The Art of the Deal: Trump, Immigration and Amnesty

            I don’t agree with Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s opinion that Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist.  While I do agree that Trump’s candidacy has “brought the bigots out of hiding” and made overt prejudice electorally salient in a way it hasn’t been since George Wallace last ran for president in the early 1970s, I think much of what Trump has said and done in this campaign can be ascribed to a cynical boorishness that he probably understands sells quite nicely to a large faction of the Republican party. 

            Trump’s signature issue is immigration.  At the press conference last summer where he announced his candidacy for president, Trump said:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.

But right after blurting out this nonsense, Trump also said “And some, I assume, are good people.”  In a later statement Trump added:

On the other hand, many fabulous people come in from Mexico and our country is better for it. But these people are here legally, and are severely hurt by those coming in illegally. I am proud to say that I know many hard working Mexicans—many of them are working for and with me…and, just like our country, my organization is better for it.

            From a policy standpoint, Trump doesn’t sound like a nativist trying to defend white American.  Instead, what seems to offend Trump is the simple idea that undocumented workers have broken our laws. 

            According to his website, the first two pillars of his immigration policy are (i) “a nation without borders is not an nation”; and (ii) “a nation without laws is not a nation.”  His key policy proposals are to, deport everyone who has crossed the U.S. border or overstayed a visa illegally and build a wall across the U.S./Mexico border. But that wall would have a “big fat beautiful door,” so that people would “come in legally.”

            Let’s take Mr. Trump at his word.  The problem with illegal immigration is not the immigration.  The problem is that it is illegal.  He’s apparently not concerned that large numbers of Hispanics (or Asians, for that matter) will dilute the white population.  Just like most Americans he stands for the rather uncontroversial proposition that the laws on the books ought to be respected and enforced until they are changed or repealed through democratic processes. 

            But if that’s so, Mr. Trump ought to be open to a deal. 

            People don’t risk crossing our borders for no reason.  By law, they cannot receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (aka “welfare”), benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka “food stamps”), Medicare, subsidized Obamacare, Medicaid or even Social Security. They come for the jobs that wouldn’t exist—low skill low wage agricultural jobs, for example—if they were not there to do them.

            That implies that somebody in the U.S. is creating jobs for undocumented workers.  If those jobs were not being created, far fewer people would be entering the U.S. in search of those jobs.  In other words, this is one of the few times that “supply-side economics” works.  If you supply something and make its price attractive enough, people will take advantage of it.

            None of this is a revelation to our government.  To reduce the temptation to cross our borders illegally, it has long been a crime for anyone to hire an undocumented alien.  Any employer who hires an undocumented worker faces a fine of up to $10,000 for each person so employed and imprisonment for up to six months.  And that doesn’t count any additional penalties imposed for failing to collect and pay withholding and unemployment taxes.

            As part of its immigration policy, the Obama administration appears to have decided to turn a blind eye to the employer side of the problem.

            If they’re going to insist on strict enforcement of all laws relevant to illegal immigration, it's hard to see why Trump and his supporters—if they’re not racists and bigots--shouldn’t also be aiming their vitriol at scofflaws.  The reason they haven't done so yet probably is that nobody really wants to prosecute farmers, manufacturers, construction companies, restaurants, hotels, landscaping companies and families that need nannies for their children.  These employers are, after all, probably otherwise solid citizens, voters and campaign contributors.  But this doesn’t mean that the next president will continue to give them a pass.

            And so, we have the makings of a deal.  In return for dropping a nonsensical and impractical demand to deport 11 million undocumented aliens just so that they can apply to return the legal way, we also drop all the nonsensical and impractical pretenses of prosecuting people who have broken the law by hiring undocumented workers.  Both groups should have to pay a fine and all unpaid taxes.  The employers get immunity from RICO liability and civil suits having to do with wages not paid to the undocumented while the undocumented get a long path toward citizenship.  All sides agree to beef up border control and legal status verification by employers.

            In a word, everyone gets amnesty.

            Nobody’s going to be completely happy with this.  The closet racists in the Trump coalition will see this as a sell-out, and, of course nobody likes paying fines or back taxes.  But, it does move the ball forward.  All sides grudgingly acknowledge that there’s enough blame for the influx of people into the country by illegal means to go around.  All sides recognize that it’s impossible to clean up the immigration mess we now have and we agree to start over from where we are right now. And,  we agree, once and for all, to resolve the matter on neutral terms in accordance with the rule of law.          

Where Do (Low Income) Babies Come From?

            The proposal for reducing poverty authored by the group of progressive scholars from the Brookings Institution and conservative scholars from the American Enterprise Institute that I discussed in my last post focuses on three highly interrelated domains: family, work and education.  Addressing problems in any one of these domains, the report argues, will have beneficial effects in the others, and it proposes actions in all three domains for maximum effect.

