Left Brimming with New Ideas?

If a center-left columnist wrote a column about the new Big Ideas that people on the left were coming up with, what would you think? That’s what E.J. Dionne just did. So what is the basis of his claim?

First of all there’s an article in The American Prospect by Michael Tomasky titled Party in Search of a Notion.

Democrats and their allies must destroy the current political “paradigm” based on “radical individualism” and replace it with a politics of the “common good.” Only a larger argument rooted in a different conception of government and society, Tomasky argues, will allow the party to “do a lot more than squeak by in this fall's (or any) elections based on the usual unsatisfying admixture of compromises.”

OK. That means a lot or a little, depending on what actual policies back it up. And a quick scan of the article indicates that his proposal for Democrats to “argue on behalf of civic reconstruction and genuine public morality” doesn’t yet have any specific ideas attached to it.

What about the Center for American Progress? Dionne says that it is pushing 15 New Ideas on its website. He’s right. Here they are.

Offering Opportunity for All: Build an opportunity nation where every hard-working person — regardless of background — can realize his or her dreams through education, decent work and fair pay.

• Create a Fair and Simple Tax Code
• Extend Learning Time
• Improve Teacher Quality
• Increase College Opportunity and Completion
• Reduce Debt Burdens by Fighting Abusive Lending
• Strengthen Pensions: Universal 401(k)

Promoting a Just and Secure World: Use America’s awesome strength to bring the world together, not pull it apart.

• Use Integrated Power
• Strengthen the All-Volunteer Army
• Grow the World’s Energy Future
• Invest in Global Equity

Building Strong Communities: Reawaken America’s conscience — our sense of shared and personal responsibility &mdash to build healthy, vibrant communities.

• Provide Universal Health Coverage
• Use Health Care to Strengthen the U.S. Auto Industry
• Provide Comprehensive Worker Adjustment Assistance

Creating Open and Fair Government: Reform government so that it is of, by, and for the people: open, effective, and committed to the common good.

• Bring Government Decisionmaking into the Information Age
• Impose New Rules to Curb Abuses of Congressional Power

Most of these ideas are great. They are ideas that Republicans have proposed in Congress and that Democrats have blocked. And there are other ideas, for instance in education, where Republicans have the same goals but different ways of reaching them. There are other areas, like the family, where the 15 New Ideas are silent. And that’s a shame, because the common good begins with the family.

The big problem for Democrats when they start talking about a new devotion to the “common good” is that Democrats, by and large, are the people on the government’s teat sucking greedily from the common good. How many Democrats are going to agree to be plucked off the teat to support civic republicanism and the common good?

That’s why Democrats find themselves opposing all the Republican proposals to enhance the common good. Just about everything you could think of doing for the common good will take money away from Democrats.

And that is going to make it difficult for Democrats to deliver on E.J. Dionne’s hoped-for Big Ideas.

Robert Carleson: Another Conservative That Nobody Knew

Everyone knows that Horace Mann was the father of public education. But nobody knows that Bob Carleson, who died April 21, was the father of welfare reform.

It’s odd, isn’t it? Welfare reform is probably the most successful government reform of the last half century, and yet the man who did the most to bring it about is unknown.

Government education, on the other hand...

It was in 1970 that Governor Ronald Reagan decided that he wanted to do something about soaring welfare caseloads in California. He appointed Robert B. Carleson as director of the welfare department. “After a year of studying the crisis,” according to the Washington Times,

Mr. Carleson handed the governor a plan that would restrict eligibility, clamp down on corruption and increase work incentives.

...

The results were irrefutable. A year after enactment, total welfare spending dropped for the first time, despite an increase in spending on the neediest families. Where once the welfare rolls had been increasing by nearly 40,000 people per month, by the end of the decade there were 300,000 fewer people than in 1971.

It is worth noting that this program was enacted in the early 1970s when program evaluations of the federal War on Poverty were already showing that the huge expansion in material aid to the poor wasn’t winning the war.

It took twenty years to take Carleson’s program national. Now the welfare case load has been cut in half and more, and welfare reform is the most successful social experiment of our lifetimes.

And the most telling anecdote in the years immediately after the 1996 reform was the news that women were deliberately getting back to work before their eligibility was exhausted so that they could “bank” it. What’s this? Weren’t welfare recipients supposed to be helpless victims? Then how could they be planning and thinking about the future, and treating welfare not as a pension but as an insurance against a rainy day?

Nobody remembers Bob Carleson except the few. But he did not live in vain.

US Economy in High Gear, Says Brit

With the GDP number this quarter expected to hit 5 percent the US remains the engine of the world economy. But don’t tell the MSM.

Just think, writes Gerard Baker of the London Times, if you extend that 5 percent for a year, that adds up to $600 billion added to the economy,

roughly the equivalent of adding one whole new Brazil or Australia to global economic activity every year, just from the incremental extra sweat and heave and click of 300 million Americans.

Or, if you like, think of it this way. Right now the US economy is about 30 percent bigger than Europe’s. In 15 years it will be twice as big.

Baker’s only worry is that rising inequality might cause the US to turn away from the global economy. Actually, he is probably wrong about that.

Inequality is probably only a problem when the economy turns south. It is then, as liberals like to say, that the voters turn to a man on a white horse. Sometimes that man is like Ronald Reagan and ushers in a quarter century of prosperity, with SUVs, McMansions, and starter castles. Sometimes that man is a Franklin Delano Roosevelt and bumbles along for ten years getting nowhere but creating lots of New Deal federal agencies and jobs for liberals. And sometimes that man is an Adolf Hitler and leads his people off a cliff.

