Anytime a member of the media says there are “inarguable facts” about the state’s economic and financial crisis, that’s usually a sign that you should be extra dubious of their claims. Steve Wiegand uses that phrase in his SacBee article today to essentially make the Parsky Commission’s case for it, in advance of whenever it is exactly that they’re going to produce an actual final proposal. Wiegand’s article essentially rehashes the basic center-right argument about state government: our taxes are too volatile, and combined with “reckless spending” and the severe economic crisis, that explains the state budget mess:

Three inarguable facts dominate California’s system of financing state government:

• It’s a mess.

• It’s currently a mess in large part due to the deepest and most pervasive global recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

• It’s been a mess for much of the past three decades because the combination of an out-of date tax system, reckless spending and fickle voters has made state government extremely vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of the economy.

I’ll grant Wiegand the first two points. Since 2007 California has had a total of about $60 billion in budget deficits. $47 billion of that is due to decline in taxes. But much of that decline is led by collapsing sales taxes. This recession is a balance sheet recession led by consumers working feverishly to pay down debt. Until the debt is purged and wages grow, the massive consumer spending binge of the last 20 years is never coming back.

That starts us down the path of realizing just how wrong Wiegand is in making his third point. Wiegand repeats the discredited “volatility” argument to infer that the reliance on personal income taxes is flawed:

Since California relies so heavily on those revenues – more than half of general fund income comes from income taxes – it makes state government extremely susceptible to swings in the economy.

“When the market tanks, those taxpayers sneeze,” said H.D. Palmer, the veteran spokesman for the Department of Finance. “And when those taxpayers sneeze, the state budget catches pneumonia.”

One of the reasons CA relies on that income is because Prop 13 has meant the state does not capture the wealth temporarily created by two massive real estate bubbles since 1978 (one in the 1980s and the other in the 2000s).

But Wiegand misses two other crucial points about income taxes. Both personal and corporate income taxes have held up better than sales taxes during this recession. This is an especially important point during this so-called economic “recovery” where those at the upper end of the income scale, along with large corporations, are weathering the storm pretty well. It is nutty to assume that they need their tax burden reduced.

Wiegand’s entire embrace of the “volatility” argument is of course flawed from conception, since there is no government budget out there that I’m aware of that has been able to resist the stress of the economic downturn. Those states that haven’t had significant budget crises, like North Dakota, also haven’t been hit as hard by the recession. The underlying economy in California is volatile and has been since about 1980. It makes perfect sense that tax collections would reflect a boom-and-bust economy.

The rest of Wiegand’s article focuses on the sales tax. As I argued above, any examination of state tax policy that does not examine the collapse of consumer spending, likely to be a long-term trend, is probably not going to be a very useful guide to what’s actually happening. After mentioning in passing the notion of modernizing the sales tax, he quickly shifts to a trip down memory lane, to the widely-mocked 1991 “snack tax” that Pete Wilson and the Legislature used in their solution to the budget deficit that year. The “snack tax” was repealed at the ballot box in 1992, and Wiegand uses it to argue that California voters are reluctant to extend taxes to untaxed goods and services.

But is still actually the case? Polls from 2009 suggest voters are willing to raise taxes to protect existing state services. Taxing accounting services, for example, in order to keep teachers in classrooms or taxing soda and junk food to keep parks open may well be more popular today than it was 17 years ago.

Wiegand closes his article by letting David Doerr of the right-wing California Tax Association repeat the totally unverified and undefended claim that the other element in our state’s fiscal crisis is “overspending”:

“The tax structure has been pretty consistent in providing income,” Doerr continued. “It’s spending. They (elected officials) just can’t say no.”

This claim isn’t supported by any evidence in the article, and as it’s the very last sentence in the article, it is not rebutted. California’s media takes it as a given – an “inarguable fact” as Wiegand said at the outset – that we have “reckless spending.” They believe this is so self-evident that they don’t actually have to prove it or explain it or justify the claim.

In fact, California’s spending over the last 6 or 7 years has been flat. The largest amounts of spending have actually gone to tax cuts, with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $6 billion per year backfilling of the VLF cuts in 2003 being the most obvious example.

When will California’s major media outlets start questioning the “reckless spending” myth? As long as they treat that myth as an “inarguable fact,” it’s not something I’m going to hold my breath to see.

Or maybe the question should be posed like this: “without affordable and accessible higher education, does California even have a future?”

