Lobbying as a Legislative Subsidy

Ezra Klein has written a great piece for the New York Review of Books; diagnosing some of the ways money does, and does not, corrode our political system.

In many of the conversations I've privately had with liberal friends and acquaintances, money and politics is often reduced to a kind of arithmetic: Money + Politics = Corruption. I do not completely disagree with the assertion, but I certainly think there is more to it that that (as I've touched on here). Why I like Klein's piece so much is that he really plumbs the depths of causation mechanisms between well financed lobby interests and favorable legislative results. The problem with the "lobbying as a form of bribery" hypothesis is that it doesn't really stand up to scrutiny in the real world:

[...] lobbying, at least in its bluntest form, doesn’t seem to work. For many Americans, lobbying is a form of bribery. A rich lobbyist goes to a corrupt congressman, money changes hands, and the lobbyist gets his vote while the congressman gets money for his campaign. Many researchers have tried to find systematic evidence of vote buying. Very few have succeeded. Lessig quotes research by Dan Clawson, Mark Weller, and Alan Neustadtl, which concluded, “Many critics of big money campaign finance seem to assume that a corporate donor summons a senator and says, ‘Senator, I want you to vote against raising the minimum wage. Here’s $5,000 to do so.’ This view, in its crude form, is simply wrong.”

Klein explains that lobbying, instead, is more a form a legislative subsidy:

In addition to providing campaign contributions and employment prospects to outgoing elected officials and their staffs, [lobbyists] provides legislative expertise. Political scientists call this “the legislative subsidy” model of lobbying, and it poses a serious challenge to the view that lobbyists are little more than parasites.

The theory was first proposed by Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff in a 2006 paper entitled “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy.” The paper was an attempt to solve a problem that, at first glance, should not have needed to be solved, because it should not have existed in the first place: Why is the behavior of lobbyists so hard to predict?

For instance: you would think that lobbyists would concentrate their financial power and well-honed connections on the politicians they need to persuade. But they don’t. They concentrate it on the politicians who are already most convinced of their positions.

In a lot of ways, the money spent on lobbying is not so much a direct attempt at vote buying or bribery, as it is an indirect attempt at agenda setting and coalition building. Certainly there's going to be "ol' boys club" type glad handing, which favors those who already are familiar and participants in networks of privilege. But that does not necessarily mean that levels of financing is the only factor.

One last thing that I think is very important, and is not mentioned nearly enough, is the fact that the "expenditure effect"; that is, the amount of influence lobbyist spending has on an issue, recedes in relation to the issue's prominence. Klein explains:

Take any issue that you’ve actually heard a lot about. The headline clashes. The big-ticket bills. They’ve all got money on both sides. They’ve all got platoons of lobbyists swarming onto Capitol Hill. They’ve all got activists and interest groups and even ordinary Americans pestering their congressmen. And they all go the same way: the Democrats vote with the Democrats, and the Republicans vote with the Republicans.

That’s true even when the big money lines up in favor of another outcome. In 2011, the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO joined together to call for a major reinvestment in American infrastructure. None passed. In 2010, most of the health care industry was either supportive or neutral on the Affordable Care Act, and if any one of them could have swung the votes of even a few Republican senators or congressmen, the desperate Democrats would have let them write almost anything they wanted into the bill. But not one Republican budged. In 2009, the Chamber of Commerce endorsed the stimulus bill as a necessary boost to the economy. Not one House Republican voted for it. Almost every major business group has been calling for tax reform and a big, Simpson-Bowles-like deficit reduction package for years now. But Congress remains deadlocked.

I do not want to imply that I do not think money is an issue in American politics; it is. But I think we need to look at the effect money has on our political system in less ideological way, and in a more scientific way.

Bonus: Ta-Nehisi Coates' own thoughts on Klein's work.

