Dan Balz has a nice article up at the Washington Post that takes a look at the difference between states that are governed by a Republican governor and legislature, and states that are governed by a Democratic governor and legislature. One-party rule is very high by historical standards, with “37 of the 50 states…under unified party control.” This creates a bit of a laboratory for comparing and contrasting the results of two radically different governing philosophies. In Democratic states, budget cuts are mixed with revenue increases, women’s rights are protected, unions are not assaulted, gay marriage is legalized, and some gun control measures are possible. In Republican states, taxes are slashed along with services, women’s rights are restricted, unions are under attack, gay marriage is not legalized, and gun rights are bolstered rather than brought into any kind of sane balance.
So, if this phenomenon of “high unified party control” governance offers us the chance to run an experiment that tells us which political philosophy works better, what are the metrics we will use to decide the winner?
The debate over which approach works better is being fought with claims and counter claims, all buttressed with batteries of statistics: the number of jobs created, the rate of job creation, changes in median income, poverty rates or the percentage of the population without health insurance.
Here we run into the same problem. The Democrats have one definition of success and the Republicans have another one.
But I’d argue that one fair measure is to see if the policies do what they are supposed to do. Does making abortion more inconvenient make it less frequent? Does slashing taxes lead to higher job creation? Does complying with the Medicaid expansion in ObamaCare reduce the ranks of the uninsured and help the states’ overall balance sheets? Does resisting the Medicaid expansion wind up benefiting the people in those states in any tangible way?
In other words, we can see if the policies actually work the way they were intended to, but that won’t change that the two parties want, for the most part, very different things.
There are a number of writeups on comparisons of MN and WI in recent months. A google of “minnesota wisconsin economy” brings up a lot of them including this by Benen:
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/tale-two-states
“Here we run into the same problem. The Democrats have one definition of success and the Republicans have another one” Ain’t that true!
To a Democrat, success is when a program helps the target group in measurable ways. So things like expanded Medicaid, easier access to food stamps, extending unemployment benefits, raising the minimum wage, bringing back manufacturing jobs – all good things,
Republicans, on the other hand, are against helping anybody for any reason unless they are rich. So success in their world is if you can bust down the poor and crush the middle class while making the rich richer. Success to them is if you can beat down teachers so good people will no longer teach in public schools, denying people healthcare access, sipping decent jobs to China by the millions, eliminating the minimum wage, destroying Social Security and Medicare.
Different worlds, different metrics of success.
I’d like to add to the list of differences “the approach to access to the polls – the right to vote.”
No. This only differentiates between what rank-and-file Democrats want and what people manipulated by the 1% through their religion and bigotry expect to get which doesn’t differ from what Democrats want. It’s also evidence of the long-term failure of political pragmatism that refuses to lay the real choice before “the people.”
I’d like to think that Lincoln was beginning to grasp that racism and sexism cannot exist within an economy that is vibrant and has an acceptable level of wealth and income inequality. It’s easy to overlook the fact that the notion of wage slavery was prevalent at the time of the civil war. That as Jim Crow laws and customs increased, so too did the power and wealth of the plutocrats. Giving rise to the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th Century that in fits and starts began the process of federal economic changes. Women were also finally enfranchised – not that they did much with it. However, bigotry and racism weren’t challenged. Except by Eleanor Roosevelt.
The bigots got the economic goodies that eighty years of their “way of life” hadn’t delivered. The problem with bigots, however, is that when times are bad, they find a scapegoat to blame and when times are good, they think it’s because they’re special and they did it all on their own. And once the issue of racism began to be addressed, they fought against the very government that had improved their financial well-being and doubled-down on that old-time religion that aids their stupidity and hate.
They are the real free-loaders. What they should have heard was “TVA or your racism and kerosene lamps?” (The kerosene industry industrialists hope you choose the latter.) “Unions and collective bargaining for decent wages and a decent standard of living or your racism and slave wages.” Where racism and sexism is most pronounced in this country (hey did you hear that the Duck guy also preaches nabbing a women when she’s still a young teen and before she has enough sense not to be a doormat for “her man” – big surprise that one), the federal money that flows to them is the highest and has been since the New Deal began. Racists are also easily manipulated to loathe other symbols or word of equality such as socialism. FDR overestimated the ability of these folks to embrace socialistic federal programs once they had benefited from them and from that embrace even more. Instead they cart around placards stating “keep government out of my Medicare.”
Just as Lincoln was left with no choice but to respond military to the succession of the south and issue the Emancipation Proclamation or consign millions of black folks to another century or more of slavery, FDR had no choice but to enact national social welfare programs and to be the progressive in the political party that wasn’t progressive.
There’s a parallel in our time. The conversation about health care should have started with “US health care costs are out of control and the simple facts: 1) health care in the US costs double or more what it costs in other countries even if we exclude the operating costs and profits of health insurance companies. 2) medicaid and medicare costs – Parts B, C, and D and not A that are funded out of general tax receipts and not payroll taxes – will continue to rise and consume larger portions of the federal budget in the next two decades. 3) if we do nothing, families, even with health insurance, will continue to file bankruptcy to cover medical costs. 4) if we do nothing, health care will soon gobble up in excess of 20% of GDP and still be inaccessible for tens of millions of Americans. So folks, it’s either some form of socialized medicine or pray that you don’t get sick or old and sick or win the lottery.
Recently I feel that many programs are working really well for people. They really tend to work for the benefit of people.
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