Ev Ehrlich's Everyday Economics

Cut the Crap

President Obama had a pretty good night on Tuesday.  His policy details were fine, and he’s awfully well-spoken.  But the President floated past the emotional tone of this moment in America, neither co-opting nor confronting  it.  There’s a stunning difference between feeding on the rage in the country today, on the one hand, and understanding it and taking it somewhere, and the President is not there yet. 

Sure, much of the Tea Party/Fox fantasy-industrial complex is as batty as it superficially appears.  But it feeds off a mélange of strong emotions – despair, disenfranchisement, and outrage.  Perhaps the President hears these frequencies, perhaps not.  But the bottom line is this; the President needs to superimpose over his policy specifics something that recognizes the strong feelings in the country today.  And, specifically, he needs to incorporate into his presentation the message that most Americans want their President to deliver:

Cut the crap.

That’s basically it.  The President is doing a fine job of projecting his openness to a bipartisan dialogue.  But he also needs to take the nation through a reality check, partly because Americans perceive, correctly, that the needles on the bullshit meters are all the way to the right, and partly because, once pushed, the vast bulk of Americans see the Tea/Fox segment of the spectrum as a self-reinforcing cocoon that talks to itself in its own language, much as the New Left of 40 years ago did.   Like the Left of 40 years ago, the New Right is now a true “counterculture,” one that is floating away from the mainstream, complete with their own response to the President’s speech.  Reality is their weakness, and the President has yet to hit them with it full bore. 

To his credit, the President finally got around to defining his view of the future, an aspect of any “transformational” Presidency, but an errand Obama hasn’t gotten to until halfway through his term; perhaps his Herculean cleaning of the fouled stables he inherited distracted him from thinking about what was next.  Moreover, I get the feeling that Obama’s intention is to embody Ghandiesquely the change he wishes to see – that is, to endow the political system with his own intelligence, composure, and open-mindedness (as opposed to brain-deadedness).

But that is sadly not enough.  The President is good on God, but short on Mammon – he’s great when he’s addressing the spiritual world of race, tragedy, and human hope, frailty, and impulses.  He looks out of place to me when discussing the economy and the realm of physical things.  His message of investing in ourselves – consciously preferring the future over the present – is substantively correct, but its emotional context is wrong.  He presents it as a choice that reflects his own thoughtfulness and intelligence.  Instead, it needs to be placed in a harder-edged context, one that reflects the harder-edged emotions of the moment. 

The American people see this and, more importantly, they feel it.  They see a system out of control, and they are shopping for leadership that provides a way out of the woods while empathizing with their sense of rage and powerlessness.  But they didn’t get it at the State of the Union.  Instead, they got a passionless vision of how we can make the future a better one, even if it was a vision with a great deal of substantive appeal.

But they didn’t get cut the crap.  In fact, if we got that level of connectedness, the policies we (as a supporter of the Administration) support would have a better chance of succeeding.   Let me show why that’s true by making three substantive points could be added to the “future first” message -- regarding climate and environment, government delivery systems, and, to begin with, budget.

We say that “everything must be on the table” in fixing the federal budget.  It’s easy to say, but until the President says straight-out that we need to fix Medicare and Medicaid, and to a lesser extent Social Security, and then rethink the tax system (as opposed to rationalizing the corporate income tax), the bullshit meters are going right, not left.  I’m sure that many his supporters don’t want the President to be the guy who puts entitlements “in play” in a significant way.  After all, his opponents would be happy to stop government from helping people, since they want the sate to go away.  But not being brutally honest about the most popular programs is absurd – they are already in play, not talking about them straight-on is like not wanting to be the first to talk about a tsunami heading for shore, or a fire that’s burning down the house.

Right now, Paul Ryan is ahead of the Administration on budgetary cut the crap.  But the President is well-situated to flank him and take the budget debate to the next level.  The American people need to be taken to a point of emotional acceptance about fixing the deficit, one that builds on the outrage they feel about being bankrupted by the choices made by others.  We’ve been kidding ourselves that we can fight wars, cut taxes, take care of everybody, and still fit ten pounds of potatoes in a five-pound bag.  We’ve been kidding ourselves about what it takes to maintain our standard of living.  And we’ve been stealing left and right from future generations, only to find that they will soon be us and our kids.  

So the budget message has to evolve into something so stripped of coyness as to be unavoidably true.  Everything the government does now – both the money it spends and the taxes it foregoes – is there because doing it made someone happy.  Fixing the problem means making people unhappy, and to say otherwise is to deny the truth.  (27 years later, Mondale was right!)  Let’s cut the crap and get to it.

The second area is the environment, specifically, planetary climate change.  Am I the only person who looks at the deniers in the climate debate and thinks about the first scene in Superman, where Jor-El’s father tells the Elders of Krypton about how their planet’s doomed, and in response they snicker at him?   At least he had his integrity.  But Obama’s given up on the “Jor-El lecture.”  The Administration’s approach is no longer to tell the Council of Kryptonians “our shit is deep” but that building rockets to take us to Earth will create good jobs!

