The Trouble With States

Virginia Governor Tim Kaine finds himself needing to scale back his preschool proposals and restrict himself to a targeted program for the state's neediest kids rather than a universal one. This seems like a reasonable response to budgetary realism, but as is usually the case with this sort of thing it'd be better to have a universal program. Preschool money for poor kids is the sort of thing that sounds good when a state is flush. When a recession comes, Medicaid costs go up, and tax revenues go down it's another matter. The state needs to balance its budget, and it's not going to want to do it by slashing services the middle class enjoys. So it comes down to tax increases and cutting services for the poor (and, of course, infrastructure maintenance as we've seen recently) and the poor tend to lose.

But the same balanced budget requirements are the very things that make it so hard to pass a universal program in the first place. The structure is similar to Ezra's argument about the states and health care. That piece turned out to be more controversial than I would have thought. The basic point it pretty simple -- it's very hard to do certain kinds of ambitious progressive programs in the context of strict balanced budget requirements. That's why liberals oppose a federal balanced budget amendment, that's why liberals didn't like the balanced budget fetishism of Al Gore's 2000 campaign, and that's also why liberals' aspirations for state action on pressing issues should also be tempered by realism about the need for a large federal role in anything that's seriously expensive.

Comments

But what about the merits of universal preschool? Why in god's name would we subsidize perschool for middle-class and affluent families, when they're doing just fine with private preschools right now? That's just a waste of money.

Posted by too many steves | August 17, 2007 2:42 PM

I don't mean to get all Ron Paulish, but doesn't the Constitution empower states to deal with education? Is it possible and/or legal for the federal government to do something like that? Of course, I wondered the same thing throughout the NCLB debate.

Posted by Unreal Veal | August 17, 2007 3:02 PM

Right, the federal government, in the persons of George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, passed a No Child Left Behind law that mandates that every child in America be "proficient" (i.e., above average) at every single subject by 2014, apparently on the belief that America is one big Lake Wobegon, With a track record of realism like that, no wonder Matt wants the federal government to have even more power over education.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 17, 2007 3:12 PM

Of course, what is missing from this discussion is the politically unspeakable suggestion that perhaps we need to raise taxes? We have internationally rock bottom tax rates and then we complain that we can't afford to do the things we NEED to do and blame balanced budget provisions.

There is no economic reason we cannot raise the tax burden from its current 28% or so to 40% provided we use it for education and health care, things proven to pay for themselves in economic growth. The book that everyone in public policy needs to read is Growing Public by Peter Lindert, which makes a good argument that there is indeed such a thing as a free lunch.

Posted by Erik | August 17, 2007 3:34 PM

So the alternative to a balanced budget or raising taxes to pay for new programs is what? To hide the cost of programs or push the cost off onto future generations of taxpayers by deficit spending? That doesn't seem very democratic or honest. If we can't convince voters that the programs we want them to finance are worth their taxes, then we shouldn't enact them.

Posted by Ron | August 17, 2007 3:40 PM

"Why in god's name would we subsidize perschool for middle-class and affluent families, when they're doing just fine with private preschools right now? That's just a waste of money."

For the same reason that social security is "the third rail of American politics" and Medicaid isn't.

Also, to take Steve Sailer's point and run in a different direction with it, because government should be in the business of providing public education for all, not in the business of mandating improbable outcomes and expecting the market to miraculously provide the necessary tools to achieve them.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | August 17, 2007 3:47 PM

Liberals don't like balanced budget amendments because, sensibly, they force a straight line onto an economy that isn't always a straight line. The same objection can be applied to the FairTax lunatics in that people don't always spend a fixed amount in a given period. Government sometimes has to incur debt to serve the public good - "ambitous progressive programs" must also include "programs that save a shit-ton of people's asses in a financial crisis" as well. It's the difference between spending like you're on salary and don't earn overtime and being on a wage, allowing for more hours and more money. Erik's right, budgets are fluid economically, and more taxes need to be raised sometimes.

Posted by Byrd | August 17, 2007 3:50 PM

LaFollette,

Right, but you're talking politics again -- we need to provide free preschool to people who are already paying for it themselves so that the program will be politically popular. My question was whether there's an argument on the merits.

Posted by too many steves | August 17, 2007 3:57 PM

It's also worth pointing out that federal action on this stuff is unconstitional. Somebody here already said it, but it's worth pointing out again. I know that's a quaint concern these days, but it's something that never seems to cross Matthew's mind when he writes about this sort of thing.

Posted by too many steves | August 17, 2007 4:00 PM

The criticism of balanced budgets is simply wrong. The problem that states face isn't that the budget has to be balanced; it's that the voters won't vote for a tax increase to pay for the program.

If you decide to deficit spend, you aren't solving the problem of paying for the program; you are just forcing the next generation of taxpayers to pay for it or cancel the program because it is running up the deficit.

