We need to put an end to a familiar but useless standoff. The Republicans are committed to cutting taxes for the few people who have benefited from economic growth in the United States—on the demonstrably false theory that the money will somehow trickle down to everyone else.27 The Democrats are committed to protecting a set of social safety net programs. These programs are absolutely necessary, and they are as important to large portions of the Republican base as they are to large portions of the Democratic base. But many of them are not designed for the twenty-first century and have poor track records of generating upward mobility.
Instead of ducking our problems, we need to take action. Among the available ideas:
• Adopting regulatory, antitrust, and tax policies that encourage small business formation and investment in new ventures
• Investing massively in infrastructure improvements nationwide
• Adopting tax policies that help restore the dignity of work by better ensuring that workers can support themselves and their families28
• Strengthening our safety net for those who cannot support themselves while ensuring that citizens are able to return to gainful employment without losing assistance they may need
• Working to repatriate—to “onshore”—manufacturing and advanced manufacturing and their attendant (and critically important) supply chains back to the United States
• Leading a coalition of our allies in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa to push back on China’s mercantilist trade policies and level the playing field for the world, instead of pursuing potentially self-defeating tariffs that tax workers and consumers broadly throughout our economy
• Anticipating the world’s transition to a fully digital economy, shaped by advanced artificial intelligence, with all its attendant implications for American jobs and wages
• Making college less expensive for everyone
• Reinventing our high schools and community colleges to provide a pathway for young people who don’t acquire a four-year college degree
• Vastly improving our lousy workforce-training programs and evaluating their success
• Ending our extended effort to roll back twentieth-century union victories, as we have done in states like Wisconsin, Florida, and Indiana, and entering into a new compact with organized workers that improves wages, benefits, and working conditions for twenty-first-century jobs
• Fixing our broken immigration system so that it better serves our economic needs (as we tried to do in the Senate in 2013)
• Ending mass incarceration and the stain it leaves on people attempting to find work
• Suggesting to the largest technology companies that have so disrupted our society, for good and ill, that instead of wondering out loud whether Silicon Valley ought to secede, they ought to use their extraordinary profits to invest in America’s heartland
• Working with the private sector and regulators—and particularly Wall Street—to evolve away from the culture of “short termism” and earnings projections that is not a fundamental requirement of capitalism and has caused us to shift our focus from what matters
And one more idea: We should think about moving the headquarters of some federal agencies out of Washington and into the rest of the country. Dick Celeste has been saying this since I worked for him in Ohio in the late 1980s. I have long believed that the Democratic National Committee should move somewhere like St. Louis or Kansas City to gain some useful perspective. At a stroke, decentralizing the federal bureaucracy would diminish the gravitational pull of Washington and plant seeds of growth throughout the country.
There is plenty we could be doing. As we summon the will not to be the first generation of Americans to bankrupt the next, we should be skeptical of politicians who spent trillions fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and giving tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans—and who now say we have no money to invest in America. Perhaps we should send them the bill, instead.
1 This was not true, by the way. As the business columnist James B. Stewart wrote at the time, “The proposals seem almost tailor-made to enrich the president and people like him.” Money magazine characterized the bill as likely to produce a “monetary windfall” for the president. Estimates of the size of that windfall, which run into the tens of millions of dollars annually, are imprecise because the president has never released his tax returns.
2 Mayor John Hamilton of Bloomington, Indiana, captured this distance perfectly in a Washington Post op-ed essay titled “No City Would Ever Pass This Tax Bill.” He wrote: “If I asked the city council to approve tripling our local debt to give hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to a few hundred of our most prosperous residents, they would ask what I was smoking. Preposterous, they would say.”
3 Economists use different methods to describe the phenomenon of economic inequality. Sometimes they compare income alone. But income tells only part of the story. It fails to capture other aspects of a person’s (or household’s) total economic picture, which often includes more, such as real estate and other property, taxes and transfers, savings, health and retirement benefits, and so on. Analysis of wealth rather than just income thus offers a more complete picture of economic security.
4 Research from many quarters is focused on this trend. The data here are from the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
5 The philosopher and writer Matthew Stewart provides a vivid analogy. “Imagine yourself on the socioeconomic ladder with one end of a rubber band around your ankle and the other around your parents’ rung. The strength of the rubber determines how hard it is for you to escape the rung on which you were born. If your parents are high on the ladder, the band will pull you up should you fall; if they are low, it will drag you down when you start to rise.” Matthew Stewart, “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy,” Atlantic, June 2018.
6 The literature on wealth and income inequality across races in the United States is also extensive. A 2018 analysis by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter found that “black Americans have substantially lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to large income disparities that persist through generations.”