California’s dramatic economic success over the last few decades, propelling the state into the forefront of the global economy, was made possible by the investments made in higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. Democrats and Republicans agreed on the need for a well-funded college system that prioritized accessibility and affordability. The UCs, CSUs, and the oft-overlooked community colleges trained generations of workers, entrepreneurs, inventors, and others who created, produced, and managed the state’s innovation and prosperity. The 1960 Master Plan was the envy of the other 49 states, and gave California and its workers a massive competitive advantage.

All of that is now under direct assault. As I have charted before, Arnold Schwarzenegger has always wanted to destroy the Master Plan and privatize public higher education, without regard to its effects on the economy. One can only assume this is part of his broader goal of decoupling the wealthy from the fate of everyone else in this state. He wants to sacrifice broad economic prosperity and the possibilities of future growth to enable the already rich to become much richer and escape any future taxation and redistribution of their hoard.

As a consequence, with yet another massive hit to higher education budgets, the UC system is proposing a truly insane 32% increase in student fees in 2010, bringing the cost of a year at a UC to over $10,000. For perspective, just 10 years ago I paid about $4,400 for a year at UC Berkeley. The total cost of the fees alone for four years were about $17,600 – which, if these increases go into effect, will buy you about 3 1/2 semesters of a UC education.

It is difficult to imagine how this will have any other outcome than economic stagnation. More and more young people will be unable to attend college and thus be consigned to even lower wages than college graduates are already experiencing. Unemployment rates are much lower for people with a bachelor’s degree than for those who do not have one, although college grads are definitely getting hit by the recession.

Or, more young people will have to take out even larger amounts of student loans to afford the higher fees. A $40,000 loan debt is an enormous burden on young families, especially in a state with a high cost of living, stagnant wages, and the likelihood of long-term high unemployment.

Either way, it represents a de facto tax increase on middle-class and working families in order to protect the wealthy from facing higher taxes. It is economically indefensible.

The possibility of such reckless fee increases, along with the destructive cuts already being felt on campuses across the state, suggests that California’s government has stopped caring about the state’s economic future. In a recession higher education should be expanding its offerings, hiring more profs and letting in more students. Retraining and re-education is an excellent, tried and true method of producing economic recovery. Yet economic recovery is a verboten concept in California these days, as these fee increase proposals make clear.

The reaction is already beginning. UC faculty are planning a September 24th walkout to protest the cuts. They are joined by 12,000 university staff, UC Berkeley grad students, and solidarity actions at UC Berkeley and UCLA, with other actions likely to occur that day as well.

That’s going to have to be just the opening shot in a long battle to save not only higher education in California, but the state’s future.

Perhaps of the decade. As Joe Mathews explains:

Today a brother and sister, David Joseph Hyatt and Merry Susan Hyatt (and yes, that’s how she spells her first name, and there’s no story behind it, she says), filed a ballot initiative at the attorney general’s office that is entitled, “Freedom to Present Christmas Music in Public School School Classrooms or Assemblies.”

Your blogger, who enjoys caroling and attended a junior high that required everyone to sing “Let There Peace On Earth” at the end of the holiday pageant, was unaware that Christmas music was under threat. If so, the people should rise to the occasion and defend it. “Each public elementary and second school shall provide opportunities to its pupils for listening to or performing Christmas music at an appropriate time of year,” says the measure. That may sound compulsory, but the initiative also requires schools to give parents three weeks’ notice of Christmas music, and to allow them to opt out of having their children be a part of it.

When I reached Merry Hyatt by phone in Redding this afternoon, she explained that at her previous school district in California (she’s a substitute teacher who lived in Riverside County but recently moved north), songs with specific Christmas content were barred from the holiday party. “We were having Christmas without Jesus,” she says, which was just silly. She was unaware of any specific law or rule prohibiting them, but “people were just guessing that they shouldn’t do it.”

Hyatt says she has no money to spend to actually qualify the initiative but that she’ll “have to go to the churches and do it for free,” a refreshingly honest statement of how socially conservative politics works these days in California.

Although one can be sure that Bill O’Reilly will be all over this initiative, the Hyatts have a more fundamental problem to deal with: the First Amendment and the Establishment Clause. As the ACLU points out:

These are difficult legal questions, and largely depend on the facts of the particular case. In general, schools cannot promote one religion over others. Singing songs, or making displays that encourage one religion would violate the Establishment Clause, so months of preparation for a Christmas pageant may not be permissible. However, schools are allowed to educate their students about various religions and engage in secular holiday traditions, so a production with multiple religious and secular songs or one that celebrates the holiday season without proselytizing may not violate the Establishment Clause.

