No, the Federal Budget Is Not Mostly Defense Spending

By Dominic Pino

Thursday, September 30, 2021

 

Whenever the Left encounters resistance on a massive spending measure, it’s a matter of routine to make wild gestures at the Pentagon’s budget, which is large, and ask why some other large amount of money can’t also be spent.

 

The Pentagon’s budget request for this fiscal year was $715 billion, and the House gave it $778 billion. That’s a lot of money. Progressives are correct on that point (and if they’re upset about the House giving the Pentagon more than it asked for, they should take it up with the Democrats who control the chamber). If you multiply it by ten, that’s $7.78 trillion over the budget window we use when talking about fiscal policy. The reconciliation bill would cost $3.5 trillion over the budget window, and 3.5 trillion < 7.78 trillion, so the U.S. spends way more on defense than on helping with “human infrastructure,” the story goes.

 

There are a few problems with that story. First, defense is a fundamental obligation of government in general and a clear constitutional duty of the federal government in particular — unlike, say, giving tax breaks to union members or paying people’s Internet bills. Defense spending also isn’t rammed through by budget reconciliation in party-line votes. To be quite honest, defense spending should be a higher proportion of federal spending — not necessarily because we should spend more on defense, but because we should spend less on everything else.

 

Second, and less philosophically, federal outlays are split into three categories: mandatory outlays, discretionary outlays, and interest on the debt. Since interest rates are so low, interest on the debt is a relatively small proportion of outlays, so most of spending is in the mandatory and discretionary categories.

 

Most federal spending on social assistance is mandatory spending, not discretionary spending, which means Congress does not have to vote on it every year. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and various income-security programs are all mandatory spending. According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2020, the federal government spent about $1.1 trillion on Social Security, $900 billion on Medicare, and $450 billion on Medicaid. Projecting those out over the ten-year budget window is never as simple as multiplying by ten, because those programs become more expensive every year. The CBO projects that from 2022 to 2031, the federal government will spend about $16 trillion on Social Security, $13 trillion on Medicare, and $6 trillion on Medicaid.

 

Those totals don’t include the $3.5 trillion the federal government is already projected to spend on income-security programs (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and SNAP) over the next ten years.

 

So, over the next ten years, the federal government is already — without passing any further legislation — on the hook for about $38.5 trillion in mandatory spending on social programs. Again, Congress does not vote on any of that. It’s on autopilot, and those benefits must be paid.

 

In comparison, $7.78 trillion for the Pentagon doesn’t look so bad. (For what it’s worth, the CBO actually projects defense spending at about $8.5 trillion over the next ten years, but it doesn’t seem that progressives bothered to look at any data before spouting off.) The reason the Pentagon’s budget is constantly before our eyes is that defense spending is discretionary. The Pentagon must make a budget request to Congress every year, and Congress gets to vote on it every year.

Why is the Pentagon’s budget so high, though? The United States spends more on defense than the next eleven countries combined and did about 39 percent of the total defense spending for the entire world in 2020.

 

One reason is that the U.S. is treaty-bound to defend most of the free world. No other country is in that situation. American allies in many cases can and should do more to pay for their own defense, but obligations are obligations, and the U.S. must be prepared to uphold them.

 

Another reason is that the largest portion, roughly a third, of the defense budget is payroll and benefits for service members. Should military service members be paid less or receive fewer benefits? Certainly nobody in Congress would argue for that, so the largest portion of the military budget is off-limits right from the start, and we haven’t bought a single airplane, tank, or gun yet.

 

Then there are the maintenance costs of the stuff the military already owns — bases, equipment, etc. — so there’s not much you can do to cut that. Realistically, even the most brutal budget cutter couldn’t do much better than maybe 20 percent of the defense budget without severely harming U.S. readiness or throwing service members out on the street.

 

None of this is to say the Pentagon is frugal or there aren’t serious problems with the procurement process. The Defense Department is a government bureaucracy, and like all government bureaucracies, it wastes money. The point is just that in the grand scheme of federal spending, it pales in comparison with the spending on social programs.

 

Not only that — defense spending and social spending are moving in opposite directions as a share of the economy. When compared with GDP, defense spending has been on a downward trend since the ’50s. At the end of the Korean War, defense spending was about 11 percent of GDP. Last year, it was about 3 percent, and the Defense Department projects it will decline slightly over the next five years. In 2021, according to the CBO, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined for about 11 percent of GDP, and by 2031, they will average about 13 percent.

 

So please, let’s cut the nonsense about a large portion of federal spending going to defense and a small portion going to social programs. The exact opposite is true, and it’s not even close.

Do Universities Still Care about Truth?

