Anti-Government Government

(cross-posted at tpmcafe.com)

The Bush initiative for rebuilding the Gulf Coast amounts, as others have said, to an experiment in massive government spending to test essentially anti-government ideas, particularly the idea of creating tax- and regulation-free zones to attract commerce.

As Harold Meyerson points out, this anti-government government is a revival of Jack Kemp-ism, the platform of market-based, ownership initiatives as a poverty strategy that Kemp championed when he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Bush 41 administration. As Meyerson points out, these strategies, especially Enterprise Zones or Empowerment Zones, proved to be of very limited value. Tax incentives alone have very little effect on where employers choose to locate jobs. Investing in education is demonstrably more likely to make employers want to place a plant or an office in an impoverished urban or rural community.

But there's one little correction to Meyerson's piece: Jack Kemp talked about Enterprise Zones, but he never implemented them in any significant way. Bill Clinton did. And, after some false starts, he did it in a way that was much more effective than tax credits alone, adding $1 billion in direct funding for communities that developed comprehensive plans for their futures. It was a mixed experiment, to say the least, but it was undertaken and implemented with seriousness and passion by Kemp's successor at HUD, Henry Cisneros, and had some notable successes.

I point this out not just to correct the record, but because it's an important point: The Right doesn't really carry out innovative social policies, they mostly just talk about them. And they use them entirely as a tool of opposition, for no purpose other than to say, "Liberals want to throw money at failed old programs, but we've got a new approach..." It's false on two levels. Liberals/Democrats are absolutely interested in new and market-based approaches, if they work. And conservatives aren't really interested in those approaches, they just like having an excuse to do nothing.

I pointed this out in a review a few weeks ago of Rick Santorum's book, It Takes a Family. Throughout his discussion of poverty policy, Santorum begins paragraphs like this:
?The Village Elders [his term for liberals] consider a large percentage of our population to be helpless: they're not going to consider how to empower the poor to build wealth,? or ?The village elders like to show they care for the poor among us simply by spending more money,? rather than investing strategically to build communities. But then Santorum offers his solution, always a piece of legislation that he cosponsored with a liberal like Senator Jon Corzine.

A friend suggested at lunch today that the Republicans wouldn't be able to succeed with the Gulf Coast rebuilding initiative because they are so hostile to government that they can't carry out a big-government project. By analogy, he suggested that if Democrats had to carry out a significant downsizing of government, we wouldn't do it well. Each has its strength. And that's certainly the public perception.

Except that it was only under the last Democratic administration that the government was significantly downsized, growth in federal spending slowed and the number of federal employees significantly reduced. Initiatives like Vice President Gore's Reinventing Government took the project of making government more efficient very seriously and made it work. Republicans can't make big government work and they can't make small government work either, because they're too glib and uninterested in the whole undertaking. All they can do is cut taxes and leave the hard work for someone else.

Bottom line: Whether you want innovative, market-based programs to end poverty (and I do, balanced with other programs), whether you want smaller more efficient government, or whether you want a big, WPA-style undertaking, you have to put it in the hands of people who understand government, who care about making it work, who don't view it as the enemy.