You're Being Ridiculous

            Let’s start out with three stone-cold facts. First, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton do not receive so much as a penny in compensation or expense reimbursement from the Clinton Foundation.

            Second, the Clinton Foundation is an “operating foundation” that puts boots on the ground to implement its programs instead of a pass-through foundation that simply makes grants to other organizations.  Charity Watch an independent organization that monitors charities, gave the Clinton Foundation its highest rating because the Clinton Foundation devotes 88% of its revenue to its programs.

            Third, as much as Republicans want to insist that the last 8 years should be described as the “Obama-Clinton administration,” the fact is that Hillary Clinton was only the Secretary of State.  Any authority Clinton had to spend money or take other actions depended on appropriations from Congress and the authorization of others, including the President of the United States.  During her time in office, she implemented the President’s foreign policy, not her own.  All of that is how it should be in a democracy.

            But now such august authorities as the Boston Globe and the Associated Press and other media outlets are complaining about interactions between Hillary Clinton, while she was at the State Department, and people associated with the Clinton Foundation.

            The media is feeding a narrative about Hillary Clinton that has enable Donald Trump and his henchmen to rail

It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins. It is now abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from public office. They sold access and specific actions by and really for, I guess, the making of large amounts of money. The specific crimes committed to carry out that enterprise are too numerous to cover in this speech.

            The narrative is false and naïve.  It doesn’t traffic in reality at all.  It attempts to hold Clinton to a higher standard than other contemporary politicians.  And because of this kind of nonsense, it diverts attention away from the fact that Donald Trump won’t let anyone see how wealthy he is or the extent to which he’s entangled with Russia or China by releasing his tax returns.

            Let’s stipulate that the Clinton Foundation has a lot of wealthy donors, including foreign governments.  Let’s admit that many of these donors gave hefty contributions.  And though we can only speculate about this, let’s also stipulate that among the motives some of these donors had for giving the Clinton Foundation money was to curry favor with a sitting Secretary of State who seemed a good bet for becoming president one day.

            So what?

            There is no evidence at all in the pile of emails Clinton and the State Department has delivered to the FBI or to Judicial Watch, the right wing organization currently prosecuting a Freedom of Information Act law suit designed to keep this controversy festering and hoping to find a silver bullet it can use against Clinton this fall, that Clinton, her husband or daughter received a “quid pro quo” for anything she did as Secretary of State.  And, as former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell will happily tell you, “quid pro quo”  is the standard for deciding on a public servant’s corruption.  Setting up a meeting, says a unanimous Supreme Court, isn’t enough.

            The argument these publications are making is that there was something wrong or improper about people associated with the Clinton Foundation calling the State Department, either for help with a problem or a sit down with either the Secretary or somebody else associated with the State Department.  Bono, for example, wanted to “do a linkup with the International Space Station on very show during the tour this year.”  Like most of the other supplicants, he didn’t get what he asked for from State.

            According to the AP:

the meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.

            Let’s parse this out.  Was there a violation of any law or agreement to which either Clinton was subject?  No, and that means that all of the stuff about corruption and criminal activity being spouted by Trump and his surrogates is nonsense.

            Then, what’s the problem?  Well, the fact that Clinton or her State Department staff sometimes made time to talk to people who were also donors to the Clinton Foundation “fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton.”

            Really?

            Whose perceptions are we talking about here?

            It couldn’t be the perceptions of the donors.  I’ve yet to see any evidence or even any allegation that anyone who wanted to see Clinton or wanted her help believed that giving money to a particular charity with which she was not associated at the time and from which neither she nor any of her family received money, was a prerequisite.

            The record shows that not everyone who wanted something from Clinton got what they wanted.  And it’s far from clear that donors such as Nobel Peace Prize winning economist Muhammed Yunus or philanthropist Melinda Gates wouldn’t have gotten face time with Clinton without having first made donations.

            In any event, do we really want to say that it’s a problem for a public official to pay attention to somebody who has done something that the public official thinks is morally commendable, like giving a large sum of mnoney to a worthy charity?

            Perhaps we’re talking about the perceptions of people who are determined to find wrongdoing on the part of every politician.  If that’s the standard, then everyone who wants to do anything flunks.  It’s always possible to spin every story into skullduggery.

            Or, perhaps we’re talking about the perceptions of the media who are either bored with Donald Trump’s mendacity, xenophobia, narcissism and inability to articulate policy or need a way to “balance out” the admittedly awful press he has earned, with some negativity directed at Hillary Clinton.  Clinton’s way ahead in the polls, and unless she gets knocked off her game, she’ll win this election in a walk.  Boring presidential races don’t serve the career interests of the reporters dispatched to cover them or their employers who are constantly in a pitched battle for eyeballs.

            Washington D.C. is a town that runs on connections.  Politicians don’t arrive here through an immaculate conception.  Every    one of them brings every mentor, donor, assistant, boss, classmate, campaign worker, and business associate together with every person any of those people has ever been associated with here when they take office.  To expect otherwise is naïve. To demand that upon taking office they sever those connections is absurd.

