We Have Enough Taxes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, March 30, 2022

 

Some people think taxes are too high. Some people think taxes are too low. But I wonder whether most of us could agree that we have enough individual taxes — and maybe too many taxes — irrespective of the question of tax rates.

 

President Joe Biden, who is and always has been a political coward, is talking about a new “billionaires’ tax” that he pretends he wants to see enacted.  The tax would be economically destructive, would produce little revenue, and is almost certainly unconstitutional in that it would tax imaginary income, treating investment gains as actual income: Imagine being taxed on the notional increase in the value of your house over the past few years irrespective of whether you have sold your house and made the money, and you’ll get the general idea. President Biden is intellectually lazy and very well may be somewhere in the general vicinity of positively stupid, but he has enough self-preserving animal cleverness to know that this is unlikely to ever be anything more than a talking point. Senator Joe Manchin has already put his name on its death warrant.

 

Which is, of course, the point.

 

It is much easier to talk about a theoretical new tax — one that doesn’t actually cost your supporters anything — than to take real steps with the tax code we already have. Easier still if there is no danger of the policy’s being enacted. This is a version of the old sophomoric stratagem, “The ideal version of my hypothetical policy is superior to the non-ideal version of your real-world policy.”

 

There are more straightforward ways to raise taxes on very high-income people. For example, we could raise the top income-tax rate, maybe creating a $1-million-and-up bracket or a $5-million-and-up bracket on top of the current top bracket, which begins at $539,901 for a single filer or $647,851 for a married couple filing jointly. Or we could raise the rate on investment income, since the billionaires and hectomillionaires our progressive friends like to go on about usually make most of their money from investments rather than from salaries. (You don’t become a billionaire on a regular fortnightly paycheck.) Those would be the most straightforward ways of raising taxes.

 

There are limits to how much you can soak the rich, of course, because the rich have lots of resources to put into tax-planning and lots of choices about how and when they receive their income. Progressives sometimes talk about the tax code as though it had to be fitted to the complex ways in which corporations and high-income individuals conduct their business without quite seeming to understand that those practices did not appear ex nihilo but developed in response to existing tax incentives. Creating new tax incentives will create new economic behavior.

 

Presented with that economic reality, the demagogue will reliably turn to cheap moralism, insisting that this is a matter of “fairness,” with the rich failing to “pay their fair share.” We already lean very heavily toward the top for tax revenue, with the top 1 percent paying 40 percent of all federal income taxes while earning only 20 percent of the income, and the top 20 percent of earners paying almost 90 percent of all federal income tax. With the top 1 percent paying a tax burden that is twice its share of income, it would seem to me that they are paying more than their fair share already. But that is the attraction of vague adjectives such as “fair” — it can mean whatever a politician needs it to mean.

 

But we should keep the basic math in mind there: Concentrating on the top 1 percent for new tax revenue takes 80 percent of all income off the table. It is going to be difficult to raise a lot of new tax revenue when you are fencing off almost all of the potentially taxable income.

 

That is one reason we should remind our progressive friends — very often — that the difference between the U.S. tax system and the tax regimes of the Scandinavian countries they profess to admire is not how the wealthy are taxed but how the middle classes are taxed: In the United States, a married couple has to earn almost ten times the median income before the top marginal rate kicks in, while in Sweden the top rate applies to those earning only 1.5 times the median income. Put another way, about 1 percent of U.S. households pay the top marginal rate, while one out of three would pay that rate should we follow the Swedish example. And the Swedish top rate is 57 percent to our 37 percent. If you want Scandinavian benefits for the middle classes, you’re probably going to have to impose Scandinavian taxes on the middle classes, too. I don’t think that would be a very good idea, but it would at least be honest — unlike pretending that the middle classes can have their Sweden on the cheap.

 

Income-tax comparisons get convoluted because the United States has more than one federal income tax — in addition to the one we call the income tax, there is FICA, a bundle of payroll taxes we pay on top of the other income tax, not to mention state and local income taxes. Some of that payroll tax is, in theory, paid by employers rather than by employees, but most economists think that in most cases, employees end up bearing most of the burden through lower wages. Because of the way taxes get spread around through the economy, in a real sense, nobody really knows what the cost of taxes are to his own household, even if he knows to the penny what his 1040 says.

 

Likewise, while it is the case that billionaires tend to have a lot more investment income than salary income, lots of ordinary middle-income people have investment income, too, in their pensions and retirement funds. As shareholders, they are payers of the corporate income tax and payers of investment taxes, and they benefit from the preferential tax treatment of investment income just like the Wall Street and Silicon Valley guys do. There isn’t any reason we have to tax capital gains in a preferential way; then again, there isn’t any reason we have to tax capital-gains income at all — businesses already pay corporate income tax, and dividends and other profit distributions are paid out of money that already has been subjected to that tax. Some thriving and happy European countries, Switzerland and Belgium among them, do not normally tax capital gains at all. They still manage to fund large, active central governments.

 

If we want to raise taxes, we already have a lot of taxes to choose from and don’t have any particular need for a new one, unless the point is avoiding talking about realistic near-term options in favor of anodyne hypotheticals. New taxes add new compliance costs, and they also create new opportunities for rent-seeking, backdoor subsidies, and cronyism. In fact, there are some pretty good arguments for having fewer taxes. If the federal government had only one or two taxes to administer rather than a whole bundle of them (income, payroll, gifts, capital gains, dividends, tariffs, estates, tobacco excises, liquor excises, Affordable Care Act excises, airport and airway trust-fund taxes — the list goes on) it might do a better job, and it might spend less money collecting the money it is owed. According to my English-major math, you are better off spending a nickel to collect 75 cents than you are spending 40 cents to collect $1.

 

There have been some radical ideas for tax reforms over the years. The 19th-century economist Henry George favored a single tax on the value of unimproved land, judging this to be the most fair and economically efficient tax, and the idea has had many admirers over the years, William F. Buckley Jr. among them. I have long thought that libertarians and climate activists ought to consider a joint program for replacing U.S. income taxes with a single tax on greenhouse-gas emissions, which would create desirable climate incentives and relieve us of the necessity of submitting to gross annual violations of our privacy by tax authorities. There are lots of compelling ideas like that, from flat-taxers and fair-taxers and unreconstructed Georgists and other sundry practitioners of wonkery.

 

None of it is going to happen, of course.

 

That is all fun stuff for pundits and think-tankers and academics, but, in all likelihood, the tax code we have is pretty much the tax code we are going to have. There isn’t any consensus behind radical reform of the tax code in general, still less consensus behind any particular radical reform, and even less consensus behind any particular radical reform that would be worth a damn. If you are a member of Congress or the president of these United States and you want to raise taxes, then you have a lot of taxes available for raising. If your big idea is dreaming up some new tax that doesn’t impose any political costs on you and yours, then you aren’t serious. In the case of Joe Biden, this is not a revelation of unseriousness, only a confirmation of it.

