Not Everything Is a ‘Grift’

Not Everything Is a ‘Grift’

&c by Jonathan Chait 

There is a strain of crude materialism on the socialistic left that attributes any disagreement with its position to personal corruption. That style of thought was exposed badly by Joe Manchin’s decision to support a major climate bill.

I don’t have any problem with raising red flags about Manchin’s financial entanglements in the coal industry, which pose a legitimate ethical concern. My problem is with the thought system that imagined his interest in the coal industry supplied the entire motivation for his behavior. The progressive media has been filled with stories like “Did Joe Manchin block climate action to benefit his financial interests?” and “The real reason Joe Manchin is sabotaging the U.S. clean energy plan.”

“Manchin is best understood as a grifter from the ancestral home of King Coal,” claimed Rolling Stone. “He is a man with coal dust in his veins who has used his political skills to enrich himself, not the people of his state.” A Sunrise Movement activist who organized protests against Manchin called him the “final villain.”

If Manchin’s primary motive was to enrich himself by protecting the coal industry, then he could have simply killed the bill immediately by announcing he would not support any partisan legislation. Alternatively, he could have supported the social spending elements while insisting it remove its clean energy subsidies. Instead, Manchin did the opposite. He vetoed nearly all the social spending measures in the bill — which he has no personal financial incentive to do — while supporting a fairly robust array of green energy subsidies.

Whatever your position is on the merits, or whether you agree with Manchin’s negotiating method (I personally was not a fan), it simply does not comport with the idea that he was motivated by greed. Indeed, the coal industry is “shocked and disheartened” by the law Manchin helped to craft.

Human motivation is complex. Corruption is one of the factors motivating people’s political view, but the left is massively over-indexed on the belief that everybody who disagrees with its position on anything is engaged in a “grift.”

One example of the above tendency I have highlighted is the conviction on the left that charter schools are a “grift.” The only motive anybody can possibly have to support them must be a hidden profit motive, not a genuine belief they can improve educational outcomes for underprivileged children. (Hence the annoying obsession with my wife’s work at a nonprofit institution that works with both traditional and charter public schools and does not advocate for education reform.)

What people outside a narrow class of specialists don’t grasp is that research shows a pronounced upward trend in the effectiveness of charter schools at improving education outcomes for urban children. Another recent example comes from a new series of three studies by Credo, in Denver, Memphis, and Baton Rouge. All three cities have found charter schools boost school performance. (And no, they are not doing it by “skimming” the most motivated students — studies are also finding that charter schools improve overall performance by the entire states and districts that introduce charters.)

Credo is notable because it found in 2009 that charter schools on the whole perform no better than traditional public schools. This finding became famous, and is continuously cited to this day to “prove” charters don’t work. But the director of Credo told me it’s badly out of date, and new studies continue to show the sector is developing scalable models that yield important benefits for urban children.

The people who keep repeating charter schools are a “grift” may not be grifters. They’re just ideologues. And they’re wrong.

One of the aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act that progressives don’t uniformly love is a side deal to reform permitting standards. Manchin demanded a promise to support a bill to make it easier to green-light energy projects. This will make it easier to build green energy infrastructure, but also fossil-fuel infrastructure.

The catch is that because this isn’t a fiscal policy change, and the IRA was enacted through a rules procedure that only allows changes to taxes and spending levels, it requires a separate vote. Republicans ought to be in favor of this, given their passion for deregulation. However, the Journal reports that there’s a snag. “Though many Republicans have long supported streamlining permits to reduce bureaucratic delays to new energy projects, party leaders are upset over the tax-and-climate bill it is linked to, which raises some corporate taxes and allots nearly $370 billion to address climate change.”

They’re upset. These are paid elected officials refusing to adopt a policy they believe would help the country, because it hurt their feelings.

Lindsey Graham tried to rationalize this position in a press conference, claiming, “I will not vote for a continuing resolution that’s part of a political payback scheme.” A “political payback scheme” is another way of saying that Manchin crafted a deal to package regulatory reforms with subsidies. That isn’t a scandal. It’s how legislation is supposed to work.

Now, as I argued in my last edition of &c, I think the way to understand this position is that Republicans see progressive taxation not just as bad policy but as a moral violation. This explains why they are lashing out in retaliation, and treating anything even touching the IRA as the fruits of a poisoned tree. I don’t see how this worldview can be seen as anything other than pathological.

Casey DeSantis, who is reportedly a close adviser to and partner with her husband Ron’s political career, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal touting Florida’s anti-poverty program. This line stood out: “Since 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson announced his ‘War on Poverty,’ more than $23 trillion has been spent on federal and state anti-poverty programs, with no meaningful improvement in poverty rates.”

This is completely false. There are several different ways to define the poverty rate, but by every single one of them, the rate has fallen since the War on Poverty began. The traditional measure of poverty shows the rate has fallen by 4 percentage points. But the traditional poverty rate does not measure non-cash benefits, like free school lunch and access to health care, so measures incorporating a broader and more accurate suite of metrics reveal and even deeper decline in poverty.

Ronald Reagan used to say “poverty won” the war on poverty, and generations of conservatives have taken this quip as a literal truth. Casey DeSantis’s empirically false belief is a reflection of her orthodox conservative thinking on social spending. If you’re looking for a Republican who will advance creative poverty solutions that go beyond Zombie Reaganism, DeSantis probably won’t be supplying them.

There was a throwaway line in Matt Yglesias’s newsletter that I think deserves more attention. “The ACA exchanges,” he wrote, “despite their flaws, are one of the main reasons I’m able to do this job.”

The Affordable Care Act had several goals. One of them was to regulate a market for individual health insurance policies that was so broken by adverse selection it was unusable for anybody who wasn’t young and completely healthy (and even for them, it often had shocking costs if they did get sick.)

Advocates of Obamacare believed this reform would not only have humanitarian benefits, but also social and economic ones. People who had been forced to work at a job that had employer-provided insurance (which, in the pre-ACA world, was the only way for working people to avoid adverse selection) would be freed to go into business for themselves if they wanted.

Nancy Pelosi said, “We see it as an entrepreneurial bill, a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care. You won’t have to be job locked.”

Conservatives endlessly mocked and distorted this statement to make it sound like Pelosi was promising people they could quit their jobs and become lazy moochers. “Able-bodied people can quit their jobs, safe in the knowledge that the suckers working man will foot the bill for any health care they may need,” sneered Michael Cannon, a libertarian opponent of universal health care.

Of course that isn’t what Pelosi meant at all when she said the bill would enable people to be “entrepreneurial.” Yglesias is a good example of this. The broken individual health insurance market before Obamacare created economic inefficiencies by forcing workers into employment arrangements that did not optimize their talents. Obamacare has made the market work better. It’s an effect that isn’t widely noted, but it’s a pretty big deal.

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