            Please, just stop it.  You’re feeding an unnecessary cynicism about government that makes it impossible for anyone to claim a mandate for getting something done once elected.

            You’re being ridiculous.

What Americans Think About Poverty

          

  The American Enterprise Institute just released the results of a public opinion survey it conducted with the Los Angeles Times on poverty in America.  As I have written before, AEI, a right-leaning think tank, has been trying to play a constructive role in rethinking the American approach to the problem. 

            As the survey correctly notes, “Any approach in alleviating poverty will need to be supported by the public to be sustainable.”  There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the raw top-line results, and AEI should be commended for this effort.

            In announcing the survey, Robert Doar, Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies, highlights three key findings.

• ·      Fully 87% of Americans—including 81% of individuals living below the poverty line—believe that requiring poor people to seek work or participate in a training program in return for welfare benefits is a better approach than providing benefits without asking for anything in return; 
• ·      64 % of Americans living in poverty say that most poor people who receive welfare benefits would rather earn their own living instead of staying on welfare; and
• ·      Only 27% of Americans believe that conditions for the poor have improved since 2001.

            Recent AEI work on poverty has made a big push to make all state welfare benefits contingent on beneficiaries working, looking for a job or participating in training programs leading to gainful employment.  AEI was probably quite happy to highlight the fact that the survey confirms that there appears to be public support for its argument that all public assistance should include a work requirement.  I’m not convinced.  Here’s the relevant survey question:

Q:        Some welfare programs have different requirements to qualify for benefits.  Which one of the following do you think is generally the better approach?

·      Requiring poor people to seek work or participate in a training program, if they are physically able to do so, in return for benefits, OR

·      Sending benefits to the poor without asking for any effort in return.

            The first problem with this question is that it doesn’t identify the additional benefits for which, in order to qualify, a recipient would have to work or participate in a training program.  Survey respondents might feel differently about Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (“food stamps”) or Medicaid benefits than they do about other kinds of welfare payments such as Temporary Aid to Needy Families benefits (“TANF”).  Are Americans really willing to let people die or starve if there simply aren’t any jobs in the locality?

            Second, the question tacitly asks respondents to make certain crucial assumptions about marginal applicants for these benefits.  Only about 65% of the people who need welfare benefits are able to work; the remaining 35% are children, disabled or retired.  63% of the 65% of applicants who can work actually do work, at least part time while 37% do not.

            The question tacitly asks respondents to guess why the remaining 37% of the employable poor do not work.  No doubt, some fraction of this group of people is simply lazy, and even I’m offended by simple laziness.  Yet the remainder of the group may have good reasons for not working, including having to care for children or other aged or infirm family members.  People caring for other family members are working—they’re just not getting paid for it.  To get a fair answer to the question, it seems to me that the latter group should be distinguished from the former.

            And finally, for a culture steeped in the Protestant work ethic, the alternative to the “require work” response is a poison pill that the question’s authors should have assumed very few would take.  In fact, overall, only 9% of the survey respondents thought that welfare applicants should not have to put in any effort—apparently at anything—to get welfare benefits. 

            Doar’s second key finding, though, could help in dispelling the notion that welfare recipients are lazy and undeserving of help from their fellow citizens.  61% of all Americans seem to recognize that poor people would rather earn a living than continue to receive public assistance.  In fact, according to the survey, 64% of all Americans living below the poverty level say this compared to 59% of Americans who are financially better off.  The survey also found that 63% of Americans who live above the poverty line think that most of the poor are “hard-working” people.

            Doar’s third key point requires some unpacking.  Overall 27% of  Americans think that conditions for poor people have improved over the past 10 to 15 years. But only 23% of the poor have seen an improvement compared to the 29% of the non-poor respondents who think things have improved. In fact, 59% of the non-poor think that the lot of the poor has either improved or stayed the same while only 43% of the poor agree.  And 53% of the poor think that things have gotten worse compared to only 38% of the non-poor who think the same thing.

            The survey also shows that the public is ambivalent about the government’s ability to fight poverty. According to the survey, 73% of all Americans, think that even if it had unlimited resources to devote to poverty, the U.S. government wouldn’t know how to eliminate poverty. By contrast a plurality of Americans agree that the government’s efforts to fight poverty have had a positive impact. 

            The fact is that the government does know something about fighting poverty.  Its anti-poverty programs have had a major impact on the prevalence of poverty in the U.S.  As Figure 1 shows, without government programs targeting poverty, the poverty level in the United States would be twice as high.

Figure 1

*Based on the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (which includes the effects of government transfers and taxes), using a threshold anchored to 2012 and adjusted for inflation.
Note: Race categories are described by the U.S. Census Bureau as Asian alone, black alone, Hispanic of any race and white alone. Not all Americans are shown.

Sources: Christopher Wimer, Liana Fox, Irwin Garfinkel, Neeraj Kaushal, and Jane Waldfogel, “Trends in Poverty with an Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure,” Columbia Population Research Center (poverty rates); U.S. Census Bureau (government programs and poverty status)

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/04/business/50-years-of-poverty.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1

            Despite some of its shortcomings, the AEI survey provides a solid foundation for building the durable political consensus the organization believes is required for improving the welfare system. If the public continues to recognize that poor people are generally “hard-working,” if larger percentages of the population can be convinced that the poor need more help, and if conservative organizations like AEI can help make the case that government can play an important role in improving the lot of the poor, the next administration might be able to make major advances in the ongoing war on poverty.                