By Carine Hajjar

Saturday, October 02, 2021

 

It’s a tale as old as time, the stereotype of the liberal professor pushing his opinions on impressionable students. But the stereotype reflects real numbers. In 2017, only 8 percent of Yale’s faculty reported being conservative. In 2021, only 3 percent of Harvard University’s faculty reported being “conservative” or “very conservative.”

 

The Kremlin-on-the-Charles caricature has taken on a new dimension: According to the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings, a report based on a survey by College Pulse, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and RealClearEducation, professors, including the stereotypically liberal ones, and students alike are scared to defy a rising campus orthodoxy and are self-censoring on campus. The damper on free speech clearly goes against the university’s supposed mission, which is to educate by fostering knowledge. How can academia tolerate such a direct blow to its very purpose? A change in priority can be the only explanation. As the university grows into a more corporate entity, it chooses the stability of ideological orthodoxy over the risks that come with open discourse.

 

College and cancel culture have become disturbingly synonymous. FIRE, which offers legal aid to students and faculty facing restrictions on free expression or the denial of due process, has seen a dramatic uptick in reports of these issues. Public attempts to sanction faculty members, as counted by FIRE, increased from 76 in 2019 to 115 in 2020. Yet the situation is worse than that number suggests. FIRE’s faculty cases actually greatly outnumber public calls for sanction, coming in at 428 in 2020.

 

Whether presenting opinions or factual findings, professors today navigate an ideological minefield. CV-type qualifications are no longer enough — they need to be woke to survive.

 

Take Steven Pinker, the noted cognitive-psychology professor at Harvard. On July 3, 2020, hundreds of members of the Linguistic Society of America signed a petition to have him removed as one of the organization’s distinguished academic fellows and media experts. The 638 signatories (among which Pinker and others uncovered forgeries) deemed him unworthy of the “honor, credibility, and visibility” that comes with being a fellow. They claimed to have “no desire to judge Dr. Pinker’s actions in moral terms,” adding that they did not “seek to ‘cancel’ Dr. Pinker.”

 

The main allegation was a “pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence,” allegedly exhibited by Pinker’s tweets and some of his writings. As Pinker, responding to one of the complaints in the petition, commented to me, “citing an African American social scientist” who finds that overt racism is decreasing is apparently “unsayable” and “legitimate grounds for punishment.” The signatories claimed that Pinker’s public utterances were “not above deceitfulness, misrepresentation, or the employment of dogwhistles.” (But no, this is not an attempt “to cancel.”)

 

Lucky for Pinker, he’s a big-enough name to weather this storm, with tenure and notable public allies in his corner. Other educators are not nearly as fortunate. “If you have to be Steven Pinker to avoid getting canceled, that’s a problem,” said Adam Goldstein, an attorney and senior researcher at FIRE, during an interview.

 

In September 2020, University of Southern California professor Greg Patton stepped away from his teaching duties for a semester after some students in his communications class expressed outrage at his authentic pronunciation of the Chinese equivalent of the filler word “um.” The administration received a letter complaining that the word — used during a discussion of pauses in speech — sounded like a racial slur in English.

 

Although Chinese students attested to the accuracy of his pronunciation, the dean of the USC business school wrote that “it is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students.” At the whiff of (absurd) controversy, the university kowtowed to woke doctrine, issuing a (seemingly copy-paste) condemnation. This was just one example of the woke autopilot operating almost everywhere in higher education.

 

The consequence? Students and professors self-censor as survival. I know I sure did as a student at Harvard. “We’re in the empire-strikes-back part of free speech,” jokes Goldstein of FIRE. “It’s a dark time for the rebel alliance of people who think that the First Amendment should actually matter on campus.”

 

Academics, journalists, and politicians have begun to react to this illiberalism. In July 2020, 153 intellectuals — including Pinker — published an open letter in Harper’s Magazine calling for “justice and open debate.” They warned that the “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.”

 

Although this constriction is most palpable on college campuses, most universities do have robust free-speech protections. At Harvard, for instance, there are free-speech guidelines that go so far as to protect “noxious” ideas, noting their “long-term benefits” to conversation. They articulate the importance of a “free interchange of ideas” to the university’s mission of “discovering and disseminating ideas through research, teaching, and learning.” (As a Crimson columnist, I suggested that the university “make stronger attempts to actually uphold” the guidelines.)

 

Harvard administrators endorse these guidelines. In 2019, the dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, condemned the fact that some students “see those with differing opinions as undeserving of our attention, our respect or our compassion.” He remains confident in Harvard’s commitment to dissenting opinions. Khurana, a faculty member at Harvard Business School, told me that he was given tenure while writing a book on “how business education was failing American society.” In his own words, it was not a “soft-pedaling book.” “At the end of the day, institutions like ours survive because we really believe in the idea of veritas. . . . If law is to justice, and medicine is to health, the university is to the truth.” And if the mission to truth is hindered? “We might as well shut the enterprise down.”

