid, which provides health insurance to poor families, into a block grant. Currently its costs are shared by the federal and state governments. As critics like Ezra Klein point out, a block grant is a device to limit federal health spending, shifting costs to states and individuals. It’s true that a block grant alone doesn’t constitute “reform” of Medicaid. But in tandem with reforms in health care delivery, especially efforts to move from fee-for-service to capitated “accountable care organizations,” a block grant could dampen inflationary pressures and protect taxpayers against the automatic and unsustainable growth of public health care spending.
Similarly, Ryan proposes to control Medicare costs by replacing open-ended subsidies with a “premium support” model. Under this approach – essentially a voucher, despite Ryan’s denials – Washington would give Medicare recipients a set amount (varying according to income and health status) they could use to buy insurance from competing private plans. Although Republicans wrongly assume that competition alone will drive down health costs – again, changing incentives to focus medical spending on the value rather than the volume of care is the key — premium support at least puts a governor on the engine of mandatory public health care spending, the main driver of America’s debt crisis.
Some liberals undoubtedly will see it as a plot to destroy Medicare. But recall that a bipartisan Medicare reform commission President Bill Clinton created in 1998 came close to embracing premium support. It’s also been endorsed by leading Democrats, including former CBO chief Alice Rivlin, and is part of the Rivlin-Domenici deficit reduction plan. In fact, as part of a more comprehensive strategy to contain health care costs, a Medicaid block grant and premium support for Medicare could serve a progressive purpose, by preventing rapid entitlement spending growth from squeezing vital public investments in children and families, scientific research, infrastructure and a clean environment.
On Social Security, Rep. Ryan disappointingly punts, proving no bolder than the White House. And as certified fiscal hawk David Walker points out, the Ryan plan does not include substantial savings in defense spending, and raises not a penny in new revenues to help the nation whittle down its enormous debts.
In other words, it’s an unbalanced plan, morally and politically, that gives the Pentagon and the wealthy a pass, and concentrates the pain of deficit reduction on middle and low-income families. The Fiscal Commission’s approach, broadly endorsed by 32 Republican and 32 Democrats Senators – if not yet by Obama himself – is infinitely preferable as a starting point for a serious debate.
Nonetheless, the Ryan plan puts conservatives’ ideological cards on the table and helps clarify the trade offs that must be made to strike a bipartisan deal. And it contains some ideas for ensuring that public budgets aren’t swamped by runaway health costs – ideas that progressives ought not to reject out of hand.
In a fairly predictable development, the Republican Party and the conservative movement are showing some signs of division over strategy and tactics, if not much in the way of ideological diversity. The latest indication of underlying fissures was the loss of 54 House Republicans in the vote to enact a second short-term continuing appropriations resolution.
Many observers will likely attribute those “no” votes to a Tea Party-bred determination to maximize budget cuts and intimidate Democrats, and there’s some truth to that. But the real story is that much of the angst on the Right about budget and appropriations negotiations isn’t about levels of spending, or even the size of government, but about the ideological hobby-horses embedded in the earlier House-passed appropriations bill (H.R. 1) that the Senate quickly rejected.
Two of the ringleaders of the House conservative revolt on spending, the hardy duo of Michele Bachmann of MN and Steve King of IA, sent out an encyclical explaining their vote in advance. They swore perpetual opposition to any appropriations measure that did not “defund” last year’s health reform legislation—not just money appropriated to implement it, but mandatory spending (e.g., through Medicaid and Medicare) required by it. Bachmann and King, then, don’t even think the radical appropriations bill passed earlier by the House went far enough, because it did not accomplish their ideological goals.
Overlapping with the “ObamaCare” obsession on the Right has been the fear that House Republicans won’t follow through with the assault on family planning services and other cultural targets encompassed in the original House-passed appropriations bill. Cultural conservative groups have been rattling sabers about this from the very beginning of the appropriations struggle, as noted by People for the American Way:
Religious Right anti-choice activists are continuing to draw a line in the sand, and dozens of them – including Tony Perkins, Tom Minnery, Penny Nance, Phyllis Schlafly, Charmaine Yoest, Richard Land, Marjorie Dannenfelser, Andrea Lafferty, and Bob Vander Plaats – have signed on to a new letter to Speaker Boehner and Rep. Eric Cantor to ostensibly thank them for supporting efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and remind them that this issue is “non-negotiable.”
Certainly some GOP pols are taking such threats seriously. As Politico’s David Catanese explained, the more ambitious among them largely joined the rebels:
A breakdown of Tuesday’s vote on a three-week budget bill to keep the government operating shows that a slew of House members considering promotions to a statewide office in 2012 bucked their parties.
The fascinating floor count reveals the complicated and risky political implications across the country surrounding a vote that temporarily avoids a shutdown.
Nine Republicans currently running or seriously considering Senate or gubernatorial bids bucked House leadership and voted “no.”
They include Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, Florida Rep. Connie Mack, New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce — all who have been mentioned as potential Senate candidates, as well as Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake, Nevada Rep. Dean Heller and Montana Rep. Denny Rehberg, who have each announced bids for the upper chamber.
Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, also a “no” vote, is likely to run for governor.