This kind of bait-and-switch is bad politics and bad policy, and sets the bullshit meters off again.  As a policy matter, you can play with research and demonstration projects and mandate that there be a million electric vehicles on the road by a date certain – excuse me, a million such vehicles other than on golf courses – and all the other stuff that creates “the green jobs of the future,” but you will not put a dent in the climate problem until you price carbon out of the system.  In fact, our approach is a feeble attempt to mimic everything the system would do if you did price carbon correctly.  It has everything except what works.  You have to start there.

Right now, the Administration is living in fear of the deniers, and by so doing, makes them stronger.  Instead, it needs to start with a cut the crap line-drawing that emphasizes the extraordinary risks we’re up against and moves the debate to the same plane of generational fairness the Administration’s opponents justifiably bring to the budget debate.  So long as we run and hide from the message that there is undeniable danger, the opponents are right – we’re proposing big programs and taxes.  As in the budget debate, “not talking about” the full implications of reality makes it impossible to address the reality.  Instead, a cut the crap approach would isolate the deniers and their friends at the Department of Creation Science at Treefrog Bible College and reframe the debate.  The purveyors of cautious instincts inside the Administration should ask Presidents Clinton and Gore if they regret not being more courageous on this score.

And a third – and perhaps most important -- arena in which the President’s program needs to find the emotional tone of cut the crap is that of government itself.  Nice joke about salmon.  But here we are talking about devoting much-needed resources to education and infrastructure, and not a mention about the profound problems plaguing both delivery systems. 

Infrastructure first.  The way to get more resources into infrastructure is to confront the reality that the political system thinks they’re a kind of bakshish.  If you’re willing to outlaw earmarks, then it’s a small but productive pivot to attack “Bridges to Nowhere” and water projects that favor barge operators over the people of New Orleans.  I have argued elsewhere, together with my co-author Felix Rohatyn, that we need to replace these money-chewing programs with a consolidated Infrastructure Bank that makes rational investment decisions among competing projects and project modes.  The President endorsed such a concept in his 2008 campaign.  But pitiful little has been done to fix the modal infrastructure programs – instead, most of the emotional energy in the area has gone into a panic over the falling collections of the Highway Trust Fund, a trough at which state legislatures and the asphalt and concrete crowd meet for lunch.  The time has never been better for an argument that we need to reform the process and deprive the political system of its toys in order to make the investments we need.  You can ignore these problems, but if you propose to expand the programs without talking about these problems, you’re going to end up hearing about the problems before too long anyway.

And it’s an order of magnitude more true when discussing schools.  As in infrastructure, we are underfunding our schools, but without a better framework, we’ll never know by how much and how to go about getting it right.  The first line of education policy is not “we need to educate our kids for the future” – that’s not a direction.  It is we have to have a very difficult but very important conversation about what’s happening in our schools.  And at the heart of that conversation is the role of the teacher.  Everything about the way we hire, fire, and compensate them comes from another era, one in which the area was a ghetto for women who had few opportunities elsewhere.  It’s a profession that you enter, absent an all-consuming desire, because it employs you for life, pays you for seniority and not talent (and therefore underpays the young and often overpays the old), disallows moving resources into where they’re needed or in short-supply (for example, into math and science or poor neighborhoods), and supports an overly-centralized administrative system in which a principal can’t order toilet paper without a permit slip from the Count Seat.  It’s as if teaching were a monastic island unconnected to the labor market. 

To talk about education policy without making the problems clear undercuts the good message the Administration brings to the table.  Race To The Top was an important policy and did much good.  But it can only be understood in the context of a wholesale break with illusion and denial – cut the crap.  It’s a particularly hard conversation because of teacher unions, which deservedly feel that they’re under the gun; not only are schools underperforming, but states and localities are going broke and public sector unions are going to be on the firing live.  But are they better off if the reforms needed come as a punishment, or as a platform for more resources and popular support? 

So, as in the budget or climate, denial is the enemy.  The President has a good agenda, and it may be the case that many of the issues raised here – the need to rein in Medicare and Medicaid, the need to price carbon correctly, the need to fix the delivery mechanisms for such vital public sector services as infrastructure and education – would reach positive conclusions anyway, and that we’re best not talking about the difficult underlying realities until they’re ripe in the process.  But that’s an illusion – they’re ripe now.  The President needs to cast himself as the person unafraid to recognize and confront these realities, not only because they’re the best disciplining measure for the policy process, but because they’re his best response to the “populist” fantasy/industrial complex that opposes him.

There’s always an instinct in any raging centrist policy wonk – like me – to argue that you can do well by doing good.  Perhaps that’s in the mix.  But the rage and frustration in the country today reflects a feeling that institutions are perpetuating themselves without regard to what happens to the rest of us – the bullshit meters are twitching in the red.  The President needs to show that he gets it, and that it’s time to have an honest debate over what to do, and cut the crap.