Vote Obamney!

[General Mung Beans]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magaz ... wanted=all

IT’S THE ECONOMY
Vote Obamney!

Illustration by Peter Oumanski
By ADAM DAVIDSON


Christina Beckwith was a public high-school Spanish teacher in Michigan when she was laid off because of government spending cuts. She says she wants to vote for whichever candidate will fix the economy, but she isn’t sure who that is. “I don’t have any training to be able to figure all of that out,” she told me.
Deep thoughts this week:

1. The biggest economic battles are behind us.

2. Undecided voters know this better than anyone.

3. Even if they don’t know many of the details.

4. Amid consensus, it’s tough to run an economy-based challenge.


It’s something I heard a lot recently. Pew Research Center, the polling company, put me in touch with a group of voters who were on the fence about the candidates and were willing to have a journalist contact them as the election neared. These swing voters represented many demographics, from various corners of the country. I spoke to a young soldier in Texas, a grandmother in Minnesota, and a 69-year-old teacher’s assistant in Mississippi, among others. Some of them had confusing views. One Tea Party supporter wanted to raise taxes on the rich and strengthen entitlements, like Medicare and Social Security. The teacher’s assistant, who said she was voting for Romney, echoed these traditionally Democratic sentiments. She had never been able to figure out where either party stood on these issues, she told me.

We’ve heard for months that this election is about the economy, and polls show it’s by far the issue that people care most about. We’ve also heard pundits complain that the election will come down to the vicissitudes of undecideds who don’t understand these issues. Yet as I spoke to a sampling of voters, it became clear that while, it’s true, they knew little about economic policy, most agreed on basic economic questions. And while some leaned Democrat and others Republican, the questions they had and the beliefs they held represented a broad center of American opinion.

In a series of polls going back decades, the Pew Research Center and other surveyors have shown that America is divided on many economic issues in name only. A majority of Americans support Social Security and Medicare, a progressive tax system and a government that regulates business in the public interest, but most share deep skepticism about the government’s ability to do all this well. Compared with much of U.S. history and to many countries around the world today, America has already settled its most significant economic debates. From the 1780s to the 1930s, there were a series of profound economic questions that fueled deep discord. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton fought over the basic nature of the new U.S. economy (agrarian or industrial?) and who would control the nation’s currency (a central bank or the nation’s private banks?). Hamilton won the first battle and the second one wasn’t resolved until the creation of the Fed in 1913.

In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the debates covered basics like whether the federal government could even regulate business or tax citizens at all. Then the 1930s brought all sorts of fundamental changes, including the development of Social Security, modern financial regulation and a government-managed housing industry.

Crudely speaking, Franklin D. Roosevelt shifted the nation to the left during the ’30s, and the nation has spent the last four decades moving slightly right. We are now in the process of fine-tuning. This becomes particularly apparent when comparing the United States with other industrialized nations. The United States is the rare state without a socialist or communist political party that wins significant votes. Europeans often have national debates about fundamental economic issues: how much industry should be government-controlled; what does private enterprise owe the state; what is the relationship between the European Union’s economic authorities and its member states. These debates are mild compared with the ones raging in China, India, Brazil and other rapidly industrializing nations.

Perhaps the best example of this economic consensus are the two candidates for the presidency. For someone who lived in the first 150 years or so of this country, it might be hard to see what’s so different about the economic policies of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Romney seeks a 25 percent top corporate tax rate, and Obama is proposing 28 percent. Romney wants to eliminate capital-gains taxes for the typical investor and leave the rate at 15 percent for higher earners. Obama wants to increase it to 20 percent. They differ on how to tax the highest incomes. But for most Americans, the distinctions might be mistaken for a rounding error. Both men strongly support expanding free trade and maintaining close to the same level of Social Security and welfare benefits. Neither has any specific plan to radically change the way we regulate business, the environment or the workplace.

These platforms can be partly explained by the fact that, even among partisan voters, there is still a lot of consensus. According to Pew, 40 percent of Republicans say that the government should help those who can’t help themselves; 21 percent of Democrats say the government should not. The biggest divide over economic policy concerns environmental regulations. Ninety-three percent of Democrats want stricter environmental laws, while only 47 percent of Republicans do. So even the most partisan Americans, on the most partisan topic, agree with one another nearly half the time. I was unable to find anybody who had strong opinions on issues like how best to regulate Wall Street.

Yet the two sides play down the overlaps. Jonathan Collegio, the communications director for the pro-Romney super PAC American Crossroads, said there was often far more agreement than discord between the candidates’ views, and policy disagreements were not usually salient to the average voter. “At the end of the day, a family of four isn’t at home talking about what the corporate tax rate should be,” he said. But no campaign would win, he told me, by painting a challenger as a slightly different version of the incumbent. “If you were selling a new cola, and you told people it tasted like Coca-Cola, nobody would buy it,” he said.

As nasty as the campaign has been, Romney has struggled to convince voters that he’s all that different from the current Coca-Cola. That’s largely because Obama has avoided the potentially divisive issues, like more stimulus and a broader overhaul of financial-market regulation, that many economists urged during his term. The Romney campaign has had trouble deciding whether this election should be positioned as one of historic decisions — capitalism versus socialism — or if it’s better to ask the smaller question of who can better manage an economic recovery in an age of broad consensus.

As Romney’s campaign surely knows, the last two challengers to unseat incumbents also based their campaigns on the economy. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was able to portray the election as one of stark differences in a time of true change. The economic crisis of the late 1970s brought the collapse of the post-F.D.R. economic order. Back then, the U.S. government still managed much of the economy, including where planes, trains and trucks could go and how much they could charge. And while deregulation began under Jimmy Carter, Reagan was able to link Carter with an approach to economic governance that was, indeed, collapsing. Twelve years later, Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush shared a broad view of how the U.S. economy should run, but Clinton convinced voters he would be a better manager.

