Eat your spinach politics

By Dave Anderson:

Complex arguments about second and third order benefits that significantly lag implementation of both policy and the upfront costs of a policy are losing arguments.  The vast majority of people are not hard-core wonks, and they have reasonable discounts on the future as well as bounded rationality and limited rational ignorance in politics.  People assess their situations on a few notable metrics.  From those metrics, they make the political decision to reward or punish those in power for their perceived performance.  

Larry Bartels has argued that disposable personal income growth was a key determinant of Gore's inability to benefit from a good economy in 2000.  DPI growth was fairly low because most wage gains were being concentrated at the top of the economy and the federal government was running a significant surplus which means revenues were comparatively high to historical norms.  This was a responsible policy set. Yet, the voters did not reward the Democrats with a strong win for being responsible on policy, they voted themselves a pay raise from George Bush's massively irresponsible tax cuts.  Bartels theorizes that if the Democrats were policy irresponsible in 1999 by advocating for a large lump sum tax refund, the 2000 election fundamentals would have been far more in Gore's favor than the basicly neutral conditions that actually resulted. 

I recently argued that the Democrats should not fall into the sucker role of the multi-generation game of budgetary kneecapping.  Instead they should deliver good public policy and programs that they have been promising and arguing towards for generations.  Debt loads matter over the long run, but they politically only matter when Democrats are in power and have a chance to implement significant social and domestic policy.  Deficits did not matter on Medicare Part D, they did not matter on war funding, they did not matter on tax cuts.  They only seem to matter when Democrats are in charge.  Over the long run revenue needs to rise to meet expected expenses, but the long run is not the next sixteen months, it is the next decade. 

Delaying needed changes to the US health finacing and care system to deal with the deficit through a combination of cutting popular programs and raising taxes in at best a neutral manner, and more likely giving the composition of the Nelson-Landrieu-Lincoln gang, a regressive fashion is a sucker's game. 

The marginal change in the deficit's level will have no real impact on most people's lives.  They will just rightly see higher taxes either through increased withholding or a national VAT, an increasingly shaky and innaccessible health insurance system for anyone who actually needs insurance, and rightly conclude that Democrats can not deliver on their promises nor can government cause positive change.  Apathy, indifference or more probably neutralization of economics/living conditions as a voting evaluation filter will occur.

So in 4 years, or 8 at the most, Republicans get re-elected with the budget approaching balance again, or at least not that far in the red, and they promise massive tax cuts to solve all problems.  Rinse, repeat and watch as Democrats wonder why doing the same thing for the third time in a row in 2024 will be any different. 

The alternative political/policy strategy is to create facts on the ground through the passage of effective social programs, most notably health insurance reform.  After creating a real and valuable deliverable, then think about revenues for the rest of the government.  At that point, there is the goodwill to actively argue that government can and does do good things with high value that are worth paying for.  Any other strategy is an eat your spinach strategy that American voters will reject as soon as someone offers to smother the spinach in cheese.