 

I’d like to think that the best kind of learning occurs with the collision of diverse perspectives, resulting in dynamic conversation and, ultimately, the adoption of informed opinion. Harvard, per its guidelines, agrees. So do faculty members such as Khurana and Pinker. But as a student, I feared that collision, especially as I saw the university administration’s passivity on the lack of it. What happened to that commitment to the free interchange of ideas?

 

Simply put, universities are no longer exclusively in the business of education, the product of that interchange. They’re increasingly in the business of, well, business.

 

Before the Cold War, universities were run by faculty: “From the perspective of 100 years ago,” says Goldstein, “the idea that a faculty member would have his speech suppressed by the university was difficult to conceptualize.” During the Cold War, higher education was laden with research grants, one of the factors leading to the bureaucratization of the modern university. From 2007 to 2018, public degree-granting postsecondary schools in the U.S. generated a revenue of $671 billion. “The amount of money involved in higher education in the U.S. was slightly more than all the software we sell and electricity combined,” notes Goldstein. The result? “Universities don’t reflect the interest of the faculty anymore, they have the priorities of a corporation.”

 

The idea of university corporatism as an impetus for illiberalism is not new. In 2015, Fredrik deBoer, who had just completed a Ph.D. at Purdue, wrote a piece for the New York Times on the pernicious effects of corporatism on campus, stating that “a constantly expanding layer of university administrative jobs now exists at an increasing remove from the actual academic enterprise.”

 

Academic freedom is not optimal for market share. “Tranquility and profitability tend to win out over truth and inquiry,” says Goldstein. Controversial views (even if factually accurate) can disturb the corporate equilibrium. This may be one of the reasons why universities are increasingly dedicated to a new concept: “safetyism,” a term coined by FIRE’s founders, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book The Coddling of the American Mind. Educators’ telos is no longer only knowledge; it’s ensuring that students feel “safe.”

 

But what is “safe”? Goldstein deals with cases where students claim to feel “unsafe” when presented with certain arguments in class. But can one really equate words — statements, claims, hypotheses — to physical safety? “It isn’t as if somebody saying words will make you explode into a fine mist,” as Goldstein says.

 

“Safe” in modern parlance seems to be about being on the “correct” side of an issue. That side is no longer simply the one on the left. Pinker shared a story with me about a hiring process he was involved in. The candidate, in Pinker’s words, “was a kind of middle-of-the-road liberal Democrat.” His political orientation did not matter; he violated a pillar of the orthodoxy. “He was skeptical about affirmative action,” which got him “branded as an extreme right-winger.” I asked if this was the reason the candidate was not hired. “It went into it,” among other factors.

 

Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, told me that certain topics demand more homogeneity than others: “We’re comfortable accepting a fairly wide range of views on U.S.–China foreign policy but we’re not comfortable accepting a wide range of views on affirmative action.” Other taboos include certain positions on race, gender, and colonialism. Summers shared a hypothetical: “If someone did research that showed that it’s better for children to spend more time with their mothers during the first six years of their life during the day, you’d have to be an extraordinarily brave person to do that on Harvard’s campus.”

 

How did we get here? Wasn’t the once-whimsical soft Marxism of college enough? Pinker offered a psychological explanation, mentioning the work of his former postdoctoral student, Peter DiScioli, on the human creation of groups. Humans have a propensity to compete for prestige as well as a fear of being in the “more vulnerable coalition.” So they join the mob lest they be the target of the mob. It’s a phenomenon that occurs in witch hunts, cultural revolutions, and political purges: “Anyone can be a victim if they themselves don’t join the ‘denouncers.’” This can be extrapolated to universities-turned-corporations, which, seeking to avoid controversy, are happy to oblige denouncers.

 

Ironically, the hippie-student-against-the-man crowd is driving this whole corporate tilt. “It’s easiest for [administrators] if they cave. . . . No skin off their nose if the universities are less able to investigate questions of truth and falsity and explanation,” said Pinker. They’re more worried about appeasing the “left-leaning students protesting outside their office.”

 

Why is this woke crowd powerful enough to dictate university incentives? Humans, in general, want to be on the “right” side of history. “We’re all moralistic animals,” said Pinker. But that doesn’t mean objective morality: “Moralistic efforts are those that attempt to claim superiority and demonize opponents.” We go for what is perceived as moral. The Harper’s open letter touched on this: There’s a “vogue for public shaming” and a “tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

 

So long as this “vogue” continues, profit-seeking entities will comply. Safetyism and moralism go hand in hand: Universities can avoid controversy by tolerating mob mentality. It’s similar to the virtue-signaling you’re seeing in corporate America (think woke Coke). It’s trendy, it’s safe, and it sells.

 

After all, what’s more corporate than appearing moral?

 

Pinker was able to weather his storm. But the petition against him sent a disturbing message to budding academics and students alike: “If you step out of line — if you doubt the overall woke orthodoxy — you’ll be subject to professional punishment.”