            As I pointed out in the last post, though we finally have agreements between scholarly conservatives and progressives about some of the facts about poverty and its causes in the United States, the final document represents less conversion than compromise.  Progressives gave a little and got a little, but they seemed to have conceded the conservatives’ point that poverty is more about character than environment.  This couldn’t be clearer than in the report’s proposals with respect to families.

            The “Family” chapter begins with several propositions to which most people would probably agree.  Though adults may be stuck in their economic circumstances, the report argues that one of the best ways to address poverty is to make sure that poor children have the tools they need to escape poverty when they become adults.  Whether it’s the influence, education and guidance or simply that there is more time and money available, children raised in two-parent households have much better life prospects than children raised in one-parent households.  That children who come from two-parent households generally do better in life than children raised in on-parent households is an empirically verifiable fact.

            Since two-parent households are better for children than one-parent households, the report proposes four measures to increase the number of children living in two-parent households as well to improve parental efficacy. According to the report “we” need to

•          Promote marriage as the most reliable route to family stability and resources;
•          Promote delayed, responsible childbearing;
•          Promote parenting skills and practices, especially among low-income parents; and
•          Promote skill development, family involvement and employment among young men as well                  as women.

            The unstated assumptions behind these proposals harken back to Ronald Reagan’s stereotypical “Welfare Queens.”  Poor (black) people, the assumptions say, remain poor, in part, because they are having too much “irresponsible” sex outside of marriage, are indiscriminately bringing unwanted children into the world, have no idea how to care for these children once they arrive and instead use these children to increase their take of welfare benefits.

            For a report that insists that policy proposals be based on empirical evidence, all of this is surprising, particularly since Richard V. Reeves, a Brookings expert on families who was in the group, had previously issued a report that refutes much of this.

            According to the Reeves report:

Premarital sex has been the social norm for decades, and sexual activity rates among unmarried Americans do not vary along class lines. There is no 'sex gap' by income.

            Moreover, a 2012 study by psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles found that poor people were just as likely to agree that “A happy, healthy marriage is one of the most important things in life” and that “People who have children together ought to be married,” as were people in higher income groups.  Compared to more affluent people, the study also found that poor people had more negative views about divorce, the same views about premarital sex, and the same kinds of relationship problems regarding parenting, communicating, sex, household chores and “each other’s parents.”
            According to the report, the only difference between poor and affluent people with respect to their thoughts about marriage had to do with economics.  Poor people rated “having the same values and beliefs, having good sex, supporting each other through difficult times, and being able to communicate effectively as less important to successful marriage than did higher income respondents.”  Instead, poor people rated “husband having a steady job and wife having a steady job,” as more important than did wealthier couples.
            If poor people value marriage as highly as more affluent people do, if they agree that people who have children together ought to be married as much as more affluent people do, and, if they are not having sex any more or less frequently than more affluent people do, then why are five times as many children born to unwed poor mothers than are born to unwed affluent mothers?
            According to both Reeves and to The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the answer is simple: birth control.  For almost all of the unplanned births, women reported that they either didn’t know about contraceptives, didn’t believe they would work or couldn’t access them.
            To be fair, the AEI-Brookings report acknowledges that there is “solid evidence that programs that provide counseling, offer a range of birth control measures including long-acting forms, and provide the services free can substantially reduce pregnancy rates.” But it also notes that “these programs remain controversial.” Not all of the scholars could bring themselves to support a call for long-acting reversible contraceptives such as IUDs or subdermal contraceptive implants. Conservatives opposed these things because they can "be seen as a form of abortion" or because they are “nudging teen and low income women towards using a form of contraception over which they have much less direct control than condoms or the birth control pill.” Whatever that means.
            The authors of the report want to use the power of the state to exhort people to behave themselves in the bedroom.  They apparently think that public service announcement from “leaders” (Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Edwards?) will influence young people responding to their sexual urges.  Then, they want to train these young people to be effective parents between the two or three jobs they are holding in order to put food on the table.  
            I have my doubts.
            I’ve got to think that progressives went along with this in return for language allowing for the possibility of more non-abstinence only sex education, easier access to contraception for everyone and an acknowledgment that “Improving family life in America requires that we more effectively help disconnected men and women gain their footing in the labor market.”  That language, though is linked to the idea that the help is to be provided so that “non-resident fathers financially contribute to and constructively participate in their families.”
            Following the conservative prescriptions for strengthening families threatens to waste a lot of time and money.  The evidence is clear that if we want to reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock births, we have to face up to the fact that out-of-wedlock sex is not going to stop.  Given that, the best we can do is to teach people realistic ways of avoiding premature parenthood.  The evidence is also clear that if we want more marriages, we have to address the fact that poor people don’t want to take the chance on marriage while their economic prospects and those of their significant others appear bleak.