It's All Politics

In the wake of this Planned Parenthood fiasco, I've been doing some reading on the Susan G. Komen foundation. I've found their aggressive marketing to be somewhat obnoxious, and their legal policing of their trademark to be abhorrent. They also spend quite a bit of their donor money on lobbyists. Lastly, this whole ordeal has restored a bit a faith in the progress our politics has made on the issue of women's health (although there's still quite a ways to go).

Just something that's been irking me with the Daily Kos reaction piece, and in passing opinions I've read, is the call to "rise above" politics and embrace the cause of advocacy for breast cancer survivors, patients, etc. For example, "Dr. Susan Love, MD, weighs in on the controversy":

Rather than putting politics into the breast cancer movement, lets rise above the political divisions and work together. Let’s redirect all the money that will be spent on investigating Planned Parenthood into funding studies looking to find the cause and prevent the disease once and for all. Let’s redirect our anger to making mammograms unnecessary because we know how to prevent the disease. (emphasis mine - JMG)

Now I think this is an excellent idea. I'd love it if we did not waste our time with frivolous investigations based more on political point scoring than actual concern for women's health. But I'm sure Rep. Stearns (R-Fl) believes his investigation is an important component of his job as a representative of his constituents. Moreover, the very act of deciding whether to fund Planned Parenthood investigations or breast cancer studies is a political one. The choice to divert taxpayer dollars to subsidize breast cancer research over testicular cancer research, or pancreatic cancer research, is a political one too. The choice to give cancer charities, and all charities tax-free status benefits is also a political choice.

I understand politics is awful is awful and that we hate it. But we have to understand that these types of questions are by definition of a political nature. We can't just avoid that, or "rise above" it; it's all politics. Until we embrace that (and maybe even if we do), we are just going to keep repeating these patterns.

(Bonus: Barbra Ehrenreich's excellent Harper's Bazzar piece on the SGK Foundation, Welcome to Cancerland)

The Politics of Grievance

A week ago, I rhetorically asked about what the point of supporting the Newt Gingrich candidacy was. Well, ask and ye shall receive, as Talking Points Memo has just published a piece profiling the "Gingrich Base".

I want to be honest in that I try to be reasonably equanimous on people's political partisanship. Different people believe different things for different reasons. I think a lot of conservative policy choices are wrongheaded, but I understand the extent that reasonable people can disagree. That being said, some truly abominable opinions have been coming out of the woodwork since the Tea Party began dominating mainstream political discourse. Gingrich's appeal, it seems, is his nakedly appeal to this kind of constituency. Specifically, Gingrich is "[...] more willing to name-check many of the anti-Obama arguments favored by the Tea Party that are too politically incorrect for the frontrunner to touch." For example

Gingrich frequently warns of creeping Sharia law, calls Obama a “food stamp president,” and credits the president’s decision-making to his “Kenyan anti-colonial” ideology. Even for a Republican candidate, Gingrich’s voters skew elderly, the wing of the party most susceptible this kind of language.

Examples of this include Tina Skipper, a retired school teacher from Jacksonville, FL who said that

“When Obama knelt with the Muslims of New York City, I knew we had something bad going on — he really scares me”

Not to be outdone, an accountant named Eileen Loney claimed that

The threat from Muslims — I think the others shy around it

If all TPM could find was voters attuned to the anti-Muslim dog-whistling that has been going off for the past decade, that would be one thing. But then there is an unnamed retired manufacturing entrepreneur in Cocoa, FL who complains that

Everybody’s becoming dependent. Are the blacks going to vote for Newt or Romney? The Hispanics? The unions? The teachers? The only way to win is to get someone articulate who can turn out conservatives while the others stay home. But if everyone ends up being subsidized voters, we’re dead.” (emphasis mine - JMG)

There's a certain point where I'm at a loss for words as to how people can hold these types of views, let alone be proud of them enough to articulate them to a reporter with their name attached. Specifically, the contention that traditionally Democratic-supporting constituencies are nothing more than "subsidized voters" is doubly galling in the sense that it a) denies the validity of claims the poor might have for social assistance with the actual challenges of poverty, but b) it casts those that receive assistance for said poverty as nothing more than naked rent seekers who vote Democratic.

