Since it’s reasonably clear the president is going to talk about the need for more revenues in his budget speech today, the theological opposition of the Republican Party to any measures that raise tax rates on the wealthy is of more than passing interest right now. And according to Politico‘s Jake Sherman, there are signs John Boehner, of his own volition or under pressure, is back-tracking on prior statements that revenues, like everything else, are “on the table” in budget talks.

[O]n Tuesday Boehner seemed to firm up his stance in advance of President Barack Obama’s speech on the deficit at George Washington University Wednesday, calling tax increases a non-starter.
“(I)f the President begins the discussion by saying we must increase taxes on the American people – as his budget does – my response will be clear: tax increases are unacceptable and are a nonstarter,” Boehner said in a statement. “We don’t have deficits because Americans are taxed too little, we have deficits because Washington spends too much. And, at a time when the American people face skyrocketing prices at the pump, energy tax hikes are a particularly bad idea.”

A “non-starter,” eh? But not, according to his spokesman, precisely “off the table”:

A spokesman for Boehner, Michael Steel, added that the statement doesn’t preclude discussion. “What Boehner said is that he’s willing to talk to anyone to try to find common ground,” Steel said.
“Raising taxes will hurt our economy, and it certainly won’t be part of any common ground. We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem, and raising taxes is only going to make it harder for small businesses to create jobs in America.”

So apparently Boehner will talk about taxes so long as it’s understood he is not open to persuasion on the subject. This is how he reconciles roles as Big Time Washington Wheeler Dealer and conservative ideologue.

This item, a response to the Demos-TDS forum on Restoring Trust in Government, is by Eric Schnurer, president of Public Works LLC, a policy consulting firm specializing in state and local governments.
As Bill Galston notes in this forum’s lead-off essay, “The public’s evaluation of both competence and integrity are shaped to some degree by its perception of government as steward of public institutions and public funds.” Patrick Bresette presents this problem as almost a Catch-22, in that progressive attempts to root out waste only reinforce public perceptions of government as wasteful. Writing of the Clinton-Gore National Performance Review (NPR), he bemoans that “[t]he media’s attention to the efforts of the initiative – and thus the public’s attention – focused on all the most egregious examples of wasteful spending that were being uncovered – from outrageously overpriced ashtrays, toilet seats and hammers to overlapping and duplicative governmental agencies and processes.”
Nevertheless, as Bresette observes, the NPR was part of an overall revival in Clinton Administration fortunes – and public trust in government – during the final six years of the Clinton presidency. I have seen similar results at the state and local levels, where I have overseen comprehensive performance reviews of government spending modeled on the NPR in seven states and helped governors in a half-dozen others to develop budget plans based on the principles discussed in this article.
This is not as dichotomous as it might seem: Revealing waste in government might increase public cynicism, but doing so also increases public confidence in the politician doing so, especially if that politician is a Democrat. The opinion research by John Halpin and Ruy Teixiera supports this argument, finding extremely high public responsiveness to an agenda of “[e]liminating inefficient programs and redirecting support to the most cost-effective programs” and like initiatives as a prelude to further progressive policies.
As both Galston and Bresette observe, Clinton and Obama rose in public esteem when they were able to convey the message that they were centrists or a “different kind of Democrat” and sank when they appeared otherwise. Clinton, according to Galston, floundered when he became embroiled in the flap over gays in the military – and, I would argue, when he decided to pursue health care reform before welfare reform – and Obama lost ground when he shifted his focus from economic recovery to the health care issue. This makes clear that the effect of fiscal responsibility on faith in government – and in those governing – also is closely related to Galston’s “third key determinant of trust in government”: responsiveness. “If people feel that the government is listening to them and working on the problems they think are most important, trust tends to rise. In recent decades, the public has come to view the federal government as much less responsive to their needs and preferences than it should be.” Conservatives have exploited the perception that Obama hasn’t been working on the right problems, focusing, instead, on bailing out banks and pursuing a health care reform that liberals cooperated in presenting as primarily transferring huge subsidies to the poor rather than lowering costs for all. As Thomas Edsall argues, this critique has fed on voter fears that limited resources were being taken from them and given unfairly to others.
Whether that constitutes a politics of selfishness, defined largely by racial and generational warfare, as Edsall warns, is debatable, however. In polling and focus group research throughout the 1990s in which I was able to participate as an advisor to various gubernatorial and Senate candidates, I found Americans amazingly receptive to paying for government programs to help needy Americans – such as education, job training, family counseling, child support, and transportation – if and when convinced of their effectiveness and efficiency.
A related concern is decline in the ideal of a shared social fate, as cited, for instance, by Bresette. It is often argued that shared commitment died when Ronald Reagan encouraged Americans to ask not what they could do for their country, but rather, “Am I better off today than I was four years ago?” It is again debatable whether Americans have been this incorrigibly self-centered for the last 30 years; in 2008, Barack Obama seemed to tap successfully into a majority yearning for some sense of community. While public attitudes on this issue may shift in a complex relationship with the competence and integrity of political leadership, as Galston discusses, or the economic vicissitudes that preoccupy Edsall, one thing has remained constant since Reagan: The willingness of political leaders, both left and right, to indulge the notion that we can have it all and not pay for it.
It is tempting to see in this our political “leaders” simply catering to the public’s own immature desire to have things both ways. But it’s also just possible that the public is making a much more sophisticated demand – to have things a different way. Might it possibly be that the public expects its leaders to figure out how the public sector can actually deliver more in services, with more customer choice, and do it for less? Preposterous, except that the technological advances of the last few decades have allowed consumers to demand that the private sector do exactly that. Politicians’ failure to respond to the same imperatives with anything more than demagoguery or transparently vapid “reforms” might actually be a cause of public dissatisfaction, rather than simply the most advantageous political response to it. Perhaps a more honest and sophisticated approach to these issues might engender public support.