I have to assume that a Holiday pageant that includes songs from multiple religious traditions won’t be enough for the Hyatts, who seem to be laboring under the delusion that this country and its public institutions exist to promote Christianity. Obviously they don’t, and I can fondly remember many holiday pageants from the 1980s that were entirely secular in nature that I nevertheless enjoyed about as much as a young boy who can’t carry a tune can.

Even though this initiative is probably not going anywhere, the success of Proposition 8 and in particular the California Supreme Court’s decision upholding it, particularly their embrace of the “anything goes” Starr Doctrine both suggest that we might see more of this crap in the future. And next time it might actually be well funded.

California’s constitution needs to be revised to prevent people from taking away the rights of others. One of those rights is to attend school without having religion imposed upon you. Even when the imposition takes the form of 6-year olds singing.

You wouldn’t know it by paying attention to the goings-on in Sacramento these days, but California is mired in one of the worst economic crises we’ve experienced in several decades. Over the Labor Day weekend our friends at the California Budget Project charted the depths of that crisis in a new study, “In The Midst of the Great Recession: The State of Working California, 2009.”

The CBP’s study has already been getting media coverage for its stat that 2 of 5 working-age Californians are jobless. But the report gives a fuller picture of just how bad things are out there. Among the conclusions:

• California has about the same number of jobs in July 2009 that it did in January 2000 – in other words, the recession has wiped out a decade’s worth of job growth. Add in the fact that we have 3.3 million more people of working age and you can see how severe the recession is.
• Job losses have been more severe – in both overall number and the rapid rate of decline – than in any previous recession (at least those with available data).
• Wages are declining across the board, but the top wage earners have seen increases, and the top 1% is taking a share of the overall wealth at a rate unseen since the Roaring ’20s, which as we know ended so well.
• More and more people are beginning to exhaust their unemployment benefits, a situation likely to worsen as high unemployment lingers for several more years.

There are several important conclusions I take from this study. You’re unlikely to ever see these in what’s left of the major media in this state, and even Democrats in Sacramento don’t seem to be touting these stats or conclusions as evidence of a need for change.

1. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a job killer. He and his allies at the Chamber of Commerce like to tout their opposition to so-called “job killer” bills that usually increase taxes or regulations on businesses. And yet after 6 years of these policies California is far worse off than we were at the depth of recession that ultimately cost Gray Davis his job. If Democrats ever wanted evidence that anti-tax, anti-regulation policies are an economic disaster, California in 2009 is it.
2. Sacramento has nothing – nothing whatsoever – to offer the jobless or to this state’s future. As I often remark, the only words forbidden to be spoken within the halls of the state Capitol are “economic recovery.” Both Republicans and Democrats have agreed that their #1 task isn’t economic recovery but to eviscerate government when it is most desperately needed; they merely disagree on the particulars. Economic recovery should take precedence over nutty demands to cut spending, but in Sacramento, it’s been the other way around.
3. Specifically, we have yet to see any plans from either party in the state legislature for producing meaningful, lasting economic recovery. California voters took matters into their own hands last November by voting for Proposition 1A, to create 160,000 short-term jobs and 450,000 long-term jobs by building a high speed rail system. But HSR, to name but one example of possible government job creation programs, has very few defenders in the Legislature, and plenty of opponents (including Democrats like Sen. Alan Lowenthal).
4. Lacking any plan for economic recovery or job creation, the factors identified in the CBP report are going to get much worse. Wages will continue to drop for everyone who isn’t already wealthy, as persistent unemployment perpetuates a weak economy and fuels a deflationary cycle.

So what do we do about this? More below.

California has a clear need for a new economic policy, one that prioritizes the creation of an economy that can provide security and prosperity to those who currently lack it. The basic elements of that policy must include:

• Greater unemployment benefits

• The creation of a universal health care system along single-payer lines

• Support for investment in sustainable infrastructure, from solar panels to high speed trains and many things in between (including restoration of the state transportation funds)

• Reversal of education cuts and fee increases and an expansion of educational opportunities for all Californians

• Creation of government-sponsored “green jobs” programs to provide both short-term and long-term work, which can dovetail with several of the above options

• Shifting state economic and tax policy away from subsidizing sprawl and instead favoring urban density, including renters

• Significant increases in taxation on the wealthy, including closure of corporate loopholes and elimination of failed tax expenditure programs

There’s obviously many other things that could be listed, and I encourage folks to add to the list in the comments.

