I have a piece at the American Prospect, The Great Society's Next Frontier, about potential futures for the welfare state. It attempts to answer the question over whether or not the passage of Obamacare means that the welfare state is now complete.
I have a piece at the American Prospect, The Great Society's Next Frontier, about potential futures for the welfare state. It attempts to answer the question over whether or not the passage of Obamacare means that the welfare state is now complete. If we take the project of American liberalism to be Keynesian economics, plus the mixed economy, plus social insurance, plus political liberalism, can we check the social insurance part as complete? I decided to ask several scholars of the welfare state what they see as potential steps in the decades ahead, and lay out their answers.
The "completed welfare state" usually means a few different things. One is that the major committments of social insurance are now determined, and it is just a matter how broadly or narrowly to construe those committments. That's many people'sanswer for the issue. Dylan Matthews gave a similar answer on bloggingheads recently, noting that things like universal pre-K will fall out of our obligations to provide universal K-12 schooling. Many of the changes experts in the piece proposed were extensions of already functioning programs, like the EITC or unemployment insurance or expanding K-12 schooling to a younger age.
Another is that the level of expenditure and revenue is set for the near future, so if social insurance is expanded it'll require a more fundamental change in what we are willing to pay for our government. And indeed many of the debates going forward will be about spending less than projected on health care through controlling costs, or changing how we fund things, such as taking the tax expenditures for 401(k)s and making them more progressive. There are many things that don't require changing the level of expenditure and revenue, such as raising the minimum wage (which compliments the EITC quite well). This is one reason we may see more of a focus on "predistribution" policy in the years ahead.
I wanted to add this point from Envisioning Real Utopias about a basic income, but also pertains to both the minimum wage and things like Demos' call for raising retail wages. In addition to reducing coercion as workers aren't separated from the means of subsistence, eliminating poverty without creating the major pathologies of means-tested anti-poverty transfers, recognizing the value of decommodified care-giving activities and subsidizing the social and cooperative market economies, a basic income also does the following:
Second, universal basic income is likely to generate greater egalitarianism within labor markets. If workers are more able to refuse employment, wages for unpleasant work are likely to increase relative to wages for highly enjoyable work. The wage structure in labor markets, therefore, will begin to reflect more systematically the relative disutility of different kinds of labor rather than simply the relative scarcity of different kinds of labor power. This, in turn, will generate an incentive structure for employers to seek technical and organizational innovations that eliminate unpleasant work. Technical change would therefore have not just a labor-saving bias, but a labor-humanizing bias.
This connection between cheap labor and technology change is a constant theme of Peter Frase, who mentioned the Prospect piece in a recent post.
Here's a chart of children with a parent behind bars:
That's a fivefold increase since 1980. But that's with a parent behind bars at any one moment. What about the percentage of children who will have had a parent behind bars at some point in their childhood?
24% of black children will have had a parent behind bars by age 17, an eightfold increase since 1980.
The interesting thesis of Invisible Men is that the government, through the means it uses to record, analyze and ultimately see the population it governs, systematically misses incarcerated people. This biases various policy debates, as researchers build their arguments off these records. This is particularly important for some serious ongoing debates, like gaps between blacks and whites in earnings or labor-force participation, or the high-school dropout rate. This missing population also means that a variety of research agendas, from political participation to family structure, are also lacking an analytical mechanism for understanding how the large increase in incarcerated populations are impacting the topics.
There aren't definitive answers for how incarceration changes family structure, though there is evidence that incarcerated fathers are less like to be cohabitating or marrying a year after their child's birth. And incarceration increases the liklihood of divorce. But we don't have full answers, in part because the incarcerated fall off the government's radar for data collection. Hopefully Pettit's book will draw attention to this gap in our knowledge, and help future researchers understand the subtle yet devestating consequences of the War on Drugs and other means of mass incaraceration for our country.
Ross Douthat argues in his recent New York Times editorial, The Liberal Gloat, that the coalition that elected President Obama was "created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear." Douthat argues that "single life is generally more insecure and chaotic than married life, and single life with children." The implicit argument is that marriage is an important part of handling the economic fears of the business cycle, and if there were more married couples there'd be
Ross Douthat argues in his recent New York Times editorial, The Liberal Gloat, that the coalition that elected President Obama was "created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear." Douthat argues that "single life is generally more insecure and chaotic than married life, and single life with children." The implicit argument is that marriage is an important part of handling the economic fears of the business cycle, and if there were more married couples there'd be less call for economic policy. Krugman notes that "insecurity is on the rise for everyone, driven by changes in the economy" and that "[y]our church and your traditional marriage won’t guarantee the value of your 401(k)."