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This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Along with a large and increasing number of Americans, I care about the long-term deficit because I think that, left unchecked, it will constrict and distort our future economy and society. And I am far from alone in believing that President Obama’s FY2012 budget proposal mostly evades the problem. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s recently released analysis, his proposal wouldn’t reduce the annual deficit below 4 percent of GDP, and the debt held by the public would double from $10.4 trillion to $20.8 trillion, nearly 90 percent of our GDP. That’s an outcome almost no one wants. To avoid it, we need to change course.
In these circumstances, you might imagine that I would welcome the budget plan House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan released on Tuesday. I do not, because it spurns the only possible framework for an adult conversation between the political parties that could lead over time to a long-term fiscal agreement. We don’t have to speculate about the shape of that agreement. We saw one version of it in the report of the Bowles-Simpson commission and another in the report of the Domenici-Rivlin commission. We may well see a third if the bipartisan Senate “Gang of Six” can coalesce around an agreement. (Full disclosure: Maya McGuineas, the head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and I put out a fourth version last fall.)
By contrast, the Ryan budget represents the victory of the Tea Party mentality over mainstream conservatism within the Republican Party. It illustrates the inevitable and draconian consequences of a fiscal policy that excludes net tax increases and holds federal government spending to its historic postwar average. “Draconian” is more than the adjective du jour; it is the literal truth. CBO estimates that under Ryan’s proposal, the portion of the federal budget not devoted to mandatory health programs, Social Security, or interest on the debt would decline from 12 percent in 2010 to 6 percent in 2022 to 31/2 percent by 2050. Does anyone think this is serious? Does anyone think this will happen? How many people–really, deep down–think it should?
There is an alternative approach that makes much more sense–economically, socially, and politically. Bipartisan discussions have converged on the objective of holding public debt to around 60 percent of GDP in 2020 through a balanced menu of spending cuts and revenue increases. While there are compelling economic reasons for not allowing the debt to rise as far as our current course would take it, only ideology requires it to disappear altogether. Nor is it necessary to hold federal spending to its historical level: All other things equal, the aging of the population and the rise in medical costs (even if slowed, as it should be, from the current rate) would suggest a somewhat higher level. The Galston-McGuineas proposal would hold spending to about 22 percent of GDP, higher than the postwar average but much lower than what the status quo would produce. Other bipartisan plans have ended up in roughly the same place.
But that’s the point: The Ryan plan is not bipartisan. (Given how skittishly House Republicans reacted to Ryan’s “Roadmap” last year, it remains to be seen whether it’s even mono-partisan.) If it’s the GOP’s best and final offer, it will be a conversation-stopper. It will be interesting to see how many contenders for the Republican presidential nomination calculate that they have no chance of winning the nomination of a Tea Party-dominated primary electorate unless they endorse the Ryan plan. One thing is pretty clear: Any Republican presidential candidate who embraces this plan will have committed general election suicide.
Ryan’s plan has one incontestable virtue: It recognizes, as do many analysts outside the conservative fold, that health care costs lie at the heart of our long-term fiscal problems. But the question is what to do about them. Turning Medicaid into a block grant to the states–a key Ryan proposal–is a genuinely bad idea, because it will lead inevitably to cutbacks in care for low-income people who have nowhere else to turn, contradicting Ryan’s own pledge of a “secure safety net.” Under his proposal, CBO estimates, federal spending for Medicaid would be 35 percent lower in 2022 and 49 percent lower in 2030 than currently projected. What are the odds that hard-pressed states could pick up the slack? And if not, how many poor children would go without without health care? How many elderly Americans without personal resources would go without decent nursing homes?

