Mark Schmitt

Representing Badly Drawn Districts

I've been trying to learn a little bit about congressional redistricting lately, which is one area of political reform I've never known enough about. Looking at the district maps of Florida, one state where there may be an effort to put an initiative on the ballot to fix the process, I was struck not just by the bizarre geography of some of the districts, but by the question, why would someone want to represent that blob? If you were a member of Congress, even if it slightly decreased your chance of reelection, wouldn't you rather represent your own city and its suburbs, say, than a slice of that city and then a group of disparate towns that have nothing in common except a lot of people of your own political party?

Some Members (mostly Democrats) are victims of these schemes and have no choice in the matter. But wouldn't Republican Rep. Ander Crenshaw of Jacksonville, Florida, prefer to represent Jacksonville, rather than a district that represents the white neighborhoods of Jacksonville, and then a string of counties running west along the Georgia border all the way to Tallahassee? Wouldn't he rather not have to move around his district by plane or drive for hours?

I was reminded of this when I read the article in The Hill noting that seven Democratic members of Congress had skipped last week's vote on the budget, which passed by three votes. Not that their presence would have turned the vote around, but it would have at least put a little more heat on the Republicans and they couldn't have given as many permission slips to their Members to vote against it.

Most of the Democrats had lousy excuses or no excuses, but Rep. Lloyd Doggett's press secretary said

"The Thursday departure was necessary to get from here to the Mexican border in time to begin the previously scheduled Friday events, which included two 'office hours' town-hall-type gatherings, a commencement speech and a speech to a border health group -- all in different cities,"said Jess Fassler, Doggett's spokesman.

Doggett used to represent the city of Austin. DeLay's redistricting split up Austin and stuck Doggett's home and the University of Texas in a solidly Republican district that ran from Austin to the Houston suburbs. He chose to run instead in a district that runs from another part of Austin through a chain of counties hundreds of miles long, to the border of Mexico, which is why he now has to learn to represent these communities with very different issues and interests.

Redistricting is not just a numbers game. It has a substantial effect on the ability of representatives to give their time and attention to both legislation and representation. Perhaps this is ridiculously high-minded of me, but just as there are many elected officials who are somewhat sympathetic to public financing of campaigns because they hate the time and energy they have to devote to begging for money, perhaps there is a potential alliance to be found among the Crenshaws and Doggetts of the world in a shared distaste for representing incoherent gerrymandered districts.

Or, there's another way to look at it. Recall that in the days of Democratic control of Congress, there were a lot of Democrats who kept getting reelected from districts that were somewhat Republican because they devoted themselves to constituent services. Good constituent service, answering every letter promptly, getting back home frequently were the hallmarks of the Class of '74 Democrats and their followers, and you still see that culture in, say, Senator Schumer. But as redistricting creates more locked-in districts, the payoff for that kind of aggressive representation is much less. Maybe for Crenshaw it just doesn't matter -- maybe he doesn't have to visit every seniors' residence in Hamilton County, because they don't expect to see him anyway. Maybe he can use every letter from a constituent to light the cigars a lobbyist buys him, and the worst that happens is that he gets 70% of the vote instead of 88%.  Maybe Doggett can do the same -- he just didn't get the memo.

I'd been a little skeptical of the value of redistricting, but the more I look at the consequences, the more I'm persuaded that nonpartisan redistricting, with some emphasis on compact districts and representing existing communities, is the key next step in opening up our politics.

Screwing the Very People Who Gave Him the "Mandate"

I noticed something interesting things in the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' analysis of what seems to be the newest iteration of the Bush Social Security plan, one that combines private accounts with "progressive price indexing," presumably modeled on the Pozen plan. This plan is not a significant redistribution from the well-off to the poor, rather it's a big hit on people at about the $60,000 earnings level, or the equivalent in the future.

From progressive price indexing alone:

A worker who earns 60 percent above the average wage -- about $59,000 today --  and retires in 2055 would face a 31 percent benefit cut.(These figures are based on the Social Security actuaries? analysis of the progressive price indexing proposal.)

And with the private accounts, and the proportionate reduction in Social Security benefits based on gains in the account:

For a worker who earns 60 percent above the average wage (about $59,000 today), the reduction in Social Security benefits would be 87 percent -- from $29,300 a year to $3,750 (in 2005 dollars), or a reduction of more than $25,000 a year. 

Elsewhere the Center notes that the reduction in benefits for a worker earning $60,000 would be almost as great (85% as large) as the cut in benefits for someone earning $6 million.

Now let's look at another factor. How did people in that $60,000 and slightly higher range do under the Bush tax cuts? According to the Tax Policy Center, households with income in the $50,000-$75,000 range had their federal taxes reduced on average by a little under $1,200 under the three tax cuts. That's a cut of 9.5%. Nothing to sneeze at, that'll pay the car insurance for a few months. But, as a percentage tax cut, it's less than those who earn less (households in the $20,000-$30,000 range got an 18% tax cut), and also less than those who earn more (households in the $100,000-$200,000 range got a 10.4% tax cut, and households making a million dollars or more got a tax cut averaging $103,000.