 

Because I worry a little more about the effect of heavy public debt than I do about the effect of higher taxes, I am much more open to tax increases than most conservatives are. If somebody with real power were to put forward a robust and plausible fiscal-reform package that addressed the real issues — including entitlements — then accepting some higher taxes as part of a political compromise might turn out to be a pretty good deal. (Details, details, details.) And there is no realistic way to straighten out our fiscal situation without a broad bipartisan consensus — it isn’t something that can be accomplished by members of one party enjoying a temporary majority. As it stands, Republicans and Democrats both are in the same boat, trying to deal with an electorate that demands a higher level of government services than it is willing to pay for. But we can’t have federal spending that is 23 percent of GDP and federal taxes that are 19 percent of GDP — as President Biden proposes — forever.

 

Taxes are not the same thing as tax rates, and tax rates are not the same thing as tax revenue, as we know from the example of the immediate post-war years, when Eisenhower-era Americans saw top marginal income tax rates that were much higher than the ones we have now while income-tax revenue (as a share of GDP) was lower than it is today.

 

If your goal is securing sufficient revenue to support federal programs, then the way forward is reasonably clear; but if your program is social leveling, vindictive class-war nonsense, or, as in President Biden’s case, avoiding the real choices before you, then the picture is entirely different.

Putin Forces Germany to Rethink ‘World’s Dumbest Energy Policy’

By Philip Plickert

Thursday, March 31, 2022

 

Among the many casualties of the Ukraine war is a political one in Germany, the country’s Energiewende (energy transformation), which was launched by Angela Merkel more than a decade ago. Many Germans were immensely proud of this transformation, which was designed to put Germany in the forefront of fighting climate change. It involves massive investments in renewables and the end to nuclear power in Germany. However, Putin’s aggression has highlighted something that was already obvious: just how fatally vulnerable this transformation has left Europe’s largest economy.

 

Simultaneously abandoning nuclear power and phasing out coal has left Germany more dependent on Russian natural gas than ever before. More than half of its natural-gas imports come from Gazprom and other Russian companies. This was the natural, if regrettable, outcome of the energy policies championed by Chancellor Angela Merkel and her predecessor Gerhard Schröder.

 

Germany finds itself now in a situation where it can be taken hostage by Putin. In response to Western sanctions, Moscow has demanded this week that EU countries pay for their energy imports from Russia in rubles — otherwise they would stop by Friday. The EU will not bow to that demand. Brussels claims to have emergency plans if Russian supplies of natural gas stop, but a sudden stop would hurt immensely. German industries claim that several hundred thousand jobs are at stake.

 

Suddenly, Germans are awakening to the brutal consequences of energy dependency. Some are now asking whether it was a good idea to abandon nuclear. Elon Musk recently called out that policy decision: “It is crazy that Germany is switching off all her nuclear plants,” he said in an interview.

 

Merkel had slowed down the planned phase-out of Germany’s nuclear power stations introduced by a previous Red-Green government, but in the wake of the disaster at the nuclear power station in Fukushima in 2011, Merkel made a U-turn to appease environmentalist voters ahead of regional elections, arranging for the even faster shutdown of nuclear plants than the plans laid down by her Red-Green predecessors.

 

Fourteen of Germany’s 17 nuclear plants have been shut down now; the Atomausstieg is almost complete. Nuclear’s share of German electricity generation has fallen from more than 25 percent to a little over 5 percent. At the end of this year, the last three reactors are set to close.

 

German fans of the Energiewende imagined that the world would see this policy as a shining example and follow suit. However, no one followed. Germany remains an outlier. Undaunted, the Greta-Thunberg-admiring nation (the green lobby in Germany is quite strong) came to accept that it might have been an exception, but it was a positive exception. In 2019, Merkel’s government agreed that coal-fired electricity plants should be phased out. Although Germany has now made a massive investment in renewables, which are heavily subsidized to the tune of more than 25 billion euros per year, these are inherently volatile (the wind does not always blow, and the sun does not always shine). Germany has had to fill its energy gap with imported electricity (some of which, ironically, will have been generated from nuclear or coal-fired sources) and natural gas.

 

The amount spent on subsidizing renewables, as alluded to above, has been enormous. When the first law approving subsidies for renewables was passed, Jürgen Trittin, the Green minister of the environment at the time, assured consumers that the costs would be “not more than one scoop of ice cream per household per month.” In reality, the subsidy — which is reflected in each consumer’s energy bills — has grown to around 300–400 euros per year per person.

 

Although the kilowatt-hour prices for solar and wind power have declined considerably, the legacy burden of subsidies is great. According to a study by economists from the University of Düsseldorf, it will total to more than half a trillion euros over the course of 20 years. The price of electricity in Germany for consumers has increased to the highest level of almost all developed nations. There was good reason for the Wall Street Journal to describe Germany’s as “the world’s dumbest energy policy.”

 

When Donald Trump blasted Germany’s energy policy and growing dependence on Russia’s gas (with, of course, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in mind) in a speech before the U.N. in 2018, Germany’s foreign secretary Heiko Maas, a Social Democrat, and his team were seen laughing and smirking.

 

Russia’s war in Ukraine has been a brutal wakeup call. Germany’s new chancellor Olaf Scholz has called it a historical turning point, a Zeitenwende. Scholz promised more resources for Germany’s armed forces which have been miserably underfunded and neglected for decades. This shift was long overdue, and it has come as a shock to some of the more left-wing members of the governing coalition. That said, there may be less to the extra 100 billion euros in military spending proposed by Scholz than at first appeared. A closer look at the small print of the budget reveals that the money will be spread over several years and that Germany might still not reach the 2 percent NATO goal.

 

For all the talk of a Zeitenwende, Scholz could not commit to stopping Russian energy imports, especially gas. Every month, Berlin continues to pay billions to Kremlin-controlled companies such as Gazprom. Since 2014 (when Putin annexed Crimea), Germany has spent more than 170 billion euros on imported energy products from Russia.

 

Germany’s dependency on natural gas from Gazprom is so great that a sudden halt in its flow would trigger a deep economic crisis. As far as the oil is concerned, there might be alternative supply sources, but that may well not be the case with natural gas, most of which has been transported via pipelines from Russia. And even if alternative sources of supply can be found, does Germany have the infrastructure to accept it?

 

Germany is trapped, and it’s a problem of its own making.

 

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Merkel’s predecessor and a close friend of Putin, set the course. In 2005, he signed an agreement with Putin for the construction of Nord Stream 1, a pipeline under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. It entered into operation in 2011. Merkel also misjudged Putin and pushed ahead with the plans for Nord Stream 2 despite warnings and opposition from the U.S. and various Eastern European states.

 

Since Schröder left office in 2005, he has transformed openly into an agent for Russian oil and gas interests, holding positions at Gazprom and as a member of the board of Rosneft and Gazprom subsidiary Nord Stream 2, making millions from his connections with the Kremlin’s energy giants. His political party, the SPD, for many years turned a blind eye to this and only recently called on him to stop.