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This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Dear Mr. President,
I write as a supporter who understands how full your plate is right now. Three foreign wars, a fragile recovery from the deepest recession in many decades, and stubbornly high unemployment would be enough for any president. Regrettably, some issues present themselves, unbidden and unwelcome, and refuse to go away, leaving presidents no choice but to address them. In my judgment, which is increasingly widely shared–in the U.S. Senate, by the public, and now by a group of former White House economic advisers–our fiscal condition is one such issue.
I hope that you have been briefed on the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of your FY2012 budget proposal. If so, you will have learned that the situation is surprisingly grim: Your proposal would leave the deficit at or above 4 percent for the next decade and double the debt held by the public from $10.4 trillion to $20.8 trillion, fully 87 percent of our anticipated Gross Domestic Product. Nearly two years ago, you labeled our fiscal trajectory “unsustainable.” You were right, and it still is.
I can understand why you declined to embrace a specific solution for this problem, either in your budget or in your 2011 State of the Union address. Numerous surveys have shown that while the people are alarmed about debt and want reduced spending in principle, they reject most of the specific cuts that would make a difference in practice. A divided Congress still tied up in knots about appropriations for the fiscal year already half over seems in no condition to address much larger long-term issues.
But that said, there are signs that the political context is shifting in ways that create an opening for the adult conversation our country needs. No doubt you are aware that 64 senators–32 Democrats, 32 Republicans–sent you a letter urging you to “engage in a broader discussion about a comprehensive deficit reduction package,” which they defined in terms resembling those of your own fiscal commission’s December 2010 report.
Just last week, a similarly bipartisan group of former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), including your own, Christina Romer, released an open letter calling on you and the Congress to adopt the Bowles-Simpson report as the point of departure for “active” and “intense” negotiations across party lines. Their letter reads, in part:

There are many issues on which we don’t agree. Yet we find ourselves in remarkable unanimity about the long-term budget deficit: It is a severe threat that calls for serious and prompt attention.

They warn that if this doesn’t happen, “At some point bond markets are likely to turn on the United States–leading to a crisis that could dwarf 2008.”
There are even signs that the American people are more focused on this issue than they have been since at least 1992, when Ross Perot received an astounding 19 percent of the popular vote after a campaign focused almost exclusively on deficits and debt. A recent Gallup survey showed that while the economy remains the top public concern, the budget deficit is in second place and rising fast. A report out last week from Third Way, which I hope your team is analyzing carefully, summarizes a substantial body of survey research pointing in the same direction.

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This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Writing in 1977 on the topic of humanitarian interventions, a noted political philosopher had this to say:

[W]hen a government turns savagely upon its own people, we must doubt the very existence of a political community to which the principle of self-determination might apply. … When a people are being massacred, we don’t require that they pass the test of self-help before coming to their aid. It is their very incapacity that draws us in. … Any state capable of stopping the slaughter has the right, at least, to try to do so.