This dynamic should be duly noted by those who persistently think Republicans facing tough electoral competition wish to “move to the center” and cooperate with Democrats. Even if that were the case, Republicans have to survive primary competition, and many now have become convinced by the 2010 results that harsh conservatism awakens a conservative majority in the general electorate.
In any event, as House Republicans, Senate Democrats and the White House struggle towards some sort of compromise on FY 2011 appropriations, it will be important to remember that numbers aren’t everything in this fight. Many conservative activists view this as an ideal opportunity to grind axes and settle old scores, and a full-fledged revolt could ensue if Republican leaders sacrifice their pet causes in pursuit of an agreement .
Speaking of the views of conservative activists, Public Policy Polling has a new national survey of self-identified Republicans out, and it’s interesting in several respects.
First of all, the poll breaks out Republicans into the 69 percent who are regular viewers of Fox News, and the 31 percent who are not. The non-Fox viewers are rather notably less conservative, and certainly less supportive of conservative pols, than their Fox-watching counterparts. For example, Newt Gingrich’s favorable-unfavorable ratio among Fox-watching Republicans is 59-24. But it’s 31-49 among non-Fox-watching Republicans. That’s a very big swing.
The poll also shows exactly how big a problem Mitt Romney faces on his health policy problem. Asked if they would “willing to vote for someone who supported a bill at the state level mandating that voters have health insurance for President,” fully 61 percent said no, while only 17 percent said yes. The very idea of a mandate, even without reference to Obama’s health reform initiative, attracts considerable hostility. And there’s no way around the fact that Romney has supported and still supports a mandate.
But perhaps the most striking number in the PPP survey is that one-fourth of self-identified Republicans think that the community organizing group ACORN is going to steal the 2012 election for Barack Obama. ACORN, of course, went out of business nearly a year ago. It takes a special kind of determination to believe that this never-more-than-marginal group somehow represents a threat to democracy from the grave.
It’s not exactly Sophie’s choice, but you have to admit there’s something a little poignant about Mitt Romney’s dilemma. To win the GOP nomination for president, he’s being forced by Tea Party types to distance himself from his greatest public achievement – making Massachusetts the first state in the union to achieve universal health care.
To mask this abject act of self-repudiation, Romney is attacking Obamacare with unwonted ideological zeal. “Obamacare is bad law constitutionally, bad policy and it is bad for America’s families,” he assured a group of New Hampshire Republicans over the weekend. Ladling on the conservative boilerplate, he added, “The federal government isn’t the answer for running health care any more than it’s the answer for running Amtrak or the Post Office.”
The problem for Romney – as his presidential rivals gleefully keep reminding conservatives — is that Romneycare is the policy template for Obamacare. It has the same basic architecture: a menu of competing private health care options (“exchanges” in the federal law, the “Connector” in Massachusetts), public subsidies for those who need them, and an individual mandate requiring all adults to buy medical coverage. The biggest difference between the two approaches, ironically, is that Obamacare is a lot tougher on containing health care costs than the Massachusetts law.
Nationally, about 15 percent of Americans (roughly 45 million) lack basic health care coverage. Thanks to Romneycare, it’s less than three percent in Massachusetts. Romney says he’s proud of that accomplishment, but Massachusetts may have to file a paternity suit to get him to own up to the individual mandate.
Romney’s disingenuous attempts to disavow the obvious similarities between his approach and the President’s aren’t doing much for his reputation for intellectual honesty. Given conservatives’ fanatical loathing for the President’s bill – “Repealing Obamacare is the driving motivation of my life,” avers Minnesota Republican and Tea Party pin-up Rep. Michele Bachmann – Romney evidently feels the bill he hammered out with Massachusetts Democrats poses an existential threat to his candidacy.
So the GOP front-runner is seeking refuge in federalism: “One thing I would never do is to usurp the constitutional power of states with a one-size-fits-all federal takeover,” he said in New Hampshire. Let me get this straight: it’s OK for states to adopt a “socialist” approach to universal coverage, including the heartily despised individual mandate, as long as it’s not foisted on them by Washington?
Maybe Romney will find a way to persuade conservatives to forgive him for governing effectively in a deep-died blue state. But at what cost? Let’s face it, Romney is basically a pragmatic problem-solver, not a right-wing ideologue. Pretending to be otherwise will cast further doubt on his authenticity as a candidate, even if it’s the only way to run in today’s radicalized Republican Party.
Well, that was quick. Rather than risk a mutiny, House Republican leaders have agreed to now cut $100 billion from the $1.1 trillion federal budget, rather than their original plan of a mere $40 billion. The question is: Can they pull it off? And if they do, will they come to regret it?
Yesterday, I predicted a coming Republican crack-up based on the premise that the Young Turks of the Tea Party are out to take a stand (gosh darnit!) against big government, but it’s a stand that’s not compatible with the continued electoral success of the Republican Party. And the spending cuts are a perfect example.
Say Republican leaders are indeed serious about cutting $100 billion. Where will they cut? A new Pew poll found only two federal programs in which more respondents favored a decrease in spending than an increase: Global poverty assistance (45 percent for a decrease, 21 percent for an increase) and Unemployment assistance (28 percent for a decrease, 27 percent for an increase). Neither of these are big ticket items.