It looks like a fair amount of liberals don't want the burden of telling the truth to the voters about the fact that programs cost money. They are looking at deficit spending as a sort of a free lunch. It isn't one. (And no, it isn't good for the economy either except in rare situations where the Congress can actually time a temporary Keynesian stimulus. In other situations, it simply crowds out investment and drves up long term interest rates and inflation.)

Posted by Dilan Esper | August 17, 2007 4:00 PM

The real reason we have ridiculous federal meddling in local responsibilities like education is because the federal government is more glamorous. Ambitious people don't want to get stuck at the local level, they want to make it to the big leagues in D.C.! Once they arrive in Washington, they want to horn in on the responsibilities of those boring losers back home, like education.

Thus, we get the entire nation stuck with a certifiably insane law like NCLB, whose mandate that every child with an IQ of 65 or above be above average in math and reading by 2014 can only be met by the loophole in the law allowing (encouraging?) the states to cheat like mad on the tests used to assess whether everybody has become above average.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 17, 2007 4:01 PM

A report prepared for the Campaign for Educational Equity by Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Tamara Wilder sums up the absurdity of NCLB in its title: "'Proficiency for All' – An Oxymoron." They point out:

"In its administration of NCLB, the U.S. Department of Education barely acknowledges this human variability. … Under NCLB, children with I.Q.s as low as 65 must achieve a standard of proficiency in math which is higher than that achieved by 60 percent of students in Taiwan, the highest scoring country in the world (in math), and a standard of proficiency in reading which is higher than that achieved by 65 percent of students in Sweden, the highest scoring country in the world (in reading)."

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 17, 2007 4:04 PM

Dilan's got it: Running a deficit is just a relatively expensive way of concealing current expenses. The reason these programs are only feasible if you're allowed deficit spending is that the public only thinks they're worth the cost if they're deceived about how expensive they are.

Frankly, I don't think that's a very good defense of either deficit spending or the programs in question. And is all the more reason that they should be done at a level of government where the costs can't be so easily hidden.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | August 17, 2007 5:14 PM

that's why liberals didn't like the balanced budget fetishism of Al Gore's 2000 campaign

Are you sure about that, Matt? IIRC, there was a huge budget surplus in 2000, and the debate then was over how to distribute it. Do you have any examples of this "balanced budget fetishism" coming from Al Gore? The only thing that comes to mind for me is the famous "lockbox" for the Social Security Trust Fund receipts, but I don't remember any liberal columnists at the time complaining about it on the merits.

If liberals had a problem with "balanced budget fetishism," it didn't seem to stop many of them from becoming ardent supporters of Howard Dean, who frequently described himself as "a total budget hawk" in stump speeches and interviews, bragged about not letting the Vermont legislature increase the size of government by more than 5% a year, and kept repeating that line about "you can't trust Republicans with your money." All of which got rousing applause.

I'd point out something similar in 1992, when a lot of liberal activists supported Paul Tsongas, the sanctimonious, pro-big-business, deficit-hawk Democrat who went on to co-found the Concord Coalition; or Jerry Brown, who at that point was advocating a balanced budget amendment. Bill Clinton made some deficit reduction noises, but was nowhere near as hard-charging as those two, and yet most liberals didn't vote for him in the primaries.

Liberal disdain - or rather, white liberal disdain - for Clinton and Gore, and enthusiasm for Tsongas, Brown, and Dean, seems to have a lot more to do with cultural/regional tribalism than with stances on issues.

Posted by Chris | August 17, 2007 5:48 PM

In addition to balanced budget requirements there is another important difference between state and federal budgets. States compete to attract businesses and rich people and to repel poor people. Nations do as well (not so big a deal for the USA). This makes the trade off high taxes for services for the poor and middle class less attractive to states compared to the federal government. Of course you know about this and probably other commenters have mentioned it.

Posted by Robert Waldmann | August 17, 2007 6:43 PM

"The basic point it pretty simple -- it's very hard to do certain kinds of ambitious progressive programs in the context of strict balanced budget requirements. That's why liberals oppose a federal balanced budget amendment..."

One could just have well said something like this:

"The basic point is pretty simple -- it's very hard to do certain kinds of ambitious right/neocon programs, like tax cuts for the rich or the Iraq war, in the context of strict balanced budget requirements...".

And overlooked entirely is the obvious point that trashing government finances with endless deficits slowly destroys the government's ability to do much of anything to the detriment of those who need government the most.

Posted by kafka | August 18, 2007 12:25 AM

You've all missed the boat here. How many of you have children?

I pay more for childcare than I did for college. I'm as middle class as it gets, and childcare eats up 25% of our household income.

I recently read a statistic that while the teenaged pregnancy rates in the US are the lowest in history, 37% of babies today are born out of wedlock. These babies are born of choice to single women in their 20s and 30s with access to birth control and abortion.