 

I asked Pinker if he had any advice for them. “Consider sitting on your controversial opinions until you get tenure.”

 

I said something about that being troubling.

 

Pinker replied: “I completely agree.”

The Next Supply-Side Agenda

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, October 02, 2021

 

Does an opposition party need a policy agenda to win elections? Not really. Congressional majorities lose all by themselves. They interpret campaign victories as ideological mandates. They become mired in process, they fight among one another, they trudge through muddy puddles of bad news. They overstay their welcome. Voters turn them out. Not necessarily because the opposition has better ideas, but because it’s the alternative to the present course. Voters don’t expect or want “structural change” from either the left or right. They want the economy to grow and society to be stable so they can work out their destinies in peace.

 

This was something President Joe Biden understood for about six months. Since July, however, Democrats have been unable to guarantee stability in coronavirus numbers, in foreign policy, in consumer prices, in personal safety, and on the border. They’ve become trapped in a Möbius strip of negotiations over the bipartisan infrastructure package and the (unwritten) Build Back Better reconciliation bill. America may or may not have lost the thread, but the Democrats certainly have. The result is falling approval numbers for Biden. Expectations that Republicans will capture either one or both chambers of Congress next year are rising.

 

Not that the GOP has done anything to deserve it. Yes, Republicans have resisted the Democrats. That’s what opposition parties do. But they haven’t put forward anything more than stinging criticisms. They haven’t grappled with the possibility that the Democratic majority will collapse under its own weight. They need to think harder, starting now, about what to offer voters. Performance art isn’t enough. And catering to the anti-vax minority is wrong and self-defeating.

 

There’s a way for conservatives to answer public concern over the pandemic, crime, and the economy. That way is the supply side. Just as an earlier generation of conservatives and Republicans addressed economic stagflation through increasing the supply of capital, the present generation of conservatives ought to advocate measures to increase the supply of resources that individuals can bring to bear on the present crisis. Rather than inadvertently backing into the corner of conflictual austerity politics, and replaying the fights of the Obama years, conservatives and Republicans can tell voters how they will provide the tools to restore normalcy.

 

Operation Warp Speed, for example, was a triumph of supply-side thinking. Its vaccines are remarkably successful at preventing hospitalization and death. Private-sector mandates, booster shots, and jabs for elementary-school students will strengthen immunity against the coronavirus. The next step is to boost supplies of at-home rapid tests. Contrast the success of Operation Warp Speed with the bureaucratic intransigence that has limited access to speedy testing and given public-health authorities an excuse not to lift masking and social-distancing rules. And look at Europe, where in many places schools have been open throughout the pandemic, and without masks, because of widespread rapid testing. Having plenty of such tests would pressure school districts to abandon their draconian quarantine policies and move to “test to stay” — an issue of particular concern in suburban districts essential to any GOP comeback.

 

Crime is another problem with a supply-side solution. Since 1961, when Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, we’ve known that “eyes on the street” reduce crime. Especially when the eyes belong to police officers. “More cops mean less crime,” writes Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute. “This is one of the most robust findings of empirical criminology, supported by study after study since at least the late 1990s.” Today’s voters fear crime, and for good reason: The United States just experienced a record spike in the murder rate. Hiring more police, paying them better, and reducing 911 response times is the closest thing to a sure bet in public policy. Republicans should be writing a crime bill that does exactly that.

 

While the economy faces different challenges than it did in the late 1970s, supply-side thinking remains a useful guide. The basic problem today is that prices are rising faster than wages. Both supply and demand fuel this inflation. The coronavirus led to a worker shortage that worsened bottlenecks in the global supply chain. Consumers accumulated a remarkable level of savings and transfer payments during the downturn and are eager to spend it on imported goods. When high demand meets limited supply, prices rise. Voters are worried.

 

What to do? Expand supply-chain capacity. Spend money to reduce blockages of goods in transit, hire more longshoremen and truck drivers at better wages, and advocate deploying the National Guard to unload cargo. Defend and expand oil and gas exploration to put downward pressure on energy prices. Promote land use and development. At the same time, maintain work requirements that encourage entry into the labor market. Focus on vaccinations in industries such as meatpacking, where reduced manpower has contributed to the rise in hamburger prices.

 

Increasing the supply of labor in the right industries would ease shortages on one end while relieving wage pressures on the other. Hence, the truly adventurous congressman might think creatively about legal immigration policy — at least until the inflation subsides. The alternative is a prolonged inflation that helps no one.

 

Most people associate supply-side with tax reform. Lowering barriers to investment and saving, however, is just one way to increase the supply of resources and improve economic and social life. In some cases, you might spend more now to boost long-term capacity. In other cases, you might spend less on benefits and regulations that discourage work (and thus limit the supply of labor). The underlying idea is that more is better — more investment, saving, vaccines, tests, police, dockworkers, truck drivers, fuel, food, and educational options, for starters.