The only other area that is close to even is Defense (30 percent for a decrease, 31 percent for an increase). Defense accounts for about half of discretionary spending. But I’m guessing a good percentage of those 31 percent who want to increase the military are solid Republican base voters.
So here’s the hard reality: There is some serious bloodlust going around Washington about cutting the budget, in part because there is some serious bloodlust about cutting the budget in the Tea Party base. But when it comes down to the actual programs that will get cut, the picture changes.
You see, many voters are symbolic conservatives in that they like to say they are for things like small government and fiscal discipline. But when it comes to specific government programs, well, why would you go and cut my well-deserved Medicare benefits when you could be cutting federal salaries or aid to the poor? In fact, with the exception of federal pay and foreign aid or aid to the poor, it’s hard to find a single government program or funding source that any majority would support cutting.
Democrats, of course, know this, and are just waiting for Republicans to go wild with their proposed cuts – especially Senate Democrats, who will play the role of putting the pieces back together.
In the end, there are two likely scenarios. In one, Republican leaders hold to the Tea Party line, but play right into Democrats’ hands, demanding harsh cuts — and in the process they awaken all kinds of anxious voters who are now suddenly worried about protecting the programs that benefit them. In the other, Republicans compromise, but alienate the Tea Party contingent, leading to an internecine battle. Either way, it’s not gonna be a pretty scene for the GOP.
House Republicans start work today on their first big initiative – repealing President Obama’s health care reform. That the new GOP majority has made its top priority a purely symbolic and, let’s face it, vengeful act speaks volumes. Don’t expect the 112th Congress to be a model of legislative decorum and bipartisan comity.
Sobered like everyone else by the Tucson tragedy, Republicans have promised a “thoughtful” debate. But the sophomoric title of their bill – “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act” – gives the game away. Even Speaker John Boehner, supposedly the adult among the new class of conservative enfants terribles, can’t refrain from calling the Accountable Care Act “job crushing” and “job destroying” on his website.
In fact, while the new health care law has some flaws, wholesale destruction of jobs is probably not one of them. Although no one can credibly predict the net employment effects of this highly complex reform, it seems likely that adding 30 million new paying customers to health insurance markets would increase demand for medical services.
In any case, House leaders know they can’t undo the President’s health reform in toto, but nonetheless feel they have to give their militant cadres a chance to get animosity to Obamacare out of their system. Once the House passes the repeal bill, probably tomorrow, it will die in the Democratic Senate. Then Republicans will get down to the more serious business of trying to pick apart the Accountable Care Act piecemeal.
In GOP eyes, the ripest targets include the requirement that everyone buy health insurance, a new long-term care insurance program, and taxes on insurance companies. While few Democrats want to undo the party’s historic achievement in finally getting most Americans covered, some will likely join GOP efforts to kill or amend these provisions.
That’s especially true of the individual mandate. It is opposed by a majority of voters, and 20 states are challenging its constitutionality in the courts. Yet, as Republicans well know, it’s also the linchpin of reform. At the heart of Obamacare is a deal in which insurance companies agree to stop cherry picking healthy customers and denying affordable coverage to people with “preexisting conditions” in exchange for adding most of the uninsured to their customer base. The deal unravels without the mandate, because then only the sickest people would take advantage of the new law, driving up premiums for everyone. Democrats tempted to oppose the mandate should keep that in mind.
As House Republicans lash the mandate as an infringement on freedom that should stink in the nostrils of all liberty-loving Americans, a little history is in order. One reason we have an individual mandate is that Republicans have opposed alternative ways to extend coverage for all Americans. They successfully blocked President Clinton’s employer mandate in 1994. And of course, they vehemently object to a national health care system that insures everyone (and taxes them to pay for it) whether they want it or not.
In reality, no truly voluntary health scheme can get around the adverse selection problem. The individual mandate is an imperfect solution, but the right question is, compared to what? The “alternatives” advanced by the GOP last during the great debate over Obamacare did not even pretend to cover most of the uninsured.
As Jill Lawrence reports in Politics Daily, health policy analysts are thinking creatively about different ways to induce people to seek health insurance. But the last thing House Republicans want to do is to improve Obamacare. Their goal is evisceration.
That’s too bad, because the nation could use a serious debate about refinements in the $1 trillion Accountable Care Act. The new long-term health care benefit incorporated in the bill (the Class Act) does need a second look from budget-conscious lawmakers. It’s especially important that the Act’s rather weak cost containment provisions be strengthened. And there will be plenty of adjustments to be made as this enormous bill is implemented between now and 2014, when its main provisions fully kick in.
In short, a party serious about governing would seize the opportunity to make fundamental improvements in the 2010 health reform law. In embracing a rollback strategy instead, House Republicans have gotten off on the wrong foot.
Republicans are convinced they have a mandate to cut government down to size. That’s hard to do when you only control one House of Congress, and harder still when your fiscal plans are fraught with internal contradictions.
It’s not even clear, for instance, what Republicans really want to accomplish. Senator-elect Kelly Ayotte, delivering the GOP’s weekly address Jan. 1, said that “Job one is to stop wasteful Washington spending.” At the same time, she said that “Congress must get serious about meaningful debt reduction.”
