Monthly Archives: May 2014

Room to Grow has Room to Grow

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My initial reaction to Room to Grow was negative. Let me try to offer a more balanced assessment.

A. One could argue that the purpose of the project is to shift the conservative conversation away from spending cuts, tax cuts, and a balanced budget. The idea is to focus on policies that will improve the way government deals with ordinary Americans in terms of health care, education, and work. My comments on that are:

1. I commend the conservative reform movement for trying to come up with policies that help ordinary people. I think that is the right thing to do.

2. Having said that, I think that the less populist parts of the conservative agenda, such as reducing taxes on capital and putting entitlements on a sustainable path, are also the right thing to do. Maybe it is prudent for conservatives to set those goals aside for a few years, but it would be wrong to abandon them altogether.

3. I think that one can argue that many progressives approaches for helping ordinary people have been at best ineffective and at worst harmful, with the latter a frequent result.

4. I think that there is zero chance that progressives will admit that conservatives have better approaches for helping ordinary people. I think that there is zero chance that the progressive media will credit conservatives with caring about ordinary people.

B. The glossy paper and colorful layout of RtG led me to expect a finished product. It is anything but that. I think it would have been better presented as a conversation starter than as a program. My specific complaints are those that I have outlined in earlier posts.

1. The chapters are not coordinated, and so the ideas do not fit together. In some cases, they are clearly incompatible with one another. For me, the lack of coherence makes it misleading for RtG to call itself an agenda.

2. Sometimes, problems are identified, such as the power of incumbents in health care and education to block innovation, without proposing bold solutions.

3. At least four chapters propose new tax credits.* I think we should be taking support for “merit goods” (aka social engineering) out of the tax code, not putting more of it in. While I support the thrust of reducing the tax burden on ordinary working Americans, I think that cutting payroll taxes would be a better approach than loading more tax credits into the system.

*Maybe more. I just remembered that the chapter on employment policies proposes a business tax credit for hiring workers who have been unemployed for a long time.

4. I worry that RtG lends itself to legislative gesturing. A member of the House or Senate can introduce one of these proposals in isolation, issue a press release, and say “Look at me. I’m offering a solution for X.” In fact, the sort of coherent approach to policy that I think is needed can probably only come from the executive branch.

5. I am increasingly convinced that all of our means-tested programs need to be consolidated along the lines I have suggested. At the very least, somebody needs to think about the interaction among them.

6. RtG did call my attention to two issues that I had not considered before: child-care subsidies; and potential marriage penalties embedded in means-tested programs. I will think about those issues and revise my ideas if necessary.

The Constitution, the President and Us

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In Room to Grow, Ramesh Ponnuru writes,

Confronted by presidential lawlessness, some conservatives are tempted to throw up their hands. They conclude there does not seem to be much conservatives can do about it besides such extreme, and for that reason impractical, measures as impeachment. But…we can make the case that the president must be bound by the laws and that executive dereliction of duty is a threat to national well-being…we could try to reestablish a political norm by raising the cost of violations of it and increasing the odds that future presidents will feel bound by it.

Good luck with that. I just finished reading The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America, by F.H. Buckley. The main take-away is that once you have a chief executive chosen by popular election, you are in trouble. The “extreme” measure of the legislature removing the head of state happens much more readily in parliamentary systems, Buckley argues. He says we are just about the only country without a parliamentary system that isn’t pretty far along on the autocracy spectrum.

Buckley says that our founders did not want a popularly elected President. They wanted a President chosen by the House of Representatives. But they were afraid to take that idea to the people, so they instead proposed that the selection would go the House in the case of an electoral college deadlock–which they thought would be the norm once George Washington left office. Oops!

Buckley says that the problem with popular election of Prime Ministers, and especially of Presidents, is that they become much more powerful than legislatures. They have national legitimacy, they can present a unified front, and they can dominate the news media. Separation of powers is a pipedream.

Where we’re headed, ultimately, is for the Presidency to become more and more powerful, until we have the equivalent of Hugo Chavez or Vladimir Putin. That’s Buckley’s version of “Have a nice day.”

More RtG

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1. Adam J. White is the author on energy. Mostly it’s “Fracking. Woo-hoo!” Not much in terms of policy specifics.

2. James Pethokoukis writes on regulatory and financial reforms. He berates “too big to fail” and cites two approaches for dealing with it: restricting deposit insurance to banks that do not engage in securities trading or more exotic businesses; or requiring large banks to hold more capital, perhaps more like 15 percent, compared with the 6 percent or less that they can hold under current rules.