It's Not the Economy, Stupid

            Almost everything you think you know about Donald Trump’s political base is wrong.

            His supporters are not poor.  They’re not unemployed.  They don’t live in places where the manufacturing industry has dried up.  Their neighborhoods aren’t dying.  Their jobs aren’t being threatened by cheap imports from China.  And their communities are not being flooded by hordes of undocumented immigrants from south of the border.

            These are among the surprising conclusions contained in a draft working paper written by Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist at Gallup. “At the individual level,” he writes, “ there was little clear evidence that economic hardship predicts support for Trump, in that higher household incomes tend to predict higher Trump support.”  For Rothwell, a careful look at individual level data does not support the idea that Trump supporters “are confronting abnormally high economic distress, by conventional measures of employment and income.”

            Instead, what does distinguish Trump supporters from others is where and how they live.  Trump’s supporters tend to live in highly segregated white communities relatively distant from the Mexican border.  They are

older, with higher household incomes, are more likely to be male, white non-Hispanic, less likely to identify as LGBTQ, less likely to hold a bachelor’s degree or higher education, more likely to be a veteran or family member of a veteran, more likely to work in a blue-collar occupation, and are more likely to be Christian and report that religion is important to them.

            For Rothwell, these findings provide strong support for what is known in social science as “contact theory.”  Contact theory holds that the more contact a person has with people who are different, the less likely it is that the person will support policies that single others out for adverse treatment due to factors such as race, religion or ethnicity. 

            Encouraging contacts to end intolerance, of course, is not what Donald Trump’s campaign has been about.  Trump is now famous (or infamous) for his determination to deport the 11 million undocumented workers now residing in the United State, to build a wall across our southern border to stop people from crossing into the United States illegally, and to make it extremely difficult for Muslims to enter the United States. 

            Rothwell’s paper makes an important contribution to understanding what is going on at this political moment.  Thanks to Rothwell, it’s no longer possible to look at this election as a battle between people who have benefited from the bewildering changes that have occurred in the national economy over the last 40 years and those who have not.  

            Rothwell is too polite to acknowledge the endogeneity problem inherent in his study.  By using contact theory for the basis of his hypotheses, he glosses over an important issue regarding causality.  Contact theory assumes that intolerance arises out of a lack of contact.  But, what if, instead of being an effect of segregation, intolerance is a feature of segregated communities?  What if intolerant people simply choose to live in segregated communities?

            Bill Bishop’s landmark study, The Big Sort, Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, and Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs make it clear that modern American communities do not self-assemble by chance.  Over the last 40 years, Americans have relocated themselves to the places where they find like-minded people.   People live, work, play and learn in all white communities because they want to.  That’s why living close to the Mexican border does not increase support for Donald Trump.  The people who live close to the border probably don’t see living in communities that are open to Mexicans and others from central and South America as a problem.  

            Rothwell’s findings make a lot more sense if they are read in light of Robert P. Jones’s superb new book, The End of White Christian America.  According to Jones, demographic and secularizing trends have severely weakened the grip of white Protestants on the culture and politics of the United States.  Whereas, in the last century, it was possible to define the American community in a way that excluded anyone who was not a white Protestant, that is no longer possible.

            Rothwell’s findings, instead, confirm my finding that this election isn’t about economic dislocation at all, at least in the eyes of the Trump supporters.  For them, something much more fundamental is going on.  They see this as their last chance to reclaim an America of small towns with homogeneous populations, an America which, if it ever existed at all, existed for very few during a relatively short period of time in American history.

            What I see happening is a rearguard action determined to “take America back” from the blacks, the Muslims, the social justice Catholics, the Jews, the Latinos, the intellectuals, the gays and the Asians now aligned with the Democrats and who Trump’s supporters now think call the shots.  They know that, with one open seat on the Supreme Court and potentially two or three more in the next four years, the next president will be in a position bring the culture war the political right has been waging to a decisive close.  Any possibility that Trump’s supporters will be able to use religion to preserve a way of life that permits discrimination against people on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation will end.  Any possibility of a retrenchment in abortion law, general sexual mores or gay rights will end.  Any ability to disenfranchise voters will end. 

            This is why Trump supporters believe Hillary Clinton is a criminal and why she must be imprisoned.   It’s also why Donald Trump is already talking about a rigged election.  It explains how Donald Trump became the improbable champion for Christians who feel religion is important.

             Trump’s supporters are saying that they do not accept as legitimate any system in which white Protestants are no longer privileged.  They insist that Hillary Clinton is a criminal because, like the current president, she is an outsider, someone who has violated their sense of who is entitled to be regarded as a true American.  They believe that Democrats such as Hillary Clinton have stolen their country.

            Jones argues that White Christian America is in the process of grieving for itself.  Donald Trump’s candidacy may be a station on the road that ends when the griever can finally accept his or her loss.