 

Time spent on frivolities is wasted. The next supply-side agenda requires conservatives and Republicans to abandon cultural despair and reflexive opposition for a self-confident attitude and a willingness to address the aspirations and anxieties of the entire electorate. Not just a slice of it.

 

I recognize that might be too much to ask. But a boy can dream, can’t he?

Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema Are a Feature, Not a Bug

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 30, 2021

 

‘What if — and hear me out here,” writes Robert Reich, “we stopped letting two corporate Democrats singlehandedly block every single progressive policy we elected Democrats to pass?”

 

Okay, Robert. But how, exactly? The Democrats have 50 seats in the Senate. To pass a bill through reconciliation, the Democrats need 50 votes in the Senate. Two of the people who hold those 50 seats do not agree with the rest of the party on “every single progressive policy.” If the other 48 senators do agree — which is far from clear — the Democratic Party will have 48 votes for its agenda, two short of what it needs. Those two, not the Robert Reichs of the world, are the ones with the power to “stop” things.

 

“Should all of this just hinge on those two?” Representative Cori Bush (D., Mo.) asked yesterday. “Absolutely not.” But should doesn’t enter into it. The question is does “all of this” hinge on Sinema and Manchin? The answer is yes. Yes it does. And why? Because, again, “all of this” requires 50 votes in the Senate, and two of those votes aren’t on-board.

 

Underneath the complaints that Reich and Bush have leveled sits the erroneous implication that, come election time, American voters are obliged to press a button marked “Republican” or “Democrat,” and that, having done so, they are shipped a drone-like representative of the winning team from a central repository in Washington, D.C. Reich complains that “we elected Democrats.” But this is correct only in the aggregate. In fact, 50 different “we”s elected one hundred senators and 435 Representatives, who between them make up our majority and minority parties. There is nothing in this deal that obliges those emissaries to agree with one another.

 

Senators Manchin and Sinema are not a pair of uninvited interlopers who are unexpectedly gumming up the gears; they, themselves, are among the gears. This being so, the duo cannot be said to be “blocking” the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority so much as they are sustaining the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority. Why? Because their decision to caucus with the Democrats rather than the Republicans is the only reason that majority exists in the first place. To hear progressives talk, one would assume that in order to take one’s place within the firmament one must first swear a blood oath to Dick Durbin. Shockingly enough, one is obliged to do no such thing.

 

A common thread runs through both the progressive agenda per se and the anger at those who are perceived to be sinking it: the mistaken belief that the United States is a homogenous political bloc, and that its states are mere regional departments of the federal government. In truth, even in the year 2021, America remains a remarkably diverse place, where people who have profoundly different geographical, economic, religious, and political needs are able to disagree with one another while living under the same national flag. Tied to our states as they are, a good number of our senators tend to understand this. The Republican Senate majority that lasted from 2015 to 2021 existed only because figures as different as Mike Lee, Cory Gardner, Jim Inhofe, and Susan Collins agreed to coexist in one caucus. Likewise, the Democrats have had control of the Senate since January only because figures as different as Sinema, Manchin, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Angus King have consented to stay in the same coalition. There is only one way that Robert Reich can “stop” this coalition from fraying from time to time, and that is to break it up completely. Is he hoping for Republicans to lure their own Jim Jeffords or Arlen Specter across the aisle?

 

There are many explanations for the rise of the imperial presidency, but one of them is that the monomaniacal thinking on display from the likes of Robert Reich and Cori Bush has become mainstream. Why did Barack Obama feel that the Senate had “stolen” a Supreme Court seat from him? Why did Donald Trump say, “I alone can fix it”? Why is Kyrsten Sinema being cast as a “betrayer”? Because far too many Americans focus on the presidency at the expense of everything else — even in such cases where the legislature is the primary player. It is a matter of considerable civic irony that, at the very same moment as we are being incessantly told that “diversity is our strength,” we have grown too selfish and too impatient to let our legislatures do what we elected them to do.

 

It is, of course, true that legislatures are slow and messy and, occasionally, irrational. But that is because the United States, too, is slow and messy and, occasionally, irrational. What Robert Reich and Cori Bush are ultimately complaining about is that their party does not have more seats in the federal legislature. And why doesn’t their party have more seats in the federal legislature? Well, because the American public did not give them more seats in the federal legislature. The reason we have a 50–50 Senate and a House of Representatives as closely divided as it has been in two decades is that the country is closely divided, too. That two senators are able to “block” what one of the factions wants to do is merely another reflection of that division.

