Why I Support Mary Burke For Governor

Last Wednesday night, I attended one of the 29 house parties across the state that were organized to give Mary Burke a chance to tell us why she is running for governor and what she wants to do for Wisconsin. I was a skeptic when I arrived (See my post on Fox Cities Progressive on December 25), but she made me into a supporter. Mary Burke is a candidate with good, progressive ideas who can win the governorship in Wisconsin.

What did she say that convinced me?

·         She said that her highest priority would be to promote the creation of jobs. The current administration has a sorry record in this area, and she said that the people of Wisconsin deserve better. Her credentials lead me to believe that she may really know what to do to create jobs in our state.  She has both private and public experience. She helped to grow Trek Bicycle into a worldwide brand with thousands of employees, and as Commerce Secretary, she helped to create and to preserve many jobs in Wisconsin. So, she knows that we can have good jobs without giving the state away to a few companies that make large campaign contributions.

·         She said that our public school system is the basic building block for creating opportunity for children in Wisconsin. She told us that using public money to support private schools drains funds from our public schools and that, except perhaps in a few places in southeastern Wisconsin, we should not be starving our public schools of funds in order to support private ones. She also said that private schools that accept public money must be held accountable just as public schools are.

·         She understands that environmental protection and economic growth do not always have to be in conflict with one another. We don’t have to destroy our world in order to have jobs, and we don’t have to starve today in order to preserve our world for tomorrow.  We can have economic development and environmental protection, but only if we promote development in a way that cares for the environment.  Mary made this clear in her response to a question about the iron mine in the Penokees. She told us that she did not like the way that the mine issue was handled. She explained that when the mine was being considered, a bipartisan bill was introduced in the state legislature that would have provided a framework for developing the mine in an environmentally sensitive way, but the bill was ignored in favor of one written by the mining company. She said that she would have chosen an environmentally sensitive, bipartisan approach.

·         As governor, she would accept federal funds to expand Medicaid. Why, she asked, should we allow the taxes we pay to be sent to other states to benefit their economies?

·         As governor, she would build a state health insurance exchange for Wisconsin and negotiate with the insurance companies to lower the rates in Wisconsin. She pointed to Minnesota, where the state’s active involvement has brought lower health insurance rates to its people. Why, she wanted to know, should we pay higher rates than those in Minnesota when we could bring them down through active state involvement?

·         She supports the right of public employees to bargain collectively.

·         She supports a person’s right to choose whom to marry, and she added that if she were governor, she would defend our state’s Domestic Partnership Registry against the lawsuits that have been filed against it, which the current administration has declined to do.

·         She believes that we should accept federal money to improve our infrastructure, especially because it would create a lot of jobs in our state.

Mary made it clear to me that her administration would be very different from the current administration in ways that I can support.  In addition, she is a strong candidate. Many progressive candidates are vulnerable to the charge that they don’t really understand the needs of business, but no one can say that about Mary. Her large role in the growth of her family’s company makes it clear that she does understand business. She is a strong candidate, and she will be a good governor. I support Mary Burke, and, if you believe that Wisconsin needs a change, I advise you to do so, too.

What Will Mary Burke Do?

I'm a Democrat, and I'd like to learn more about what Mary Burke will do to create jobs in Wisconsin. Her campaign web site headlines “Solving Problems, Not Picking Fights,” and it says several interesting things including:

·         As Governor, Burke will put her private sector experience into action to hold the line on taxes and spending, and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent effectively.

·         As governor, Mary will grow our economy and create jobs by strengthening our core industries like agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, forest products and technology.

·         During her tenure as Secretary of Commerce she focused on attracting new businesses to Wisconsin and helping entrepreneurs and small businesses to start up and grow.

These are admirable goals, but they don't tell me what Ms. Burke would actually do. If you think about it, you will see that our current governor also supports these goals, but his policies have not been very effective in promoting them. So, I'd like to know what Ms. Burke would do that is different from what Mr. Walker has done.