7 Krueger drew on research by the economist Miles Corak (see his 2012 paper, “Inequality from Generation to Generation: The United States in Comparison”). The nickname “Great Gatsby Curve” was not Corak’s but came from the Obama White House, which issued a statement noting that “on the eve of the Great Recession, income inequality in the U.S. was as sharp as it had been at any period since the time of The Great Gatsby.”
8 Gordon writes that “steadily rising [income] inequality over the past four decades is just one of the headwinds blowing at gale force to slow the growth rate of the American standard of living.” He identifies these others: “education, demographics, and government debt” as well as “globalization, global warming, and environmental pollution.”
9 To varying degrees, many western democracies find themselves under pressure from growing income inequality. The inability of elected officials to grapple with this phenomenon led the Washington Post recently to observe, of the annual economic forum, that “Davos is in decline as elites fail to tackle the globe’s biggest problems.”
10 Let me stipulate that not every young person has to go to college. As noted, my old school district has been leading the way in creating modern apprenticeship offerings for our students. But the decision whether to pursue college or another path should be a young person’s choice. It should not be the result of our systemic failure to educate children living in poverty. And, while I agree that not everyone should go to college, it’s also true that I often hear that observation being made by parents about children other than their own.
11 The Bush administration encouraged the idea that the war in Iraq would cost nothing. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised that “the bulk of the funds for Iraq’s reconstruction will come from Iraqis.�
� His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, assured Americans that “we’re really dealing with a country that can finance its own reconstruction.” One wonders if these two officials advised Donald Trump on getting Mexico to pay for his border wall.
12 It may sound like Monday-morning quarterbacking, but I always believed it might have been useful for President Obama to have presented the Republicans with a package that contained much smaller tax cuts and then allowed them to work him up to a larger tax-cut package. That would have enabled Republicans to contribute something to the bill and might have given them a political incentive to support it. To this day, I have never met a person who was aware of receiving a tax cut from President Obama’s stimulus bill.
13 Though most signs presented civil if not subtle frustrations about government, many had a darker edge: “1984 Is Not an Instruction Manual!” “Obama … Commander and Thief.” “The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African.” And “Bury Obama Care with Kennedy,” the reference being to the late senator from Massachusetts, Edward Kennedy, who had succumbed to brain cancer two weeks earlier and whose seat I had the honor of filling on the Senate health care committee.
14 Bennett lost even though he had the support of Utah senator Orrin Hatch and Republican national leaders like Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney and even though he was preferred by more Utah voters than either of his opponents in polls preceding the convention. The convention upset was dramatic, with Tea Party members waving yellow Gadsden (“Don’t tread on me”) flags and shouting “He’s gone!” when the vote tally was announced.
15 Chosen for their willingness to recite a standard script of impossible and incompatible goals, the Tea Party candidates often proved undisciplined and problematic on the campaign trail. In Delaware, O’Donnell stumbled when she admitted that she had “dabbled into witchcraft” in high school. Angle got into trouble by maintaining that Islamic sharia law was in effect in American towns like Dearborn, Michigan.
16 For instance, Senator John Cornyn, of Texas: “Our debt is $14 trillion and the deficit is $1.5 trillion and the public is looking for some adult leadership on these issues. I think the same old demagoguery is not going to win the day because in the end we are going to have to do something.” And Senator Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, a consistent voice for fiscal discipline: “We are spending trillions of dollars every year and nobody knows what we are doing. The executive branch doesn’t know. The congressional branch doesn’t know. Nobody knows.”
17 In an interview with Ezra Klein about the political dynamics within the House Republican Conference, the journalist Robert Costa noted: “So there are thirty to forty true hard-liners But there’s another group of maybe fifty to sixty members who are very much pressured by the hard-liners. So he [Speaker Boehner] may have the votes on paper. But he’d create chaos.”
18 This has been a deliberate strategy for some parts of the GOP since Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House. The longtime Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote: “A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.” In “Federalist No. 62,” James Madison foresaw the effects of this antigovernment chicanery and wrote that it “poisons the blessing of liberty itself.”
19 It is true that some of the Recovery Act’s tax cuts were included in the fiscal cliff package. But they were much smaller than the permanently extended Bush tax cuts, and were extended only temporarily.
20 Episodes like this one inspired me to introduce a bill requiring senators to report to the Senate floor when there is a shutdown and stay there until the government is reopened. When Coloradans hear about this bill, what they like best is the requirement that senators be arrested and taken to the floor if they refuse to attend. I am pleased that the cosponsor of this legislation is Cory Gardner, my Republican colleague from Colorado.