 

A good starting point for sorting out Germany’s energy mess would be to extend the running time of its remaining nuclear plants. The country is not only hostage to Putin’s gas, but also to green ideology. “Atomkraft, nein Danke!” reads the slogan on posters at demonstrations and millions of car stickers seen all around the country since the late 1970s. The repudiation of nuclear energy is central to the political and emotional identity of Germany’s Greens – and not just the Greens. Many German voters, regardless of their political complexion, are hostile to nuclear power.

 

By contrast, in a number of European countries there are signs of a nuclear renaissance. Reversing an earlier plan to reduce France’s use of nuclear power, President Emmanuel Macron has announced plans for the construction of up to 14 new plants (nuclear power supplies around 70 percent of France’s electricity). In the U.K., Prime Minister Boris Johnson is targeting an increase in nuclear’s share of the U.K.’s energy supply to 25 percent over the longer term. Belgium has recently revised its plan for abandoning nuclear power. Existing plants (which were due to be phased out by 2025) will have their lives extended by ten more years.

 

In Germany, however, such moves would be taboo for the Greens and the Social Democrats (the government is a coalition between the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the classically liberal FDP). And the FDP is not prepared to break ranks by calling for a revision of the Atomausstieg. Neither is the center-right opposition, the Christian Democrats, Merkel’s party, which is only starting to recover from the electoral disaster they went through last year.

 

Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, the Green minister for the economy and the climate, has ruled out extending the operation of the remaining three nuclear plants (which together deliver around 5 percent of Germany’s energy needs) beyond year-end. He claimed this would be “too risky” and “not viable.” The association of the operating companies has denied these claims.

 

Habeck has looked instead for alternative sources of gas, securing a long-term LNG supply agreement from Qatar — a country that his Green party previously lambasted for its poor record on human rights. In addition, the EU has just struck a deal with the U.S. for much-expanded LNG supplies to Europe. Habeck claimed that this deal could make Germany more or less independent from Russian gas by mid 2024.

 

The Greens would like to abandon fossil fuels altogether at the fastest pace imaginable. They dream of an industrial country completely powered by wind and solar. Several thousand more gigantic wind turbines are to be built across Germany with the effect on the landscape that is easy to imagine. But even with much expanded wind and solar power capacities, energy security is not guaranteed. Given the volatility of wind and solar energy, it means that in an extreme winter, blackouts cannot be ruled out.

 

Germany’s energy course correction was never going to be easy, but it will be made far more difficult by the longstanding prejudices of those in charge. It appears that some politicians would rather risk a blackout than take the pragmatic course and reconsider nuclear energy.

Corporate America’s Hypocrisy

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, March 31, 2022

 

There’s something heartening about the way corporate America rushed to cut ties with its operations in Russia. But the quick, sweeping moves offer a strange contrast to the way corporate America has rarely if ever uttered a critical word about the government of China and its ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs, its human-rights abuses, its oppression of Hong Kong, its threats toward Taiwan, etc.

 

In fact, corporate America might be getting tough on the Russian government in hopes that people forget how much it has groveled to Beijing and obeyed the wishes of the equally autocratic, equally aggressive and abusive Chinese government.

 

The publication Axios is particularly interested in the idea of corporate CEOs becoming the new decisive political leaders in American life. “How CEOs became the fourth branch of government.” “The CEO job now includes political activism.” “CEOs seek their own State Departments.” If Axios isn’t outright supportive of the idea, it certainly doesn’t seem critical of this trend.

 

The notion of letting America’s corporate boards and CEOs have a bigger and more outspoken role in shaping government policies is a terrible idea, although fewer people are willing to come out and say so, now that many big corporations are more progressive or “woke” in their public statements.

 

These corporate leaders may be bright and driven and have a better understanding of economics and job creation than the average citizen. I’m not bashing them, and I’m not saying they shouldn’t have a voice, maybe even a loud one, in national discussions and debates.

 

But the public didn’t elect these CEOs to a darn thing. And if we strongly disagree with those leaders, we can’t get rid of them, short of buying massive amounts of stock in the company. For all the flaws of our president, Congress, governors, and state legislatures, if we don’t like them, every two, four, or six years we get to decide whether they stay in their jobs. Corporate leaders have every right to set corporate policy for their businesses and employees. But national or state policy, which affects all of us, is supposed to be set by people who can be tossed out in the next election.

 

In fact, you could argue that one of the reasons that corporate CEOs are increasingly outspoken is because they don’t have to run for office and win a majority or the largest plurality.

 

For all of the near-obsessive discussions of “diversity, inclusion and equity” in corporate America in recent years, chief executives aren’t particularly diverse; in fact, Congress is more diverse, at least when measuring race and gender.

 

But even aside from skin color, ethnicity, and gender, there are other segments of the American population that I suspect are either completely unrepresented or dramatically underrepresented at the top level of America’s big corporations. Eleven percent of Americans do not have a high-school degree; I would be surprised if any top CEOs don’t have one. Only 12 percent of Americans have an advanced degree, and I suspect the majority, probably the overwhelming majority, of CEOs do. How many CEOs are deeply religious? Back in 2014, Fortune identified seven that were. How many CEOs have served in the military? Eight percent, according to one study. How many CEOs were homeschooled, went to a community college, or have large families?

 

This isn’t even getting into the politically outspoken CEOs who are insufferably contradictory and hypocritical. Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, with an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion, boasted that, “I’m an avowed socialist. I’m proud of it. That was a dirty word just a few years ago until Bernie Sanders brought it up . . . we’re a billion-dollar company, and I don’t want to be a billion-dollar company. The day they announced it to me, I hung my head and said, ‘Oh God, I knew it would come to this.’” Apparently, Chouinard thinks he became a billionaire by accident.

 

Returning to the realm of corporate America and U.S. foreign policy, it is glaringly obvious that Russia is a much smaller and less important market to giant international companies than China is. That makes it much easier for corporate America to take a tough line, cut ties, and offer a full-throated denunciation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Disney gave the Chinese government de facto veto power over its creators for decades, but paused all business operations in Russia on March 10.

 

Starbucks announced it was suspending all operations in Russia on March 8.

 

For many years, Starbucks was one of the most outspoken and politically active corporate brands; CEO Howard Schultz saw standing up for what is right — or at least, what he saw as right — as central to the company’s identity and values. He contended that because his company could make a difference in contentious issues, it had a duty and an obligation to take a clear and loud stand, even if it wasn’t what some customers wanted to hear.

 

Until it came to China. Then he believed that the company couldn’t do anything, and there was no point in taking a political stand, as he laid out in his autobiography, From the Ground Up:

 

In countries outside the United States where Starbucks does business, I do not believe the company is in a position to proactively effect social and political change to the degree we might in the United States, where being an American company gives us the theoretical license to try. We do not have such expansive license in other countries. We can, however, exercise our values by how we conduct business, and share those values with leaders in other lands to show you can be profitable and morally centered at the same time.

 

Starbucks has opened more than 5,400 stores in China since 1999; it’s hard to see evidence that China has gotten any more “morally centered” in that time. It’s amazingly convenient that Starbucks concluded it just couldn’t make a difference when access to a huge market was at stake.