Returning to this topic in 1999, he observed that “the greatest danger most people face in the world today comes from their own states, and the chief dilemma of international politics is whether people in danger should be rescued by military forces from the outside.” The problem, he argued, is not that individual states are prone to engage in such interventions, but the reverse: There have been “a lot of unjustified refusals to intervene.” It is, he said, “more this neglect of intervention [by individual nations] than any resort to it that leads people to look for a better, more reliable, form of agency.” And he offered a number of reasons why humanitarian interventions conducted under U.N. auspices might well meet this standard.
I agree with this distinguished scholar, who is (as you may have guessed) Michael Walzer. And that is why I disagree with his recent critique for TNR of our intervention in Libya.
Walzer begins his case against the administration with three prudential points. First, it’s unclear what the purpose of the intervention is, and therefore what the endgame might be. Second, the attack lacks significant Arab support. And third, technical passage of the enabling resolution in the U.N. Security Council should not obscure the breadth of international opposition, which includes not only the usual suspects (Russia and China) but also an important ally (Germany) and two of the most significant rising democracies (India and Brazil).
I could quibble with each of these propositions, but, as Walzer and I agree, that would divert us from the core issue. As he says, “[n]one of this would matter if this were a humanitarian intervention to stop a massacre.” But, he contends, “that is not what’s happening in Libya today.” That depends on what he means by “stop.” As the revolution faltered and government forces surged east, Qaddafi made a blood-curdling speech about the fate that awaited the residents of Benghazi. His threat to hunt them down “alley by alley” has been set to music and has become his supporters’ unofficial anthem.
On any impartial global index of leaders’ veracity and trustworthiness, Qaddafi would rank near the bottom. But in matters of organized brutality, there’s every reason to take him at his word. At the very least, there’s a very real possibility of mass reprisals and killings that would dwarf the slaughter at Srebrenica. That brings us to the nub of the matter: Were we required to wait until the slaughter began in order to “stop” it, or are we allowed to intervene to prevent a humanitarian disaster that is probable but not absolutely certain? The example of Rwanda suggests that if outside parties wait until the murder begins, it may be too late to halt it before many thousands have died. I don’t understand the basis for Walzer’s conclusion that unlike Rwanda, the threat to innocent life in Libya is not “extreme” enough to justify we what are doing.
All things considered, then, there is good reason why the impending fall of Benghazi moved President Obama to act. Bill Clinton has stated more than once that his failure to intervene in Rwanda was–morally and humanly speaking–the worst decision of his presidency. I agree. If I had been sitting where Obama was sitting last week, I would have acted as he did to prevent what could have been a similar stain on my administration. To be sure, there’s a chance that this wouldn’t have happened, even if we hadn’t intervened. But would we have been morally justified in taking that chance?
Yes, there are costs and risks. But let me use a philosopher’s example to clarify the issue. Suppose you’re a skilled swimmer walking along a beach. You hear a cry for assistance and observe someone struggling in the water a hundred feet offshore. Although it’s highly likely that you can bring the endangered swimmer safely to shore, there’s a small chance that you can’t, and a smaller but not negligible threat to your own safety. You also know that no one else can act with equal odds of success. Would it have been right to walk on by?
Since Kant, we have been familiar with the proposition that “ought implies can.” But in some circumstances, the reverse also holds: “can implies ought.” Our massive, ongoing investment in military capacity has a range of consequences for defense and diplomacy. It also has moral consequences. Because we can act in ways that others can’t, we are not as free as they are to ignore threats that we have the power to abate.
Having said this, let me grant a point Walzer rightly makes: Humanitarian protection is one thing, regime change quite another. This is a distinction that Obama also makes. No doubt his ringing and (many believe) unwise declaration that Qaddafi must go has muddied the waters. But while it may be complicated to say that our military intervention is bounded by the requirements of civilian protection and that we will use non-military means to bring about Qaddafi’s fall, it is not on its face incoherent.
Let me grant, as well, that the endgame is murky at best. There’s a non-trivial possibility that Qaddafi will be able to hang on to power in a substantial part of Libya. If so, we and our allies may have committed ourselves to protecting “Benghazistan” against retribution for the indefinite future. We’ve seen that movie before. Let’s hope this one ends better.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As events abroad rivet the media’s attention, the outlines are being drawn for a fiscal debate that will shape both the 2012 election and our economic future. Over the past few weeks, important documents have appeared which make it clear that the situation is extremely dire–but also that the public is unaware of, or in denial about, the trade-offs needed to remedy our predicament. The only solution is for President Obama to engage with Congress and begin educating the public by explaining why we need not short-term spending cuts, but long-term fiscal balance. And he needs to start now.