So which is it—cut public spending or cut public deficits? That’s a distinction with a difference, especially to investors worried about the basic soundness of the U.S. economy. To them, deficits are simply the arithmetic result of government spending too much, taxing too little or both, as is clearly the case today. Last month, Republicans struck a deal with President Obama on a tax cut package that will add $950 billion to the nation’s debts. Key GOP House leaders have made it clear they will oppose any tax hikes to solve the budget crisis, which they pretend is purely a matter of overspending.
Ayotte seemed closer to the mark in saying Republicans come to Washington to “make government smaller, not bigger.” In practice, however, that ideological goal may not be compatible with what the public seems to want. Independent voters especially have focused on narrowing the enormous deficits that force America to get deeper and deeper in hock to Chinese and other foreign lenders.
And if Republicans are serious about taking taxes off the table, they’ll have to make even deeper cuts in public spending—including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—to close our yawning budget gaps. It will be interesting to see which GOP bravos are willing to walk that plank. Thus far, House Republicans are proposing only cosmetic cuts, like trimming the House budget by $25 million. It’s a good idea for the House to discipline its own spending, but in a $3 trillion budget, that’s chump change.
Meanwhile, the GOP is planning to vitiate budget caps imposed by the previous Congress. Under the caps, any new spending or tax cuts would have to be offset by equivalent spending cuts or tax hikes. Republicans would eliminate the later requirement, so that tax cuts too would trigger deeper spending cuts. This of course is a formula for a deepening fiscal crisis and intensifying polarization between the two parties. And House Republicans will take a run at repealing Obamacare, which would certainly reduce federal spending but actually increase future budget gaps. In any event, it’s not happening
Some of the more fervid Tea Party types are even threatening to vote against raising the debt ceiling in March if Democrats don’t agree to new spending cuts. If they are serious, this could mean America would default on its debts for the first time in history. It would be, as Obama’s chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, said yesterday, an act of political insanity, the equivalent of taking yourself hostage and threatening to shoot.
Finally, there’s the crucial question of timing. Incoming House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan reportedly is planning a package or rescissions aimed at cutting about 21 percent from 2011 spending Congress approved last year. The aim is to return domestic spending to its 2008 level, before Obama took office.
The risk is that withdrawing a significant chunk of fiscal stimulus could abort an economic recovery that at last seems to be getting traction. There’s no question that Americans want to restore fiscal discipline in Washington, but what they want even more is for the economy to grow and unemployment to start falling.
Goolsbee hinted that Obama’s next budget also will contain some spending cuts. But the GOP’s ideological zeal to cut government gives Obama an opportunity to offer a more pragmatic approach that puts jobs growth first, while taking balanced and gradual steps to put the federal government on a fiscally sustainable course.
Progressives do need to get serious about getting federal spending under control. But by framing the coming fiscal battles as a choice between a more robust economy and a smaller government, they can speak directly to Americans’ number one priority and thereby regain the political initiative.
The punditocracy apparently cannot resist the tendency to personalize political trends and developments. It has turned the midterm election into a political melodrama starring Barack Obama as the redeemer-President who inspired such soaring hopes in 2008, yet unaccountably failed to transform America in his first two years.
The saga of Obama agonistes may be more interesting, but public angst about the economy is what is really driving today’s election.
Sure, the president’s approval ratings are down (though not as low as Ronald Reagan’s or Bill Clinton’s at the same juncture). The public believes that the administration’s policies have failed to revive the economy, even while plunging the nation deeper in debt and, in the case of health care, expanding government’s reach.
But if unemployment were, at say, seven percent and trending downward, voters probably would see things in a more optimistic light. What’s oppressing the electorate is not the specter of big government, it’s the hangover from the 2007-2009 economic crisis, the worst to hit America since the Great Depression.
It’s not just lingering unemployment (9.6 percent). Americans lost roughly $11 trillion in net worth in those years, including about $4 trillion in home equity. Though stock prices rebounded somewhat, foreclosures continue apace and sales of new homes are at a 50-year low. Hammered by this “negative wealth effect,” U.S. households are shedding debt instead of spending, which depresses economic demand.
Our big banks still carry hundreds of billions of troubled loans on their books, and small businesses still have difficulty getting loans. U.S. businesses are keeping payrolls lean to cut costs, while sitting on nearly $2 trillion in retained earnings.
The federal government, meanwhile, seems to have exhausted the usual countercyclical remedies. With the national debt swelling rapidly, there’s little appetite in Washington for another dollop of stimulative spending (and will be even less if Republicans take over the House). The Federal Reserve says it’s ready for another round of “quantitative easing” – aka, printing money – but interest rates are already near zero.
The truth is, an economic downturn triggered by a financial crisis is much deeper and prolonged than an ordinary recession. No wonder voters are in a sour mood. They are lashing out at the party in power because the real culprits – the Republicans who were asleep at the switch as the housing and financial bubbles formed – aren’t around anymore to catch the blame. That’s not fair, but politics seldom is.