 

Vladimir Putin is giving corporate America an easy win, and one that helps it sweep its corrupting relationship with China under the rug. I’m glad corporate America is cutting ties and making the economic sanctions on Russia effective. But you notice you’ve heard a lot less about China in the past month or so — and I suspect both America’s corporate boardrooms and the government offices in Beijing are just fine with that development.

Biden’s Dishonest Budget

By Philip Klein

Thursday, March 31, 2022

 

At a time of historically high debt, President Biden spent the first year of his presidency pushing for $6 trillion worth of new spending on a host of liberal priorities, of which (thanks to Senator Joe Manchin) he was limited to about $2.5 trillion. Now, in proposing another massive budget, Biden is trying to portray himself as some sort of legendary fiscal hawk.

 

Do not believe him.

 

In unveiling the Biden budget this week, the White House released a “fact sheet” that was filled with misleading claims.

 

Up front, the administration makes the claim that “the deficit fell last year — by around $300 billion.” What this leaves out is that it only fell relative to the historically high levels in 2020, when the Covid pandemic hit, and that deficits are higher than they were projected to be when Biden took office.

 

Specifically, in February 2021, weeks after he was sworn in, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that deficits would be about $2.3 trillion during the fiscal year that ended on September 30. But under Biden, the actual deficit for the year came in at nearly $2.8 trillion. Put another way, even though the deficit declined relative to historically elevated 2020 levels, it actually ended up about $500 billion higher than what CBO was expecting before any Biden spending policies went into effect. CBO has noted that the 2021 deficit was “nearly triple the shortfall incurred in 2019.”

 

The Biden budget document also boasts that, “as our historic economic and labor market recovery continues, the President’s Budget projects that the deficit in 2022 will be more than $1.3 trillion lower than last year’s—the largest ever one-year decline in our country’s history.”

 

Again, this is deceptive. Before any of Biden’s policies went into effect, the CBO anticipated that deficits would decrease as the country emerged from the pandemic. In the same February 2021 report, CBO projected a $1 trillion deficit for 2022. But the Biden budget projects a deficit of $1.4 trillion — or 40 percent higher than the trajectory before he came it into office — and then touts it as an incredible achievement.

 

The document also asserts, “The Budget improves our country’s long-term fiscal outlook while also delivering on the ambitious agenda the President laid out in his State of the Union address.”

 

This is another ludicrous claim.

 

When discussing the long-term fiscal outlook, what makes the most sense is to talk about overall federal debt as a share of the economy. The debt-to-GDP ratio has been on an upward trajectory for decades because of a combination of fiscal mismanagement by both political parties combining with the retirement of the Baby Boomers and health-care inflation. In 2019, just before the pandemic, debt had risen to 79 percent of GDP. Due to the surge in pandemic-related spending and the drop in revenue from a lockdown-battered economy, debt surged past 100 percent for the first time since World War II. While it is common for debt to rise during national emergencies, in the case of World War II, debt levels receded at the conclusion of the war. But the Biden budget does not anticipate that at all.

 

In fact, the Biden budget expects debt to grow from 102 percent of domestic product in 2022 to nearly 107 percent by the end of the budget window in 2032. That would exceed the World War II record.

 

Though Biden does claim $1 trillion in deficit reduction as a result of trillions in proposed tax increases, his budget relies on what the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl has flagged as a “magic asterisk.”

 

Specifically, at the bottom of Table S-1 on page 119, the budget includes a footnote that reads:

 

The Budget includes a reserve for legislation that reduces costs, expands productive capacity, and reforms the tax system. While the President is committed to reducing the deficit with this legislation, this allowance is shown as deficit neutral to be conservative for purposes of the budget totals. Because discussions with Congress continue, the Budget does not break down the reserve among specific policies or between revenues and outlays.

 

Translated, what this means is that Biden is not including the deficit effects of his trillions of dollars of proposed spending through Build Back Better. And remember, the administration is also claiming that “the Budget improves our country’s long-term fiscal outlook while also delivering on the ambitious agenda the President laid out in his State of the Union address.” In other words, he’s still pushing the same spendthrift policies, but his budget counts them as having no effect on the budget. The idea that these were excluded because they are subject to congressional action is farcical given that the same logic would apply to all the other policies in the budget.

 

The bottom line is that Biden’s reckless agenda has only exacerbated our already terrible fiscal situation, and the only reason we aren’t in even worse shape is that the centerpiece of his agenda has been blocked.

The Abortion Vote That Could Haunt Democrats in November

By John McCormack

Thursday, March 31, 2022

 

Parental rights have become a major flashpoint in American politics. Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s statement that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” cost him dearly in last year’s Virginia gubernatorial race. But Senate Democrats don’t seem to have learned much of a lesson from McAuliffe’s mistake: They recently voted — almost unanimously — in favor a bill that would strike down laws requiring parental consent or parental notification before a minor has an abortion. And that vote could haunt Democratic candidates in November.

 

Take, for example, the case of Arizona Democratic senator Mark Kelly, who is up for re-election this year in what will likely be one of the most competitive races in the country. When I recently asked Kelly if the bill he voted for, the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), would invalidate Arizona’s parental-consent law, the Arizona senator told me he didn’t know. “I think that’s something that you could, you know, reach out to the Congressional Research [Service] folks and figure out,” Kelly said. He did, however, express general opposition to parental-consent laws, saying he would not be the “arbiter of an age” at which a minor could choose to have an abortion without her parents’ involvement.

 

The office of GOP senator Steve Daines, the chairman of the Senate Pro-Life Caucus, tells National Review that it confirmed with the Congressional Research Service that Arizona’s parental-consent law would likely be struck down under the WHPA.

 

But you don’t need experts’ analysis to figure that out — you just need to read the bill: The version of the WHPA that House Democrats almost unanimously voted for in September 2021 — the same version that received a vote in the Senate on February 28 of this year — explicitly states that “access to abortion services has been obstructed” by “parental involvement laws (notification and consent).”

 

The bill generally invalidates state laws that limit abortion. “The basic principle is that there can be no restriction that is not also imposed on a medically comparable procedure. If they single out abortion or reproductive rights, it’s going to fall foul,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a chief sponsor of the WHPA, when he first proposed it in 2013.

 

The original 2013 version of the WHPA explicitly exempted some popular abortion laws from this general rule — including laws banning partial-birth abortion and “requirements for parental consent or notification before a minor may obtain an abortion.” When the WHPA was reintroduced in 2015 and again in 2017, the bill still included those carveouts for parental-consent and parental-notification laws. But after the 2018 “blue wave” that swept Democrats back into power in the House and cost a handful of moderate Democratic incumbents Senate seats, the exemptions for parental-involvement laws were quietly dropped from the WHPA.

 

Shortly after Senate Republicans and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin voted to filibuster the WHPA last month, I asked Senator Blumenthal why Democrats had decided to drop the parental-consent carveouts and whether he agreed that the WHPA would strike down state parental-involvement laws. “I’d have to get back to you,” Blumenthal replied in response to each question. When I followed up with him later, he said the bill “would preclude medically unnecessary laws” but refused to specify whether parental-involvement laws fell into that category.