Several days ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its preliminary analysis of the fiscal impact of the president’s FY2012 budget proposal. Its findings were not pretty. In no year between now and 2021 would deficits fall below 4 percent of GDP. Over the next decade, enacting the president’s proposal would create deficits totaling $9.5 trillion, $2.7 trillion more than the cumulative deficit in CBO’s baseline budget. Federal debt held by the public would double from $10.4 trillion to $20.8 trillion, 87 percent of GDP, and annual interest on the debt would rise from 1.4 percent of GDP to nearly 4 percent. Even if the share of the debt held by foreign investors and governments does not increase over the next decade, CBO’s projection suggests that we’ll be shipping fully 2 percent of our GDP (almost $500 billion) overseas each year by the end of the decade, just to pay the interest on foreign holdings of U.S. government debt.
Whatever one may think about the size, timing, and appropriateness of short-term budget cuts, the CBO report adds precision to the common view that our long-term fiscal course is unsustainable. If you believe, as I do, that the best approach melds continued short-term fiscal ease with long-term restraint, then moving toward the long-term discussion as soon as possible is essential, for the simple reason that there’s no viable political path to the former that is not linked to the latter.
It’s clear that President Obama could do more to make this a reality. During the same time period, 64 senators–32 Democrats (60 percent of their caucus), 32 Republicans (70 percent of theirs)–sent a letter to President Obama urging him to “engage in a broader discussion about a comprehensive deficit reduction package.” Referring to the work of the president’s own fiscal commission, the letter went on to define the meaning of “broader”: “Specifically, we hope that the discussion will include discretionary spending cuts, entitlement changes and tax reform.” While some observers have dismissed this demarche as odd or inconsequential, it is anything but that–especially in these polarized times. Beyond the adjective “broader,” the most important words in the letter were a verb and a noun. By “engage,” the senators meant, “Mr. President, please get off the sidelines and get personally involved, because this process can’t succeed without your active participation.” And by “discussion” they meant an ongoing face-to-face dialogue, not occasional presidential monologues with little follow-up.
Meanwhile, the public is agitated but unsure how to solve the problem. On March 21, Gallup issued its latest survey of public concerns, and the economy remains at the top of the list, with 71 percent reporting that they worry about it “a great deal.” The budget deficit/federal spending is a strong second, at 64 percent. Notably, there is a wide gap between Democrats and Independents on this issue: While Independents rank spending/deficits second on their list, behind only the economy, these fiscal issues don’t appear at all on the Democrats’ list of top concerns.
Yet as a gap in the latest Pew Center survey underscores, regarding our fiscal condition as a serious problem is one thing, but endorsing a serious remedy is quite another. By a margin of 2 to 1, the public favors cuts in domestic spending. That’s where support for fiscal stabilization ends. American are split down the middle (47 percent in favor, 49 percent opposed) on cutting military spending, they reject changes to Social Security and Medicare by 65 percent to 30 percent, and they oppose raising taxes by a similar 67 percent to 30 percent. Compared to six years ago, support for cutting discretionary spending, domestic and military, has risen significantly, while opposition to tax increases hasn’t budged.
For the most part, these sentiments cross party lines. Seventy-five percent of Democrats oppose changes to Social Security and Medicare, but so do 61 percent of Independents and 59 percent of Republicans. Seventy-six percent of Republicans oppose tax increases, as do 67 percent of Independents and 61 percent of Democrats. Seventy-one percent of Republicans favor cuts in domestic spending, but so do 60 percent of Independents and even 54 percent of Democrats. The only area of significant disagreement is defense, where 57 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Independents favor cuts, compared to only 33 percent of Republicans.
No budget analyst who has mastered fourth-grade arithmetic believes that we can regain control of our fiscal future solely through reductions in discretionary spending. The Pew survey makes it clear (if further evidence were needed) that public concern about the problem far outruns public understanding of its sources and scope. As I have argued, the only way to change these public attitudes is to level with the people about our fiscal situation and educate them about the true choices we face. This task is essential and long overdue. But if former professor Obama isn’t willing to take the lead, it’s hard to see how an informed public discussion can ever begin.