And while conventional wisdom pillories Obama for pushing health care or financial regulatory reform rather than spending every waking hour focusing obsessively on jobs, it’s not clear that would have made much of a difference.
The supposedly awesome powers of the presidency don’t include any magic levers for creating private sector jobs or dramatically speeding up recovery. In 1982, unemployment was even higher – 10.4 percent – on Election Day. Rather than promise instant relief, Reagan said the pain was necessary to wring inflation out of the economy and lay a stronger foundation for future growth. He urged Americans to “stay the course” and ride out the downturn. Republicans lost 26 House seats that year, but the economy eventually sprang back to life and propelled Reagan to a thumping reelection.
So Obama is right to stay calm, rather than running around the country trying to do something that doesn’t come naturally to him – emoting and feeling peoples’ pain. Instead, he should be crafting a new and more compelling economic narrative focused on unleashing American entrepreneurship and innovation. Forget Paul Krugman; Obama’s challenge is not to press for more stimulus or whine about economic inequality or posture as an anti-business populist, it’s to propose structural changes that will assure a broader, more robust economic recovery. These include an infrastructure bank, a new clean energy roadmap, pro-growth regulatory and tax reform (including corporate taxes), and a credible plan to restore fiscal stability once the economy regains strength.
Such a plan also is the best way to assure Democrats’ political recovery from the drubbing they will take today.
This post is the third in a series about the Progressive Military
The wounds from the healthcare debate in America are still fresh. There are many in the GOP Congressional minority that would see the healthcare bill repealed, and there has been much scare-mongering about a government-run healthcare system – that patients will be lost in the bureaucracy, they’ll lose control over their health decisions, the quality of care will suffer, and the costs will be tremendous.
If the Veterans Administration healthcare system is an example, those fears are overblown. The military’s government-run healthcare system is not just good in the field, it’s good at home as well and shows that government can do healthcare.
I was a customer of 100% government-run healthcare for eight years. I visited the emergency room, received all my shots and checkups, got my wisdom teeth pulled, and received my prescribed medication all without being killed or turned away by some bureaucrat. I received the same level of care everywhere, whether in Missouri, Washington, Germany, or Iraq. And not just me, my family as well. I’m not alone. There are over 1.4 million Americans on active duty in the U.S. military. If you include their family members, retirees, and those receiving Veterans Administration benefits, the number swells to over 9 million Americans already actively receiving government healthcare.
Active duty troops and their families use the 532 active military medical facilities nationwide and enroll in TRICARE, which is the military’s government-run healthcare system. Reservists called to active duty over 30 days are covered as well. For retirees, TRICARE fills the gap for what Medicare doesn’t cover. CHAMPVA gives the same coverage to family members of disabled or deceased service members no longer serving and gives them access to Veterans Administration hospitals. The Veterans Administration system (VA) coverage has changed from serving only troops with service-connected disabilities to serving all veterans based upon need. There are over 24 million Americans eligible for VA medical benefits at over 1000 facilities nationwide, 9 million of which are over 65.
It’s a well-known fact that the traumas caused on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan lead, by necessity, to innovations in trauma care. As an Iraq war veteran, I saw this in action personally with our combat medics, especially when they patched me up after suicide car-bomber hit my vehicle head-on. The military health system also develops medical technology, techniques, and procedures that can be used in the civilian world.
The Army’s National Trauma Institute, in cooperation with several universities, collects data from wounded soldiers to identify what can be done to improve their first-response treatment and will help not only on the battlefield, but in civilian hospitals as well. The military is making an exemplary push to digitize medical records in order to make them easier to search through and transfer between locations, not to mention saving money. This idea was picked up in the new healthcare legislation.
The uniformity of the military medical system also pays dividends in health safety against epidemics and pandemics, as exhibited by the fast and nearly-comprehensive immunization rate of soldiers against H1N1. Achieving such rates quickly among the civilian population would be improbable. I and many other soldiers are also vaccinated against diseases many in the civilian population are not anymore, namely small pox and anthrax. Our troops also get the flu shot at the beginning of every flu season. The military was the first to test the effectiveness of flu nasal-spray vaccinations compared with shots to reduce the use and cost of needles. This is done not just for their health, but also to save the system from having to pay more money for sick sailors and airmen later.
The military is devoted to preventing disease, illness, and injury not only because it they take troops off the field, but they also cost the system money. The U.S. Army Public Health Command and similar organizations in the other services are devoted exclusively to this mission.
If you contrast a system that has an interest in seeing that you to stay healthy because it saves them (the government) money with a system that makes money when you are sick, (insurance companies, HMOs) one can see that a pinch of prevention is worth a pound of cure. A similar government system implemented nationwide would save people money, improve their health, and save lives. If universal government-run healthcare is good enough for the troops, it’s good enough for us all.
It’s true the system is not perfect. There have been scandals surrounding military healthcare, such as the living conditions for recovering troops at Walter Reed Medical Center and veterans groups (some of which I am a member of) constantly push for improvements to the VA system. But in general the quality of military healthcare is very good, and proof that government-run healthcare can indeed work.
Photo credit: US Army Africa
It’s only taken six months for President Obama’s landmark health reform bill to go from stupendous historic achievement to political blunder. That anyway is the fast-congealing consensus among pundits who follow the polls.