At the risk of getting too lost in the weeds here, the Tax Policy Center also has a way of looking at the tax cuts as what they are -- deferred taxes, which will eventually have to be paid for. Assuming that the financing of the tax cuts is distributed proportionally based on existing law, the cuts become a really raw deal for those $50,000-$75,000 households. Only 24% of them have any real tax cut at all, and their after tax income actually declines. The millionaires still come out way ahead, though.

(I know that I'm mixing apples and oranges, individual earnings for Social Security and household earnings for income tax data. An individual earning $60,000 might be in a household with earnings of much more than $60,000. Perhaps someone at one of the fine institutions cited here can disaggregate the data successfully; for my purposes it's enough to note that households in the $75,000-$100,000 range did not do much better under the Bush tax cuts, receiving an average cut of 10%.)

Now let's look at another bit of data: Where did Bush's votes come from? Every income group below $50,000 voted for Kerry in 2004. But in the $50,000-$75,000 category, Bush took over, winning that group 56/44. Bush's biggest gain over his 2000 vote was in this category, and he even did a little better in this group than in the group earning $75,000-$100,000.

People earning $60,000, or households in that range and slightly above, are not rich. They're the very heart of the American middle class. And they are where all the stresses and anxieties and risks of middle-class American life come together. There are no supports at that level, no Medicaid, no subsidized child care, no need-based financial aid for college. But it's not enough to be secure, either. The cost of college is terrifying, as is the possibility of losing a job and health care. The pressures of work and family are acute at that level. If you own a home, at that income level, you're fortunate but in much of the U.S. it will be very difficult to buy a home in an area with good schools. It's the level of income where you think you ought to be secure and comfortable, as your parents were, but no longer are.

This group showed a real confidence in Bush, and yet they either get screwed or get forgotten every time. If the Democrats can't find a way to speak to the realities of life for people who have been so betrayed by their political leaders, it will be truly shameful.

Brooks Channels Disinformation

I'll admit, David Brooks' claim today that Senator Reid had offered Frist a secret codicil to his deal on judges, under which he agreed that the Democrats would not filibuster a Bush Supreme Court nomination, gave me a second's pause in my assessment of Reid's tactical genius. (Brooks claims to have been "reliably informed" that Reid told Frist he would deliver the three or four votes necessary to overcome a filibuster on a Supreme Court nominee, but wouldn't put it in writing because the liberal interest groups would get hold of it, and that Frist ignored the offer. Brooks maintains his above-it-all stance by gently scolding Frist for not taking the deal.)

But then I remembered that when I said something nice about Brooks, I was bombarded with e-mails and comments attempting to demonstrate his essential dishonesty. I think this is proof of that -- either dishonesty or simply gullibility in channeling plain old disinformation.

Reid may not be as smart as I gave him credit for, but imagine how unlikely it is that he would have offered to grease the way for the next Supreme Court nomination: He doesn't know who the nominee is, unlike most of the other judicial nominations at issue. He can't make such a promise because he can't know whether he can deliver on it. And making such a promise would be an invitation to bring on the worst possible nominee, from the Democrats' point of view. While Reid might have been able to keep the alleged offer secret from Nan Aron and Ralph Neas, it wouldn't be secret from the White House. And if Judge Janice Rogers Brown is a little scary, folks, meet Justice Janice Rogers Brown, here to repeal that "socialist revolution" that put us all in "slavery" about 70 years ago.

If Reid were forced to actually deliver on such a promise, it would not just be an ill-advised squishy compromise, it would be the end of his leadership of the Democratic minority, and a debacle for the party.

As disinformation, however, it makes sense. It undermines Reid at a moment when he's riding high. It helps spin the rightwing storyline that the Democratic Party is in thrall to interest groups that take a harder line than the elected members do. And it helps stir up tensions between those outside groups and the congressional party.

It's an interesting tactic, worthy of the master, but Brooks either should have been able to see through it, or chose not to.

Universalism and Social Security

Steven Bainbridge, a conservative blogger who I had a fascinating exchange with on internet politics once, suspects hopefully that maybe, maybe it's just possible that Bush's proposal to convert Social Security into a welfare program might actually have less to do with saving it that with undermining its long-term political support:

Has Bush suddenly become a redistributionist, soak-the-rich pinko? I doubt it. Instead, I suspect there may be something else going on here. William Voegli recently reminded us of what he calls The cynical idealism behind Social Security:

    Wilbur Cohen, who devoted half a century in government to designing and defending America's social insurance programs, gave his answer in a 1972 debate with Milton Friedman on Social Security: 'I am convinced that, in the United States, a program that deals only with the poor will end up being a poor program. . .'

Since Social Security long has been the third rail of US politics, maybe Bush thinks the prospects of serious changes in the program will be stronger in the long-run if political support for it is weakened.