For fun, how well has the income of couples with children held up in the Great Recession when compared to single households with children? Let's look at the Federal Reserve's recent Survey of Consumer Finance. This comes out every three years, with the last version covering 2010. Here's net income for single households with a child versus couple households ("families in which the family head was either married or living with a partner") with a child:
In the Great Recession, single households with a child lost 2.3 percent of their income, while couple households with a child lost 9.4 percent of their income. Now obviously having $67K is better than having $29K. And the 2.3 percent loss of income for people with less could sting a lot harder than the 9.4 percent loss for those with more.
But what is important to emphasize is that having a couple raising kids, whatever its other virtues, is not a good form of insurance against the business cycle. The Great Recession has hit married households with larger drops in income. This is probably driven by having two people working in the household, which, as Senator (!) Elizabeth Warren emphasized years ago, doubles the chance that someone might lose their job. So even if the number of children being raised in single households dropped suddenly, that's no replacement for an aggressively liberal, Keynesian welfare-state approach to driving the macroeconomy to full employment.
This isn't just conservatives, as education-obsessed centrists and liberals have a blind-spot here as well. I recently wrote a piece for The American Prospect about young people graduating into the recession. The focus was how the average college graduate is likely to have a permanent loss to their income, compared to the more temporary income loss for those who attend elite colleges or don't go to college at all. I mentioned it in passing at the end, but this technically means that the college premium, especially at the margins, drops in a recession. Therefore getting more education is a poor form of insurance from the business cycle compared to, once again, Keynesian welfare-state full employment.
Paradigm Down
I have no interest in seeing a resurgent conservative movement in this country. One reason I was worried about Romney winning the 2012 election and passing the Ryan Plan in January 2013 and Lochnerizing the Supreme Court is because an animal is most dangerous when it is dying and knows it. But it might be helpful for those on the right to get an outsider's perspective.
Douthat argues that conservatives focused too much on those getting "gifts" and other free-loader metaphors. But the most sustained conservative economic arguments of the Great Recession have been reviving the liquidationist, Mellonite approach to the business cycle. I think that's one important reason Romney and conservatives were unable to put real pressure to President Obama's vulnerability on the economy. They believe the recession is purging the weakness in the economy, doing healthy work, and to the extent the recovery is sluggish it is the fault of activist government and policy attempting to address unemployment.
The House GOP, in particular, has pushed the Mellon-wing, calling for austerity to promote growth, while also pulling back on monetary policy to stimulate the economy. Understanding the "47 percent" and "free stuff" comments benefit from the context of conservative arguments that government policy is the primary reason that unemployment remains high, as all the free stuff allows the unemployed to stay on vacation. If conservatives want to build a new economic paradigm that works for working people, they should probably have some idea on getting unemployment down sometime in the next decade.
Another important conservative focus is running everything the government does through private hands. The conservative movement is not about small government, it is about privatized government. From Bush and Ryan's attempts to privatize Social Security, to turning Medicare into a Groupon, to bringing private industry into the military, every step involves introducing market agents into government processes and pushing market risk to individuals. This continued under Mitt Romney's big policy ideas. He had an idea for taking our system of unemployment insurance and turning it into a system of private unemployment savings accounts. He wanted to fix higher education costs by expanding the for-profit industry, which would "hold down the cost of education," even though they are far more expensive than their non-profit equivalents.
The conservative idea that citizens don't have enough undiversifiable exposure to the risks of the new economy - long-term unemployment, low wages, risks of a large drop in income, globalization, automation etc. - is not one that is going to work going forward. The economic voters Douthat wants to win over see the cronyism of funneling money through private agents, and they think of the market with far more dread and anxiety than entrepreneurial glee. Though they may be ambivalent about more liberal solutions, they certainly don't like the perpetual conservative project of making all of government's functions look more and more like their empty 401(k)s. That might be another place to start for conservatives who want to rebuild their economic ideas.
As part of our series "A Rooseveltian Second Term Agenda," an outline of what needs to be done to build upon and safeguard Dodd-Frank.
As part of our series "A Rooseveltian Second Term Agenda," an outline of what needs to be done to build upon and safeguard Dodd-Frank.
One of the Obama administration’s biggest vulnerabilities when it comes to its first term policy legacy was that the roots of the legislation it ushered through wouldn’t take hold until around 2014. Thus if a Republican president took office in 2013, there was a real chance that he could dismantle, or at least strongly interfere with, the new framework for health care and financial regulations. And it was clear by 2010 that movement conservatives would make the repeal or collapse of both bills a litmus test for all Republicans in office.
But with President Obama’s victory last week, the core framework of Dodd-Frank, the financial reform bill he signed in 2010, will become the law of the land. The question now is how to best push it forward in the coming months and years.