Celebrating Earth Day

Al Gore celebrated Earth Day, April 22nd, with an fearmongering screed in Vanity Fair. Watch out for the 10,000 ft chunk of ice perched on the top of Greenland, he advised. If it fell off and plunged into the ocean it could raise sea levels by 20 feet!

On the other hand, we could talk, as OpinionJournal.com does, about the amazing improvements in environmental quality since the first Earth Day in 1970.

Since 1970, carbon monoxide emissions in the U.S. are down 55%, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Particulate emissions are down nearly 80%, and sulfur dioxide emissions have been reduced by half. Lead emissions have declined more than 98%.

Meanwhile the number of cars of the road has doubled and the number of miles driven has tripled in the United States.

Fifteen years ago at an environmental conference in Davos, Switzerland, a German told me a story about the problem of the improving environment. Every time a chemical plant has a spill in the River Rhine, he observed, there’s a fish kill and the attendant media attention. The dirty little secret is that thirty years earlier there were no fish kills. There were no fish kills because there were no fish living in the rivers. German rivers were too toxic for the fish.

Last year in the British press they wrote about the herons that you could now see along the River Thames. Herons? But that must mean there are fish in the river for herons to eat, and food in the river for the fish to eat.

Still, as Al Gore points out, there is always the chance that Greenland will slide into the sea.

Who is al-Maliki?

Last week the squabbling politicians of Iraq settled upon a prime minister to replace the unsatisfactory al-Jaafari. And hopes are high that he can get a cabinet together in the next couple of weeks. But who is Jawad al-Maliki?

Iranian journalist Amir Taheri gives us a first look. Is he an “apparatchik” of the al-Dawa Party? Or is he a long-time freedom fighter against Saddam Hussein’s regime? More to the point, can he serve as an effective prime minister? On the one hand, writes Taheri,

Where al-Jaafari is a charismatic figure and a powerful orator, al-Maliki is a more cerebral leader - and no crowd-pleaser. In Iraqi politics today, that may be a disadvantage.

On the other hand:

But al-Maliki has several advantages - starting with his discipline and capacity for hard work, something al-Jaafari singularly lacked. Plus, he has developed close ties with secular Shiite leaders and groups, again something that al-Jaafari never achieved. Last but not least: The Kurds and Arab Sunnis, who together account for more than 40 percent of the population, see al-Maliki as someone they can work with - another contrast with al-Jaafari.

So the answer is: we don’t know. Meanwhile, Taheri writes, the government has two urgent tasks, to push through an emergency economic plan and to negotiate a future relationship with the Coalition occupying forces after the current UN mandate expires in December.

The Russians are Coming -- To Royal Ascot

Many of us, when we take time out from worrying about Iraq, have worried for years about the London social season.

With the British descending into an informal miasma of athletic gear and hoodies, who is going to keep the good old traditions going, like tea at Wimbledon and big hats at Royal Ascot?

Have no fear. The newly rich Russians that have flooded into London in recent years just love dressing up and flaunting their wealth.

And who can blame them? After 80 years of dreadful Stalinism and socialist realism who wouldn’t enjoy dressing up and showing off?
As Christine Toomey explains in the Sunday Times, the Russians like the London season because so many of their “traditions were destroyed in the Russian revolution.” Even the Russians back home are getting into the act, if only vicariously. “Two Russian documentaries were filmed at Royal Ascot last year.”

Can the Russians really be accepted in snooty old London? Elena Ragozhina, editor of a glossy magazine for rich Russians, thinks so. They can get doors to open through their charitable donations.

“Charity is a new concept for many Russians. In Soviet society the state was expected to provide for everybody,” she says. “But before that, there was a noble tradition of charitable giving in Russia, and we are trying to revive that. The generosity of many Russians is greatly appreciated, I think.”

Oh sure. Just listen to this. Some of the old school are not too impressed.

Since the appearance of so many arrivistes, the season is said to have lost its appeal for some of its traditional patrons, says Clive Aslet, a former editor of Country Life. “Most of the real old families rather look down on that world now. They see it as rather pretentious.”

Lowering the tone of the neighborhood, eh?

The Social Security Guarantee

Democrats like to characterize individual Social Security accounts as a “risky scheme.” Social Security, they assert, is guaranteed, while you could lose all your money in an account at Fidelity.

Hold on a minute, writes Jagadeesh Gokhale. What do you mean “guaranteed?”

Life holds no certainties. But to provide a relatively strong benefit "guarantee," Congress would have to pass a law requiring a super majority vote to alter the current benefit formula.

...

In reality, there is no strong Social Security guarantee and future electorates are unlikely to acquiesce to exclusively revenue-side adjustments. Potential future benefit adjustments should not be ignored, but talk of "guaranteed" benefits misleads people into believing their retirements are more secure than is really the case -- a misperception that negatively affects how much they personally save for the future.

The Social Security “guarantee” is really nothing more than the power of Social Security recipients to use the political system to extract resources from other Americans. But in an economic crisis the political system is quite likely to tell the elderly to go fly a kite. It’s happened before.

In fact it is Social Security that is the “risky scheme.” First of all, it discourages savings, which reduces the resources available to pay for pensions. And on a larger scale it also reduces fertility.

[E]conomists and social scientists have begun to suggest that the long-term fertility decline in developed economies may also be the effect of generous pension and health insurance programs. A recent study shows that a significant portion of fertility declines among developed economies during the 20th century can "be explained" by the generosity of retiree pension and health benefits.

The best system is for ordinary people to save for their own retirements and stop working when they can afford it. Once the government steps in and sets an arbitrary level retirement benefits it introduces a systemic risk that endangers everyone’s well-being.