Recommended: The Abbie Hoffman of the Right: Donald Trump

David Brooks has a brilliant piece in today's New York Times Op Ed page: The Abbie Hoffman of the Right: Donald Trump. Well worth reading and thinking about.

Can democracy work with an uninformed electorate?

Here is an interesting question: can democracy work in the long run with an ignorant electorate?

Is the American electorate ignorant? The many surveys by people like the Pew Research Group suggest so. A recent 2017 Pew poll revealed that less than half the respondents knew that Neal Gorsuch is a Supreme Court judge, despite all the fuss earlier in the year when he was appointed. Only about a third knew the current unemployment rate. Only about 60% knew that the UK was proposing to leave the EU. In a 2015 poll, only about a third knew that water boils at a lower temperature at higher altitudes.

A 2014 Annenburg survey by the University of Pennsylvania found that a third of the respondents couldn’t name a single one of the three branches of government, and 42% had no idea which party held the majority in the Senate. A recent Fusion poll showed that three quarters of Millennials (ages 18-34) had no idea who the Senators from their own state were. In a 2002 National Geographic poll, only about 17% could find Afghanistan on a world map – even worse, 11% couldn’t find the USA on a world map and a third couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean on a world map.

Sounds to me like an ignorant electorate. Hillary Clinton made a big deal about winning the popular vote, but in fact the reality was that she and Trump each got votes from about 30% of the voting-eligible population, and the largest proportion – about 40% - didn’t bother to vote at all.

So now we have politicians like Bernie Sanders proposing economically infeasible ideas like free college for all and free medical care for all, and politicians like Donald Trump (if you can call him a politician) proposing tax cuts at a time when we are running a half-trillion dollar a year federal deficit and should be raising taxes to eliminate the deficit and pay down at least some of the federal debt, and the uninformed voters seem to be buying it.

So with a voting population that is this uninformed (and perhaps many politicians who aren’t much better educated), how can a democratic system work? And especially how can it work in a world that has grown so complex and technological?

It is an interesting question.

The Sanders single-payer health insurance proposal

Bernie Sanders proposed a single-payer health insurance plan back during the 2016 presidential primaries, and I see that the far left, including 2020 presidential aspirants like Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kalama Harris are climbing on the bandwagon, along with a number of Democratic senators. Apparently this is emerging as a key proposal for the Democratic far left in the upcoming election cycles.

It sounds great, EXCEPT that no one is talking about the costs. Sander’s proposal during the primaries had an estimated cost of $1.4 trillion per year, based on an analysis by Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. That is almost surely optimistic, since most estimates like this are lowballed to make the proposals sound reasonable.  In Sander’s case, he assumed about $6 trillion in “savings” over the next ten years as a way to lower the costs. Others come up with higher costs. Kenneth Thorpe, a professor of health policy and management at Emory University, put the cost at $2.4 trillion a year. A team from the Urban Institute put the number at $2.5 trillion a year. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projected $2.8 trillion a year. Let’s be very generous and assume a realistic cost estimate might be around $2 trillion a year, higher than Sander’s low-ball estimate but lower than most other independent estimates. Is this economically feasible?

Well, as I pointed out in a series of posts some months ago, the federal government is already running a deficit of about half a trillion dollars per year, and the federal debt is already at about $20 trillion, which is 108% of the GDP, the total value of all goods and services the nation produces in a year. So it would be pretty disastrous to increase the annual federal deficit; in fact we should be reducing it. But let’s assume we just keep the annual deficit the same, meaning that Sander’s plan would have to pay for itself. What would that imply?

Currently personal income taxes are the source of most of the federal government’s revenue (not counting pass-through revenue like Social Security). Corporation taxes contribute only about 9% of federal revenue, and various excise taxes and fees contribute about another 9%.  All the rest, about 82%, comes from personal income taxes. Those income taxes provide about $2.4 trillion per year. So if we want to add another $2 trillion in expenses for a single-payer government-run health system without increasing the federal deficit, that would imply that personal income taxes would have to almost double.

Will American voters accept an almost 80-100% increase in their personal income taxes?  I don’t think so, and I don’t think any politician who proposed that would get elected.   

No doubt politicians like Sanders will continue to avoid the cost issue, and provide fuzzy estimates based on unrealistic assumptions about the amount of “waste and fraud” they will find to offset the costs. But realistically a government single-payer plan covering everyone will require raising our taxes to European levels, which often run 45-55% for the middle class. I would guess that sort of tax increase would be politically unacceptable to American voters, so I assume this far-left socialist populist movement is in the long run a dead end for the Democratic Party.

In fact, there is evidence of that. Sander’s own home state of Vermont tried it and then pulled the plug on the plan.  Colorado had a referendum on a single-payer plan last year and 80% of the voters rejected it.  That ought to be a warning to the Democratic Party.

Religion in America

It does seem to me that both the secular liberals and the religious conservatives in America need to learn more tolerance.

The secular liberals need to come to grips with the reality that (a) there are more religious believers in the world as a whole, and in America in particular, than non-believers, though their beliefs differ widely, and (b) religion isn’t going away, in fact in many places it is growing. Liberals cannot gain and hold political power by denigrating and ridiculing those who are religious (“clinging to guns and religion” – Obama, “basket of deplorables” – Clinton)   – it just isn’t a workable strategy. Liberals will have to learn to be tolerant and accepting, and even understanding, of those who are religious. And they will need to tailor their social strategies to encompass tolerance for differing points of view on some social issues.

Religious conservatives need to come to grips with the reality that not everyone believes as they do, and in America, with its historical foundation of religious freedom, they cannot expect to impose their particular beliefs on everyone. Those who find abortion unacceptable are free never to have abortions, but not to insist that no one else can have abortions. Those who find homosexuality unacceptable are free to avoid homosexual relationships themselves, but not to deny, or even castigate or persecute, those who find such relationships acceptable.

The problem, of course, is that both the more dogmatic secular liberals and the more dogmatic religious believers are bound into rigid unthinking, intolerant ideologies, and in that respect the more dogmatic and activist liberals are being just as unreasonable and intolerant as they accuse the more religious of being. In that sense dogmatic liberalism is as much a religion as any other religion.

Ironic

It does seem to me ironic that liberals who profess to bend over backwards to be sensitive to other cultures and their religions – Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc – can’t be anything but derisive about the beliefs of their own Christian countrymen.

It does seem to me ironic that liberals who profess to be against segregation of any kind are building segregated “safe spaces” on campuses.

It does seem to me ironic that liberals who in the 1960s and 1970s were proud and loud defenders (correctly) of free speech are now shouting down and driving off campus any speakers they don’t agree with.

It does seem to me ironic that liberals who profess to be against stereotyping and labeling are nevertheless quick to stereotype and label as racist, sexist, Islamophobia, “deplorable”, etc, anyone who doesn’t agree with them.

This isn’t the liberalism I believe in.