Um, yeah, maybe. You think so? Ensuring broad support for the program is exactly why some of us so strongly oppose raising the payroll tax cap, a far milder form of means-testing. Social Security is a pretty good deal for almost everyone, even compared to risk-adjusted private investment options. Why mess with that?

One fascinating aspect of the Bush campaign to privatize Social Security has been the desperate attempt to find some constituency, somewhere, for whom Social Security is a manifestly bad deal. And it's amazing how hard it has been for them to do it:

First there was the claim that it's a bad deal for African-Americans. That was one that you didn't know whether to laugh at or be offended by. (My colleague Marcellus Andrews probably did the best job of combining the two emotions.)  Then there was the claim that it's a bad deal for younger workers, but that depends entirely on the premise that the government will chose to default on the Treasury bonds.

Finally, as you could see in Bush's press conference Thursday night they've identified a constituency that supposedly doesn't get a good deal from Social Security:  It's a widow or widower whose spouse dies shortly before retirement. The surviving spouse would get either his/her own benefits, or the spouse's, whichever is higher, "but not both," as Bush points out. And that's true. Of course, if the spouse dies and leaves children under 18, survivor benefits under Social Security will be a lifesaver for the family.  (As Hans Riemer of Rock the Vote points out, young people are familiar with Social Security and like it, because they think of it as the program that helped Johnny's family when his dad died.) And if the widow didn't put in at least ten years in the workforce herself, or didn't earn as much money, the benefits through her husband's Social Security are much more than she would get on her own. So, to summarize Bush, the person for whom Social Security is a raw deal would be a widow or widower whose spouse dies at, say, 60, after the kids are grown but before retirement, and in a household where both spouses worked for much of their adult lives at relatively comparable incomes. The system is "unfair" to that widow or widower, according to Bush, because she only gets Social Security benefits for one person, not two.

It's a pretty cool social program that's a good deal for everyone except a person in that particular situation. And what's so bad about one person's getting benefits for one person anyway?

(Of course, as was finally pointed out in the Senate Finance Committee hearing last week, the forced annuitization feature of private accounts means that they're not really inheritable either, at least not after the annuitization has occurred.)

Anyway, Bainbridge thinks this will create some paralyzing dilemma for Democrats:  "the nice thing about Bush's plan is that it forces the Dems to make a tough choice: Do they publicly disavow their adherence to soaking the rich progressivity as a solution to income inequality or do they risk weakening long term political support for their signature program?" John Tierney adopts the same "tough choice" argument in his New York Times column Saturday.

What's silly about this is the failure to see just how not-tough a choice this is for Democrats. We would have to be insane to accept a change that creates a huge, middle-class constituency for whom Social Security would be a demonstrable rip-off. 

Outside of a tiny handful of House Democrats, maybe, and a few intellectuals, you won't hear a voice raised in favor of "soaking the rich progressivity." Until Bush forced Social Security onto the agenda, few liberals were pushing for changes to make it more than the most mildly redistributive program. We oppose tax cuts that go overwhelmingly to the wealthy, but that doesn't mean that we are pushing for a return to 80% tax rates on the wealthy. Liberals understand, as Tierney does not, that Social Security is not an inefficient anti-poverty program, but a broad-based social insurance program.

In some ways, the problem for liberals is that we are, if anything, too familiar with the merits of universalist programs like Social Security. Most Washington liberals, Hill staffers, campaign staffers, etc., have been thoroughly indoctrinated, either directly or indirectly, in the doctrine best expressed by Theda Skocpol: that successful programs are those "that reach a huge cross-class constituency," with Social Security always the model. Twice in the last ten years, I've been told in a voice of absolute certainty that, "the first thing I learned in graduate school was that only universal programs work."

So there's no doubt that preserving Social Security, the original model of a universalist program, and not letting it become a targetted welfare program that leaves a large category of middle class people worse off, will be an easy call. In fact, I suspect that the words "progressive indexing" may never be heard again after a week or so. There's no tough choice here.

But there is a limitation to the dogmatic understanding of the importance of universalism. It is easy enough to preserve Social Security -- but how do you build a new program? If successful programs are universal, that means we can't have a health care program that's targetted principally at the uninsured. If we want to deal with education, can we concentrate resources on the 20% or so of schools that are really disastrous, or do we have to provide something for everyone. Without resources, universal programs will inevitably be very thin programs, fairly modest benefits for a huge cross-class constituency. There would be real daring, real opportunity to make big changes if liberals went not necessarily for "soak the rich progressivity," but for a clear message that our well-being as a society is measured by how we treat the worst-off, and a moral agenda of targetted, rather than universal, programs.  In both his 2004 campaign and in what appears to be the beginnings of its 2008 rerun, John Edwards has been the closest to this potentially liberating insight.

But for an existing program like Social Security -- forget it. Universal was good enough for FDR, it's good enough for us.