I heard from someone down South today. They were crossing into South Carolina from Georgia. Over the South Carolina line, the American flags were flying at half-mast. Nobody important died. It was in mourning for yesterday's Supreme Court's decision on the health care bill.
After two years of inflammatory rhetoric promising the certain end of freedom should this bill be enacted, many, many people believe it. For a long time, this belief could be sustained on the hope that the court would find it unconstitutional, or that congress would devise some way to pull the plug. But the reality is setting in that the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land. With less than a year and a half from its main provisions taking effect, if you don't like it, it's time to get specific about what you don't like. It's not going away on its own.
As a nation we accept the general principle that our individual freedoms are circumscribed by our legal frameworks. We believe in the system. This law isn't perfect, but it now belongs to all of us. The bill was passed and it's no longer up for debate on constitutional grounds. Griping about the death of freedom is all well and good, but if you really want to do something about it, it's time to call your congressman and demand reforms.
Let's look at the individual mandate. It's a provision in the Affordable Care Act that compels people to retain health insurance coverage, or else pay a tax amounting to no more than 3.5% of personal income. It's also the least popular part of the law that people know about. The mandate is essentially a tax is managed by the IRS, but the money goes directly to a fund to help pay for other people's insurance premiums. Unlike other taxes, the IRS doesn't have the authority to impose criminal penalties for non-compliance. If you don't have insurance, all they can do is garnish your tax refund, and if you can demonstate financial hardship, the tax is waived altogether.
Is this the death of freedom? If so, then we need to talk about the tax benefits I enjoy from being married, or massive deductions in mortgage interest that forego from not owning a house. Even though I want to be a married homeowner, I don't want the government telling me I should be. I question the social value of those rules, but I'm not about to take up arms. It's just not that big a deal. The tax system is riddled with incentives and penalties. If you don't like them, call your congressman and demand reforms. Start a web site. Get a dozen people to call and they will listen. You are not powerless.
But consider this: Young people can now stay on their parents' plans until they are 26. Uninsured people with pre-existing conditions (like my mom) can now get good insurance for cheap. Insurance companies can no longer have lifetime limits on benefits, and cannot turn away sick kids. They have to spend 80% of your premiums on actual health care, or else give you a rebate check. In 2014, if you don't have coverage, you will be guaranteed a decent plan that costs no more than 11% of your annual income. The government will pick up some or most of the tab for families of 4 making less than $90,000 a year. And it's paid for.
If you don't like those provisions, by all means, call your congressman. If you didn't know them by now, and you didn't like the Affordable Care Act, then maybe you should rethink where you stand and who you trust.
This isn't the system I would have designed, but for me there is only one non-negotiable abstract principle: universal health coverage is a human right. If there is another way achieve that goal, I'm all ears. More specific to our realities, if there's another way to incentivize the healthy people we need to buy insurance, I'll listen. Seriously.
But I have no more patience for the partisan blowhards and their abstract claims to liberty. If people can't be bothered to inform themselves on what they like and don't like about the bill, they forfiet their right to complain. If they choose to ignore the good and overdramatize the bad, then they are not acting in our nation's interests. If they have real concerns about the bill, I'm listening. We all should.
If our leaders still can't come to the negotiating table after two years of near-existential political warfare, lost court battles, and unending bad faith, then they should be replaced. It's well past time.
Friday, June 29, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
Broke versus Poor: Don't Confuse the Two
Being broke is a financial problem, and being poor is a social one. They're clearly related, but they're not the same thing. People learn from the older people around them, and if you're born into a place where all the older people are getting into trouble or going nowhere, then someday when you're older, you'll probably be a lot like they were. You will probably be poor, and so will the newest batch of neighborhood kids, who like you, won't have any better ideas. Poor people have poor options, so they make poor decisions, and their kids end up poor too. Even if you shower poor people in cash, most of it won't really change things. It's the cycle of poverty, and like most things cyclical, it's nothing new, and it's not so easy to end.
Among people who think about the broke-poor relationship, there are two main schools of thought. On one hand, there are many examples of people who were broke and ended up making millions. Immigrants, hard workers, and the odd genius. We all love these stories. Conservatives tend to think that they prove that any poor person can achieve if they just put their mind to it. By extension, anyone who doesn't is lazy and not worth their time. On the other hand, there's the story of the poor sap who never quite has enough money to make things work and ends up in jail for posession. We all feel for these guys. Liberals tend to think that they prove that it's because he was broke that he didn't succeed. They ignore his crappy upbringing, or think that it's just a matter of money and everything will change and he'll raise kids better.
Conservatives often think that if people's mindsets will change, they will be able to work out their finances and prosper under the rules of the game. Liberals think it's a matter of material deficiency, and that the rules are stacked against the poor. Both have a point, but both are missing something essential. For conservatives, culture is an excuse for people's bad behaviors, and a means of absolution from their fates. For liberals, money and programs are all that's up for negotiation. Culture is a taboo subject. For all of us, we misunderstand, excuse, or ignore society's cultural pathologies at our peril.
