"Givers and Takers"

Massachusetts doesn't have a single Republican member of Congress. They haven't elected a Republican Senator since 1972, and the legislature is not merely in Democratic hands -- of 200 legislators in the state house and senate, only 29 are Republicans. Yet the state has now elected its fourth consecutive Republican governor. And these are an increasingly dangerous bunch. Last week, Governor Mitt Romney's budget advisor, Eric Kriss, told the Chamber of Commerce that the state needs

an ecosystem-like balance between those who contribute through taxes and those who receive government benefits,. What ratio is sustainable? Lyndon Johnson's Great Society figured it to be around 9 to 1 -- that is, 90 percent should help the bottom 10 percent rise up. . . . Forty years later our ratio at the state level is more like 3 to 1....Some -- most in this room probably -- are net contributors, while others are net beneficiaries. The ratio betwen givers and takers turns out to be a critical variable of government.'

According to the Boston Globe, Kriss later admitted that he had completely made up the figures in this analysis, particularly the 9 to 1 ratio of the Great Society. And of course that's obviously not what anyone in the Johnson administration was thinking, because by their very nature, Great Society programs like Medicare would reach far more than 10% of the population.

This is painfully reminiscent of a nasty old routine by former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, in which he would put on his phony drawl and complain that "We got too many people ridin' in the wagon, and the rest of us are pullin' the wagon. We need the people ridin' in the wagon to get out and start pullin' the wagon." (I can quote that from memory because almost every Gramm floor statement in his eighteen-year Senate career included that little riff, plus his proud declaration that "Ahh flunked the third, fifth, and ninth grade.")

Noah Berger of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center (which is part of the excellent State Fiscal Analysis Initiative that I'm involved with in my other life) has a superb response to Kriss, pointing out among other things that the share of total personal income going to government in Massachusetts has declined from 18.8% in 1979 to 16.5% today. But more to the point, Berger notes that all of us are "givers" and "takers" in different ways at different times in our lives. The kid in school is a "taker" today, and a "giver" later when he has skills and a job. The senior using Medicare today or relying on Medicaid for long-term care is likely to have been paying taxes for forty years or more.

To me, this is the central truth that has to be reestablished as the basis for liberal politics. It is not about "compassion," distributive economics, or the obligation of the rich to help the poor. That's nothing more than the converse of the Kriss/Gramm line. The point we need to reestablish is that government at its best can provide a platform of economic security for all of us, one that any of us might use at one point in our lives, not at others, and if we happen to be very lucky, never at all. I'm not collecting Unemployment Insurance today, but I'm sure glad it exists. I'm probably less likely to need Medicaid or TANF benefits, but they are there for all of us if, in some way, the floor falls out from under us. And this platform of economic security, no matter how far we might feel we are from needing it, provides us all with a peace of mind that allows us to take economic and personal risks -- risks that often create prosperity -- that we would not be able to take in the pre-New Deal environment.

One of the great mistakes of liberalism is to misunderstand this. For example, I often hear people say that policies regarding welfare should be determined by "those affected" -- that is, current recipients of welfare/TANF benefits. And, of course, the poorest people often go unheard in government, so anything to boost the voice of the neediest is worthwhile. But this way of framing the question has always seemed to me to perpetuate the Eric Kriss/Phil Gramm notion that there are just two kinds of people, welfare recipients and the rest of us, takers and givers, those "ridin' in the wagon" and those "pullin' the wagon." That's wrong, and we have to fight that at every turn. I may not have that much in common with a woman raising kids on her own with an $8/hour hotel job, but we both have a stake, both personal and ethical, in a system of economic security that prevents us from tumbling all the way to rock bottom. And that's why we have to fight the "givers and takers" rhetoric with passion and outrage. It's a narrow, ugly way to look at the world.