            But then again, why bother with evidence if ideology continues to tell us everything we need to know about the facts of life?

Liberals and Conservatives Finally Agree on (Some of) the Facts About Poverty

            It’s news when right of center and left of center policy mavins can get together on anything, much less a complicated and values laden problem such as reducing poverty.  But, that’s exactly what a team of scholars from the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the progressive Brookings Institution, with the guidance of New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, have just accomplished.

            The working group included 15 scholars—7 from Brookings, 7 from AEI and Haidt--who spent 14 months trying to develop a shared understanding of the causes of poverty and to build a framework for addressing it.  The result is an 85 page report that seeks to craft policies promoting personal responsibility, opportunity and financial security, the three values that all of the scholars agreed were central to addressing poverty.

            In many ways, this is a remarkable document.  It does a fairly good job of dispensing with the talking points of both sides.  Instead, it insists that all policies must both flow from a clear-eyed factual view of reality and be empirically proven to accomplish what they sets out to accomplish.  It is forthright in identifying the known unknowns, it is cautious about making broad policy prescriptions in the face of uncertainty, and it suggests pilot programs that test its conclusions to insure that what it suggests will be effective and scalable.

            Chapter 2 of the report is particularly refreshing in that it specifies a shared set of facts about the world. This is a major achievement in itself.  Liberals and conservatives tend to see the world through different lenses, and I suspect that the purpose of Chapter 2 was to end the argument about which side’s view of the world was correct. 

            Among the key facts that are now no longer open to dispute.  According to the report:

• ·      The poverty rate for the elderly declined from 35% in 1959 to 10% in 2014 and “this progress can be attributed to government programs because the entire reason for the decline is Social Security;
• ·      The poverty rate has risen since the Great Recession, and regardless of how it is measured, the poverty rate has never fallen below 15 percent and remains within the15-20 percent range;
• ·      There is little economic mobility in the United States.  Children in the top and bottom income quintiles—40 percent of all children--are much more likely to wind up in or near their parents’ quintiles than other children; 
• ·      The rungs on the economic ladder are getting further apart;
• ·      There are fewer marriages and more children living in single parent homes, giving children from two parent homes a major advantage;
• ·      Less-educated men (especially blacks) have been working less over time, partly in response to their declining wages;
• ·      The wages of at least 90 percent of men have fallen since the Great Recession if benefits like health insurance are not taken into account;
• ·      Wages for men at and below the 50^th percentile are similar to or lower than they were in 1979;
• ·      Government work support benefits have greatly reduced poverty rates among single-mother families (and low–income two parent families as well) every year since 1987. Thus, the federal work support system achieves the important goal of making work pay;
• ·      The minimum wage and collective bargaining “have traditionally helped limit inequality”; and
• ·      The gap in reading scores between children in the top and bottom income quintiles has grown, as has the gap in educational attainment.

            Imagine that! Conservatives finally willing to agree that government anti-poverty programs actually work! Not only that, but they agreed that collective bargaining and minimum wages “traditionally” served the admirable purpose of reducing inequality.  And they also agreed that low wages (and not laziness or shiftlessness) had at least something to do with the declining number of hours black men work.  Elsewhere in the chapter, they also acknowledge that there is some evidence that bleak economic prospects for potential mates has influenced the rate of marriage among the poor.

            There’s other good language in the remaining six chapters that progressives can cheer.  Scholars on the right have made it possible to move on from the arguments that we lost the war on poverty or that government programs designed to help the poor don’t simply transform the safety net into what House Speaker Paul Ryan likes to describe as a hammock.  On the whole, we progressives can feel hopeful about the fact that representatives from DC’s premier conservative think tank have finally heard what we’ve been saying and taken the evidence seriously.

            That’s the good news.  The bad news, which I’ll detail in my next post, is that in order to get this good language, progressives have had to capitulate on the right’s claim, as detailed in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, that culture plays an important role in creating American poverty.  The Brookings folks have implicitly signed on to the proposition that the poor, in large part, are at fault for their poverty.

            This is an important point, because it affects the kinds of remedies that can be considered and accepted by all.  Whereas progressives are likely to look at the problem from a macro level and propose remedies that seek to reform the entire economic system—full employment policies, for example—conservatives tend to focus on improving the behavior of the individual.  And, for the most part, that’s what we get in the policy proposal chapters of the report.

            I do think that the report suggests some good ideas for addressing poverty.  Something is almost always better than nothing.  But I also think that it’s folly not to emphasize the need to reform the economy as a whole.  The problem with the poor isn’t that they’re not good, smart or responsible.  The problem with the poor is that they’re caught in a system that makes it hard for them to earn enough money.