21 Six years later, the memory of this time would provoke me to respond to comments made by Senator Cruz on the Senate floor. As he pulled out his playbook to defend the Trump shutdown in the name of unpaid members of the Coast Guard, I suggested that he was crying “crocodile tears,” since he had made the work of Colorado’s first responders so much harder during his first shutdown. I remembered well his trip to the World War II Memorial and was inclined not to let him get away with it again.
22 The rush job of drafting and making changes to the bill generated a widely covered drama of consequential decisions done on the fly—handwritten adjustments made and lost; last-minute alterations on sticky notes—that endowed the Tea Party’s rhetorical demands for legislative transparency with a lingering stench of hypocrisy.
23 It is an unfair comparison, but my old paperback edition of Constance Garnett’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov is only 924 pages and it takes an undergraduate about three weeks to make it through that one. Unlike the tax bill, it is also well written.
24 Ironically, the most progressive aspect of the tax bill was its capping of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction at $10,000. Many Democrats continue to advocate for repealing this provision of the Republican tax plan. From the standpoint of parochial politics, this position is understandable. From the standpoint of America’s middle class, it is not. Repealing the cap on SALT would cost the federal government $620 billion over a decade. More than half of the money would go to the top 1 percent of households, making more than $755,000. More than 80 percent of the benefit would go to the top 5 percent of households, making more than $319,000.
25 Trump’s boast at his exclusive club was overheard by other guests, who in turn reported it to CBS News. Mar-a-Lago members pay a $200,000 initiation fee and annual dues of $14,000 for the privilege of sitting in that dining room.
26 In September 2017, then secretary of defense James Mattis wrote to John McCain, chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, explaining that budget uncertainties “obstruct our path to modernization, and continue to narrow the technical competitive advantage we presently maintain over our adversaries.”
27 In a policy debate that cannot be held during a thirty-day legislative cramdown, we could have argued the pros and cons of whether it is better to tax work or reconsider the preferential treatment we currently afford gains on capital and massive transfers of intergenerational wealth. As Yascha Mounk argues in The People vs. Democracy, “it makes little sense to ask corporations that create a lot of jobs for a proportionally higher [payroll tax] contribution than corporations that create very few jobs.” Consider a comparison: at this writing, Facebook’s market capitalization is $431 billion and the company employs 25,105 people. By contrast, the market capitalization of General Motors is $54.49 billion, about an eighth of Facebook’s, while it employs 180,000 people, seven times as many.
28 Sherrod Brown’s central campaign ad in 2018 was titled “Dignity,” and in it Brown concluded with these words: “If you love this country you fight for the people that make it work.” Sherrod was the only Democrat to win a statewide seat representing Ohio in Washington that year.
NO PROPHETS IN OUR TIME
Sabotaging the Iran nuclear deal—and undercutting
the tradition of bipartisanship in foreign policy.
I. The Common Good
When I was a child, the memory of World War II was very present in my home. Although, as I have written, my grandparents cherished their American citizenship and knew in their hearts how fortunate they were to have it, I was always conscious of a deep and abiding sadness as well—sorrow for what hatred and violence had erased at a stroke. In truth, the horrors and dangers of the world and the evil that people do to one another and to entire groups—whether in the name of ideology or of religion or for purpose
s of material gain—are never closed chapters. In small ways, every one of us has witnessed examples in our personal lives and in the life of our communities. As for the big ways: history offers a tragic record of how the human moral sense can be upended—with lethal and civilization-shattering consequences.
But history also demonstrates that there are counterforces. It demonstrates that we can hold evil in check. But to do so we must create durable institutions and agreements that represent at least a small step away from what we dread. Sometimes this means accepting a “lesser bad” as a weapon against an infinitely greater harm. This is a legitimate tool of visionary statecraft. There is no silver bullet for the world’s most vexing and dangerous problems. There is no single button you can press to make them go away. These problems need to be treated as one might treat a chronic disease, with many clinical approaches and with coordinated tactics, chalking up moderate victories when one can while planning immediately for the next initiatives.
This is the context in which President Obama’s decision to test carefully the possibility of a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program must be viewed. The Iran deal, which was concluded in 2015, represented a shift from the maximalist philosophy—go in heavy and hard and seek to solve every problem completely and forever—that had informed much of our foreign policy since 9/11. After so many years of reacting to bad choices, the agreement sought to manage a dangerous situation, not go to war with it. The agreement, which curtailed Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for an end to economic sanctions, was a case study in leverage. The United States drew on new alliances and multilateral diplomacy to address a serious potential threat to national security—while at the same time strengthening the global nuclear nonproliferation regime. It was a signal foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration.
The Land of Flickering Lights Page 16