If only she looked them up before proposing wholesale changes in politics.
> Sawicky wrote:
> >> . . . The power to levy taxes, for example, is increasingly
> deployed to tithe low- and middle-income people to subsidize the state
> functions--such as corporate welfare and the military--favored by the
corporate elite. >
The tax burden on middle class has been very stable for the past twenty years. The share of taxes paid by the rich has gone up a lot (because their income share has). I don't see how you can get from this to the above statement.
"Corporate welfare" is not very well defined. If it's spending programs, as a share of the budget it's very small. If it's defense, it's gone down since 1986. If it's tax expenditures (e.g., loopholes), I would bet my house that BE has not checked to see if the things she thinks are 'corporate welfare' are higher now than at some point in the past. I have yet to see anybody else yammering about corporate welfare put up anything but numbers for a specific year. This whole idea began with Robert Reich, incidentally, and was well critiqued in an article in, coincidentally enough, In These Times which quoted from yours truly.
> Numbers on taxes must be easy to look up. I have heard what Ehrenreich is
> saying from a number of different people. Unfortunately, I don't have any
> figures at my finger tips. She mentions corporate welfare and the
> military, but one can consider an increase in funding for the criminal
> justice system as a bolster to Capital's side in the class war. And what
about the entire budget for foreign policy which includes things like export
promotion and the pillaging of Russia?>
Corrections is a small component of government spending. It has grown, but as a budget matter it is not significant. The policy underlying that growth is more the point. Foreign policy budget is tiny. Export promotion is also tiny.
> people feel they must eschew too much math. Say their articles were chock
> full o' equations. Wouldn't that cut into Doug's territory?
Doug has never been guilty of flinging around equations, in my recollection. Numbers yes, equations not often, if ever.
Brad said:
<<There *is* no more federal match for state welfare expenditures. We *are* likely to see a race to the bottom once maintenance-of-effort requirements expire and the next recession hits. We don't know how large the race to the bottom effect will be, but I am scared.>>
Means-tested benefits are provided under Medicaid, Food Stamps, Supplemental Security Income, the Earned Income Tax Credit, a number of other programs, and TANF/formerly AFDC. State governments supplement these with other programs. All of this is "welfare," let's not forget.
For those interested in checking the data themselves, see the Steuerle article I cited, free on the web. Or get the Ways and Means "Green Book," also free on the web. I'm also going to take a run at this in a piece I'm writing, particularly to debunk some of the stuff I've heard relating to these posts.
The competitive issue is really a secondary point; if all states had the same match and it was eliminated, there would be more or less the same cause for concern.
The size of the expected effect is significant. This is elaborated in an EPI study by Andy Reschovsky and Howard Chernick in a forthcoming book. But it hasn't happened yet. If the "price effect" resulting from the elimination of the match had all the microeconomic power imputed by Brad, we'd already see larger drops in benefits, with or without a race to the bottom. So like other projections, the predicted effects probably won't unfold because other factors will weigh in.
<The law that the Congress passed and Clinton signed in 1996 may well lead to the end of welfare sometime in the next decade. Robert Reischauer draws an analogy between TANF and revenue sharing--the second ended quickly once the economy slowed, and the first is likely to end quickly, because both involve Senators voting for taxes to fund programs that are then spent by Governors who then run against Senators...>>
The end of revenue sharing had nothing in the wide blue sky to do with the economy. I worked in the revenue sharing program. It was killed because it was not liked by conservatives or liberals, because the states were busy enjoying all the Medicaid money rolling in, and because the local governments didn't have enough clout to protect it.
The process to which you allude -- the political vulnerability of funds whose purposes are loosely specified, and the special vulnerability of public assistance -- I discussed at nauseating length in a paper I wrote in 1990, "The Poverty of the New Paradigm," which had the misfortune to be released right before Bush invaded . . . , excuse me, rushed to the defense of the Kuwaitii monarchy. So I'm aware of it.
It was easier to eliminate revenue sharing from the then existing base of Federal aid. Ten years or so later, from a smaller base (documented in EPI report by Daphne Kenyon), it should be increasingly less easy to kill other stuff.
<Unfortunately Barbara Ehrenreich's... pea-sized brain is too small to grasp that the real fiscal impact of the change from AFDC to TANF hits (a) sometime after 2000, and (b) only when the next recession his, and so THERE IS STILL TIME TO REVERSE THIS F****** POLICY DISASTER IN THE MAKING IF ONLY PEOPLE WOULD ORGANIZE!!>
Peas and carrots aside, true enough. But if people think welfare has already disappeared, they are not well situated to defend, reform, and extend what we still have, which is most of what we used to have.
Cmd. Henwood said:
<Barbara Ehrenreich has a PhD in biology, so I think she can probably count. You can rightly point to the relatively small decline in the "income security" lines of the federal budget, but on the other hand you know what happened to the real value of the typical AFDC check in the last 20-25 years of that program's life.>
AFDC + Food Stamps, yes. The decline certainly ran through the 1970's, but I'm not sure how it looks after that. Most of it happened before "welfare reform." So we can make too much of the impact of the bill by assuming too much about where we were ex ante, and fearing too much about where we are now.
<I suspect Ehrenreich's main political point, her numeracy aside, was the end of welfare as an entitlement and its replacement by an even more moralizing, intrusive, and chintzier program than its predecessor. TANF is still young, and the economic cycle has been kind. We have no idea how the states will behave in a recession, nor how recipients and former recipients will fare over time. We do know that the people kicked off General Assistance in Michigan did quite badly, and we can assume that lots of the people that Rudy has kicked off welfare in NYC have done badly (of course we'll never know for sure since he's not collecting numbers and won't let anyone else in on the secret either, though everyone awaits the work that Heather Boushey & her colleagues that the New York City Housing Authority will be doing on workfare).>>
The states will come whining to the Feds, like they always have. They, R's and D's alike, will look like a bunch of liberals when they petition Congress for aid. All the stuff about states' increased power and responsibility will fizzle like the fizz on yesterday's beer.
The key issue in my view is whether reformers will have a better model of how to provide assistance. When the shit hits the fan, rather than patch up the system, be prepared to propose something different that is effective and politically robust.
I've mentioned before that a good place to start is elaborated by my colleague Jared Bernstein in EPI's policy alternatives book, "Reclaiming Prosperity." Just don't ask me to explain the title of the book.
What isn't going to fly is any variation of income as a right. Income support is only going to happen if it is combined with work and other responsibilities of some type.
MBS