I understand it is easy to have glib views about "the Blacks" or "the Unions." It's something else entirely, I think, to openly appeal to such a segment of America's voters. In some ways, the success of the politics of grievance in recent years is an indictment against the political opportunists that court such sentiments; in other ways, it's commentary on the state of our electorate.

Deficient Reduction; politics versus policy

I've recently been writing on the ways that undue attention is paid to the politics of an issue, as opposed to actual policy outcomes. My first two examples came from the conservative end of the spectrum; namely Newt Gingrich and Tea Partiers cum environmental activists. Today I wanted to continue the theme, but with a different example.

First, a primer: out of this summer's debt ceiling debate/hostage crisis, a Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction was created as a compromise. The basic goal of the committee was to produce a plan the reduced the federal budget deficit by $1.5 trillion dollars over a ten-year period. If the committee failed to produce a bipartisan plan that could be scored by the Congressional Budget Office (a process that takes about 48 hours) before Thanksgiving, then automatic cuts of $1.2 trillion would go into effect. This is refereed to as “the trigger,” although technically it is a process called “sequestration.” At any rate, the automatic cuts where designed to do two things. First, the trigger itself is combination of defense and domestic spending cuts. This was supposed to give the Democrats and Republicans on the committee equal incentive to agree on a compromise. Second, in the event the committee suffered political deadlock, the deficit would still be reduced; albeit in a way that is somewhat draconian, yet also with political coverage for both parties.

So, a spoiler-alert for those who have more important things to do than follow politics all day: The JSC failed to produce a bi-partisan plan. Quite a bit a the political horse-race news coverage is devoted to the implications of it's failure.

With this, I wanted to highlight Matthew Yglesias' very smart piece on how the JSC's failure is a victory for those who prioritize deficient reduction, and why the emphasis on “bi-partisanship” over actual policy outcomes is absurd. Specifically, Yglesias writes that news “is being termed a “failure,” and by the standards of D.C.’s fetishization of bipartisanship, it is one. But in terms of deficit reduction, failure is actually better than success.” (emphasis mine – JMG)

This is a re-occurrence of the basic theme I have been trying to emphasize: a large and disproportionate segment of politics and political media is concerned with the political optics of an issue or event that it is with the actual outcomes of it. Read Yglesias' piece and you'll understand, from a pure deficit-hawk point of view, the failure of the JSC is the best possible outcome. Whether the outcome is coded as “partisan” or “bi-partisan” shouldn't matter.

Culture, Policy and Ideology

There are a number of factors that influence a person's political orientation. I would argue that in the day-to-day horse race coverage of political campaigns, we lose sight of the importance of cultural factors and how they shape people's ideological orientation; regardless and sometimes even in contrary to policy preferences. As a specific example of this, I would like to point to this Berkes and Harris piece published by Slate.com.

The article itself is about a regulatory loophole in that the EPA has given to cement kilns that run on hazardous waste. The basics are these plants are legally allowed “to emit greater amounts of some toxic chemicals into the air than the hazardous-waste incinerators specially designed to burn the very same chemicals—including industrial solvents, aluminum-plant waste, and other toxic leftovers from the production of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and oil.” The reasoning for this allowance is unclear in the article. The EPA spokesperson quoted in the article simply states that the regulations are “set with a margin of public health and safety.”

One such plant: Ash Grove Cement Co, is located in deep red Chanute, Kansas, is causing concern among some locals. One of these locals, Jeff Galemore and his five middle-aged siblings decided take action on their concerns and organize a “Chanute Environmental Rights Group.”

