OK, last week I promised a shorter (but not too short!) 'Goldilocks' version of the May 5th post, here goes:
"Early on in the pandemic, I heard the phrase 'food insecure' used to describe the challenge being addressed by an area food bank. And I was like, what's that mean, like you eat in private because other people make fun of your lunch? Seems like the pandemic would be a good thing for these folks, what with the distancing and all, and also thanks to whoever named my problem.
Turns out, 'food insecure' roughly means access to food, and access is a multi-layered factor that includes a physical consideration. In short, as usual I'm an idiot, there was more than met my eye, and there's obviously a context for when this phrase and its precise definition is important.
It wasn't important for the context I heard it, though, since it was about a food bank. For about six months, I spent a few hours a week at a food bank. We didn't ask clients if they were 'food insecure', we asked them if they were poor, using income as a proxy. On my last day, I realized I was making less money than the clients. To me, overusing expressions like 'food insecure' is just another way we hide poverty, the same we do when we use proxies instead of the real thing, and equate treating symptoms with curing the disease."
The above risks simplifying the issue, but I think the issue is simple. This is a funny feature of issues - when you forget to decide in advance that an issue must be complicated, it often turns out that the issue isn't complicated. And if you've spent some time addressing these issues at the grass roots instead of just talking about them from distance, you understand that the front lines don't have time for complexity, and why those who immerse themselves in complexity eventually retreat.
I think the simple issue is that at a certain level we all accept that some people will be in poverty, and until that thinking changes we'll address rather than solve poverty, likely through a proxy list of related issues. Further, these issues will become needlessly complicated as the distance grows between symptom and condition. Here's an example of my simple way - compare one map of Boston showing coronavirus rates by neighborhood against this list of Boston rents by neighborhood. I didn't crunch the numbers to the last dollar, the math is too complicated, but a simple glance suggested that the lower the rent, the higher the infection rate. My not so juicy conclusion - no money, mo' problems. But we knew that long before COVID-19, right? Not all of us, I guess.
The problem I wrote about a few days ago, my problem with Bernie - and I guess the problem that sunk him, since he's out of the race - is that income inequality is a massively complex issue, and therefore requires a massively complex solution. It's hard to campaign on complexity and, in the world of the Magalomaniac, feels like a losing strategy against a simple message. Now, I'm not suggesting a simplification of every issue to make it fit the strategy of a campaign - I'm suggesting a campaign strategy that finds the simple issues. Otherwise, we'll end up distilling income inequality into tax the rich, and although it isn't exactly an inaccurate summary of Sanders's plan, it creates some vulnerabilities in the position, namely why we would treat those who deserve their wealth the same as those who have essentially stolen it.
Here's a hypothetical example illustrating why I don't like seeing complex issues simplified for campaign purposes. Suppose tomorrow someone 'solved' coronavirus - maybe she invents a cure, or finds a vaccine, or merely translates Trump's suggestion to consume ultraviolet into some kind of salable, scalable inhalable. Whatever the detail, in this hypothetical today's problem is solved tomorrow. Let's call our imaginary savior Doctor TOA. How much wealth would Dr. TOA deserve? Does $50 billion seem too high? Actually, it seems too low, at least if you accept the premise of this article, which suggests the virus may cost us $2.7 trillion in lost value. Even if you think the estimate is too high, or flawed, or whatever, and want to cut it down to some arbitrary number - $500 billion - then $50 billion would be 10% of your made up figure. Another estimate I came up with is $121 billion, using total virus deaths as of today (242K, which means this number will increase by the time you read it) and multiplying by $500K, which the military apparently pays families of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan as a death benefit. So would my hypothetical Dr. TOA deserve $121 billion, the full (but approximate) value of human life lost to the virus?
Whatever the final dollar total, the tricky part comes next - could we then all agree not to include Dr. TOA when calculating income inequality in the future? The reason I bring this up is because the rich of the future will include people like Dr. TOA, and as long as we have The Not Rich, they will come up with an idea to tax The Rich. It's pretty easy to envision the debate, one side will note how we agreed at the time that Dr. TOA deserved the wealth - why change the rules? The other side will counter - tax the rich! And so it goes, and will go, on and on and on.
I'm not so sure my hypothetical is too far off the mark. In some ways, I feel like we are at that last stage I outlined above - on this list of the richest people in the world, I see wealth associated with Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. These companies didn't solve the equivalent of COVID-19, but much of our current social distancing is enabled by the successes of these organizations. Relatively speaking, they are probably deserving of their wealth, but I don't think this consideration is part of any proposed income inequality solution, probably because it's "too complicated". It should be. Talking about 'solving' income inequality without stating who deserves their wealth feels like a reckless shortcut, at least from a political point of view, because you'll have to either treat everyone the same (meaning you punish productive activity through taxation the same as you would greedy activity) or commit time in the future for deciding exceptions (inviting things like lobbying into the process, which might bring us back to square one).
Let's get away from the imaginary and look at a specific plan. One of Bernie's primary mechanisms for lowering income inequality involves taxing companies where the CEO to median worker ratio exceeds 50 to 1. As a theory, I love it, but I bet a lot of voters look at that idea and see utopia - namely, one where corporations meekly pay higher taxes and make no change to worker compensation. Right? Please, stop it - you lost every voter who believes a corporation would respond by laying off employees, or implementing widespread pay cuts, or slashing benefits to make up for the difference, or sending jobs offshore, or converting full-time salaries into contractor roles, or any other thing they've done throughout world history to dodge taxes. Honestly, sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who believes all this, yet still would have voted for him. Regardless of who wins in November (my guess: regardless of who wins, nobody is going to win) I'll have one lasting conclusion from this election season - if you feel compelled to run because of a complex issue, look for a simpler issue that gets at the same basic idea.
It's been about two full months since Super Tuesday, and I'm still shaking my head. This link on his website says it all - how does Bernie pay for his major plans? Who cares? Why is this the first link on his 'issues' page? Our national debt is over $22 trillion - why is funding suddenly an issue? The problem is that at a certain level we all accept that some people will be in poverty, and until that thinking changes we'll address rather than solve poverty, likely through a proxy list of related issues. One way to address this issue is to have a President who spends too much, but not too much, a steady pair of hands who has experience in an administration that only added somewhere between three and nine trillion dollars to the debt. The rest of us are bidin' our time until we're ready to address the real issues, those listed on Bernie's website - homelessness, funding and expanding social security, climate change, universal health care, and more.
The only way to pay for all of those things is for everyone to pay for them, each American contributing a fair share, but that's obviously not possible when the poverty rate exceeds 10%. We have to address that simple but significant issue first, addressing the income gap from the bottom end. The idea of working your way up, making a better tomorrow for you and yours, has long been the American advantage, what made America great and will make it so in the future. But it doesn't work when so many people are stepped on, as you do with the bottom rung. To make it any more complicated than that, to think the problem can only be solved with the loops, swoops, and bull of policies, percentages, and politics, makes a knotty issue of a poverty line. We're going to be stuck in this mess until a candidate comes along who can state the simple issue - a system that enables unlimited wealth accumulation while there are still people living below that line is a system where no one deserves their wealth.