She seems to be saying what Mitt Romney said in his presidential campaign: "I have been successful in business. So, you can trust me to create jobs." In the end, people didn’t believe Mitt Romney, and I want to know more before I decide to believe in Mary Burke.

Running a business is very different from running a state. A business has a clear goal, which is to make money for its shareholders, but a state governor has to mediate among the competing goals of different interest groups. A business can distinguish easily between costs and benefits. For a business, profit is a benefit, and everything else is a cost, but a state governor has no such automatic clarity. Are improved highways a cost or a benefit? Is increased aid to schools a cost or a benefit? Is improved environmental protection a cost or a benefit?  The answer to each of these question depends on the perspective and interests of the person answering.

Governor Walker resolves this complexity by adopting the goals of business as the goals of our state. For him, anything that increases the profits of businesses is a benefit, and everything else is a cost.  As an approach to creating jobs, this approach has some appeal, but it has not proven to be very effective in practice, and it has had high costs in other areas like education and environmental protection.

Mary Burke seems to be saying that her goals match those of Scott Walker, but she will be better at attaining them than he has been.  I hope that she has more to say than that, and I look forward to hearing her proposals. How will she promote job creation?  How will she support education? How will she protect our environment? How will she “hold the line on taxes” while also finding ways to pay for important state programs? My support for her candidacy hinges on her answers to these questions. Our state deserves more than a kinder, gentler Scott Walker.

Why It Is Stupid to Cut Unemployment Benefits Now

     It looks as though extended unemployment benefits are going to expire at the end of December, and 1.3 million people will suddenly lose their lifeline. This loss of income will do great harm to those people and will also damage the communities where they live. The income they receive is spent at local merchants and supports both profits and jobs.  So, why is their income being cut off? Why is such a harmful policy supported so widely?

      One reason is probably the hyper partisanship in Washington. Some Republicans will not agree to anything that is supported by the Democrats, and that may account for part of the problem.  Another reason is fear over the national debt. People are worried that the government is spending too much money, and they want to cut wherever they can. However, cutting unemployment benefits will make the problem worse, not better. Our government can pay its debts only if our economy grows, and our economy can grow only if people have money to spend. Cutting unemployment benefits prematurely will depress the growth of our economy. It seems obvious that we should not try to solve our deficit problem by doing things that will make it worse.

     A third reason for this misguided policy is the view stated recently by Sen. Rand Paul that extending unemployment benefits does workers a disservice by encouraging them to remain unemployed.  Those who hold this view are afraid that some people will think to themselves, “Why should I get a job when the government will pay me for doing nothing?”  These lazy people will raise the unemployment rate artificially because they are not really looking for work. People are counted as unemployed workers who are eligible for benefits only if they are looking for work. So, those who prefer to live on their benefits must pretend to be looking for work and therefore, they raise the unemployment rate artificially. However, an article in Business Insider  suggests that the evidence for a large effect of this kind is not convincing. 

     Moreover, anyone who has ever been poor or who has worked with poor people knows that most work very hard to sustain their precarious economic lives. They hold down two or even three jobs to make ends meet.  In addition, many of the currently unemployed are people who held jobs for many years. Their personal identities and social statuses were closely linked to their work. They were proud of their ability to provide for their families. When the crash of 2008 yanked the rug out from under them, they were devastated, and the suggestion that they have suddenly become layabouts who prefer to live on a government dole that averages only $330/week is not very convincing.

     However, unemployment benefits undoubtedly do affect the wage level at which people are willing to accept jobs. $330 for a forty-hour week comes to $8.25/hour, which is about 14% higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that for many people, the pride that comes from holding a job will not outweigh the fact that a person who takes a job at the minimum wage will be poorer than he was when he was receiving unemployment benefits.

     It is widely recognized that that the current minimum wage is too low. In fact, it is lower in real terms than it has been in many years. Interestingly, the people who oppose raising the minimum wage are often the same people who oppose extending unemployment benefits, and this conjunction can help us to understand what underlies their political positions.