How Government Is Supposed to Work

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

 

There is a predictable — and, to some extent, intentional — pile-up happening in Washington, an ugly and loud collision of big spending proposals, a bill to raise the debt ceiling, and a bill to fund the regular operations of government and avoid a federal shutdown. There are many reasons for this mess, and one of the most important of them is that our dysfunctional Congress is incapable of following its own rules.

 

People’s eyes tend to glaze over when you start talking about congressional procedure and “regular order,” but, bear with me.

 

We have a way to improve the appropriations process, and that way is — this part should be obvious! — the appropriations process. But it has been a long time since Congress has stuck to its own spending procedures.

 

Here is how this is supposed to work.

 

First, there is a “budget resolution.” This is a nonbinding policy statement that Congress adopts after a good bit of internal negotiation and some pro forma negotiation with the White House. The president does not actually have much to do with taxing or spending, which is why it always has been nonsensical to talk about the “Reagan deficit” or the “Clinton surplus.” We had Tip O’Neill deficits and, on paper, at least, a Newt Gingrich surplus. The point here is not a partisan one — the point is that budgetary power, and budgetary responsibility, lie with Congress.

 

Second, there is the real appropriations process. The budget resolution says what Congress would like to spend, in a perfect world. The appropriations process determines what Congress is actually going to spend (sort of — more on that in a second). Under “regular order,” spending bills originate in the House, which has an Appropriations Committee and, more important, a dozen or so appropriations subcommittees. Under “regular order,” each of those subcommittees produces a spending bill covering its particular area of responsibility: “Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies,” “Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies,” “Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies,” etc.

 

It is in these subcommittees that spending priorities are supposed to be set. And if you are looking for a place to manage infrastructure spending, this is it. The subcommittee system is far from perfect, but the full-time members of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies have a better shot at making intelligent and responsible decisions about energy infrastructure than does Congress as a whole — especially when those energy-infrastructure decisions are lumped in with literally everything else Congress appropriates money for.

 

Under regular order, we would have twelve (or so; the number has varied) appropriations bills to be considered, debated, and amended individually, instead of one big bill covering all or practically all discretionary spending.

 

Which brings us to a caveat mentioned above: Most federal spending today is not discretionary spending, which is to say, it is not spending that Congress has to authorize through the appropriations process. The majority of federal spending, about two-thirds of it, is so-called mandatory spending — things such as Social Security and other entitlements that keep chugging on irrespective of what Congress does or does not do in the budget process. So, keep this in mind: When you hear about all those trillions of dollars in play, that’s only a small part of overall spending.

 

But it is not an insignificant part.

 

The instruments that have supplanted regular order are so-called omnibus spending bills — one big spending bill instead of twelve smaller, more manageable ones — and the process known as “budget reconciliation.” Reconciliation is mainly of interest to the Senate, because it allows taxing and spending bills to move on a special track that is not subject to filibuster and that limits the number and kind of amendments that can be put forward to bog down the process. The omnibus model has obvious problems, the main one being that it forces the Nancy Pelosi mentality — “We have to pass the bill to see what’s in it!” — on everything Congress does. The reconciliation process has proved vulnerable to procedural gamesmanship, and, though it was adopted in the hope that it would help to reduce deficits, it has proved as likely to do the opposite in practice.

 

The main obstacle to returning to “regular order” is what I call “procedural maximalism.” Procedural maximalism is the habit of exploiting every parliamentary constraint and every legislative choke-point to the greatest possible extent, sacrificing the long-term credibility and effectiveness of Congress to short-term political interests. Put simply, an omnibus spending bill creates one opportunity for a high-stakes filibuster, whereas regular order would create a dozen opportunities for slightly lower-stakes filibusters. If we could rely on senators to show some restraint and resort to filibusters only in fights of real consequence, that would not be a problem. But we have the senators we have.

 

One possible reform would be exempting appropriations bills adopted through regular order from the filibuster. The filibuster gets a bad rap, sometimes undeservedly: The antidemocratic character of the Senate is by design and is a critical part of our constitutional architecture to the extent that it allows the Senate to act as a brake on demagoguery originating in the House and, increasingly, in the White House. That is something that we should preserve if possible. But the filibuster also creates opportunities for demagoguery in the Senate. It is one more lever — a big one — in the machinery of procedural maximalism.

 

Good government is boring government. Disorder, drama, and cathartic confrontation in the national assembly are the enemies of peace, prosperity, and prudence. While the import and impact of government shutdowns are always oversold and overdramatized, we should try to avoid them all the same — and the prospect of a partial default on federal debt, while also exaggerated, should be something close to unthinkable — because we need order in the state. Predictability is precious.