Also very recently there was story in the local paper about a woman with 2 small children whose babysitter cancelled on her one morning. Calling her boss, she was told she would be fired if showed up late to work or did not come in. The woman could not find anyone to watch her children so, in desperation, she brought them to work and left them in the car. Needless to say, the children died.

There is a childcare crisis brewing in this country. It sickens me that our communities must endure the needless preventable deaths of children while retards debate the merits of balanced budgets and levels of taxation. I guess it's ok to shift the tax burden to our children when the issue is pointless war in Iraq. We can always find the money for that stuff. Dems certainly won't vote against that or be bothered to explain how they plan to fund their own residual war.

This issue should be a no-fucking-brainer right up there with healthcare for every progressive.

Posted by Just Karl | August 18, 2007 12:49 AM

Re: The woman could not find anyone to watch her children so, in desperation, she brought them to work and left them in the car. Needless to say, the children died.

I hope they threw the book at the stupid woman too. No job is worth your kids' deaths. Good God, what an idiot! Why didn't she just leave them at home-- or bring them into work? Or just tell them to shove their fool job and find another, or go on welfare? This one deserves a Darwin award. But sadly it was the kids who were removed from the gene pool not the mother.

Posted by Jonf | August 18, 2007 1:09 AM

Good God, what an idiot! Why didn't she just leave them at home-- or bring them into work?

What can I tell you, people in desperate circumstances don't always act rationally. Apparently she didn't even check on them in the 95 degree heat because she was afraid of getting caught away from her desk. After work she discoverd them dead, took them home, bathed them, put them into their best clothes, stuffed them into garbage bags, and then shoved them under the sink next to the trash can.

Posted by Just Karl | August 18, 2007 1:26 AM

Or, another way to put it is, people who don't act rationally find themselves in desperate circumstances a LOT more often than people who do act rationally.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | August 18, 2007 7:39 AM

Or, another way to put it is, people who don't act rationally find themselves in desperate circumstances a LOT more often than people who do act rationally.

I don't think I've ever run across a better example of knee-jerk sneering spoiled-white-boy libertarian contempt than the above-quoted sentence. Go on, Brett Belmore, finish your thought and tell us all how people in desperate circumstances are always there because they didn't "act rationally," and therefore deserve whatever they get.

Posted by James Gary | August 18, 2007 9:06 AM

Hm, another liberal with reading comprehension problems. Want to go back and actually examine the statement you quoted?

Of course people can find themselves in desperate circumstances despite having acted sensibly. Such is life, you can do the right thing and still have things go bad. But that's not the way to bet!

Why are you so determined to deny that acting irrationally has negative consequences? If it didn't, what would be the point to rational behavior?

It's simply a fact, like it or not, that if you are looking at somebody in desperate circumstances, most of the time you can trace it back to some mistake they made, usually an obvious one. Really, it's not "blaming the victim", if somebody is the victim of their own actions.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | August 18, 2007 11:00 AM

BB,

In this case the woman had childcare all lined-up until her babysitter canceled at the last minute. At that point, she was forced to choose between staying home with the children and losing her job (a situation that would result in her being unable to provide for her children). Under this stress, she made a tragicly stupid decision. I don't see how you come to the conclusion that this situation was the direct result of a previously poor decision on the woman's part.

Posted by Just Karl | August 18, 2007 11:32 AM

or tragically stupid...whichever you prefer

Posted by Just Karl | August 18, 2007 11:35 AM

Under this stress, she made a tragicly stupid decision. I don't see how you come to the conclusion that this situation was the direct result of a previously poor decision on the woman's part.

Well, you said it, she did make the decision....

Posted by Karl | August 18, 2007 11:50 AM

Exactly, the dead children are a result of a very poor decision. She had any number of options which wouldn't have resulted in dead children, and didn't take them. No, she took the option which could result in legal penalties if they'd been dogs, not babies.

Look, it's really unfortunate that she was placed in a circumstance where none of the choices that would preserve her childrens' lives were easy choices, but would instead have other negative consequences down the line... Consequences other than them dying horribly. But people face choices between bad and worse options all the time, and we expect them, as a normative matter, to not make a bad situation worse.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | August 18, 2007 12:08 PM

It's simply a fact, like it or not, that if you are looking at somebody in desperate circumstances, most of the time you can trace it back to some mistake they made

Look, it's really unfortunate that she was placed in a circumstance

You seem to be changing your tune. Originally, you claim the circumstance was somehow of her own doing, now, she has been placed in that circumstance.

No one is claiming this woman made the correct choice, but it's not like she left them to go get drunk. I am simply lamenting her lack of readily available options. We need a reliable childcare safety net.

Posted by Just Karl | August 18, 2007 12:31 PM