Obviously our state’s broken government is a major impediment to getting any of this done. But structural reform efforts may not get far without a clear idea of the kind of state we expect those efforts to produce.

I am beginning to wonder if we have gone about this backwards. We all know California needs major change, from our economic policies to our structural processes. But while we’ve done a good job this year of articulating the reasons for and solutions to the crisis of governance, we haven’t done as good a job articulating the crisis of economics and how we can provide progressive responses to it.

Perhaps a better way of producing public support for major reform efforts, such as eliminating the 2/3rds rule or calling a Constitutional Convention, is to strongly articulate a clear and coherent response to the economic crisis, and when our existing system proves unable to implement it, use that as a lever for reform. It wouldn’t be reform for its own sake, but reform to sweep away the impediments to finally ending the Great Recession.

Currently California is dominated by a politics of lower your horizons and suffer – a concept that everyone has to suffer through this mess, that anyone not suffering needs to be brought down a peg (unless they’r rich, in which case we need to coddle them), and that any efforts to address the crisis are just too ambitious and must be abandoned until economic recovery somehow falls out of the sky and into our laps.

Surely we can all see how ridiculous such a policy is. But it is thriving in California because of a lack of a clearly articulated alternative.

It is time Californians banded together to offer progressive solutions to a conservative crisis. Because if we don’t, we’re going to get even more conservative solutions – and the Great Recession will be a new norm instead of a catalyst for renewal.

Later this month the Commission on the Twenty-First Century Economy, also known as the “Parsky Commission” after its chairman, Republican fundraiser Gerald Parsky, is to finally release is proposals for overhauling the state’s tax system.

Or so we’re told. This is their second deadline, and current reports suggest they’re not a whole lot closer to agreement now than they were back in July when they blew past another deadline. The conflict is fundamental: given the absurd straitjacket requirement that the proposals be “revenue neutral”, commissioners are battling over which taxes to cut and which to raise. They do so against a backdrop of political pressure to openly embrace regressive taxation.

One of the commissioners, tax expert Richard Pomp, has decided to lay out his objections to the proposals and to the overall concept of scaling back progressive taxation in the form of a “Red, White and Blue Plan.” Pomp is based at UConn’s law school and served in a similar advisory role on a commission examining New York State’s tax code. Pomp’s letter gives a solid case for protecting and strengthening California’s landmark and successful corporate and income tax policies, while proposing other sensible tax reforms, including an oil severance tax, that would help California deal with its crisis.

You can read the whole letter here. Below are some excerpts and my own commentary. Overall it does nothing to challenge my own belief that this commission is not likely to offer us anything of value, was created by Arnold primarily to advance an attack on progressive taxation and to massively transfer wealth to those who already possess it. But at least Pomp is pushing back on some of the worst ideas.

On the idea of eliminating the corporate income tax:

The California corporate income tax was adopted in the early 1930’s. The tax is similar to that used by 90% of the states. Based on information provided to the Commission, the tax introduces an element of progressivity to the State’s tax structure and to some extent falls on nonresidents who exploit the California market and benefit from the State’s public services and infrastructure.

Those wishing to eliminate a hoary tax that is part of the national tax consensus have the burden of proof of demonstrating compelling evidence that the gains from doing so would outweigh the losses. This is especially true in California where the 2/3 vote requirement makes it unlikely that once eliminated, the corporate tax will ever be reinstituted. I have reviewed our meetings and submissions and find nothing that even purports to make a credible case in support of eliminating the tax.

Because the tax has existed for more than 70 years, it has accompanied both periods of strong State growth and periods of weak growth. The tax can no more be given credit for the former than it can be blamed for the latter.

The California corporate income tax was once viewed as a model for other states and was emulated and replicated. California was looked to as a leading state on sensible corporate tax policy. California has now abandoned that role. Today, the tax has been emasculated and eviscerated through secret closed door deals. The solution is to reinvigorate it, not eliminate it.