 

Of course, conservatives want less federal spending, and we are right to want that. But here are a few points to consider: One, not every $1 in spending is equal — it matters, and it matters a great deal, what we spend that money on. There are urgent priorities right now that are going unattended, in spite of those trillions of dollars going out the door. Which brings us to: Two, the major spending action is on the mandatory side, not the discretionary side. If conservatives want to get spending under control, then we are going to have to do things that we have not recently been very much inclined to consider: reform popular entitlements, farm subsidies, and other so-called mandatory outlays. That, really, is what the reconciliation process is best suited for, and conservatives should use it for that when they have the opportunity to do so.

 

The alternative is to have another one of these emotionally rousing, economically destructive, politically disfiguring pageants of sanctimony and asininity every couple of years. That’s an option — and it will remain an option until we drive ourselves into a national crisis that forces us to make hard choices at precisely the moment when we are least able to bring great resources and long-term thinking to bear on our problems.

 

This should be the Republicans’ new Contract with America: “We’ll give you a federal government so unbelievably boring that you’ll rarely ever have to think about it. There won’t be very many surprises. With any luck, you’ll forget our names. Here’s how.”

 

“Here’s how,” is the hard part, of course. But we do have some examples to follow. Two cheers for the subcommittees and regular order. Three cheers for boredom.

Why Progressives Won’t Admit They Hold the Reins of Power

By Nate Hochman

Thursday, September 30, 2021

 

Since disaffected white voters in Middle America first flocked to the person of Donald Trump on the 2016 campaign trail, an entire cottage industry of think-pieces, op-eds, and explainers has sought to “debunk” the popular conception of the MAGA-hat voter base as a dispossessed or marginalized demographic. The argument goes something like this: Trump’s “working-class-fueled victory that many journalists imagined” is a myth — actually, “many Trump voters” live in “reasonably good” economic circumstances. His electorate was “driven by fear of losing status, not economic anxiety” — in fact, “it wasn’t the economy, but racism and xenophobia that explained Trump’s rise.” They weren’t the forgotten men and women that the former president appealed to in his inauguration speech; they were just bigots.

 

The latest example of this is Patrick Wyman’s essay “American Gentry,” published in the Atlantic last week. According to Wyman, America’s “gentry” class is the regional “salt-of-the-earth millionaires who see themselves as local leaders in business and politics,” but they are “distinct from the highest levels of a regime’s political and economic elite.” This gentry is where power actually resides in the United States. They are a “local elite” composed primarily of entrepreneurs, franchise owners, manufacturing or agribusiness executives, and other well-to-do local leaders whose wealth and prestige are inextricably tied to areas that “don’t figure prominently in the country’s popular imagination or its political narratives.” But despite its geographical obscurity, the gentry class “stands at the apex of the social order throughout huge swaths of the country,” he says. “It shapes our economic and political world thanks to its resources and comparatively large numbers, yet it’s practically invisible to the popular eye.”

 

Trump’s election, as always, lies in the not-too-distant background of this analysis. Wyman begins his essay by referencing pro-Trump boat parades as a prime example of the gentry class, which — unlike the coastal elite — supported Trump in large numbers. “These were the people who, remembering or inventing their tradition of dominance over their towns and cities, flocked to Make America Great Again,” he writes. Much of that sociological account may be true, but it also raises the question: How can a class that “stands at the apex of the social order” also be so dispossessed as to “flock to Make America Great Again,” motivated primarily by a nostalgia for their lost “tradition of dominance”?

 

The truth is that the gentry’s relative wealth — the main metric that elite progressives use to tell the story of Trump voters and their supposed privilege — has little bearing on their actual power in 21st- century America. A combination of neoliberal economics and aggressive cultural liberalism over the past four decades has led to increased centralization of cultural, economic, and political power in dense urban areas. Financialization, for instance, has rewarded paper-pushers in the managerial class at the expense of brick-and-mortar business owners outside of New York, Chicago, and a handful of other cities. And the credentialed bureaucrats who have benefited the most from this arrangement have wielded their new power to advance a cultural understanding that is actively hostile to the traditionalist, Christian, and primarily white population in the vast American middle — even as they sternly lecture that population about its “privilege.”

 

If wealth alone were the best measurement of political power in contemporary America, then Asians, especially those of Indian and Taiwanese descent, as well as some Arabic and African immigrant groups, would be far more privileged than whites. Confronted with that point, progressives like Wyman would probably protest that the mechanisms that uphold and reproduce social privilege are more complex than numerical measurements such as household income. In more than one sense, they would be right: Political, cultural, and technological trends have at least as much to do with a group’s status in society as wealth does.

 

Wyman tries to circumvent that point by arguing that the wealth of these elites “derives not from their salary — this is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, such as doctors and lawyers — but from their ownership of assets.”  Those assets, he argues, can give them a “stranglehold” over what gets done in some regions of the country. But the places in Middle America where those assets are owned and operated are quickly becoming obsolete: While they may continue to be profitable for the foreseeable future, their broader influence on the national stage continues to diminish rapidly. The power of these Middle American “elites” is dying alongside the communities where they reside.