 

Other Senate Democrats similarly dodged the question. Colorado senator Michael Bennet wouldn’t say whether the WHPA would strike down Colorado’s parental-notification law. “We were just voting on a motion to proceed” to debate on the bill, Bennet said, so questions about specific provisions were “premature” though he would be “happy to answer them when they’re relevant.” But Bennet didn’t merely vote to start debate on the bill; he is one of 48 Democratic senators who cosponsored it, and now he is unwilling or unable to say what effect it would have on existing laws in his own state.

 

Michigan senator Gary Peters, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told National Journal on March 1: “Reproductive health for women is a powerful issue and one that we will certainly be campaigning on in the fall.” When I subsequently asked Peters if he supported getting rid of parental-consent laws, he replied: “Parents should always be involved in decisions for their children.” When pressed on if the bill he’d voted for would strike down state laws mandating such involvement, Peters gave the same non-answer: “I would certainly want parents to continue to play a key role in decisions for their children.”

 

Mark Kelly, the endangered Arizona incumbent, was less equivocal.

 

“As a parent myself, somebody who has raised two daughters who are now in their mid 20s, I take this very seriously. But ultimately I feel that young women at a certain age should have the rights to make these kind of decisions with their doctor,” Kelly told National Review in the Capitol. But at what age should a minor be able to make that decision without parental consent? “I’m not going to be the arbiter of an age and a timeline and red line,” Kelly said. “You know, people ask, ‘Is there a red line here?’ No. But, I think it’s important for women to be able to make these decisions on their own, and not a bunch of folks in Washington making them for them.”

 

Among the five Senate Democrats NR questioned about the WHPA, only one, Tim Kaine of Virginia, explicitly argued that the bill wouldn’t affect state parental-consent laws.

 

“I’m a parental-consent supporter, and I’m a Hyde amendment supporter, and [the WHPA] didn’t affect either of those,” Kaine told NR, pointing to a provision in the bill that allows restrictions on abortion procedures “as long as those requirements were also for other medical procedures.”

 

“Any procedure for a minor, you gotta get parental consent,” Kaine said. “Parental consent for medical procedures is ubiquitous.”

 

What to make of Kaine’s argument? First, it is simply not true that requiring “parental consent for medical procedures” is a “ubiquitous” feature of state laws. In New York, for example, minors generally need parental consent for other surgical procedures but not for abortions.

 

Second, it would be up to the courts to decide whether the WHPA allowed generally applicable parental-consent laws to be applied to abortion at the state level. The text of the bill instructs courts to “liberally” interpret its provisions and prohibits any regulation or restriction that “expressly, effectively, implicitly, or as implemented singles out the provision of abortion services” and “impedes access to abortion services.”

 

Third, even if the WHPA allowed for generally applicable parental-consent laws to be applied to surgical abortions, those laws wouldn’t necessarily apply to medication abortions. “No Arizona law requires parental consent for prescription medications for minors, including contraceptives,” according to the Center for Arizona Policy. As the Guttmacher Institute notes, a 1977 Supreme Court ruling held that there is a “constitutional right to privacy for a minor to obtain contraceptives in all states.”  If the WHPA became law, it is hard to see how a state could allow a minor to obtain contraceptive pills but not abortion pills such as RU-486, which is used to kill an unborn child during the first nine weeks of pregnancy.

 

The evasiveness of Democratic senators about the WHPA’s potential effect on parental-involvement laws shouldn’t be surprising, given the consistently high popularity of such laws among voters. According to the Guttmacher Institute, “37 states require parental involvement in” — i.e. parental consent to or notification of — “a minor’s decision to have an abortion.” In 2011, when Gallup last asked Americans whether they favored a “law requiring women under 18 to get parental consent for any abortion,” 71 percent said yes while only 27 percent said no. Asked why the organization hasn’t polled that particular question in the years since, a Gallup spokesman told National Review in an email that “we consistently found that about seven in 10 [Americans] support that proposal across nearly two decades of polling on it. So part of the reason we haven’t updated it recently is because of how little it has changed.”

 

The Senate Democrats’ vote for the WHPA on February 28 was overshadowed by the war in Ukraine, which was then in its opening days. But following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which is expected to be handed down this summer, the issue of abortion should once again come to the forefront of American politics for at least some period of time.

 

Democrats have made a big, risky bet on a bill that strikes down parental-consent laws and enshrines a right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy in all 50 states. And if abortion issues play a prominent role in the stretch run of this year’s midterm cycle, they could very well pay dearly for it.

Cancel Only the Cancelers

By Dan McLaughlin

Monday, March 28, 2022

 

Freedom of speech is a natural human right and an important social value. It is not the only social value; like any other right or value, it must sometimes be balanced against others, such as democracy, equality, public safety, and the freedoms of conscience and association. But it is a bedrock value of tremendous importance. Whether or how it is protected in law varies by who is threatening it: the federal or state government, schools, businesses, etc. Even where speech is threatened only by private actors and is not protected by law, however, the culture of free speech is worth defending. If free speech dies as a cultural value, it will not long be respected in law.

 

And if the culture of free speech dies within the legal profession, the laws on the books will become unenforceable. A nation of laws is only as strong as its nation of lawyers. That is why we should be particularly alarmed when young lawyers seek to stifle free expression.

 

Free Speakers and Free Listeners

 

The core of freedom of speech is allowing encounters between willing speakers and willing listeners, with the goal of advancing the truth through an adversarial process of dispute and reflection rather than by restricting ideas deemed too dangerous to discuss. Whether we are discussing the legal right to speech or the broader cultural value, much of the confusion (often deliberate) over free speech revolves around the failure to acknowledge the dual roles of the willing speaker and the willing listener. Your right to speak does not include a right to compel others to listen to you, a right to compel others to affirm or repeat your message, or a right to prevent other people from listening to speakers you reject.

 

As a private citizen or a private organization, you have a right not to be forced to offer a private platform to speech you would not endorse. We all benefit from liberal norms of free speech that promote a large, public marketplace of ideas. A liberal society, however, must make space for individuals and organizations to act illiberally in order to control their own message. A church can expel unbelievers; a political party or an ideological publication or group can demand adherence to its principles. Those organizations acting in an illiberal manner internally can help them promote an external message that competes in the marketplace of ideas. It helps them become willing speakers available to willing listeners.

 

In judging a private organization’s interactions with individuals, we should ask whether its protection of its own rights of speech and association are proportionate rather than aimed at suppressing external speech. For example, as I argued in the case of NFL players protesting the National Anthem, the league has every right to tell the players that they cannot use the league’s time and property as a platform by staging political protests on the field during a league-sponsored, televised event. On the other hand, the league should also recognize the players’ right to opt out of that event as well as their right to engage in political protests off the field on their own time and their own dime without punishment.

 

A private organization’s entirely legal behavior can, however, be harmful to the culture of free speech if it lessens the space that exists for exchanges of ideas to take place. Some private actors play a particularly large and powerful mediating role in the marketplace of ideas: A major university, a book publisher, or a social-media platform plays a role in the culture that is supposed to promote encounters between willing speakers and willing listeners.