     What do these two positions have in common? The answer is that they tend to drive down wages. If people are desperate enough, they will take jobs at any wage. The politicians of the radical right know that if they can end unemployment benefits and hold the line on the minimum wage, a moderate level of inflation will cause their big donors’ labor costs to fall and fall and fall. It is not too much to say that the goal of these policies is to drive down wages and thereby hasten the process by which the wealthy few enrich themselves still further by exploiting the poverty of their neighbors.

     If this policy is successful, it will hurt not only the unemployed but also many small businesses and their employees unless the economy grows much more rapidly that most economists are predicting. Businesses can be successful only if they have customers. If we allow the American people to become impoverished, their consumption will no longer sustain the prosperous, local businesses that they sustain today. Many small businesses will fail, and their workers will lose their jobs, thus swelling the ranks of the unemployed and driving wages down still further.  Whole communities will become poorer, and they will be unable to sustain the educational systems that provide opportunities to individuals and educated workers for businesses.  Large companies will look overseas for workers and for markets. So, they and their shareholders will be just fine, but the United States of America will become a poorer country. Is that the country we want to live in?  Is that the country we want to pass on to our grandchildren?

Some Reasons Why We Should Not Cut Social Security Benefits

Social Security Benefits Do Not Contribute to the Federal Deficit

Representative Reid Ribble and others are calling for reductions in Social Security benefits as a part of the effort to reduce the federal deficit. This is wrong in several ways.  First, Social Security payments do not contribute to the federal deficit. Social Security is fully funded by the social security tax, which is collected from workers and employers. So, cutting Social Security benefits would not do anything to reduce the deficit. In fact, it might very well increase the deficit because people whose benefits were cut would become poorer, and some of them would apply for food stamps or other programs that are paid for out of the federal government’s general revenue, thereby contributing to an increase in the federal deficit.

Cutting Benefits Would Place an Unfair Burden on the Old

Second, cutting benefits would place the burden of making Social Security itself solvent for the long term entirely on the old. Although Social Security does not contribute to the federal deficit, the program has its own long-term financial problems that have to be fixed. Social Security will become unsustainable during the next 20 years if we do not find a way to improve its finances, but there are several ways to do that without cutting benefits. We can raise the level of wages that are subject to social security tax, we can tax non-wage income like interest income, dividend income or capital gains, or we can raise the social security tax rate slightly (2%). Some combination of these can make Social Security solvent for the foreseeable future while spreading the burden equitably among all of us. In contrast, cutting Social Security payments would place the burden of making Social Security solvent for the long run entirely on a group many of whose members are already poor. Many old people are already struggling to make ends meet. Such people include elderly veterans, and we should certainly not reward their selfless sacrifices by making their last years harder than they already are.

Cutting Benefits Would Hurt the Economies of Wisconsin and the Fox Valley

Third, cutting Social Security benefits would harm the economies of Wisconsin and of the 8^th Congressional District where we live. In Wisconsin, more than 1.1 million people collect Social Security benefits, and their benefits contribute almost $16 billion to the state’s economy. In the 8^th Congressional District alone, 141, 855 people receive total benefits of $2.02 billion. Almost all of these dollars are spent locally. They create jobs and contribute to the profits of local businesses.  Cuts to Social Security benefits would thus directly harm the economy of our area by reducing the amount that Social Security recipients spend. Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

Cranberries and Government: the Way Our Free-Enterprise System Really Works

Grants to Promote the Cranberry Business

An article that illuminates the relationship between government and business in our society appeared in the Post-Crescent on October 28, 2013. The article is entitled ”Feds to Back Cranberries in Wisconsin”, and it says,

As part of $52 million in U.S. Department of Agriculture grants to support specialty crop producers, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection will partner with the University of Wisconsin researchers to help cranberry growers reduce pesticide use and environmental threats as well as expand the international market by determining the overwintering patterns of the cranberry flea beetle, testing soil-drench efficiency and sharing the information with local producers, according to a USDA news release.