 

In fact, even within these increasingly alienated swaths of America, the relatively conservative class of small-business owners and local philanthropists is being crowded out by economic centralization. Powerful coast-dwelling investors and multinational corporations are ruthlessly hollowing out regional cultural identities and traditions even as they corrode local economies. “Corporations and hedge funds now own most local and regional newspapers,” writes the left-wing blogger Daniel G. Jennings. “Today’s newspaper publisher is a corporate apparatchik whose major role is cost cutting.” That’s not all: “The investor class is even coming for agriculture. . . . Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda are America’s largest owners of farmland. The Gates family owned 242,000 acres of farmland in July 2021.” On top of that, Chinese investors now own 192,00 acres of American farmland — so much so “that there is now political pressure to stop the practice,” Jennings writes.

 

So how does power work in modern America? As Declan Leary points out in the American Conservative, it’s not to the benefit of the so-called American gentry:

 

Politically, it is virtually indisputable that the vast majority of power is currently vested in the federal government, far removed not just from Americans’ concerns but their influence as well — including even the gentry outside Washington. Economically, power is disproportionately held by multinational organizations — including both highly visible, public-facing ones like Amazon, Walmart, and Apple, as well as less headline-friendly institutions like big banks and holding companies. Culturally, everything lies in the hands of a few Hollywood giants, the Big Five book publishers, and the handful of tech companies that dominate the digital space.

 

Wealthy or not, rural and exurban America is alienated from the places where most of the nation’s important decisions are made. These urban centers are full of the financially affluent, but that is not what truly makes them the elite. The primary source of their power is their control of American identity — the narratives, symbols, cultural shibboleths and taboos, and social arrangements that define our self-understanding and the structure of our shared political life. A New York Times writer may not be able to buy a multimillion-dollar house in Palm Beach, but he is infinitely more able to imprint in the halls of American power his vision of how the world should be. A well-placed federal bureaucrat may not have immediate access to the capital to build a successful construction company in Little Rock, Ark., or Lubbock, Texas, but he can shape the conditions in which others do so.

 

It is proximity to these organs of central power — not wealth or control of assets in small-town Idaho or rural Nebraska — that is the basis of status and privilege. The “forgotten men and women” that Trump spoke to and inspired were not necessarily poor, though many of them were. Rather, they had been left out of or actively excluded from the political and cultural center of their own country. Their role in our shared civic life was implicitly viewed as less legitimate than that of their urban counterparts. They no longer had a place in the stories that we told about ourselves as a nation, except as the butt of late-night comedy jokes or as a general representation of stupidity and backwardness in popular culture and mainstream media. It’s no wonder that white working-class voters who told pollsters that “I often feel like a stranger in my own land” were 3.5 times more likely to vote for Trump than those who did not have that feeling.

 

The repeated efforts to reframe Trump voters as denizens of privilege reads as a desperate bid by progressives to avoid self-critical introspection. If the true elites are the Trump base rather than the progressives who control the universities, Big Business, corporate media, the culture industry, the nonprofit sector, the federal bureaucracy, and almost every other center of power in modern American society, then coastal progressives need not admit the uncomfortable truth — uncomfortable in a culture that prizes victimhood above all else — that they are the ones who hold the reins of power. Today’s aristoi is all noblesse and no oblige: “An outsider pose is appealing because it allows powerful people to distance themselves from the consequences of their decisions,” writes Sam Goldman in the New York Times. “When things go well, they are happy to take credit. When they go badly, it’s useful to blame an incompetent, hostile establishment for thwarting their good intentions or visionary plans.”

 

What Goldman does not mention — but is at least as important — is that progressive elites’ refusal to acknowledge their own privilege also allows them to mock and denigrate their embattled fellow citizens under the pretense of “punching up.” The insistence that red America is privileged provides the pretext for the relentless assault on its symbols, traditions, and way of life. But that’s no way to govern a nation. Until our leaders recognize that, the possibility of peaceful coexistence in this big, beautiful country of ours will continue to elude us all.

Anti-DeSantis Ad Tells the ‘Dark Dystopian Story’ of Florida Leaving People Alone

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 30, 2021

 

This attack ad against Governor DeSantis is among the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

 

When it came across my timeline on Twitter, I expected it to be full of out-of-context quotes and ridiculously partisan charges. Instead, it features ominous music while DeSantis says positive things such as, “We trust people to make their own decisions in this state, we’re not going to be bludgeoning people.”

 

Perhaps the best part of all is the juxtaposition between DeSantis saying, “if you’re trying to lock people down, I’m going to stand in your way” and the screen flashing, “TERRIFYINGLY EVIL” and “A DARK DYSTOPIAN STORY.” Because, as the avid historians among us will know, things tend to get really totalitarian when government officials say, “I’m going to leave you alone.”