He also mentions copyright and patent reform, including Alex Tabarrok’s idea of having patents with different terms: shorter terms for innovations that are not expensive to arrive at (think of innovations in software) with longer terms for innovations that are expensive to arrive at (think of drugs that require hundreds of millions of dollars of research and testing).

What he fails to mention are reform of the FCC and the FDA, both of which are long overdue given new technological realities.

3. Carrie Lukas talks about policies related to work-family balance.

the Government Accountability Office estimates that in 2012 the federal government administered 45 programs related to early learning and child care, which cost taxpayers roughly $14.2 billion per year. In addition, there are five tax provisions to support individual spending on child-care services, which reduce tax receipts by approximately $3.1 billion annually. These resources solely benefit families using formal, paid child-care arrangements–overwhelmingly center-based care. Rather than favoring these choices, policymakers ought to make that support available to all families witih children under the age of five…since many of the current programs, like Head Start, are geared to assist low-income women, a new mechanism for support should be allocated on a means-based scale to help those with lower incomes most.

That makes sense. But, again, there is no integration with other chapters in the book. We saw that Scott Winship touted something like the “universal credit.” Are we going to fold support for child care into a sort of universal credit, or are we going to continue to take a fragmented approach to policies?

4. W. Bradford Wilcox talks about policies to provide incentives (or at least remove disincentives) for marriage.

the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program could be transformed. Instead of depending on household size and household earnings–which creates the potential for a marriage penalty–it could become a wage subsidy for individual low earners.

…for other means-tested tax and transfer policies targeting low- and moderate-income families, couples could receive a refundable tax credit for the amount of money that they lose by marrying.

the marriage penalty associated with Medicaid should be eliminated

So far, in the various chapters of Room to Grow, I have seen three different Medicaid reforms, three different suggestions for changing the EITC, and new tax credits for health insurance, families with children, childless workers, and child care. Obviously, that does not bother the editors of this volume as much as it bother me. They might make an argument that the more ideas, the merrier. But I do not think that you can govern on the basis of solutions that are mutually incompatible.

I Won’t Be Going

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I am interested in the concept of the “smart grid” from a SNEP perspective. The IEEE is holding a conference on Intelligent Energy and Power Systems next week.

The aim of IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Energy and Power Systems is to bring together researchers from the areas of Power & Energy, Power Electronics, Intelligent, Predictive and Adaptive Control, Smart Grid and Industrial Electronics from leading universities, research laboratories and industry. This conference will be the place to discuss modern ideas, innovative concepts and experimental results.

The conference is in Kiev.

RtG on the Safety Net

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The chapter is by Scott Winship.

rather than instituting work-promoting reforms program-by-program, there is much to be said for consolidating them, thoughtfully modifying phase-out rates to transparently encourage people [to] move to work, and offering supports outside the confines of specific programs.

As part of SNEP, I have a somewhat specific proposal that attempts to do this. Winship refers a proposal by Oren Cass that sort of sounds like mine, but as I look closer the resemblance seems to go away. You can read Reihan Salam’s write-up from last year on the Cass proposal.

As an alternative, Winship writes,

Congressman Paul Ryan, who chairs the Budget Committee, has spoken favorably of the United Kingdom’s “universal credit.” Under this approach, various means-tested programs would again be consolidated, and benefits would be distributed to families as a single amount rather than through separate programs with their own applications procedures and bureaucracies. A universal credit may be designed with a single phase-out schedule as beneficiaries move into work

Yes. I need to find out more about the British experience, which I understand ran into a number of implementation snafus.

Again, I raise the issue of coherence. The big enchilada of means-tested programs is Medicaid. If you going to have a coherent policy document, then you need to decide whether or not Medicaid reform is going to consist of folding into a universal credit. Instead, the chapter on health care reform talks about a completely different approach to Medicaid.

I want to see a policy playbook, and that means that the ideas have to fit together. Relative to that expectation, RtG comes across to me like a bunch of vendors standing outside the ballpark, all shouting. “Tax credits!” Getcher health care reform here!” “Gotta have higher ed reform!”

RtG on Education

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1. The K-12 chapter is by Frederick M. Hess.

Conservatives should broaden the implications of their intuition in favor of choice and encourage more choices within school curricula. These choices would allow families to better meet the needs of their children–through more robust foreign-language instruction, for instance in math, or the ability of home-schooled students to participate in school sports or electives.