The Galemores describe themselves as conservative Republicans and they align with candidates and causes not considered sympathetic to tough environmental regulation. Jeff Galemore, who works with his dad in the family oil business, recently posted a sign on his front lawn announcing a meeting of a local Tea Party group. His sister, Selene Hummer, 51, owns a home-decorating store and proudly displays a “Sarah Palin 2012” bumper sticker on the rear window of her pickup.

“We're not really tree-hugging liberals,” said Hummer. “But when your environment becomes damaged or you feel that you're being contaminated—I don't care what party you're in—this is your human life.” (Emphasis mine - JMG)

Now I am quite sympathetic to the Galemore's concern for their environmental safety, and I find it a failure of government when citizens are forced to question the safety of the air they breathe or the water they drink. That being said, the Galemore's inability to draw the line from their―and their neighbors―political choices to the policy outcomes that shape their community is a crucial failure of self-awareness. Participation in a representative government has both rewards and responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is to consider the possible outcomes of your choices in representatives; and that includes how much environment degradation is tolerated in the name of being “pro-business.”

This is where I think culturally factors come into play. The phrase “pro-business” is a catch-all for low-tax, low-regulation ideology that allows candidates to elide by policy specifics. This also allows voters to avoid confrontation with policy outcomes as well. What being pro- or anti-business means in terms of tax levels or regulatory regime is less important than picking a side.

To illustrate this point: the key action of the Galemore's environmental organization was to hire an independent expert, “a former inspector for the Texas Air Control Board and an adviser to the Sierra Club,” to make his own analysis of pollution levels in Chanute. At an event the Galemore's organized, the “park pavilion teeming with dozens of people, filling most of the folding chairs and lining the room’s perimeter.”

Most were not there to listen. Their T-shirts read “We are Chanute” and “Real Families, Kansas Jobs.” Some were Ash Grove employees and their families. Others were community supporters of the plant.

There was heckling when the Galemores or a few allies criticized Ash Grove and voiced concern for their health and the environment. (emphasis mine-JMG)

I think this furnishes my point. The conservative, pro-business politics of Chanute is culturally mediated. The Galemore's attempts to raise legitimate policy questions as to what being “pro-business” entails has earned them a scarlet letter.

I'm Hoping to Soon End My Posting Hiatus

But for now, Ta-Neshi Coates, preaching to the choir:

If you don't like the current iteration of America, you need to remember that you are America. The failure to build a more progressive America isn't merely a testimony to dastardly evil, it's a testimony to the failure of progressives.

David Brooks is wrong wrong wrong

David Brooks is a terrible columnist. Every time I read one of his pieces, I see errors so glaring that even a junior poli sci undergrad would be able to spot them. His column today is an excellent example of this.

He starts one a premise that, now that Paul Ryan released a budget, the Democrats need to get serious about entitlement reform. Here's a gem of a paragraph:

The Democrats are on defense because they are unwilling to ask voters to confront the implications of their choices. Democrats seem to believe that most Americans want to preserve the 20th-century welfare state programs. But they are unwilling to ask voters to pay for them, and they are unwilling to describe the tax increases that would be required to cover their exploding future costs.

Has Mr. Brooks been asleep for the past two years? Does he forget the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? Readers might recall the law. It was the one with taxes on high-cost insurance policies and major cuts to programs like Medicare Advantage to help pay for the bill. President Obama and Congressional Democrats got hammered over these cuts and taxes, specifically from the Republican legislators and candidates.

Shorter Brooks: President Obama and Congressional Democrats write, lobby and pass a healthcare reform bill that according to the CBO, will place our projected revenue to follow the pace of healthcare costs, and they are "unwilling to describe the tax increases that would be required to cover their exploding future costs."

Whereas Paul Ryan "has moved us off Unreality Island," with a plan that caps Medicare and Medicaid spending at inflation rate +1% and gets gets roughly two-thirds of it's cuts from programs for lower-income Americans.