Count me as skeptical. Even if health care doesn’t poll well now, that doesn’t mean Obama was wrong to make it a top priority. But, in an atmosphere colored by public anger over bailouts and a sluggish economic recovery, there’s no doubt that the bill, for now at least, is more of an albatross for the president than an asset.
According to pollster Douglas Schoen, 81 percent of independents express concern about a federal takeover of health care, and nearly three-quarters say it’s important that candidates back a repeal of the law. He calls health care an “unambiguous disaster” for Obama.
And Bill Galston reports on a new Gallup survey that finds voters by 56-43 disapprove of the health bill.
An AP poll reveals much confusion about health reform. More than half the public wrongly believes the bill will raise taxes this year, and a quarter think it sets up bureaucratic “death panels” to decide who gets or doesn’t get care.
No wonder Obama hit the hustings yesterday to clear the record and remind people of why they wanted health care reform in the first place.
But it’s clear, right, that Obama made a mistake in pushing so hard for health care reform and it distracted him from what most Americans care about, namely, fixing the economy? Actually, I don’t think it’s clear at all.
First, Obama pulled out all the stops to keep the economy from sliding into the abyss, but gets very little credit for it. On the contrary, his steps to rescue financial institutions are even less popular than health care, and his stimulus package doesn’t fare much better.
More fundamentally, presidents have very limited tools for reversing economic downturns. It’s not clear what more Obama could have done — or gotten a deeply polarized Congress to agree to do — even if they spent every waking hour thinking about the economy.
And let’s suppose Obama had followed the pundit’s advice, and put off health care until the economy recovered. Well, that would mean taking up health care in 2011 at the earliest. But how likely is it that the president could pass an historic health care reform after the midterm election, when his party is expected to suffer big losses and maybe even lose control of the House of Representatives?
Maybe the midterm will produce a new crop of GOP moderates, eager to pass universal health care in defiance of the party’s leadership, not to mention the Tea Party’s feral legions, but I doubt it.
The historical record is very clear on one point: the time for presidents to wrack up big legislative accomplishments comes early in their term, when their political and public support is at highest ebb. If Obama had instead waited and tried to husband his political capital for a later push, he would have had a lot less to spend.
Besides, the bad economy overshadows everything else. If we had six percent unemployment, people might feel better about health reform too. And there’s a good chance that once its provisions actually kick in, reform will grow in popularity.
But even if it doesn’t, Obama still did the right thing. America today doesn’t need artful dodgers in the White House; we need leaders willing to take on the hard cases. That inevitably offends powerful interests and voting groups. In fact, presidents who leave office about as popular as when they come in probably haven’t done very much.
So progressives should take heart, and not try to back away from health care reform. It was difficult, it was imperfect, but it was a moral and economic necessity to cover the uninsured and start getting runaway medical costs under control. It was the very rarest thing in contemporary U.S. politics — an authentic act of political leadership – and no amount of second-guessing and poll-driven punditry can change that.
photo credit: apoxapox
Mike Konczal returned from vacation and promptly put up a post criticizing my take-down of Edward Luce’s horrible Financial Times piece on “the crisis of the middle class”. It’s become apparent to me over the past few years that I’ve been in D.C. that you can’t refute a specific empirical question about the situation of the poor or middle class (e.g., is it in crisis? as in much worse off than in the past?) without being attacked on much broader grounds than you staked out and being called an opponent of these groups or an insensitive jerk. I actually don’t disagree with much that Mike writes “against” my “views”.
What I do disagree with is the contention that the middle class is in crisis. And I think that it’s bad to believe (and assert for mass audiences) that that’s true because it hurts consumer sentiment, prolonging high unemployment, and diverts attention from the truly disadvantaged who really are in crisis. Mike can say that that pits me against the middle class (his post was titled, “Scott Winship versus the Middle Class”), but then let me ask Mike and others who would disagree with me a simple question: Why do you think Americans are deluded about their economic conditions, since in June, 7 in 10 American adults said their “current household financial situation” is better than “most” Americans’ (Q.25, disclosure: the poll was commissioned by my old employer)? Why are you against the middle class?
Mike says that when I say some problem affects a tiny fraction of the population, that’s like a hit man saying that he doesn’t kill that many people as a fraction of the population – the “Marty Blank gambit” as he calls it. But look, that’s not an apt analogy. If I were saying that we shouldn’t give a rat’s ass about the tiny share of the population that experiences a bankruptcy, that would be using the Marty Blank gambit. I never said that, and I wouldn’t. But if you convince everyone in the middle class that they are just one bad break away from bankruptcy, then you shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t spend their money and the recovery continues to stall. It’s important to convey the facts correctly. Mike is stalling the recovery! Why are you against the middle class, Mike??
Finally, I think the best chart I’ve seen that puts all of this into perspective (which I made myself) is the following showing health insurance trends:
Anyone who wants the data can email me at scott@scottwinship.com.
And contrary to Mike’s assertion, the fraction of under-insured has not increased. You can read the conclusion of my dissertation if you want to see what the facts show.
I’ll keep being concerned about the people who are in crisis, but I’m not going to buy in to the conventional wisdom among progressives that the middle class is in crisis.