When I said at the rollout of Room to Grow that I found it timid and tentative, this is the sort of thing I had in mind. I would prefer a bolder approach that is more focused on making it possible for entrepreneurs to compete in the education field. I think you have to regard as harmful any Federal funding that supports public schools rather than enabling alternatives to gain a foothold.

I have not through what these bold reforms might look like. How about prizes for achieving results? Maybe for getting students from disadvantaged backgrounds up to grade level. Maybe for enabling high-caliber students to win contests in math, science, or writing? Maybe for getting decent educational outcomes at very low cost?

2. The higher-ed chapter is by Andrew P. Kelly.

Rather than trying to hammer an antiquated accreditation system into something well suited to innovative ideas, policymakers should instead develop a new, parallel pathway to the market. The could mean a new accreditation agency that is designed to certify innovative programs (as Senator Rubio, among others, has proposed), or it could mean devolving accreditation to a new set of actors (like state governments, as Senator Mike Lee has proposed).

I agree that this is the important problem to solve.

RtG on Tax Reform

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The essay is by Robert Stein.

tax cuts for the middle class should be designed to offset the greatest fiscal-policy distortion that affects middle-class Americans: the disincentive to raise children caused by Social Security and Medicare.

…A recent tax reform proposal by Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) would take a large step in this direction. He would keep the current $1000 child credit and the personal exemption for children, and a new credit of $25000 available to all taxpayers with kids, with no phase-out of the sort that applies to the current credit. The new credit could be used to reduce income-tax and payroll-tax liabilities: it couldn’t be used to increase refunds for those who have already used other credits (like the earned income credit) to reduce their tax bill to zero.

To help pay for the news larger child credit, Senator Lee would greatly simplify the income tax code, getting rid of all itemized deductions except for the mortgage interest and charitable deductions. He would also limit the deduction for new mortgages to $300,000.

1. The assumption is that people are thinking, “My retirement is taken care of. So I don’t need my children to pay for my retirement. So I won’t have so many children.” I would like to see some estimates of this effect. How large is it? I’m not even sure that it has the right sign (having your retirement taken care of might make you more willing to have children, because your finances are less uncertain).

2. Getting rid of itemized deductions and capping the mortgage deduction sound like good ideas. But I would rather use the revenue from those to reduce payroll taxes and thereby improve the labor market.

3. Meanwhile, in another chapter, written by Michael Strain, we find

The EITC is much more generous to households with children than to those without; in 2014, the most a childless worker will get from the EITC is $496, while a worker with three or more children will get up to $6143….we could increase the maximum size of the credit for a childless worker by a factor of six and the maximum credit for a worker with one child would still be larger. So policymakers should double or triple the credit available to childless workers, and fund the expansion by reducing tax benefits (like the mortgage interest deduction and the state and local tax deduction) that now almost exclusively benefit higher-income households.

I don’t mind so much that one author thinks we don’t subsidize middle-class parents with children enough and the other thinks that we don’t subsidize childless workers enough. But I certainly mind that each of them wants to use the same revenue source to fund additional subsidies.

One of the reasons that I am reluctant to have SNEP be a large group project or to think in terms of political appeal is that I want it to be coherent. To me, that is the difference between politics and policy. Incoherence might be a feature in politics. In policy, I think of it as a bug.

Again, you have my idealism/cynicism, which separates politics from policy. Politics is what politicians do to win votes. Policy is what wonks propose in the hope that it will help the country. I think that one should propose good policy, taking into account obvious political constraints. However, I would not assume that voters, other than rent-seeking interest groups, choose candidates on the basis of specific policies.

RtG on Health Care

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The essay is by James Capretta. He says that there are four keys to health care reform.

First, the basic market orientation of this approach is in a sense its overarching characteristic…allow providers on the ground to try new ways to deliver quality care at a low cost

When during the question period I said that RtG sounded tentative and timid, without strong specifics, the moderator rebuked me, saying that I needed to read the sections on health care and education. But, honestly, I did not see anything specific in Capretta’s chapter that indicates a policy change that would contribute to the worthy objective given above.

His second idea is to

place an upper limit on the amount of employer-paid premiums that would enjoy tax-preferred status.

That is fine, although I thought that at one point some sort of penalty for “Cadillac health plans” was part of Obamacare. Of course, if it ever was part of Obamacare, it probably got waived.

