What Should the Democrats Stand For? I: Equality

A party as large and varied as the Democrats needs some core that people can use as a shorthand for what the party stands for, and that make sense out of a welter of policy  positions. I'll be making some suggestions; here's my first.

I. Equality

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all ... are created equal..."

Equality is a founding value of the American republic, the first of the "self-evident" truths in the Declaration of Independence. Yet while we hear a lot these days about inequality, it's hard to find anyone talking about equality as a political issue. When we're talking about wealth and income, the argument is over how unequal they should be, and whether they've become too unequal.

But the promise of the American Revolution was of a nation where people, whatever their differences in position or privilege, had equal rights as citizens. How are we doing?

Equality of Political Power

The fact is, most people do not feel they have a say in our political life equal to that of people with money. A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 66% of Americans think that "wealthy Americans have more of a chance to influence the electoral process than other Americans." And not just the electoral process but the whole political process: A poll last year found that 75% thought that people like them have too little power and influence in Washington (with similar percentages for working people and, to my surprise, poor people), while 82% thought that wealthy people have too much power and influence (69% for large businesses).

Here's the thing: they're right. A startling recent piece of academic research looked at the outcomes on almost 1,800 policy issues, and concluded: "... analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

There are a lot of ways the rich and corporations could exert influence, but surely the main one is through campaign contributions. Any doubts people might have had about this were surely removed by the Republican panic around their recent  tax bill, when a congressman from New York made the memorable statement, "My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’ "

Public patience with the situation has worn thin. In a 2015 poll, 85% (including 81% of Republicans) say either that the system for funding political campaigns needs fundamental changes or that it needs to be completely rebuilt.

Yet at the same time, the Supreme Court  has handed down a series of rulings, beginning with the famed Citizens United v. FEC decision of 2010, that have seemingly made it nearly impossible to restrict the role of money in politics. The Citizens United case, as you may recall, involved an organization that wanted to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton shortly before a  primary. In that decision and later ones, the  Court, while upholding the right of Congress to restrict contributions to candidates, has essentially said that any attempt to restrict independent expenditures for or against a candidate is an impermissible infringement of freedom of speech. Some of the rulings seem bizarre--for example, the Court has held that providing matching funds to a candidate who is being outspent places an unacceptable burden on free speech.

So it has increasingly seemed impossible to stop the flood of big money into politics. Fortunately, we don't need to.

Wait...what?

Actually, we don't need to keep big money out of politics-- we just need to get small money in. Let's do the arithmetic. In 2016 a total of $4 billion was spent on Congressional races, and another $2.4 billion on the Presidential race.  There are roughly 250 million voting-age people in the US, and around 93% are citizens-- call it 230 million. A campaign contribution of $50 per person would yield more than $11 billion, completely swamping big-money contributions.

Now, how do we get 230 million people to contribute $50 each? Several variants on a solution have been proposed by me and better-known people. My preferred version is to simply give everyone a $50 tax credit for contributions to a candidate for Federal office. A tax credit, not a deduction: the first $50 of any contribution would from the donors viewpoint be free. The credit would be refundable, meaning that even those with no tax liability would be eligible to receive $50. Some minor tweaks would be necessary to prevent fraud.

But, you object, even though the contribution costs the donor nothing, surely not everyone will be interested enough to contribute. True. Let's assume that after advertising to inform people about the law, half contribute. So divide expected contributions by two. But there is only one Federal election every two years, so multiply by two. Result: more than $11 billion.

A law like this could have powerful effect on the way politics is practiced. In theory, politicians could go on trying to supplement their small-contribution funds with large contributions from wealthy donors, but those who did would be vulnerable to attacks from rivals who promised not to accept large contributions. To be sure, those who went the small-money route would have to develop new strategies for fund-raising. Instead of spending hours every day on the phone with wealthy people--unconsciously soaking up their view of the world--they would have to (and now could!) spend more time in touch with their constituents. As for voters, contributions would no longer be an elite activity for the wealthy and the ideologically committed, but could become as commonplace as voting.

Combine the voter hunger for a solution with the intuitive appeal of this approach (and add a catchy name-- my suggestion is the "U.S. Grant," after the face on the $50 bill, but maybe "The Fifty-Buck Plan" gets the idea across better) and this could be a very strong campaign issue for the Democrats.

Equality Before the Law

If equality means anything, it means that the law--specifically, the criminal-justice system-- should treat everyone equally. And this seems not to be true for some people. Most notably, it seems not to be true for African-Americans.

It is difficult for lifelong whites like me to wrap our minds around how differently blacks view the prospect of an encounter with police. I found anecdotal reports like this one to be the most illuminating.

But there is ample survey evidence of differences in attitudes to back it up. In a 2015 Gallup survey, for example, that asked, "Thinking about the community where you live and work, do you think the local police treat minorities more harshly, less harshly, or just as they do anyone else?" 19% of whites said "more harshly;" so did 54% of blacks. (This may partly reflect the fact that they live in different communities.) And asked, "Do you agree or disagree: These days police in most cities treat blacks as fairly as they do whites," 31% of whites disagreed; so did 76% of blacks. Most poignantly, when Gallup asked, "Have you ever warned your children to be careful when dealing with the police?" 32% of whites said yes, as did 74% of blacks.