Early on, Romney portrayed himself as a radical transformer. But as polls favored Obama, he seemed to shift to a Clintonian approach. And even though Ralph Loew, a 65-year-old lawyer in Connecticut, told me he doesn’t pay much attention to the economy, he has been affected by the dissonance. Loew says Romney “would be a capable president,” but he says he will probably end up pulling the lever for Obama. He says he doesn’t know all that much about economic policy. (“I wouldn’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of lots of the issues that are involved. That part of it doesn’t interest me.”) Either man, he says, could probably do just fine, so he will stick with the guy who has the job now. At least Loew, unlike so many nonpartisans, will actually vote.


Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR's “Planet Money,” a podcast, blog and radio series heard on “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and “This American Life.”

Fairly interesting article, although I have some reservations about it such as not mentioning Obama's and Romney's differences on issues like health care reform, Medicare reform (although admittedly the Ryan-Wyden Plan was bi-partisan although the latter pulled a Romney on that one), and defence spending. And I don't think European elections are that stark either-I don't think the conservatives there for example advocate repealing UHC while the social democratic parties seem to have become more centrist recently.

[Zaune]

... I don't think the conservatives there for example advocate repealing UHC while the social democratic parties seem to have become more centrist recently.

Wanna bet? I can't speak for the rest of Europe, but here in the UK that's exactly what's happening.

[Starglider]

... I don't think the conservatives there for example advocate repealing UHC

I can't speak for the rest of Europe, but here in the UK that's exactly what's happening.

Ludicrous far-left fantasy.

As the party of the NHS, we will never change the idea at the heart of our NHS – that healthcare in this country is free at the point of use and available to everyone based on need, not ability to pay. Labour promised to save the NHS but today, despite the massive increase in spending, the gap in health outcomes between the UK and the rest of Europe has actually widened.

A decade of top-down, bureaucratic mismanagement has consistently undermined the professionalism and motivation of NHS staff and skewed NHS priorities away from patient care, creating a culture where ticking boxes is more important than giving patients the treatment they need. We can’t go on with an NHS that puts targets before patients.

We understand the pressures the NHS faces. In recognition of its special place in our society, we are committed to protecting health spending in real terms – we will not make the sick pay for Labour’s Debt Crisis. But that doesn’t mean the NHS shouldn’t change. When you’re more likely to die of cancer in Britain than most other countries in Europe – and when the number of managers in the NHS is rising almost three times as fast as the number of nurses – the question isn’t whether the NHS should change, it’s how the NHS should change.

Action to date

• We have increased the NHS budget in real terms in each of the last two years.

• Last year, local NHS bodies received an increase of more than £2.5 billion.

Planned actions

• We are increasing investment in the NHS by £12.5 billion per year by 2015. The NHS will have real terms increases in its budget available to it in every year of this Parliament.

[Simon_Jester]

[random speculative note]

I bet one of the reasons "the number of managers is rising faster than the number of nurses" is pressure to spend more time assessing and double-checking how well the existing nurses are working.

Obviously you can't run a large organization without performance assessments. But the more time and energy you spend assessing and trying to enforce 'best practices' on the system, the more managers you need to keep track of what everyone's supposed to be doing.

"Raising our institution's standards" or something like that sounds really good; there are reasons it doesn't always work like it's supposed to.

[Starglider]

I bet one of the reasons "the number of managers is rising faster than the number of nurses" is pressure to spend more time assessing and double-checking how well the existing nurses are working.

The fundamental reasons were that (a) New Labour was technocratic, which demands lots of metrics to base decisions on and (b) New Labour was a central government phenomenon which regarded 'backward' local governments with contempt and attempted to centralise control of everything as much as possible (have heard this from multiple friends in the UK civil service). The only thing local government is good for, in the New Labour mentality, is to hire incompetent people off the streets to suppress unemployment numbers. As New Labour had to pretend to reject failed 1970s socialism, nationalising industry was not an option but the same basic thirst for central control whatever the consequences was there. Denied the ability to socialise and micromanage productive industry, New Labour turned instead to proceduralising, bureaucratising and micromanaging every aspect of the public sector, aided and abetted by the vast tusnami of pointless regulations sweeping into the country from Brussels. Merely reversting the trend has been a huge Conservative achievement; hacking back even half of this worthless bureaucratic kudzu is a tricky job that will take some time (naturally, middle managers dig their feet in, scream bloody murder and fight for every pointless expensive junket and seat-filling paper-pushing headcount).

[Simon_Jester]

I bet one of the reasons "the number of managers is rising faster than the number of nurses" is pressure to spend more time assessing and double-checking how well the existing nurses are working.

The fundamental reasons were that (a) New Labour was technocratic, which demands lots of metrics to base decisions on and (b) New Labour was a central government phenomenon which regarded 'backward' local governments with contempt and attempted to centralise control of everything as much as possible (have heard this from multiple friends in the UK civil service).

You can also get this without centralized control; all you need is centralized standards. The US education system runs into similar problems with a very decentralized system combined with standardized testing and evaluation-by-fad-compliance. Only there, the practical difference it makes comes out of reduced worker efficiency (more hours spent complying with said fads and administering said tests) instead of reduced labor force efficiency (more warm bodies spent managing instead of working).

I don't think it's about New Labour per se. I think it's the sort of thing that happens whenever modern MBA-culture as we know it starts to get out of hand. Just as there were consequences to having mid-20th century union-culture get out of hand in the workplace, there are consequences when it happens to management culture.

The private sector isn't immune to this either.