If David Brooks bothered to care about how policy works and the reality of our problems, he could right very interesting and illuminating columns. But pieces like this are just partisan tropes that do nothing but add heat and no light to our policy dilemmas. It's a shame he abuses his platform to push this kind of junk analysis.

Facepalm

As more people believe that the president is a Muslim, the more the line between some abstract Truth and the wisdom of crowds is blurred.

Some Must Reads

Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post today.  I was originally planing on writing a short rebuttal, but after reading Conor Clarke's response (and follow-up) over at the Daily Dish, I don't see how I can really add anything to the conversation.  In the article is one of the better (if not best) non-technical summaries of externalities that I've read in quite some time:

The point of cap and trade is to solve a problem of social cost: As an energy consumer, I am imposing a cost on society (pollution) that I do not take into account when I make the original decision to consume.

In this quote,  Clarke is cuts through the political obfuscation of Palin's article, gets to the definition the words being used, and how these words apply to the topic at hand.  As Palin's op-ed illustrate, political arguments in America consistently rely on emotional appeals driven by charged vocabulary; vocabulary which is embedded in decades old culture war debate.  For example, inside language of Palin's article—the "Cap and Tax" epithet—is itself part of a clear attempt to 're-brand' the proposed energy plan with the 'tax-and-spend-liberals' narrative of American politics. 

This is what is so frustrating about our nation discourse, not just on energy bills or general politics—this is an element of the country and culture as a whole. We place a greater emphasis on the appearance of things, and how these things fit into our pre-determined narratives and understandings; than on the realities and facts of a situation.  It is because of this emphasis on appearances that Sarah Palin can write an opinion piece on energy policy, have it published in one of the country's major national newspapers, even though, as Derek Thomson (in another excellent appraisal of the op-ed) points out:

"Palin wrote a 700-word takedown of cap-and-trade that did not include the words pollution, emissions, carbon, or global warming."

It seems one doesn't need data, facts or a solid argument.  Just a reasonable appeal to the traditional monsters that lie under the bed.

Politicians (Really) Are People Too

Sarah Palin was a flashpoint for me, and I think many people, during the 2008 campaign.  She crystallized a lot of what the right of the Republican party was about; she fought the battles of the culture war, she recalled the Richard Nixon's contempt of the (liberal) elite.  At the same time Governor Palin personified the GOP's patten of emphasis of winning over governing, as well highlighting politics over policy.  Because of this, I've spent some time reading about her resignation-the commentary, the analysis and the theories behind her decision.  The speculation is exciting, but is monotonous as it is empty.  A series of 'maybes' without answers is the daily parade of modern news, yet has no real meaning to the reader.  Ellen Goodman, in her column today, gets to the heart of why Palin's resignation is so compelling, and places a human emphasis on the soon-to-be-former Governor:

"What fans loved about Palin was her perceived authenticity. She was repeatedly described as “real.’’ I think it’s what Palin believed about herself. Even after her resignation, she described her role as governor, saying “This is who I am. This is what I am.’’ But, forgive that gosh-darned empathy, this is a woman who hit a moment when she doesn’t really know who she is. Or what she wants."

Goodman is pointing out the very obvious, but often forgotten point that politicians are human beings; they have thoughts, feelings, needs, goals, passions and failures.  This is lost in the noise of the 24/7 news cycle and the political games the country plays every 2 and 4 years.  After the crucible of American media and politics; CNN's candidate tracking, 538's daily poll updates and RealClearPolitics' daily aggregate, candidates lose their humanity—slowly they become abstractions.  Cardboard cutouts for supports to fill with expectations and values.  Times like these, Palin's resignations as well as Mark Sanford's personal meltdown, remind us that politicians are dynamic—living and feeling beings just like everyday people.  So it is ironic, yet ultimately fitting, that Sarah Palin's final show show of authenticity is her political undoing.

Quick Thought

Before I go to bed: why do we look at torture with a partisan lens?