It is, of course, the spate of videos of police killing unarmed black men and boys that raised this issue to public (meaning white) notice. Are police really more likely to shoot unarmed blacks than unarmed whites?  When I took a look at this question a few years ago, I found that, while armed blacks and whites were killed by police at similar rates, blacks were greatly overrepresented among the unarmed who were killed by police. More recent research has come to a similar conclusion.

It's unlikely that this mostly represents racist killers on our police forces. But there are situations where cops have to make very quick decisions weighing the threat to their own lives against the risk of killing an innocent civilian. Those situations might be turning out worse for blacks because cops unconsciously view them as more threatening than whites. Or they might be turning out worse because cops unconsciously think lives of innocent blacks matter less than lives of innocent whites.

Notice how framing the issue as "equality," instead of "identity politics" (whatever that is) changes the debate. The response of many whites to the shooting of an unarmed black man is to focus on what the victim should have done differently. For example, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams would undoubtedly be alive today if they had not led police on a high-speed chase. But undoubtedly there have been unarmed white couples that did that. The question is, have any of them ended up being shot by police a total of 47 times? If so, I haven't heard about it. In a society where people are equal, we should not tell a subset of citizens, "Behave perfectly all the time, and we'll let you live."

But, perhaps with one nervous eye on the white working class, Democrats have had a hard time talking about this issue-- witness the strange, flustered response of Nancy Pelosi to a question about Black Lives Matter. Here's all she needed to say:

"I think there's been a lot of confusion among whites about what the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' actually means. As I understand it, it's saying that that the life of a black should matter as much as the life of a white-- it's about equality. And as a principle, I don't see who could be against that."


Equality of Opportunity

If the American Revolution was anything, it was a rejection of the European idea of a hereditary ruling class; the Constitution even says explicitly, "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States." Yet today, the chance that someone born in the bottom 20% of the income distribution will end up in the top 20% is higher in Britain than in the U.S., and in our New World neighbor Canada it's almost twice as high as in the U.S.

Consider that passport to the top 20%, Harvard. Two-thirds of its undergraduates come from the top 20% of the income distribution. A startling two in five come from the top 5%, and 15% from the top 1% By age 34, Harvard grads from poor backgrounds are doing nearly as well as people from wealthy backgrounds, but there were few from poor backgrounds to begin with.

The story is the same, or worse, at other Ivy League schools: Dartmouth, Yale, Princeton, Penn, and Brown all had more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. I doubt it's because admissions officers prefer to admit people of their own social class. Rather, it's because of the accumulation of privileges of upbringing and schooling that parents in the upper 20% are able to bestow on their children.

Finighan and Putnam talk about a "growing opportunity gap in America." They point out that someone from a disadvantaged background with high test scores has about the same chance (around 30%) of graduating from college as someone from an affluent background with low test scores; that over the 35 years from 1972 to 2007, the top income decile doubled the amount it spends on its children, to around $6,000, while spending by the lowest deciles remained flat at around $1,000 (to be completely clear, I am not blaming poor parents for this-- it mirrors what happened to incomes over this period); and so on.  In particular, while the more affluent find it increasingly difficult to cover the cost of high-quality child care, working-class families find themselves priced out of the market altogether, and must settle for lower-quality child-care, such as with unlicensed providers.

If we want to avoid--or undo--the development of a de facto hereditary aristocracy ,we need to take some serious steps at both ends of the existing public school system. The first step would be to come closer to equalizing the early childhood environments of children from different income classes by establishing universal preschool. This would also be a bread and butter issue for many middle-to-low-income families, for whom child-care expenses are a significant burden. The second step would be to offer free or nearly free college, so that students get used to thinking of college as something achievable.

This is going to cost some money, much more than the U.S. Grant plan I discussed above. The cost of providing universal "quality preschool education" has been estimated at $34 billion for 4-year-olds and $35 billion for 3-year-olds. Bernie Sanders estimates the cost of his plan to cover 2/3 of the cost of tuition at state colleges and universities  (with states paying the rest) at $47 billion-- it's unclear to me whether this number includes other parts of his plan, such as the reduction in student loan payments.

So for the full two years of preschool plus the Sanders plan, the total is $116 billion per year. That's around 9% of the total US discretionary (i.e., excluding thing like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) budget, or around 19-20% of the non-military discretionary budget, which seems like a lot. On the other hand...

On the other hand, the recent Republican tax cut is projected to add $1.9 trillion to the debt over ten years, which averages out to $190 billion per year, for something that had very little effect on the economy other than making some rich people much richer. Should we not spend a third less than that for something that promises to increase U.S. productivity, improve life for struggling families, take seriously the promise of equal opportunity regardless of social background, and maybe make a start on healing the cultural chasm that is America today? I think we should.

Note: If you've been following the Democratic candidates closely, you may be wondering  how this sort of preschool plan compares to Sen. Elizabeth Warren's universal child-care proposal. As far as I can tell, the terms high-quality preschool and high-quality childcare  (for ages 3 and 4) are synonymous. Warren's plan costs around 50% more, but includes children from ages 0 - 3 in addition to 3- and 4-year-olds. The gap is filled by having parents, except low-income parents, pay up to a cap of 7% of income, which, as best I can tell, means that virtually everyone will get some degree of subsidy. I am not advocating for one plan over the other.