“These investments will strengthen rural American communities by supporting local and regional markets and improving access to fresh, high-quality fruits and vegetables for millions of Americans,” USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a news release. “These grants also help growers make food safety enhancements, solve research needs and make better informed decisions to increase profitability and sustainability.”

Government/Business Partnership Contradicts the Radical Rightist View

Here we see a fine example of the partnership between public and private investment that has always supported the growth of our economy and the well-being of our people.  Radical rightists like to say that government is always the problem, never the solution, and they believe that the size of government should be minimized in order to reduce the drag on the economy that is produced by taxation. The taxes that we pay are seen a nothing more than money that is drained from the private economy and that is used unproductively.

This “cranberry grant” shows how limited and distorted the radical rightist view is. In fact, government expenditures have always been important to the growth of the American economy. American agriculture is one of our most successful and profitable industries, and it is an area that has developed with government support for more than 100 years.  President Abraham Lincoln signed the law that created the land-grant university system. The University of Wisconsin is a part of that system, and researchers there have for generations carried on research that has promoted the development of Wisconsin’s agriculture.  The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 established the partnership between the land-grant universities and the US Department of Agriculture to support agricultural extension work, which brought the results of research to farmers in all parts of the country. Thus, American agriculture has developed as a partnership among the federal government, the state governments, the farmers and the businesses that support farming, and the “cranberry grant” is only the latest fruit of this century-long partnership.

Many Industries Depend on Public Investment

Agriculture is not alone in its dependence on public investment.  The automobile business – that icon of 20^th century American industry – has always depended on public investment in roads and highways.  Without the hundreds billions of dollars of public money spent on roads and highways by state and local governments as well as the federal government, the automobile business could not have developed as it has. The oil business has also benefited from the growth of the automobile business that has been fostered by public investment in roads.  In Wisconsin, the tourist business that supports much of the northern part of our state could not exist without the roads. How many Chicagoans would go to Door County for the weekend if they had to take an overnight boat from Chicago to get there?

There are plenty of other examples. The aircraft business, another very successful American business, has been helped for decades by the procurement activities of the United States Air Force and by the efforts of our State Department to promote sales of American military equipment to other countries.  The internet was created with the support of the Defense Department, and without that public investment, none of the businesses that have grown up around the internet would exist at all.

The Role of Government in Banking

Our economy has also benefited from the government’s banking policies. When our country was founded, Alexander Hamilton insisted that the new federal government assume the debts contracted by the states during the Revolutionary War, and since that time, the full faith and credit of our government has stood behind the its debts and through them it has stood behind the value of the US dollar. Our businesses are able to borrow at reasonable rates all over the world because no one doubts the stability of the dollar.  The Glass-Steagall Act and other regulations introduced during the nineteen-thirties protected us from banking panics for more than sixty years, and we all know what happened when those regulations were eliminated.

We Should Not Kill the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs

I could go on, but the point is clear. The American economy and through it the American people have benefited greatly from the partnership between public and private investment that is the most outstanding characteristic of the American free-enterprise system. Minimizing the size of government would impoverish all of us by cutting off the funds that have supported research, built our infrastructure and promoted our products around the world. Such a policy would also expose us to banking panics and the economic insecurity that they bring.  As we work to solve our government’s current fiscal problems and reduce its debt, we should remember these things. If we do so, we will not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

The Meaning of the Confederate Flag

The Origin of the Flag as a Symbol

Tea Party demonstrators in Washington are waving the confederate flag in front of the White House. Why are they doing it, and what are they trying to say?  Why do people continue to find it a moving symbol 150 years after the end of the Confederacy?  The flag was as we all know, the confederate battle flag.  So, at the beginning, it symbolized the southerners’ fight against what they perceived as an unjust invasion by the United States into southern territory. The South claimed the right to secede from the Union, and the federal government said, “No.” In this context, the confederate flag fit well into the long, American political tradition of opposition to a strong, federal government, and hundreds of thousands of southerners rallied to the flag in the name of state patriotism.  A man like Robert E. Lee, supported the secession in part because of his devotion to his native state of Virginia.