 

There has been a vigorous debate around whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 should be read, or changed, to recognize a distinction between “platforms” and “publishers” so that the government can punish social-media platforms and search engines for restricting access in a way that constricts the willing exchange of ideas. The platform–publisher distinction is not, in fact, incorporated in the current text of the law, and there are serious questions about whether the law could effectively draw such a distinction without causing more trouble than it cures. But the law aside, the platform–publisher distinction is one grounded in common sense. People instinctively understand that Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Spotify are predominantly technological platforms in the liberal business of providing a marketplace of ideas for willing speakers to meet willing listeners, while National Review or The Nation or the Washington Post are in the business of creating speech for consumption by willing listeners. Even if the platforms and the publishers are not treated differently in law, their role in the marketplace of ideas is different, and the cultural judgment of their behavior should be different as well.

 

Censors and Censoriousness

 

Fundamentally, there are three types of threats to speech. One is the sort of government censorship or government interference that is against the law. But what constitutes government censorship is sometimes misunderstood. Much of the recent conservative pushback against, say, critical race theory in classrooms and workplaces or the instruction of young children in sexual ideology is not about obstructing messages to willing listeners, but about resisting the indoctrination of compelled listeners. There are fair debates around how you draw those lines, because it is impossible to educate children without conveying values, but when government employees such as public-school teachers speak in their official capacity to a captive audience, they are engaging in the use of government power, not their own, private speech. That exercise of government power should, like any such exercise, be subject to the ultimate control and supervision of the voters, and it should reflect their values.

 

Do you like critical race theory? Take a college elective. Buy a book. Attend a lecture on your own time. Those are all exercises of willing listening. Don’t mandate it for schoolkids or employees. Do you want to promote your sexual ideology? It’s a free country — but not in a public kindergarten.

 

The second type of threat is private censorship: behavior by private actors that obstructs encounters between willing speakers and willing listeners. Private censorship is mostly legal, although at times it can run afoul of various specific rules such as contracts or antitrust laws. But the more pervasive it becomes, the more it can crowd out the access of willing listeners to willing speakers.

 

That is the case with secondary boycotts. If you hate Joe Rogan, don’t listen to his show. That is the free market for speech at work. But attempting to use commercial pressure on Spotify in order to prevent Rogan’s willing listeners from finding him? That is anti-speech. It is the prevention of willing exchanges of ideas on the theory that your rights to impose economic consequences on Rogan’s message are greater than the rights of Rogan’s listeners to hear that message. “This person says wrong things believed by a large audience” is never a valid basis for seeking the suppression of speech.

 

Private censorship is also at work when mobs try to use noise and the force of their collective presence to prevent speakers from being heard. Want to protest a speaker? Grab a sign and stand peaceably outside. Ask pointed questions. Don’t shout the speaker down to prevent willing listeners from hearing them.

 

The third and least dangerous threat, but a threat nonetheless, is censoriousness. Free speech does not mean freedom from any and all consequences for speech. Saying some things should get you fired from your job or ostracized by your friends. But to establish the practice of shaming the worst kinds of speech does not mean that every disagreement should be met that way. A culture of censoriousness means one that respects the forms of free speech but strangles it in practice by a continuous posture of outrage and overreaction. A culture that values speech, civility, a diversity of viewpoints, and a spirit of tolerance and humanity will not overdose itself on censoriousness.

 

Lawyers and Mobs

 

The culture of free speech has been under siege in America in recent years, and one of the most alarming battlegrounds has been our law schools. Some of that intolerant mood comes from left-wing faculty, but much of it bubbles up from progressive law students. Ilya Shapiro, for example, was met with performatively “traumatized” protesters demanding his firing at Georgetown Law School, and by an angry mob that shouted him down at UC Hastings College of the Law. Another common target for the intolerant Left has been the Alliance Defending Freedom and its general counsel, Kristen Waggoner. Waggoner’s appearance at Yale Law School — to speak, ironically, on a cross-ideological panel on free speech — triggered another effort to shout her down. You can read Waggoner’s account here.

 

Defenders of bullying mobs, such as Mark Joseph Stern of Slate, have tried their best to whitewash and downplay the events at Yale Law because the protest was eventually defused to allow the event to go on (unlike at Hastings Law), but Stern has been rebutted at length with video and reportage by David Lat (here, here, and in this Twitter thread), Aaron Sibarium (here, here, and in this Twitter thread), John Sexton, and Dave Urbanksi. To her credit, Yale professor Kate Stith, who was moderating the event, warned the mob, told them to “grow up,” and eventually got them to leave the room. But the noise and disruption prevented many attendees from hearing the panel, and disrupted nearby classes, forcing some of them to move to Zoom.

 

Yale has — on paper — a strong policy protecting campus speakers from this sort of thing. The policy declares that “access to a university event or facility may not be blocked” and “a university event, activity, or its regular or essential operations may not be disrupted. . . . Dissenting members of the community may protest and express disagreement, but they may not interfere with a speaker’s ability to speak or attendees’ ability to attend, listen and hear.” The policy makes this specific, including among the banned activities “holding up signs in a manner that obstructs the view of those attempting to watch an event or speaker, regardless of the message expressed,” “speaking from a bullhorn, shouting, or playing amplified music or noise from audio sources in a manner that interferes with speakers’ ability to be heard and of community members to listen, or disrupts or interferes with classes or other university activities,” and “standing up in an assembly in a way that obstructs the view of those attempting to watch an event or speaker and/or blocking the aisles or routes of egress.”

 

Further, the policy has some teeth: A Riot Act–style “three strikes” rule requires disruptive students to stop after two warnings or be subject to punishment. The protesters left the room after Stith’s first warning but continued their activities outside.

 

Rules, however, have meaning only if they are enforced. At Hastings, the administration more or less sided with the mob. At Yale, the response has not been much stronger. What should follow to deter this sort of thing in the future?

 

Two proposals are on the table. Stanley Kurtz argues that the university can still discipline anyone involved, and he points to a policy that (like NLRB rules, the Texas abortion law, the Alaska ethics rules that were weaponized against Sarah Palin, or other “private attorney general” statutes) allows anyone to file a complaint:

 

Yale has perhaps the clearest, firmest, and most venerable requirements in the nation for sanctioning those who shout down speakers. . . . Yale Law School’s “Rules of Discipline” allow any “member of the Law School” (which includes all Yale Law School faculty members and all Yale Law School students) to trigger an investigation and hearing regarding any alleged violation of Yale’s Law School Code. . . .There is substantial evidence that all of these rules of discipline were violated at the March 10 Federalist Society event. . . .

 

In this case we needn’t depend on sniveling administrators to act. Any Yale Law School student or faculty member has the power to file a complaint, or rather a series of complaints, against those who participated in the shout-down. And according to Yale Law School’s Rules of Discipline, those complaints must be investigated and acted upon. So, for example, the members of Yale Law School’s Federalist Society who were present at the event, and whose freedom to learn was interfered with, can file complaints and initiate hearings.