The most sensible, immediate reform would be to give regulators the adequate resources necessary to do their jobs. The CFTC had its funding cut by both parties last year in a move that will make their crucial work even harder to accomplish. The GOP is aiming to remove the independent funding stream for the CFPB. Without decent resources, it is unlikely that financial reform will be carried out effectively.
The next goal will require new reforms to draw some lines on the issues that haven’t been implemented well after the initial passage of the law. The Volcker Rule continues to be a mess while rules are being written. There isn’t a clear vision for what important new offices like the Office for Financial Research will set out to accomplish. These are major pieces of the legislation and are essential to creating fair, accountable, and transparent markets.
Fleshing out the post-Dodd-Frank agenda is also crucial. What should the proper regulations, if any, of high-frequency trading look like? Is breaking up the banks necessary for eliminating Too Big To Fail and the power of the financial firms over the markets, as a larger chorus of experts is starting to argue? How important is the government in preserving middle-class access to a 30-year fixed interest rate mortgage loan?
Fighting off a bi-partisan effort to make Dodd-Frank more industry-friendly will continue to be a full-time battle. But even though we don’t have to worry about the party in power repealing what has already been put into place, there’s no excuse for neglecting to articulate a vision for a financial sector that serves the greater interests of the real economy.
Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.
Occupy has created a Strike Debt wing, which has a new project: a Rolling Jubilee. There will be a livestream of the Debt Jubilee fundraiser tonight, starting at 8pm ET, that you can access from their webpage. It features Janeane Garofalo, Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Lizz Winstead, and many more. You should check it out.
Occupy has created a Strike Debt wing, which has a new project: a Rolling Jubilee. There will be a livestream of the Debt Jubilee fundraiser tonight, starting at 8pm ET, that you can access from their webpage. It features Janeane Garofalo, Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Lizz Winstead, and many more. You should check it out.
To give you a sense why I find this new project fascinating, I'll quickly review three random projects I've been working on recently, all of which are related to this new project.
The first is on what bankruptcy law professor Ronald Mann refers to as the "sweat box" model of consumer debt and bankruptcy. Mann argues that the 2005 bankruptcy amendments benefit creditors "by slowing the time of inevitable filings by the deeply distressed and allowing issuers to earn greater revenues from those individuals" and functions as a windfall for creditors because it "enable[s] issuers to profit from debt servicing revenues paid by distressed borrowers who are not yet in bankruptcy." More broadly, the distressed debt markets allow debt collectors the right to make huge profits by "sweating" debtors through assessing fees, raising rates, and inflating the debts owed while debtors struggle to pay the debts back over long periods of time. At the distressed end, debts aren't about recovering what is owed or making sure loans that aren't being paid turn into good debts that have reliable payments, but instead about the option to harrass small payments indefinitely. Debt collectors don't want these loans to work. (The same distorted incentives might be in playwith those who have missed a mortgage payment.)
Another is focused on student debt, particularly about how the collapse of public higher education has been a planned political project. Rather than student debt levels being the result of individual greed or cost inflation driven by productivity levels, they result from a specific project to shift costs for public education onto the individual that has been consciously planned. This is part of a larger project to dismantle the access and mobility inherent in the centuries-old public higher education system in this country.
The final one is arguing that one explanation for why our recovery is so slow has to do with a debt overhang. Rather than forcing the losses of our housing bubble onto creditors, we've left them to stagnate, dragging down aggregate demand. Or we've solved it through foreclosures, which have huge costs for communities and municipalities. The financial sector itself understands that these loans aren't worth much and are fighting among itself over who will eat the losses, but this knowledge hasn't spread to homeowners or the country at large.
Rolling Jubilee
Explaining these issues and how they connect is difficult, but it is now easier with Strike Debt and its Rolling Jubilee project. What is the Rolling Jubilee? "Banks sell debt for pennies on the dollar on a shadowy speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to collect the full amount from debtors. The Rolling Jubilee intervenes by buying debt, keeping it out of the hands of collectors, and then abolishing it."
The project relentlessly emphasizes the social conditions for the creation of debt: "We believe people should not go into debt for basic necessities like education, healthcare and housing." Debt in our country evolves in a system of institutions where publicly provided goods are missing or being dismantled in real-time, with private systems designed to benefit the few replacing them, and that is something that can be resisted. And the Jubilee also emphasizes that these specific debts that they are buying no longer reflect something that's owed, as they were written to zero on a balance sheet a long time ago. These are debts whose real value consists of a harrassment option to try and collect more than the pennies on the dollar that they were bought for.