In other words, the corporate income tax works very well, and no case has been made for its elimination. I can only conclude the obvious – that those on the right proposing its elimination are doing so for ideological and kleptocratic reasons. In a state governed by reason and common sense this idea would be dead as a doornail. The fact that it lives is a sign of how much our politics have been taken over by the practitioners of a reverse Robin Hood economics.

On volatility, Pomp agrees with the widely known fact that California’s tax income is “volatile” because we have a lot of wealthy people (a situation Pomp rightly notes most other states envy). Pomp goes on to state that the problem with volatility is, from his perspective, a “spending problem” – the state should not spend unusual revenues on ongoing expenditures. He uses a personal example to illustrate this:

To use a personal illustration, consider that my own income is also volatile. Not so much my teaching income, which (unfortunately) is fairly predictable from year-to-year, but rather my consulting income. But rather than shun that volatility I welcome it. I look forward to tripling my consulting income next year, even if it subsequently returns to this year’s level. I also wouldn’t mind hitting the lottery some day, notwithstanding the resulting volatility and the likelihood of never hitting it again. I also don’t mind receiving a large contingency fee upon winning a case, even if I will never receive one again. What I would not do, however, is to commit to a long term mortgage on the romantic hope that I will continue to receive such income every year. Yet that seems to be what the Legislature does.

Now I disagree with Pomp’s assessment of how California has spent in the past. He seems to be embracing the idea here that part of California’s problem is “overspending,” though he is making a specific point about the problems inherent with spending unusual revenue spikes (referring to the dot com boom of 10 years ago) on things with long-term costs. I don’t believe this to be as big a part of the state’s problems as Pomp implies – California’s actual problem is that we have a structural revenue shortfall where the state does not take in enough money to fund the basic programs we need to survive and thrive.

Still, I get what Pomp is saying. When I get an unexpected bit of revenue, I usually put in the bank, pay down debt, or buy a piece of infrastructure (such as a new, more reliable, and lighter bicycle, enabling me to save money by riding around Monterey instead of driving).

It is natural to want to translate this to public budgeting. But it is also not so cut and dried. It’s not always easy to determine what is “unexpected” revenue and what is normal. The California economy was generating lots of tax revenue in 2005, but 3 years earlier and 3 years later it wasn’t. And even though our tax receipts have fallen off a cliff of late, there will be some recovery in the future (even if the sales tax may slowly or even never recover).

All tax revenue is volatile, because economic activity itself is volatile. So instead of worrying about how to deal with volatility, we are better off figuring out how to pay for the programs that the people of California want – like schools, health care, parks, transit.

Here I tend to agree that we need some form of a “rainy day fund” – but only one that is filled during prosperous years, after we have attended to restoring cuts made to programs in the last 2 years. There’s nothing wrong with saving in the fat years to get you through the lean years, but that shouldn’t be the centerpiece of spending policy, especially for a government. Government budgets aren’t necessarily supposed to behave like household budgets, after all.

Pomp also blasts the “callous” notion of eliminating the deduction for medical expenses (I hadn’t even known that was being floated) and then lays out some of his own proposals:

Summary of Red, White and Blue Plan Proposals

• Adopt a severance tax at competitive rates

• Adopt an independent tax court pursuant to the ABA Model State Tax Tribunal Act

• End Pay-to-Play, that is, eliminate the requirement that the tax must be prepaid as a precondition to challenging an alleged deficiency

• Eliminate the special corporate tax provisions adopted in 2008 and 2009 (elective single factor apportionment; new provisions on NOL carryback; tax credit sharing), until a rigorous cost-benefit analysis justifies them

• Reinstate the double weighted sales factor

• Publish the name of any publically traded corporation receiving more than $5 million in tax expenditures and the amount and nature of those tax expenditures

• Publish the names of publically traded corporations and the amount they paid in California corporate income tax

Given the strictures and limitations of the commission these aren’t half bad ideas, and Pomp remains open to the nebulously defined and poorly understood “net business receipts tax.” But it may be the case that Pomp’s letter is best used as an argument for implementing these fairly straightforward proposals beyond the scope of the Parsky Commission while we also continue to work on making the tax code even more progressive.

Ultimately California’s wealthy, its large corporations, its commercial property owners, and those making over $250,000 need to be paying higher taxes. That isn’t likely to happen overnight, and we have to first remind Californians that they want the services more than they want the tax cuts.

As Brian mentioned yesterday, Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed SB 789 yesterday, the bill that would have made it easier for farmworkers to form unions.