From the beginning, however, the meaning of the flag was ambiguous because the secession was not disinterested. The people of the South did not choose to secede from the Union because of a disinterested devotion to the principle of states’ rights.  They seceded in order to preserve the institution of slavery, and the secession was led by the class of large slaveholders. However, most of those who fought in the confederate army were not slave holders. They had no need to secede, but they were persuaded that it was their duty to fight.  Thus, they fought and died in defense of interests that were not theirs.  

The Flag in the South after the Civil War

After the Civil War and the Reconstruction, the confederate flag was used again by the southern ruling classes to regain and then to maintain the control that they had lost in the war.  They wrapped themselves in the confederate flag as they justified the Jim Crow system of racial segregation, but the real purpose of that system was to use the power of local governments to keep a cheap labor force on the land. People were terrorized to keep them docile. Voting restrictions like poll taxes and literacy tests were devised.  This system resulted in the oppression and poverty not only of African Americans but also of hundreds of thousands of poor white people who labored as sharecroppers on southern plantations. Their interests were actually the same as those of their black neighbors, but the ruling class whipped up racist feelings, waved the confederate flag, and enlisted the poor whites in the defense of the system that oppressed them.

The Flag Today

Now, again, we see the confederate flag being used to get ordinary people to act against their own interests. A person who waves the confederate flag in front of the White House is expressing his anger at what he sees as an overbearing federal government that is trying to take away his rights and his freedom, but again, he is being manipulated. 

Some very wealthy people want to keep their taxes as low as possible. They want to be able to pollute the environment in order to make money. They want to keep wages low.  They have supported a huge propaganda campaign to portray the EPA and OSHA as unwarranted interference into the rights of businesses and as killers of jobs. They oppose the Affordable Care Act (ACA) because it is an expansion of the role of government, and they know that down the road, it will prevent their taxes from being lowered.  So, they have poured money into persuading people whose lives may be saved by the EPA or by OSHA to campaign for their elimination. They have poured money into persuading people who have no health insurance that the ACA will be an infringement on their liberties and a killer of jobs. Thus, the confederate flag is today what it always has been. It is a symbol of citizens’ resistance to federal power that is used by elites to manipulate people into opposing policies that would benefit them.  Those who wave the confederate flag see themselves as Davids facing a government Goliath, and they do not understand that this is not their fight. In the name of freedom, they wave the flag of slavery and fight to strengthen the chains that hold them down.

Why Are Political Opinions Impervious to Facts?

Political Opinions Are Not Opinions About Facts

Why are political opinions impervious to facts? We have all noticed that people almost never change their political opinions as a result of exposure to facts, and we have all wondered why this is so. It bothers us that people can be so “unreasonable.”  The people we disagree with us always seem especially stubborn in their opinions. How, we ask ourselves, can those people be so blind? How can they persist in opinions that are clearly contradicted by the facts?

We never say that about the people we agree with.  We never accuse them of holding opinions that are contrary to the facts.  This bias in favor of people we agree with is independent of our opinions. Liberals think that conservatives are impervious to facts, and conservatives feel the same way about liberals.  What is going on here?

In order to answer that question, we have to begin by recognizing that political opinions are not opinions about facts. They are opinions about policy. They are opinions about what we as a society ought to do, or about what the government ought to do or about what politicians ought to do.  Consider Obamacare. The difference between liberals and conservatives with regard to Obamacare is in their answer to questions like these:

·         Ought the federal government to regulate the market for health insurance, or is it better to allow the free market to regulate it?

·         Ought the government to require individuals to buy health insurance, or is it better for each individual to decide this question for him or herself?

Political opinions are generally answers to questions like these. They are statements with “oughts” in them.

Statements With “Oughts” Cannot Be Deduced From Premises Without “Oughts”

Questions like the two listed above cannot be answered by an appeal to facts, and the reason why facts cannot answer these questions lies in a basic truth about logic: we can never deduce a statement with an  “ought” in it from premises that that do not contain an “ought”. 