What can be done?
There's aid from the government or charity. It can help people who are broke. When done right, like when it pays for school, keeps people healthy, or helps them along into a career with some dignity and decent pay, it can be really effective. This is where society organizes its social and economic goods. But it's not very good at changing the communities that young people grow up in. Even if people are given all the money, resources, and opportunity society can provide, their culture will remain mostly unchanged. Some people even say it will be made worse.
There's community activism. It can help people who are poor. Local leaders, church pastors, hometown-kids-done-good, and others can make good role models and maybe change the lives of a few others coming up. This is where culture and behavior can be modified. But it is limited in scope by money, subject to personality, midguided ideas, and plain old corruption. We hear stories about someone making a difference in their communities, but we rarely hear about those communities changing, and too often, we hear about someone taking whatever money there is, and running. Or worse, running for city council.
There's business. Most people would gladly take a decent-paying job with a chance at advancement over a monthly welfare check or a wad of cash from standing on the corner all day. This is where people can get real, sustainable material help. The problem is that usually there are few of these jobs in poor areas. It's not because business is evil or people are lazy. This is because the workforce of poor (but not necessarily broke) people is often uneducated and unreliable, so only the worst jobs become available to them. There's plenty of wealth out there. It's well-organized and even today still leads to prosperity for most people who can get into a career. But that's probably not going to happen if you're poor, and business has little to say about how to change the cycle of poverty.
For the first time in a while, I have real hope, even if it's from somewhere weird. Last night I caught an episode of Undercover Boss. It was on TV while we ate dinner; something to pass the time. At first I thought it was just another mindless reality show meant to distract the audience between commercial breaks, and maybe it is, but I saw something I'd never seen before.
The "Undercover Boss" was an executive from Subway posing as a Sandwich Artist. One of the places he went was to a church in a poor part of Buffalo which had its own Subway franchise on the premises. The church got people working there at the same time as providing all the services, mentoring, and social exposure that you get out of a good church. The employees got good jobs and more training, the church owns the franchise and makes a little money, and people work with a chance of becoming someone. The government provides incentives to businesses who want to affiliate with a social organization, and uses the organization as a conduit for aid programs. It doesn't have to be a Subway, and it doesn't have to be a church. This idea could be replicated in 10,000 different ways with 100,000 social institutions and millions of young workers as beneficiaries.
Entrepreneurs, corporations, franchise holders, and others can work with churches and local governments to expand into new markets, paying people more, profiting, increasing aggregate demand for the products they sell, changing people's lives, and making our country the place it can and should be. But we'll all need to work together and be honest about the nature of our nation's social and material shortcomings.
Being poor and being broke are not the same thing, but poverty is some synergy of the two. To really change poverty, we need the engines of government, civil society, and business working synergistically too. American ingenuity can fix these problems. All the pieces are there. We just need to rethink how we put them together. We need to stop confusing poor with broke.
Among people who think about the broke-poor relationship, there are two main schools of thought. On one hand, there are many examples of people who were broke and ended up making millions. Immigrants, hard workers, and the odd genius. We all love these stories. Conservatives tend to think that they prove that any poor person can achieve if they just put their mind to it. By extension, anyone who doesn't is lazy and not worth their time. On the other hand, there's the story of the poor sap who never quite has enough money to make things work and ends up in jail for posession. We all feel for these guys. Liberals tend to think that they prove that it's because he was broke that he didn't succeed. They ignore his crappy upbringing, or think that it's just a matter of money and everything will change and he'll raise kids better.
Conservatives often think that if people's mindsets will change, they will be able to work out their finances and prosper under the rules of the game. Liberals think it's a matter of material deficiency, and that the rules are stacked against the poor. Both have a point, but both are missing something essential. For conservatives, culture is an excuse for people's bad behaviors, and a means of absolution from their fates. For liberals, money and programs are all that's up for negotiation. Culture is a taboo subject. For all of us, we misunderstand, excuse, or ignore society's cultural pathologies at our peril.
What can be done?
There's aid from the government or charity. It can help people who are broke. When done right, like when it pays for school, keeps people healthy, or helps them along into a career with some dignity and decent pay, it can be really effective. This is where society organizes its social and economic goods. But it's not very good at changing the communities that young people grow up in. Even if people are given all the money, resources, and opportunity society can provide, their culture will remain mostly unchanged. Some people even say it will be made worse.
There's community activism. It can help people who are poor. Local leaders, church pastors, hometown-kids-done-good, and others can make good role models and maybe change the lives of a few others coming up. This is where culture and behavior can be modified. But it is limited in scope by money, subject to personality, midguided ideas, and plain old corruption. We hear stories about someone making a difference in their communities, but we rarely hear about those communities changing, and too often, we hear about someone taking whatever money there is, and running. Or worse, running for city council.