*added note: Mike informs me that I missed the joke in his title, a Scott-Pilgrim-Versus-The-World nod. I like to think I’m clever and witty, but clearly my lack of sleep from parenting a newborn has left me not so quick on the uptake…)
This item is cross-posted at ScottWinshipWeb.
Kevin Drum notes my last post and then wonders, “What I’m more curious about is what this looked like in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Was optimism about our kids’ futures substantially higher then?”
The results I showed were mostly from a fantastic database of polling questions called “Polling the Nations”, which I recommend to everyone (though it’s not free, it’s not that expensive relative to other resources). That’s why they only start in the mid-80s, and there’s a gap between the mid-00s and the two or three polls I cite from this year and last (my look at this question was a few years ago).
Anyway, Kevin’s query reminded me that there’s another compilation of polling questions that is also amazing—the book, What’s Wrong, by public opinion giants Everett Carll Ladd and Karlyn Bowman. And it’s a free pdf.
So, let me add some results to those I posted before. I’m focusing, to the extent possible, on questions that ask parents about their own children. When people are asked about “kids today” instead of their own kids, they are much more likely to be Debbie Downers—a phenomenon that journalist David Whitman dubbed the “I’m OK, They’re Not” syndrome, which is much more general than questions about children’s future living standards. Also, let’s be careful to distinguish between levels and trends.
First, let’s look at the confidence parents have that life for their children will be better.
| Percentage of parent confidence that life for their children will be better | |||
| Year | Very confident | Fairly confident | Not at all confident |
| 1973 | 26% | 36% | 30% |
| 1974 | 25 | 41 | 28 |
| 1975 | 23 | 39 | 32 |
| 1976 | 31 | 39 | 25 |
| 1979 | 25 | 41 | 29 |
| 1982 | 20 | 44 | 32 |
| 1983 | 24 | 38 | 33 |
| 1988 | 20 | 45 | 28 |
| 1992 | 17 | 46 | 31 |
| 1995 | 17 | 44 | 34 |
| 2000 | 46* | N/A | 48* |
| Source: Roper Starch Worldwide; *Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard | |||
That last one shouldn’t be directly compared with the others—not only did it only offer a yes-or-no response, it was also asked of all adults. More on that in a sec. What we see from the Roper surveys is a fairly steady decline in solid confidence, but not much of a trend in pessimism.
The main dynamic is that parents have moved from being “very” confident to “only fairly” confident. It looks like there may have been a small decline in optimism from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. But it’s interesting that from 1973 to 1995, between 61percent and 70%percent were at least fairly confident that their kids would be better off.
The Washington Post polling result provides a nice opportunity to look at the “I’m OK, They’re Not” pattern, since all adults were asked the question, even though fewer than half had children under 18 in their household. In a poll my employer* commissioned from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and Public Opinion Strategies, we asked parents about their expectations for their children’s living standards. We asked people who had no children under 18 at home about “kids today.”
Pooling everyone together, 47 percent of adults said kids would have higher living standards. But the parents were much more optimistic about their own children, with 62 percent saying their kids’ living standards would improve. So the Washington Post result might have been right in the range of the Roper results had the question been asked only of parents.
Other polls have asked whether parents think their children will be better off when they are the same age:
| Percentage of parents that think their children will be better off when they are the same age | ||
| Year | Better off financially | Not better off |
| 1981 | 47 | 43 |
| 1982 | 43 | 41 |
| 1983 | 44 | 45 |
| 1985 | 62 | 29 |
| 1986 | 74 | 19 |
| 1991 | 66 | 25 |
| 1994 | 47* | 39* |
| 1995 | 54 | 39 |
| 1996 | 52 | 39 |
| 1996 | 51‡ | N/A |
| 1997 | 51‡ | N/A |
| 1999 | 67‡ | N/A |
| Sources: ABC News/Washington Post; *Newsweek; ‡Pew Research Center | ||
So optimism declined between the mid-1980s and early-1990s, recovered starting in the mid-1990s, and generally remained above early 1980s levels (when the economy was in recession). Except for 1983 majorities or pluralities hold the optimistic position.
Another series of polls asked parents whether their children will have a better life than they have had. They also indicate a decline in optimism from the late 1980s to the early 1990s and a subsequent rebound:
| Parents outlook on their children’s life | ||
| Year | Better life | About as good |
| 1989 | 59% | 25% |
| 1992 | 34 | 33 |
| 1995 | 46 | 27 |
| 1996 | 50 | 26 |
| 2002 | 41* | 29* |
| Sources: BusinessWeek; *Harris Poll | ||
Strong majorities thought the children would have as good a life as them or better, and while more people thought their kids would have a better life than thought they would have a worse life, optimism failed to win a majority of parents in a number of years. The trends appear to reveal a decline in optimism from the mid- or late-1990s to the early 2000s. Considering all of these trends thus far, a fairly clear cyclical pattern is emerging, as Kevin observed in his post.