 

As in other contexts, I’m wary of designing a grievance procedure this way. Similar grievance processes that trigger an automatic initiation of the disciplinary machinery can, as we have seen in an example from Stanford Law School, be abused as a weapon against speech even by people on the right. But the friends of free expression have few enough weapons with which to defend speech; one may as well use the tools that are given, so long as they remain on the books.

 

The other proposal, from Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals: Blacklist the law students from clerkships. “Students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted,” Silberman wrote in an email to other Article III judges. “All federal judges — and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech — should carefully consider whether any student so identified should be disqualified from potential clerkships.”

 

Mark Joseph Stern, who is plainly still seething over being called out for his dishonest effort to get Shapiro fired by Georgetown Law, argued on Twitter that Silberman was doing the same thing: “I know we had a big conversation on here about the propriety of complaining to someone’s prospective employer about their free expression of unpopular views, so I’m sure Silberman’s email will be condemned across the aisle.”

 

Stern is missing the point. Nobody is trying to get the Yale protesters (or those at Hastings or Georgetown) punished or blacklisted for having bad opinions. The point of what Silberman is proposing is to cancel only the cancelers — to impose consequences for the abuse of the power to suppress speech. These people want the privilege of a law license, which allows private professionals to wield governmental power. They intend to do so as antagonists of the right of willing listeners to find willing speakers. That is dangerous to the culture and to the law of one of our most cherished freedoms.

 

Very few values are more essential to the law than both sides getting heard in order that disputes be adjudicated by a reasoned decision-maker. Systems of law are designed to resolve disputes by speech and evidence precisely so that disputes will not instead be resolved by resort to violence. Mobs are the antithesis of that: They bring the force of the crowd to bear to drown out reason. Left to run wild, they will destroy not just speech but law itself.

 

The question Silberman raises is what to do with people who graduate from law school having been taught that there is only upside to illiberal attacks on speech. That is, in fact, a question that should worry potential employers, not only because it is a sign of a temperament unsuited to the practice of law but also because it is a pattern of behavior likely to be repeated in the workplace, with ruinous effects on any organization. The sorts of people who think that speakers ought to be shouted down on campus are unlikely to be tolerant of co-workers or subordinates. It is a symptom of an abusive personality unfit by character to a collegial workplace or a powerful profession.

 

Mobs will continue to suppress speech unless and until they face consequences. The cancelers and the mobs should be the ones on the receiving end of their own medicine — they ought to be the only ones. A recent New Yorker article about the birth of Method acting tells the story of how the great director Elia Kazan made up his mind in 1952 to “name names” of fellow members of his onetime theater company Communist cell to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan knew that the people he was naming would be canceled in the McCarthy-era sense, blacklisted from working in Hollywood or many other corners of show business. But then, Kazan recalled, these same people had been all too eager cancelers themselves, to the point of firing Kazan himself for departing from the Party line. “In 1936, the Party had ordered the Group’s cell to seize control of the company. When Kazan refused, he was publicly shamed and kicked out”:

 

I couldn’t clean out of my mind the voice of V. J. Jerome and its tone of absolute authority as he passed on the Party’s instructions for our Group Theatre cell and his expectation of unquestioning docility from me and the others. I heard again in my memory the voice, arrogant and absolute, of the Man from Detroit as he humiliated me before my “comrades” in Lee Strasberg’s apartment over Sutter’s Bakery. I recalled the smell of the sweet chocolate topping and the cinnamon from below and how silent my fellow members had been, unresponsive until they’d voted against me.

 

Ideally, open enemies of speech should face proportionate consequences. That is why the longer-term answer is something more like what Kurtz proposes: Universities should reclaim the power to discipline students until they learn that this is America and act like it. To that end, the disciplinary tools available should be put to use. But if students manage to graduate high school and college and law school without developing the capacity to tolerate disagreeable speech, the legal system itself will have no choice but to take a stand to prevent them from using the tools of the law to close down the marketplace of ideas.

The Most Dangerous Class

By Joel Kotkin

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

 

Twenty-first-century America may be dominated by oligarchic elites, but arguably the biggest threat to our economic and political system might be located further down the food chain. This most dangerous class comes from the growing number of underemployed, overeducated people. They’re what has been described in Britain as the lumpenintelligentsia: alienated, angry, and potentially agents of our social and political deconstruction.

 

This is far more than an angry mob shouting in keystrokes, but the proto-proletariat of a feudalizing post-industrial society. Overall, notes one recent study, over the past 20 years we have created twice as many bachelor’s degrees as jobs to employ them. Instead of finding riches in the “new economy,” many end up in lower-paying, noncredentialed jobs. They then compete with working-class kids, often products of similarly dysfunctional high schools; an estimated one-third of American working-age males are now outside the labor force, suffering high rates of incarceration, as well as drug, alcohol, and other health issues.

 

Although they are not subject to the same pressures of the working class, the fate of those attending college and even graduating is far from bright. This is the most-anxious generation in recent history, and for good reason. Today more than 40 percent are working in jobs that don’t require their degree, according to a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Another study notes that most may never ascend to the kinds of jobs that graduates have historically enjoyed.

 

This is a global phenomenon. Over a quarter of Chinese graduates are unemployed, and the number is increasing.

 

In India, one in three graduates up to the age of 29 is unemployed, according to a Labour Ministry report released last November, almost three times the country’s overall unemployment rate. A recent U.N. analysis also suggested that this huge bulge of underemployed educated people could undermine the country’s stability in the years ahead.

 

As Greta Thunberg and her legions remind us, young, discontented people have tended to push toward the extremes. In Latin America, underemployed graduates have long been a source of disruption. Today roughly half of all Latin American college students don’t graduate, and many never really see a payback for their time in college.

 

A similar pattern of disruption drove the Arab Spring. There, as well as in the Balkans, unemployed and underemployed college graduates have been a major disruptive force. In Africa, where youth unemployment is also high and the numbers are growing fastest, college graduates who compose barely 7 percent of the total workforce also labor in low-end jobs.

 

Earlier, underemployed intellectuals were critical to the success of the Bolshevik Revolution — a largely powerless, impoverished intelligenti embraced the red cause of overturning all major institutions. Later, many rewarded themselves with the privileges of the old aristocracy, albeit dressed up in egalitarian camouflage.

 

A large portion of Germany’s far larger educated but also often near-destitute population embraced national socialism. As the historian Frederic Spotts has noted, many welcomed the Führer’s efforts to “cleanse” German culture of foreign contamination, while “testimonials of loyalty rained down upon it unrequested.” Some of those testimonials were self-serving, Spotts suggests, since Nazi policies were hostile to leftist intellectuals and artists, as well as gays and Jews. Getting these rivals out of the way could be a good career move. But attachment to Nazism was not simply opportunistic. Universities served as a “stronghold” of the regime, with Nazis winning control of student councils as early as the 1920s. Ultimately highly educated young Germans, once afflicted with unemployment and underemployment, would provide an important early recruiting base for Himmler’s SS.