I doubt the Obama White House was under any illusion that the country would erupt with biprtisan applause or offer uniform salutes of support when the decision was made to launch a military strike on Libya. But still, the reaction of Republicans is pretty amazing given the years they spent complaining that Democrats wouldn’t support George W. Bush on Iraq as a matter of simple patriotism. This Politico lede says it all:

After demanding for weeks that he be more decisive on Libya, not one candidate in the field of 2012 GOP hopefuls has expressed support for President Barack Obama since he began bombing the North African nation.
The GOP’s presidential prospects either sharply criticized the commander-in-chief this weekend or avoided weighing in.

The self-styled Churchillian figure Newt Gingrich has been typical of his peers, alternating between complaints that Obama didn’t act unilaterally weeks ago to attack Libya and snorts of derision about the slight strategic importance of that country to begin with.
Get used to it. People running for the 2012 presidential nomination are aware that the early-state caucus and primary voters who will determine their fate hate Barack Obama with a deep and abiding passion, and do not believe the president is capable of or even interested in action in the country’s interests. So the candidates will oppose him no matter what he does, and if he changes his mind to agree with what they said two hours ago, they’ll attack him for being weak or irresolute.
If there is to be any sort of real debate over the administration’s actions towards LIbya, it’s going to have to be mainly among Democrats.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The struggle over fiscal policy is likely to preoccupy official Washington for most of the 112th Congress. Although this fight is necessary and important, it should not divert our attention from fairly disturbing developments in the economy, where some key indicators are flashing warning signs. Consider the following.
Consumer prices rose 0.5 percent in February, and so-called “core” inflation (excluding food and energy) was up 0.2 percent. Although official statistics treat food and energy as non-core, ordinary Americans regard them as central. After all, these are the items that households purchase most frequently, and they shape public perceptions about changes in price levels. That’s the biggest reason why the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index dropped last week to its lowest level since last August.
Changes in food and energy prices are also influencing the public’s economic priorities. As recently as last December, Pew reports, 47 percent of Americans cited the job situation as their top economic concern, compared to only 15 percent who mentioned rising prices. By March, those most worried about jobs had fallen by 13 points to 34 percent, while those most concerned about inflation had nearly doubled, to 28 percent. And as more foreclosed homes are being thrown on the market, housing prices have resumed their decline, and housing starts fell sharply in February to their second-lowest level since 1946. Even more significant, permits for new construction in February fell 8.2 percent from January and were 20.5 percent below the already depressed level of a year ago.
Are these developments likely to be transitory? I think not, for two reasons. First, we are now competing for resources in a global market. As developing countries continue to grow strongly, their demand for food and fuel will only strengthen. Upward pressure on prices in these sectors can persist even if growth in the United States remains anemic.
Second, as I have argued repeatedly over the past year, the era of rapid increases in consumer spending has ended. Wages continue to stagnate, but households can no longer compensate by withdrawing equity from their homes. Understandably, they are trying to reduce their debt burdens, which peaked at unsustainable 136 percent of disposable income right before the crash. (Mortimer Zuckerman’s recent article usefully summarizes the evidence on this point.)
There are only two alternatives to growth led by domestic demand–rising exports and increased public and private investment. The administration has talked a good game about doubling exports over five years, but up to now it has been unwilling to bite the political bullet and send the long-stalled trio of trade agreements to the Congress for ratification. And as Bruce Stokes pointed out in a recent article, “U.S. exports have only doubled once in any five year period in modern history and that was when the dollar halved in value against both the Japanese yen and the German deutsche mark in the late 1970s.” Today the list of currencies against which the dollar must fall would have to include China, but the administration has been unwilling to force the issue.
The administration has also talked a good game about public investment but has yet to make a serious push for the promising vehicle it claims to support, a national infrastructure bank. Just last week, a bipartisan group of senators including John Kerry, Mark Warner, and Kay Bailey Hutchison introduced the BUILD Act to create a financing mechanism that could leverage up to $600 billion in new private investments. The Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO both support the proposal. Maybe the administration favors it as well, but I have yet to find any public evidence to that effect.
The White House has clearly shifted into full reelection mode, and it has decided to position the president above the fray rather than push for more legislative action that could boost the economy. (Even legislation, as in the case of the free-trade agreements and the infrastructure bank, that could draw bipartisan support.) But by not pushing those policies–and letting the Congressional budget battle drag out in endless gridlock–Obama may be undermining the very economy that will determine his chances for reelection. What is he waiting for?

