Solomon’s (false) Choices: about that pot of money for liberal nice things
by digby
As Atrios always points out, there seems to be the mistaken idea that there’s only a certain amount of money available for liberal good things and deciding who to help is a zero sum game:
Some of the More Serious liberalish people have a weird approach to thinking about things. Actually don’t really know David Leonhardt’s political views, and he’s reporter so in theory he doesn’t have any, but he probably leans a bit our way. He tweeted this:
Seems clear that shifting some money from SocSec to preK would lead to faster econ growth.
It goes on to link to a Jon Chait post about how we could pay for pre-k by switching to chained CPI…
But these are false choices. These are not deals that are on the table. There is no fixed pot of money for liberal nice things.
His point was that even talking about this sort of thing is silly since Republicans believe that there isn’t even a small pot of money for liberal nice things so it’s ridiculous to even contemplate it. But I think it’s strange that Democrats buy into this idea at all. Even they frame these discussions as if the idea of ever raising taxes above the levels we had in the 90s is insane or that reallocating defense money is completely ridiculous. No, if the old people are able to live in dignity, it means that children must go uneducated and if sick people are taken care of it means that young adults are unable to get a college education. It’s up to us liberals to make these Solomon’s Choices and live with the consequences because that’s-just-how-it-is.
Dean Baker takes on this thesis today:
In a recent WaPo op-ed with the subtle title “Payments to Elders are Harming Our Future,” Harry Holzer and Isabel Sawhill claim that “our very expensive retirement programs already crowd out public spending on virtually all other priorities—including programs for the poor and those that strengthen the nation’s future—and will do so at even higher rates in the next decade and beyond unless we reform these large programs.”
If this crowd-out thesis were true, we would expect to find that nations that spend more on the elderly spend less on children. But this isn’t the case. Although a bit dated, the chart below, produced by researchers Jonathan Bradshaw and Emese Mayhew, plots expenditures on family benefits and services (per capita child) by expenditures on benefits and services for the elderly (per capita elderly).
The chart shows that counties that spend more per capita on the elderly also spend more per capita on children. Moreover, contrary to Holzer/Sawhill’s claim that we have “very expensive retirement programs”, U.S. expenditures on the elderly are moderate in cross-national terms. Bradshaw and Mayhew conclude: “we have found that if there is generational inequity it does not stem from demography alone. Nations make choices about the level of resources they commit to children and the elderly, and the countries that are most generous to children also tend to be most generous to the elderly.”
The US is the most powerful country in the world, blessed with vast wealth and immense capabilities. It’s a matter of priorities, that’s all, a reflection of values that inform how a just and compassionate society should operate. Other countries put a premium on the welfare of their vulnerable populations. We don’t.
There’s more data at the link to Baker’s article. I’m always struck when I see these charts by what a backwards country we really are. There’s a very high cost to running a global military empire filled with people hate their own government.
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