                                   

A Reply to George Will's Screed Against Progressive Taxation

            I don’t know why I continue to read George Will’s column.  Despite the erudite language, the man seldom has anything intelligent to say (unless he is talking about baseball).  I suppose, for me, it’s like a car wreck on the side of the road.  I know it’s against my better judgment—to say nothing about contributing to a traffic jam on my way out of the Tragic Commons—but I just can’t help it.

            In his latest column, Will insists that there is no “intellectually sturdy case for progressive taxation,” which is the system the American tax code has used since the adoption of the 16^th Amendment in 1913.

            The idea behind a progressive tax system is that people who earn more money ought to pay taxes at progressively higher rates than people who earn less.  It’s a very simple and practical idea.  People who earn a lot of money can more easily afford to bear the burden of paying for the government we need than can people who earn less money.  As a society, we have concluded that poor people have problems enough and that we shouldn’t multiply those problems by imposing heavy taxes on them.

            Will cloaks his argument in pseudo-scientific and pseudo-philosophical language, which hearkens back to Cicero’s tactic of rhetorically throwing sand in the eyes of his listeners when he didn’t have a case.  He makes his argument in the context of trashing Democratic politicians like Bernie Sanders who are focused on reducing economic inequality and argue that one way to do it is to increase the progressivity of the tax system.

            The argument for progressive taxation, Will writes, ultimately boils down to an “essentially aesthetic judgment about how people ought to value money or about the social value of expenditures by the wealthy and non-wealthy. But, quoting a 1952 essay by two University of Chicago law professors, Will argues that this “aesthetic” judgment, when codified in the tax code conflicts with the idea that “It is one of the virtues of a free society that, within the widest limits, men are free to maximize their satisfactions according to their own hierarch of preferences.” 

            From there, Will lapses into a densely packed thicket of nonsense:

It is, however, the nature of reality that burdens imposed on the wealthy minority can injure the majority by impairing economic incentives, thereby suppressing growth. Progressive taxation reduces the rewards of investments and the real rate of return on savings, thereby encouraging consumption over saving and hence over capital formation. When progressive taxation slows economic growth, it makes inequalities of wealth more durable by retarding the accumulation of new fortunes. And by encouraging constant tinkering with the tax code to perfect equity, progressive taxation gives a patina of altruism to rent-seeking by economic factions, whereby government enriches those sophisticated at manipulating it.

            He’s gotten the idea of progressive taxation mixed up with the more libertarian arguments against taxation in general.  It is a fact of all economic life that all taxation “reduces the rewards of investment and the real rate of return on savings, and hence over capital formation.”  Ditto for economic growth, the accumulation of new fortunes, and tax code based rent seeking.  Will’s not just arguing against progressive taxation.  He’s arguing against all taxation.

            Oh, and like someone who has had too much right-wing Kool-aid, Will seems oblivious to the fact that the last thing our economy needs is more savings and capital formation.  What it needs instead is more consumption and demand.

            Lurking beneath the main argument is an outlandish conception of the government as some sort of alien invader. “But who is to decide, and how are they to decide, the ideal spread between the top and the bottom of the income distribution?  The argument for progressive taxation must demonstrate this:  Such taxation does not do more harm by slowing economic growth would do by its distributive effects.” 

            Later on, he writes:

Because other arguments produce only “uneasy” cases for progressive taxation, this is the argument of last resort: All striving occurs in, and all success is conditioned by, a social context. Each individual’s achievement, like each individual, is derivative of society, which is entitled to socialize — conscript — whatever portion of each individual’s acquisition that society calculates is its rightful share. Because collective choices (provision of education, infrastructure and other public goods) facilitate individuals’ strivings, the collectivity, represented by government, can take as much of created wealth as it decides it made possible. Being judge and jury in its own case, government will generously estimate its contributions and entitlements.

           

            Well.

            In the first place, in a democracy, the people decide these things through their elected representatives.  There is no platonic ideal of perfection in real world government policy.  There is only the politically feasible, and that is the basic idea enshrined in the Constitution as explicated in Madison’s Federalist X.  If the people accept the judgments of their legislators, they reelect them; otherwise the people replace those legislators with others who promise to do what the people want.

            And, given that the power to make policy ultimately resides in the people, there is no requirement for legislators to demonstrate anything.  They implement their policy and they take the credit for success and the wrath of voters for failure.  That’s American democracy in a nutshell.

            Will’s solution? Apparently a flat or proportionate taxation in which “If taxpayer A earns 20 times more than taxpayer B earns, taxpayer A pays 20 times more dollars.” Leaving to one side the hardship that this would impose on the poor, flat taxes typically result in lower rates for the wealthy and higher rates for everyone else.  When they don’t do that, flat tax proposals increase the mismatch between federal revenues and expenses, resulting in larger federal budget deficits and more federal debt.

            Surely you can do better than this, George.  If not, then please, just focus on baseball.