As the UFW points out this is a life or death matter for many farmworkers. 15 farmworkers have died from the heat while working in the Central Valley over the last 5 years. But if workers speak up about the need for water breaks or other accommodations to deal with the heat, they are liable to lose their jobs. Hence the need for rights and protections that SB 789 would have offered.

The Courage Campaign, where I work as Public Policy Director, has been working on a campaign to support the UFW and SB 789. Marta Evry, the community organizer behind the excellent California Closed video from the July budget battle, produced an amazing video that tells the story of Audon Felix Garcia, who died from the heat while working in a field near Bakersfield in July 2008.

Just as we were getting ready to deploy our action, we got word of Arnold’s veto. But we were not going to be deterred by the governor’s callous indifference to the workers and their families who risk their lives in the heat to earn a living and keep our agricultural industry alive.

So we decided to take a different tack. Since Arnold won’t help the farmworkers, we feel it’s time we asked his possible successors if they will stand up for farmworkers’ rights and well-being and sign the California Employee Free Choice Act. The Courage Campaign plans to deliver petition signatures to each of the 5 major candidates for governor: Jerry Brown, Tom Campbell, Gavin Newsom, Steve Poizner, and Meg Whitman.

With the November 2010 election just over a year away, and the primaries coming in just 9 months, it is about time for progressives to start leveraging the upcoming campaign to force the candidates to pay attention to progressive issues. Workers’ rights and their basic health is about as fundamental a pair of progressive values as you’ll find.

Which of these candidates will step up for the farmworkers? Watch the video and help us find out.

Below is the email we sent to our members today.

Dear Robert —

Fifteen people suffered heat-related deaths in the fields of California in recent years. But yesterday —  with Labor Day fast approaching — Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that could have saved their lives, had it been state law.

With one year left in his term, we can’t count on Gov. Schwarzenegger to change his heart or his mind. But the five declared or likely candidates for Governor — Jerry Brown, Tom Campbell, Gavin Newsom, Steve Poizner, or Meg Whitman — can be pressured to pledge to sign this bill when the Legislature passes it again.

Farmworkers routinely work in triple-digit temperatures in the Central Valley, harvesting the crops that feed Americans. Because of the toxic pesticides used in the fields, workers wear heavy clothing and gloves to protect themselves — increasing the risk of death due to heat exhaustion. When they ask for water breaks, they are often denied. And when they speak up, they risk being fired.

By vetoing the California Employee Free Choice Act — the bill that would give farmworkers the right to speak up and do something about these unsafe conditions — Governor Schwarzenegger put the lives of thousands of farmworkers at risk yet again.

We can’t wait until the next Governor is elected to take action. That’s why we are asking the Courage Campaign community to help the United Farm Workers build a new movement — signature by signature — that holds the next Governor accountable for the lives of farmworkers.

To launch this campaign, community organizer Marta Evry created a short online video for the Courage Campaign that tells the heartbreaking story of Audon Felix Garcia — who died in a field near Bakersfield in 2008.

Please watch “Heat” now and then sign our petition asking Jerry Brown, Tom Campbell, Gavin Newsom, Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman to promise to protect farmworkers’ lives and sign this bill if they win the 2010 gubernatorial election. DEADLINE TO SIGN: Labor Day.

http://www.couragecampaign.org…

Labor Day is about honoring workers and reminding ourselves how important their rights are to our society. That’s why we need to make this bill — and farmworkers’ lives — an issue in the 2010 campaign.

By signing this petition and telling your friends to sign it as well, you will be calling out the next Governor of California to take a public position on this life-and-death issue.

Thank you for honoring the lives of these California farmworkers this Labor Day weekend.

Robert Cruickshank

Public Policy Director, Courage Campaign

Crossposted at Daily Kos

There’s an interesting generational phenomenon at work here. The age group that currently enjoys the benefits of a single-payer system, those over 65, are among the least likely to support health care reform. The age group most likely to support reform is the other end of the spectrum – people age 18-29, as the LA Times reported yesterday:

Adults 18 to 29 are the group most supportive of President Obama’s plan to overhaul healthcare, according to a recent poll by SurveyUSA. They are also the age group that most supports creating a government-run health insurance option.

Young people account for 30% of the uninsured population, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a health policy research foundation. They are least likely to be offered health insurance through employment benefits — just 53% of working young adults are eligible for employer-based coverage. And since their incomes tend to be low, buying coverage on their own is usually too expensive.