Anyway, Capretta also proposes an age-graduated tax credit to people without employer-provided health insurance. So without being especially charitable, I can say that he is specific on his point two. However, I have to quibble and say that while such a tax credit may be good on horizontal equity grounds–putting different categories of consumers on the same footing–it tends to worsen the overall bias that consists of subsidizing health insurance through the tax code.

His third idea is continuous-coverage protection. The idea as I understand it is to outlaw making risk adjustments to anyone who already has insurance coverage. If you never had coverage and you walk in to an insurance company with a bad illness, too bad for you. But if you were covered before, you have to be given rates that do not penalize your bad illness. That strikes me as a reasonable approach, although I still think we will need high-risk insurance pools. There are going to be people who choose not to insure and then find out that they have an expensive illness, and we are not going to bankrupt them.

His fourth idea is to enable Medicaid recipients to take a cash-equivalent voucher to purchase health insurance. Again, that is a reasonable idea. But as he points out, we need to sort out the state-Federal mix in Medicaid, which right now creates perverse incentives for states to over-spend Federal money.

With SNEP, I am thinking in terms of integrating all means-tested programs, including Medicaid. There is another piece in RtG, by Scott Winship, which alludes to the Oren Cass Flex Fund. But Capretta’s Medicaid ideas and the Flex Fund are an example of two specifics in RtG that strike me as not fitting together.

So, of Capretta’s four keys, the first has no specifics (no reforms of the supply side of medical care), the second involves a new tax credit that may or may not be a net improvement, the third seems fine to me, and the fourth strikes me as incompatible with other specific proposals in the book.

RtG and the Conservative Vision

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Reading Room to Grow allows me to clarify my goals in Setting National Economic Priorities. In the opening essay, Peter Wehner writes,

Americans do not have a sense that conservatives offer them a better shot at success and security than liberals. For that to change, conservatives in American politics need to understand constituents’ concerns, speak to those aspirations and worries, and help people see how applying conservative principles and deploying conservative policies could help make their lives better.

I am at once more idealistic and more cynical than this. I am idealistic in that I would just spell out the policies I would most like to see given what I judge to be the political constraints, without worrying about how the policies come across to ordinary people. I am cynical in that I do not think that voters respond to policy proposals.

Yuval Levin writes,

Moral individualism mixed with economic collectivism feels like freedom only because it liberates people from responsibility in both arenas. But real freedom is possible only with real responsibility. And real responsibility is possible only when you depend upon, and are depended upon by, people you know. It is, in other words, possible only in precisely that space between the individual and the state that the Left has long sought to collapse.

…the conservative approach to public policy… involves three steps: experimentation (allowing service providers to try different ways of solving a problem), evaluation (enabling recipients or consumers of those services to decide which approaches work for them and which do not), and evolution (keeping those that work and dumping those that fail).

Levin sounds like a cross between Edmund Burke and, well, me. I consider it to be moral philosophy properly done. What passes for moral philosophy on the left, in contrast, comes across to me as a set of gestures and postures. Tom Lehrer summed it up years ago in The Folk Song Army.

We are the Folk Song Army.
Everyone of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.

Reform Conservatism’s Playbook

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It is called Room to Grow, and I attended the rollout of it. Kevin Glass writes,

Conservatives are roundly seen by non-conservatives as partisans for the rich, it’s argued, and that perception must change to counter the ascendant progressive movement.

…Conservatives, Sen. McConnell said, “have often lost sight of the fact that the average voter is not John Galt.”

McConnell promoted three pieces of legislation that he said would fit in to the Republican reform agenda – the Family Friendly Workplace Flexibility Act, the Expanding Opportunity for Charter Schools Act, and the National Right to Work Act.

Actually, McConnell spent most of his time talking about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid bringing bills to the floor without allowing for amendments. McConnell seemed really jazzed about having beaten back a primary challenge, so that he can become Majority Leader himself if the Republicans pick up enough seats. He predicted that the Democrats would still have at least 40 seats in the Senate next year, and he assured us that he will allow them to block legislation. Because he does not want to be like Harry Reid and achieve his goals undermine the comity that makes the Senate a terrific institution.

I’ll post more on the substance of RtG in the next few days. Compared with my idea for SNEP, I would say that it is more political, more fragmented, and less ready for implementation. Of course, since SNEP does not yet exist, RtG is way ahead on that score.

[UPDATE: Kevin Glass writes about McConnell’s theory of Senate mechanics and partisan relations. Glass gets into the merits of McConnell’s argument. Even I were to grant the merits, which I am not all that inclined to do, it was so off-topic at the RtG rollout that I found it painful.]