 

Historically this was less the case in America. Enrollment in colleges and universities in the United States increased threefold between 1910 and 1940, and, with the exception of the Depression years, the U.S. economy was able to produce enough good jobs for them. The expansion continued after the Second World War, as the GI bill helped double the number of degree-holders by 1950. With the growing availability of college loans, the total number of people enrolled in college in the United States grew from 5 million in 1964 to over 7.6 million in 1970, and then to some 20 million today. The percentage of college graduates in the labor force soared from under 11 percent in 1970 to over 30 percent in 2010 — a proportion that has remained about the same since then. With each educational-level achievement, there was the expectation — and reality — of higher earnings, notes historian Robert Gordon.

 

The appeal of college grew as the old blue-collar economy faded, and, at least initially, seemed to be a safe harbor for new workers. But over the past few decades, as the number of college graduates has soared, the supply of good-paying jobs has declined. The costs of the former have soared, too: Since 1971 the price tag for a four-year degree has increased more than four times the rate of inflation.

 

The upper tier of universities continues to thrive, notes David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, filling the ranks of the global “superclass.” Their positions have waxed relative to less well-positioned institutions, including state schools and non-elite private colleges. For the most part they remain bastions of the class order: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Robert Reich, a lion of the Left and a former Harvard professor, characterizes the modern elite universities as being designed mainly “to educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class.”

 

Like the society it is serving, academia itself reflects, in some ways, a reversion to an older, almost premodern society. For most college teachers, the road to tenure is problematic, as most remain adjuncts on minimal salaries and obtain little in the way of security. They live, as was noted on the Working-Class Studies blog, “precarious workers, more like restaurant and hospitality workers, gig performers, contract healthcare workers, and delivery drivers than the tenured professor.” Noah Rothman of Commentary magazine has compared today’s universities to a modern form of manorialism in which top administrators, deans, and tenured faculty enjoy comfort, leisure, and security, but teaching adjuncts decidedly do not. Today roughly 75 percent of college teachers are not on tenure track, and half of these are part-timers. One in four of this group lives on some form of public assistance. Some of them actually see their commitment to the academy as akin to a monk’s “vow of poverty.”

 

Their students, particularly outside the elite colleges, don’t do all that much better. A college degree from elite schools such as Harvard or Yale still has economic value, but a large proportion of those attending college would be better off not doing so. College enrollments continue to drop, down over 6 percent since 2019. For many, the option of trade school offers third option, one that now appeals to roughly three-fifths of the American public and is increasingly seen by companies as a more useful form of education than just collecting degrees.

 

Indeed, a survey taken in 2020 found that only a third of undergraduates see their education as advancing their career goals and barely one in five think the BA is worth the cost. The combination of poorer parents, decreasing rewards to education, and distaste among many Americans for academia’s overwhelmingly progressive agenda may further depress college attendance in the future. The upfront investment is high (tuition fees for four-year public colleges have increased by an average of 213 percent in real terms — for private colleges the figure was 129 percent — between 1988 and 2017) and returns are not guaranteed. The future for many colleges, particularly in the liberal arts, may be grim indeed.

 

More troubling still, universities can get away with obscurantism and enforced ideological conformism because of their enormous power over labor markets. They are no longer primarily about learning, as Jane Jacobs noted as far back as 2004, but about providing the credential needed for a high-paying job. What they increasingly don’t teach are skills useful in the workplace. One recent study of American college students found that more than one-third of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” in four years of college. Employers report that recent graduates are short on critical-thinking skills.

 

Getting a graduate degree is increasingly irrelevant, too. More than 140 colleges “paused” admissions to doctoral programs during the pandemic. The best guess is that quite a few of these pauses will be permanent. But the diminished prospects extend well beyond academia. Overall, people now in their thirties are considerably less likely to own a home than were their counterparts in earlier generations, due to a shortage of starter homes, blocking the key method of wealth accumulation. By some estimates, increases in home values over the last decade accounted for 86 percent of middle-class wealth accumulation.

 

Indeed, according to projections from the Deloitte Center for Financial Services, Millennials will control barely 15 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2030 — half the proportion of Generation X and barely one-third of the share that will be enjoyed by Boomers, who by then will be entering their 80s. In the aftermath of two huge events — the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic — more educated people have been forced to embrace gig work, which has been a boon for some but has left many others, here and abroad, consigned to a regime of insecurity and low wages.

 

The junction of indoctrination and declining opportunities leaves our society, and the future of the republic, in great peril. In 2018 half of all recent college grads made under $30,000 annually and in half of the schools, they earn less than a high-school-educated person even six years later. As they age, many of these workers may never really enter the high-end job market. Your local Uber driver or Starbucks barista is not likely to become tomorrow’s entrepreneurial success, nor will the part-time teacher of gender studies work at anything but low wages.

 

This is a generation in which entrance to the middle class is increasingly blocked. Over 90 percent of people born in the 1940s and 80 percent in the 1950s did overwhelmingly better than their parents. Among those born in the 1980s, almost half do worse. The decline, note Richard Reeves and Katherine Guyot in a study for the Brookings Institution, is most evident among the upper-middle class, the very group that has long prioritized education.

 

There could be different responses to this decline. Some on the left see a reprise of labor militancy, which includes sporadic, occasionally successful, organizing efforts among tech workers, college adjuncts, Amazon warehouse workers, and Starbucks baristas. This will not be a reprise of George Meany’s AFL-CIO, and may only be limited as — despite the media coverage — the rate of private-sector unionization is at its lowest ebb in recent history.

 

Instead, our young proto-proletarians will seek their fortune from the public coffers. Many already embrace socialism. In the 2016 primaries, the openly socialist Bernie Sanders easily outpolled Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined among voters under 30. In the early 2020 primaries, even as the older cohorts rejected him decisively, Sanders trounced his competitors among the young once again. A poll conducted by the Communism Memorial Foundation in 2016 found that 44 percent of American Millennials favored socialism while 14 percent preferred fascism or communism. By 2024, Millennials and Zoomers will both equal the voting share of the long-dominant Boomers.

 

One issue that may appeal is to substitute work with a universal basic income, which would remove the need to perform in a market economy. Most Americans over 50 strongly reject this idea, but those under 30, notes Pew, embrace it by two to one. Some have even embraced an “anti-work” lifestyle, which basically means the rest of us will be supporting them until we keel over.

 

The youthful progressive Left — as opposed to more-traditional liberals — reject much of this country, seeking instead to replace it with a nation “transformed” into some ill-conceived mashup of Venezuela, Cuba, and (their fantasy) Sweden, constituting what one conservative writer has described as “a zombie army of anti-capitalists.”

 

Yet if it is easy to disagree with and reject the authoritarian tendency among proto-proletarians, it is incumbent on those who are either conservatives or traditional liberals to come up with paths for success for those who do not attend four-year schools as well as those who do. Better jobs, not more welfare, is the key to greater equality and less alienation. A nation of struggling renters, with no hope of ascending into the middle class, are fodder for authoritarians; they do not make the ideal citizenry of an optimistic, vibrant republic.