As the article explains, much of the support for health care reform among younger people is as function of our drearier economic prospects. We tend to have high debt loads or low wages – or both. We don’t have assets to fall back on, we couldn’t buy a house during the affordable years and have that asset be subsidized by Prop 13.

And yet there are deeper factors at work here. The health care crisis affects every generation, especially those who thought they were living a comfortable middle-class lifestyle until medical debt their insurance didn’t cover wiped them out. Many of those older homeowners are barely surviving the recession with their finances intact. We younger folks may be feeling the recession’s bite harder than most others, but there is plenty of misery to go around.

So why is it that younger people are more supportive of reform? Part of it is that we are more progressive than virtually every other age group, by virtually every measure out there. Because we weren’t raised in an era of McCarthyism, because those of us under 30 have only vague memories of Reagan, and because we have recoiled so strongly from the Republican who has dominated our conscious lives the most – George W. Bush – we are not trained to see government as the enemy. We are more willing to see government as the solution because we aren’t carrying around the burdens of the 1950s or the 1980s, because we do not take the New Deal state for granted.

But there’s another factor at work here as well. We can call it the boiling frog effect. Older generations of Americans were socialized into a society where the economy generally worked, at least for most people middle-class and above. If you had a job, you could expect to have health care. You could expect to own a home, and enjoy a basic level of economic security.

That is not true today, not for any American outside the wealthiest percentiles, no matter what your age. But for folks who were socialized to think of America as the awesomest economy in the world, where you could expect to have security and health care if you held down a job, the present crisis snuck up on people the way heat snuck up on the frog in what had been a cold pot of water. They didn’t expect it, and they still haven’t adjusted their expectations to the new reality. They still see the present crisis as a temporary but difficult spot.

Us younger folks, though, have been thrown right into the boiling pot. We’re entering an economy that doesn’t offer anything of use to anyone who isn’t rich, and we can see that right off the bat. Unlike older generations who may have seen the system as offering realistic opportunities for security and advancement when they first entered, we are under no such illusions. We know things are fucked and that we are not likely to see any meaningful improvement in our fortunes anytime soon.

Moreover, we’re thrown into this crisis at a crucial moment in our lives – when we want to build lives, families, communities. The number of people I know who have delayed having children because of dire economic straits is staggering. And when you take away someone’s future like that, you create a cohort of people who quite clearly and instinctively understand the need for fundamental, root and branch reform.

We’re the natural foot soldiers of reform. But we’re not being spoken to by the reformers. More on that below.

The LA Times article also examined how the current reform proposal might affect the young:

Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, says a requirement to buy insurance would hurt young people most, forcing them to subsidize the healthcare needs of older people without making health insurance more affordable for them.

“Young people are probably one of the groups that’s going to come out the worst on this,” Tanner said. “They’re going to pay more in the short term because they’re going to have to go out and buy health insurance. And they’re going to pay more in the long term.”

Genevieve Kenney, a health economist at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, disagrees.

“I think many more uninsured young adults stand to gain from healthcare reform than stand to lose,” Kenney said, citing plans in Congress to provide insurance subsidies for low-income people, many of whom are young.

As much as it pains me to say this, the guy from Cato is right. Mandated insurance without a public option offers nothing of value whatsoever to younger people. That’s because it’s not designed to help us. It’s designed to extract even more money from our already meager bank accounts and deliver us virtually nothing in return. It is a classic case of screwing over the young in order to preserve a zombie economy that is dead, but is still being clung to by those who refuse to admit it, who cannot envision a new economic policy, and who are deathly afraid of change.

Because the Obama Administration seems to have repeated the flaw of most Democratic political leaders that preceded it and chosen to ignore younger voters, even though we were by far the group of voters that backed him the most strongly in 2008, we are feeling left out of a debate that is primarily focused on appeasing seniors and right-leaning boomers. The more transformative approach, to build a coalition of change that unites seniors, the young, and those in the middle under stress in support of an expanded Medicare for all, has been ignored.

Obama will suffer the consequences for that. Us younger folks will stagger on, even more determined to build political movements and to assert political power. Eventually we will be the ones to lead the implementation of a universal single-payer system in America.

I only hope it comes sooner and rather than later. I don’t intend to become a part of a new Lost Generation.