The early 2000s dip also shows up in Harris Poll questions asking whether parents feel good about their children’s future:
| Percentage of parents that feel good about their children’s future | |
| Year | Feel good |
| 1997 | 48% |
| 1998 | 65 |
| 1999 | 60 |
| 2000 | 63 |
| 2001 | 56 |
| 2002 | 59 |
| 2003 | 59 |
| 2004 | 63 |
| Source: Harris Poll | |
The dip is revealed to be related to the 2001 recession, as optimism rebounded thereafter, again following the business cycle. Again, solid majorities generally take the optimistic position.
The longest time series available asks parents whether their children’s standard of living will be higher than theirs. Unfortunately, it appears that most of these polls ask the question of adults without children too:
| Percentage of parents that believe their children will achieve a higher standard of living | ||
| Year | Higher standard of living | Lower standard of living |
| 1989 | 52% | 12% |
| 1992 | 47 | 15 |
| 1993 | 49 | 17 |
| 1994 | 43 | 22 |
| 1994 | 45* | 20* |
| 1995 | 46 | 17 |
| 1996 | 47* | N/A |
| 1998 | 55* | N/A |
| 2000 | 59* | N/A |
| 2002 | 61* | N/A |
| 2004 | 53* | N/A |
| 2006 | 57* | N/A |
| 2008 | 53* | N/A |
| 2009 | 47/62† | N/A |
| 2010 | 45‡ | 26‡ |
| Sources: Cambridge Reports/Research International; *General Social Survey; †Economic Mobility Project; ‡Pew Research Center | ||
Once again the cyclical pattern emerges, though it is not quite as clear in the mid-2000s. Optimism is far more prevalent than pessimism in every year, reaching majorities from the late 1990s until the current recession. Even today, optimism is no lower than in the mid-1990s, and the EMP poll implies that when looking just at parents with children under 18 living at home, solid majorities continue to believe their kids will have a higher living standard.
Taken together, there is very little evidence that a supposed stagnation in living standards is reflected in Americans’ concerns about how their children will do. The survey patterns show that parental optimism follows a cyclical pattern, generally is more prevalent than pessimism, and did not decline over time. In fact, we can compare beliefs in 1946 to 1997 for one question—whether “opportunities to succeed” (1946) or the “chance of succeeding” (1997) will be higher or lower than a same-sex parent’s has been:
· Roper Starch Worldwide (1946)—64 percent of men said their sons’ opportunities to succeed will be better than theirs (vs. 13 percent worse); 61 percent of women said their daughters’ opportunities to succeed will be better than theirs (vs. 20 percent worse)
· Princeton Religion Research Center (1997)—62 percent of men said their sons will have a better chance of succeeding than they did (vs. 21 percent worse); 85 percent of women said their daughters will have a better chance (vs. 7 percent worse)
As one would expect, mothers in 1946 believed their daughters would have more opportunity, but surprisingly that view was even more prominent in 1997. And among men, there was very little change. Notably, unemployment was slightly lower in 1946 than in 1997, so this isn’t a matter of apples to oranges.
Or even more strikingly, consider two polls asking the following question: Do you think your children’s opportunities to succeed will be better than, or not as good as, those you have? (If no children:) Assume that you did have children.
· Roper Starch Worldwide (1939)—61 percent better vs. 20 percent not as good vs. 10 percent same (question asked about opportunities of sons compared with fathers)
· Roper Starch Worldwide (1990)—61 percent better vs. 21 percent not as good vs. 12 percent same
While the 1939 question only refers to males, given the relatively low labor force participation of women at the time, it is perhaps still comparable to the 1990 question. However, the unemployment rate was 17.2 percent in 1939 compared with 5.6 percent in 1990. Still, the two are remarkably close.
OK, can we put this question to bed? Americans believe their children will do as well or better than they have done, and this belief hasn’t weakened over time. Now let’s get back to arguing about objective living standards rather than subjective fears about them.
* For the love of God, nothing you’ll ever read on my blog has anything to do with my job—there are people at Pew whose ulcers flare at employees’ side hustles like mine.
This item is cross-posted at ScottWinshipWeb.
Photo Credit: fiskfisk’s Photostream
Yesterday J.P. Green did a post on the Missouri “ObamaCare referendum,” noting its rather tilted character and echoing Jon Chait’s endorsement of a progressive way around the unpopularity of an individual mandate for the purchase of health insurance, as designed by Paul Starr.
But there’s another aspect of the Missouri vote that ought to be mentioned: the individual mandate that was the target of the the state law ratified by Proposition C wasn’t just a feature of “ObamaCare.” It was also a central element in RomneyCare, Massachusetts’ pioneer health reform effort. And amidst all the rationalizations that Romney has offered in an effort to distinguish RomneyCare from ObamaCare, he hasn’t repudiated his support for an individual mandate.
Even if you don’t think the Missouri vote was a fair representation of overall public opinion in the Show-Me State (and it’s dubious on that front, given the low turnout and the 2-1 Republican tilt among priimary voters), it was sure a good measure of how politically active Republicans feel. And a shudder had to shake Romney when he heard about it, since it’s very unlikely the 2012 Caucus-goers in next-door Iowa are going to feel any warmer towards the individual mandate seventeen months from now, when they once again pass judgment on Mitt’s presidential ambitions.
This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist
Photo Credit: nmfbihop’s Photostream