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This item, the sixth essay in the Demos-TDS online forum on Restoring Trust in Government, is by Peter Levine, Director of Research and Director of CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement) at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service.
Americans’ distrust of government is deep and poses a fundamental obstacle to progressive reform. According to the CBS/New York Times poll conducted in Feb. 2010, just six percent of Americans believed that the stimulus bill that had been enacted almost one year before had created any jobs so far. And according to a 2009 Gallup poll, Americans believed that 50 cents of each dollar of federal spending was wasted.
Distrust of government has old roots in American history, but attitudes toward government were much more favorable in the mid-twentieth century, when progressive politics were ascendant. The reasons for today’s profound distrust probably include deliberate anti-government propaganda that echoes around the conservative chambers of an increasingly polarized news and entertainment media–plus lame responses from liberal leaders.
But when only six percent of Americans trust the government to have created any jobs by spending almost one trillion of their dollars, the problem is much deeper than Fox News or the communications strategy of the White House. The underlying relationship between people and their government is fundamentally broken.
I don’t believe that communicating the virtues of government or educating citizens about the public sector can raise trust much, because the pro-government case is too difficult to make in a crowded media environment, and the message is too vulnerable to scandals. Also, if the government actually fails to address our most serious problems–which I fear is the case–people will not be convinced that it works.
I am equally skeptical about improving accountability in the way that the Clinton and Obama administrations have tried. They hope that by disclosing information about the government’s performance, they will expose and remedy actual failures and thereby increase people’s confidence in public institutions.
The evidence that transparency improves performance and trust is mixed, at best. Besides, most people do not want informational accountability; they want relational accountability. For example, they do not want to know the test scores, teacher salaries, and graduation rates at their local high school; they want to know the principal and have confidence in her values.
In focus groups that Doble Research Associates conducted for the Kettering Foundation in 2001, parents were highly resistant to the idea that tests would be useful ways to hold school accountable. For one thing, they wanted to hold other parties accountable for education, starting with themselves. A Baltimore woman explained, “When I think about accountability, I think about parents taking responsibility for supervising their children’s learning and staying in touch with teachers.” This respondent not only wanted to broaden responsibility but also saw it in terms of two-way communication.
Many participants wanted to know whether schools, parents, and students had the right values. They doubted that data would answer that question. One Atlanta woman summed it up: “What we’ve got to do is develop a stronger sense of community between the schools and families in the community.”
I believe that schools and other public institutions would work better if they enlisted more of the energies, ideas, and values of ordinary citizens and trusted them to make consequential collective decisions. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for a career of work showing that laypeople can do an excellent job of managing public institutions. She has also found that decentralized, participatory bodies can produce better outcomes than either centralized, expert-led bureaucracies or markets, even though participatory bodies often overlap, duplicate efforts, and reinvent one another’s wheels.
Ostrom argues that we have moved in the opposite direction, consolidating school districts, replacing elected boards with appointed experts, relying on standardized tests and measures, and otherwise reducing opportunities for laypeople to work together in public–all in a foolish quest for efficiency.
Decentralized, participatory efforts work well because the problems that really concern us–such the dropout rate of about one third, rampant crime, deindustrialization, and the profligate waste of natural resources–are “wicked problems.” They involve complex, rapidly changing, interconnected systems that are virtually impossible to predict or to shape from the outside. They also involve conflicting values and interests, so that the very definition of success is contested, and people’s motives are part of the problem.
In general, “wicked problems” are best addressed by decentralizing control and empowering mixed groups of people, including those most affected. There are no expert solutions. Markets decentralize decision-making, but they cannot address genuine public problems such as deep inequality and environmental degradation. Governments can redistribute resources and regulate behavior but cannot solve “wicked problems” without the local knowledge and energies that citizens provide.