For example, suppose I say that in our community, many people are starving. Does that imply that we ought to set up a food bank to provide food for them?  No, it does not.  Perhaps, each person is responsible for providing for his own needs, and if someone is unable to do so, that is too bad for him, but it is not my problem.  In order to deduce the conclusion that we should provide food for the starving people, we have to introduce a premise with an “ought,” or – to put it differently – a moral principle.   We have to say something like “We are our brothers’ keepers,” or “Reaching out our hands to help our neighbors is the right thing to do,” or even “A rich community like ours ought not to allow its members to starve.”  Armed with such a premise, we will be able to deduce the need to set up a food bank. Thus, we would say (1) a rich community like ours ought not to allow its members to starve, (2) members of our rich community are starving.  Therefore, we should set up a food bank to feed the hungry people.

Political opinions are almost all answers to questions like, “Should we set up a food bank to feed the starving people?” and that means that they can never be deduced from facts alone. We can arrive at them only if we first introduce moral principles as a premises.  Unfortunately, we in America today are uncomfortable with moral principles, and we are especially uncomfortable with moral disputes. We prefer to think that morality is a matter for each individual to decide for him or herself.  So, in our political debates, we appeal to “the facts” in our effort to persuade, but “the facts” never persuade because underlying the debate is a difference of opinion over basic, moral principles, and that difference is concealed because we don’t like to argue over moral principles.

For example, underlying the debate over Obamacare is a basic moral question.  Is it a responsibility of the community to make sure that everyone has access to health care regardless of his or her ability to pay even if the community has to require everyone to be insured, or is that requirement so egregious an infringement on individual liberty that it ought not to be allowed? Those who support Obamacare say that the infringement on individual liberty is an entirely reasonable price to pay because it is a responsibility of the community to make sure that everyone has access to health care. Opponents of Obamacare find that the infringement on individual liberty is too high a price to pay because, ultimately, everyone must take responsibility for providing his or her own health care.

This disagreement extends to opinions over the current government shutdown.  Those who believe in the community’s responsibility to provide health care for its members see the president as a hero who has removed from the United States the stain of being the only modern nation that does not provide all its members  with  health care.  Such people naturally see the Republicans in the House of Representatives as blackmailers who would use the budgetary impasse as a lever to  move the country backward.  Those who believe that the infringement on individual liberty is intolerable see the president as the villain and the House Republicans as heroes.  No appeal to facts can possibly change these views.

Facts Can Make Us Uncomfortable

We do not like to debate moral principles, but we still have them, and since we do not like to debate them, we often do not think about them systematically.  Consequently, we are able to hold moral principles that are contradictory.  At some level, we may believe, for example, that each individual is responsible for his or her own welfare and at the same time believe that the community should help those who are unfortunate.  Such a person may – to use our earlier example – oppose the establishment of a food bank and yet be uncomfortable when he or she hears that many people are starving.  In this situation, it is easy for him or her to ignore the information or to impugn its source, to say, “That is an example of the liberal bias of the media,” or “That is an example of the conservative bias of Fox News."  We all do this. We ignore uncomfortable facts, or at least we give them less weight than comfortable ones, and so, even when we might be influenced by facts, we are not. In this situation, our preference for not examining our moral principles makes it hard for us to see their effects on our choice of facts to see.

Facts Can Rally the Troops or Help to Make a Case

Facts can be used to rally the troops. Facts that are consistent with our moral stances can be used by leaders to rally us behind their standard.  Thus, liberals are thrilled by the large number of people who tried to enroll in Obamacare last week, while conservatives are equally thrilled by predictions that Obamacare will ruin the economy. Facts can also be used to make a case. If we already know what we want, we can marshal facts in support of our view.  They help us to feel that we are right.

Thus, in a political debate, we see both sides marshaling facts, but neither side is really talking to the other side. Instead, each side is rallying its troops and strengthening its case in its own eyes. Facts are armor that helps to defend us against the enemy. They are not weapons to persuade him. As a result, we get parallel monologues rather than real dialogues. We will not be able to have real, political dialogues until we recognize that political discussions are not about facts. They are about moral principles.