Strike Debt can only purchase so much debt. What can it do going forward? There's the obvious ability to use this to highlight how bad debts actually play out in our country and expose the ins-and-outs of this system.
I'd personally like people to make the connection between random groups of people doing this and the government doing this itself through eminent domain. Right now southern California, for instance, is a battlefield between municipalities looking to prevent destructive foreclosures and the financial industry, which is looking to do a capital strike. Other cities are turning to eminent domain to buy mortgage debt at its real value, write it down, and save their communities. It would be great for them to say, "Hey, if cultural studies icon Andrew Ross and some Occupy kids are capable of doing this, certainly we, with our legal powers of eminent domain and power to tax, could do the same!"
And I'm already hearing about people proposing a form of "debt-holder activism" akin to the idea of shareholder activism: exposing wrong-doing, suing debt traders for selling debt without proper documentation, etc. It might be far-fetched, but it is worth exploring.
Critiques
There are reasonable criticisms of this project. But I'll start with some that I don't find convincing.
Doug Henwood, for instance, believes that this is generated by activists' uncritical populism, or the anarchist anthrology of David Graeber's Debt, or the reification of Bowles-Simpson's debt talk. But this is putting the carriage before the horse. A little over a year ago, I wrote some code that went through the We are the 99% Tumblr and parsed it for clues about what was motivating the people submitting their stories. And even I was shocked at how much student debt, medical debt, and debt overall were factors in those people's misery. It is how they identify the challenges they face, and this was equally so at Occupy sites.
It's fun to imagine people writing hostile comments on that 99% tumblr saying that all these people's misery is not useful to the cause because it focuses on the sphere of circulation instead of the sphere of production. But this is what is behind young people's suffering and it is an important project to address it as such. Linking it to a larger project of broad-based propserity is the work of others, and I believe the Strike Debt people are trying to do so.
Henwood also argues that Strike Debt can't buy in sufficiently large amount to buy up all the debt. That's true, but hardly the goal. He also brings up the idea that bankruptcy is a universal solvent here and should be emphasized over other projects. I disagree. To go back to Ronald Mann's "sweat-box" theory of bankrutpcy, the fees, waiting period, and other charges involved in post-2005 bankruptcy means that the legal DNA of bankruptcy code, while very useful, amplifies these problems. You can see it in the academic research that finds a spike in bankruptcy filings after people get tax rebates, because they finally have the resources to declare bankruptcy. You also see it in this random We Are the 99% tumblr entry, which notes, "I have been trying for the last 4 years to save $2000 to file bankruptcy for $5000-$10000 medical debt. It still hasn’t happened."
There are other worries that I find to be more important.
First, it's a big problem that it isn't clear yet whether those whose debt will be forgiven are stuck with a tax bill. Blogs are going back and forth on this issue, though the IRS should have given a comment already. That there aren't, say, tax attorneys Occupy can direct people to is a problem. It's funny that, given Marcel Mauss' influence on David Graeber and many in Occupy, the tax issue might hinge on being able to legally define what a "gift" is.
Another worry is whether or not this will build a community of people committed to the cause going forward. According to a Strike Debt spokesperson, when they forgive debts they send certified mail containing the Debt Resistor's Operation Manual and a notice explaining what the Debt Jubilee is. Contrast it with foreclosure activism, where there is a lot of work that goes into building up the person in their community and making sure the person has the strength and the resources to both fight and contribute back. I've debated whether or not this is an actual problem, but it is certainly not sufficient to keep me from being excited. The people contributing are more energized than I had expected to see, which means you many see a community of people vested on the donation end as well.
The last issue is debt itself. As Jacob Hacker and Nathaniel Loewentheil argued in theBoston Review forum on debt, "[B]y focusing so much on debt...the challenge of reform appears both smaller and larger than it really is. Smaller because providing write-downs for households with underwater mortgages, while valuable, would not be enough...[yet a debt focus sets] sights higher than necessary... [W]e do not have to change people’s conception of debt or personal responsibility... [A] broad coalition will be based more on effective organizing than on consciousness-raising or cultural change around debt."
I think in the long-run Hacker is right, which is why I'm happy that the Strike Debt coalition has worked to link its concerns back to larger ones of public health care, free education, and a more robust safety net. Weaving these concerns with broader ones is precisely the work that needs to be done.
Last year, Suresh Naidu sent me the following chart, which is an evolution of different tactics during the civil rights movement, 1955-1962, charted by frequency of occurrences:
This chart is taken from Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency by the sociologist Doug McAdam. Tactists will come and go. What is necessary to keep in mind are the goals and the spirit of experimentation. I hope you check out the telethon tonight and follow the Strike Debt news to see if this is a wave of experiments worth following in the months ahead.