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This item, the fifth essay in the Demos/TDS online forum on Restoring Trust In Government, is by Thomas B. Edsall, who holds the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Chair at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. This article was originally published last October, in slightly modified form, by The New Republic.
In the 2010 election, you could glimpse the brutish future of American politics. This new age of brutishness may or may not include the Tea Party. But, even if the Tea Party dissipates, the anger undergirding it will not. The Tea Party has expertly articulated a widespread grievance: that the government is redistributing money from hardworking Americans to the idle and undeserving. Of course, this is hardly a new charge. But it takes place in a new context–an age of growing austerity, where this complaint will acquire an ever-sharper edge and battles over the scarce resources of the state will erupt in spectacular skirmishes.
Politics has, in some sense, always been a resource war–and in American politics it has usually taken the form of one political party promoting a social safety net and the other party decrying how hard-earned tax dollars unjustly finance those benefits. But, while that debate was intense, it was in some sense resolvable. For decades, our political system has been able to fund an array of social programs while keeping taxes relatively low. The American economy grew at a sufficient pace that it could rather effortlessly bankroll a state that satisfied divergent interests.
But that broad, unintentional compromise is no longer sustainable. We’re entering a period of austerity, far different from anything we’ve ever seen before. The predictions, especially the ones formulated by sober, nonpartisan analysts, are eye-popping. Earlier this year, a Congressional Budget Office report estimated that the debt as a percentage of GDP would approximately triple by 2035. Put another way, debt will come to exceed 185 percent of GDP. That’s far worse than Greece’s current perilous condition, a crisis that has been portrayed as the reductio ad absurdum of fiscal indiscipline.
Like the David Cameron government in Britain, or any number of other states across Europe, we’ll soon be forced to reckon with the fact that our economic viability depends on some combination of shrinking the state and raising revenue. If we were careful planners–and, of course, we’re not–we would begin by saving about 5 percent of GDP each year. Next year, for example, we’d have to make tax increases and spending cuts add up to about $700 billion. Over time, the total costs would prove immense: raising everyone’s tax bill by at least 25 percent (and probably a lot more than that) or eliminating about 20 percent of the federal budget (the approximate current size of Social Security, for example).
Even if you assume that a crisis is distant–or assume that we’ll avert it by letting the Bush tax cuts expire and further containing health care costs–the anxieties about deficits are already acute. Both parties are posturing to assume the mantle of fiscal conservatism, a trend that the success of the Tea Party will only exacerbate. And while President Obama’s deficit commission did not achieve any bipartisan agreement on solutions, it did help propel the problem to the fore where it will remain for the foreseeable future.
With resources shrinking, the competition for them will inflame. Each party will find itself in a death struggle to protect the resources that flow to its base–and, since the game will be zero-sum, each will attempt to expropriate the resources that flow to the other side. This resource war will scramble our politics. Each party will be forced to dramatically change its calculus and remake its agenda. And if you thought our politics had grown nasty, you haven’t even begun to consider the ugliness of the politics of scarcity.
At first glance, the Democrats have the most to lose in this new struggle. They have spent decades trying to recover their image from the excesses of the McGovern era, repositioning themselves as something more than an aggregation of aggrieved–and needy–interest groups. Even Barack Obama, the most liberal president in decades, packaged himself as post-partisan candidate, rather than as a warrior on behalf of unions or minority groups. “There’s nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics,” he said during the campaign. “There’s nothing liberal about wanting to make sure [our soldiers] are treated properly when they come home.” This pitch worked well. The public basically considered him a man of the center–a perception that rested on many years of Democrats shaking off the caricature (and reality) of paleo-liberalism.
But, for all the gains the party has made, the age of scarcity risks reversing them. It’s precisely the Democratic Party’s historic base–minorities, labor, the poor–that will take the greatest hit in coming years. You can already begin to see signs of this. Even when Congress approved an economic stimulus bill in August, it coupled spending on health care and teachers’ salaries with deep cuts in food stamps. It reduced benefits for a family of three by $47 per month, according to one estimate.
Or take state government, which is really the vanguard of the crisis. The austerity hammer has fallen hard on Democratic constituencies. According the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, at least 31 states have slashed programs that provide low-income children and families access to either health care or health insurance. Peruse almost any state budget and you’ll find further shredding of the safety net. Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare has closed nine of its 45 field offices; Georgia has cut funding for low-income family support programs by 7 percent. And that’s all merely a prelude to a looming apocalypse. In their next budgets, 24 states will face a shortfall of at least 10 percent–and it’s not hard to imagine where they will trim to cover that gap.

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