There's business. Most people would gladly take a decent-paying job with a chance at advancement over a monthly welfare check or a wad of cash from standing on the corner all day. This is where people can get real, sustainable material help. The problem is that usually there are few of these jobs in poor areas. It's not because business is evil or people are lazy. This is because the workforce of poor (but not necessarily broke) people is often uneducated and unreliable, so only the worst jobs become available to them. There's plenty of wealth out there. It's well-organized and even today still leads to prosperity for most people who can get into a career. But that's probably not going to happen if you're poor, and business has little to say about how to change the cycle of poverty.
For the first time in a while, I have real hope, even if it's from somewhere weird. Last night I caught an episode of Undercover Boss. It was on TV while we ate dinner; something to pass the time. At first I thought it was just another mindless reality show meant to distract the audience between commercial breaks, and maybe it is, but I saw something I'd never seen before.
The "Undercover Boss" was an executive from Subway posing as a Sandwich Artist. One of the places he went was to a church in a poor part of Buffalo which had its own Subway franchise on the premises. The church got people working there at the same time as providing all the services, mentoring, and social exposure that you get out of a good church. The employees got good jobs and more training, the church owns the franchise and makes a little money, and people work with a chance of becoming someone. The government provides incentives to businesses who want to affiliate with a social organization, and uses the organization as a conduit for aid programs. It doesn't have to be a Subway, and it doesn't have to be a church. This idea could be replicated in 10,000 different ways with 100,000 social institutions and millions of young workers as beneficiaries.
Entrepreneurs, corporations, franchise holders, and others can work with churches and local governments to expand into new markets, paying people more, profiting, increasing aggregate demand for the products they sell, changing people's lives, and making our country the place it can and should be. But we'll all need to work together and be honest about the nature of our nation's social and material shortcomings.
Being poor and being broke are not the same thing, but poverty is some synergy of the two. To really change poverty, we need the engines of government, civil society, and business working synergistically too. American ingenuity can fix these problems. All the pieces are there. We just need to rethink how we put them together. We need to stop confusing poor with broke.
Wednesday, June 06, 2012
Stop Calling People Stupid
Yesterday in Salon, a professor of political science wrote an article titled, Can Liberals Cure Stupidity?
Today, Clive Crook at Atlantic Monthly pointed out an exchange between a New York Times editor and Bill Maher. The New York Times editor said, "If it's Kansas, if it's Missouri, no big deal. You know, that's the dance of the low, sloping foreheads, the middle places, right?"
In private conversation I've heard many well-meaning lefties, many of whom are involved in political causes, and actively employed in improving the social welfare of the poor make similar comments. It's not enough to stop saying that people are stupid. It's time they stop thinking that way altogether.
I recommend a two part approach for liberals curing stupidity.
Today, Clive Crook at Atlantic Monthly pointed out an exchange between a New York Times editor and Bill Maher. The New York Times editor said, "If it's Kansas, if it's Missouri, no big deal. You know, that's the dance of the low, sloping foreheads, the middle places, right?"
In private conversation I've heard many well-meaning lefties, many of whom are involved in political causes, and actively employed in improving the social welfare of the poor make similar comments. It's not enough to stop saying that people are stupid. It's time they stop thinking that way altogether.
I recommend a two part approach for liberals curing stupidity.
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Step two: Look in the mirror. Who's stupider? The smart guy with all the facts who can't convince anyone of anything, or the idiot who can sell bottled water to a fish?
I really don't care how smart someone is (or thinks they are). I've known plenty of smart people who have done really, really stupid stuff. I've known plenty of dumb people who have gotten way, way ahead in life. Intelligence is not a good measure of success in life. It doesn't make a person more or less moral. It doesn't solve any of the world's problems on its own. What does?
Well, for starters, if the problem involves getting people mobilized behind a cause (like an election), knowing how to talk to those people, maybe even getting to know a couple of them personally might help. Listening without judgment to the way people view the world might help form a message that gets them on your side.
I'm routinely amazed when someone involved in something like global health talks about changing the breastfeeding patterns of African women by first understanding their culture, and then switches gears to refer to their own countrymen as ignorant and beyond saving. It should be easier to talk to people who look like you or speak your native language, but using the same humble, patient approach locally rarely occurs to these people. The same principles at work in Kibera or Conakry also apply in Kentucky and Kansas.
I am tired of people blaming Fox News and multinational corporations for people voting against their interests. Until someone convinces them otherwise, they're just our interests, not theirs. This is nothing new. Rich people have always been powerful. Powerful people have always stayed that way by influencing others.
In today's media war, monied interests on the right influence others by paying people to craft very, very effective messages. At least they stopped paying for mobs with billy clubs. If liberals want to influence others, they shouldn't cede any ground in the "fly-over" states. They shouldn't concern themselves with being outspent if they're so sure they're right. They should have a little faith in their own beliefs. They should stop theorizing, take a road trip away from the coasts, get off the interstate, and start talking to people.
The bottom line for me is that in this world there are no noble savages and no ignorant rednecks; only people who are just trying to get by the best they can. There are no messianic saviors or evil geniuses; only people who want to have some influence over what happens. And there is no way to get people on your side by calling them stupid.