Growth & Justice Blog

Minnesota Poll's progressive majority on health care

As a former reporter for the Star Tribune who wrote scores of news stories based on the Minnesota Poll, I am very familiar with the science of polling and its limitations,  and the crucial importance of context.    Here's some important context for the poll results and the headline that declared "Obama's support declines sharply.''   

 A drop in 10 percentage points on job approval, after the "honeymoon" and late in a president's first year,  is typical, but especially if he's mounting the most sweeping social and economic reforms in decades during the most serious recession in a century.    The coroporate bailouts and continuing war in the Middle East have  angered the left, the bailouts and the expansion of a public role in health-care have infuriated the right, everybody's still worried about their personal finances, and still the president's approval rating is about 20 points higher than his predecessor's.

The concerns about health-care transformation undoubtedly are an overriding factor but it appears that the dissatisfaction with Obama's plan comes from many liberal folks who wish he'd gone further.   Although Minnesotans disapprove of his overall "handling" of health care (45 percent to 39 percent),  there is clear approval of the  "public option'' despised by the right-wing critics (51 percent to 37 percent).   Most in the poll  approve a law requiring coverage (54 percent to 37 percent) and a slight plurality (43 percent to 40 percent) actually favor the overall changes being supported by Obama and his congressional allies.   Most important,  perhaps, the poll showed that about 40 percent of Minnesotans are either worried about losing coverage or are currently uninsured.

We've often made the case that there is a sustained majority in Minnesota who favor the moderate-to-progressive position on key economic and tax-budget issues.   These key issues include support for public education, transportation, public health-care, environmental protection and most of the worthwhile vital investments that our governments provide.    This majority also favors  a fairer and reasonably larger tax burden on those at the top of the income scale,  and polls show it opooses an  inflexible "no new taxes'' orthodoxy.

Dane Smith

After Labor Day, keep working on economic justice

I had the great privilege of delivering the Labor Day Sunday sermon at my church (Unity Church, Unitarian Universalist, in St. Paul). I offered the best I could find from Abraham Lincoln, the Bible, Catholic and Lutheran teachings on social justice, and recent economic studies to make the case that we have an inequality problem in Minnesota and the nation. And it was a treat to get Donna Summer's great song, "She Works Hard for the Money'' into the liturgy as the postlude.  

Here's one point I made about labor and fairness, and democratic and religious traditions.

As Americans we mark our progress by looking back at forms of liberation from exploitation of labor. In our western hemisphere, we look back in horror at the forced conversion and attempted enslavement of aboriginal people to Christendom and efforts to bring them under the English and Spanish or French yoke. We are proud of the American Revolution and our fight against the illegitimate seizure, without representation, of our labor. We are proud of the great fight led by liberal religious founders of our own Unitarian Universalist denomination against the enslavement of African people. Interestingly, southern defenders of slavery used the Bible’s apparent approval or neutrality on the subject to advance their secessionist cause.

In the last century, we’ve made enormous progress against the much more subtle forms of semi-slavery that come with unbridled capitalism and the slanted bargaining table set up between employers and employees: the simple and basic right to organize, child labor laws, the 40-hour work week and overtime compensation, the minimum wage, the civil rights movement and ongoing efforts to finish the Emancipation Proclamation and end the de facto slavery imposed on people of color, the migrant workers’ reforms, and in more recent years but throughout history, hugely important, the oppression of women in the workforce.

I urged the congregation to consider the mountains of evidence that show economic inequality growing once again, after we reached a high-water level of overall economic equality in the 1970s. And I urged folks to do whatever they possibly could to change policies and laws to bring about more equal outcomes, chiefly through more and better investment in human capital.   

The full text of the sermon is available here [PDF]. 

— Dane Smith

Hollowing out the public sector affects public safety

Our continuing and increasingly dubious experiment with starving the public sector in Minnesota is producing almost daily reports of questionable budget cuts.   A Star Tribune front-page story on disappearing lifeguards at public beaches is the latest manifestation of our increasingly penurious fiscal policy.    Anti-government conservatives like to claim that much or most of government investment is unnecesssary or superfluous, and that all we really need are military forces, courts and police to protect property.   But it turns out that a relentless ratcheting down of public investment affects public safety in myriad ways:  crumbling bridges, less attention to mesothelioma incidence in northern Minnesota miners, Local Government Aid cuts that force police and emergency service layoffs, hospital reimbursement cuts that hamper emergency rooms in the midst of an ongoing swine flu pandemic, and on and on.    Public safety is a primary responsibility of our entirely legitimate and mostly effective state-and-local government systems.    Most of the things those governments do eventually have something to do with public safety and providing for the "General Welfare," an often overlooked primary goal that is spelled out in the United States Constitution.    And these systems can't be funded without fair and ample tax revenues.

Dane Smith

Click on "10000strong.org" for Martin Luther King Day

This is about here and now.   At Growth & Justice, we try to focus relentlessly on the long-term and the strategic, on the thinking and research and advocacy that will expand and improve our public investments for a more shared prosperity.   And we don't focus so much on the immediate, the obligation to take care of more urgent injustices.   Few human needs are as immediate and pressing as hunger, and by all accounts this problem is spreading in Minnesota during a time of deep economic travail.    Here's something I'm doing right now, and I urge you to do so also.   Click on 10000strong.org, watch the powerful and compelling video,  and do what the good people tell you to do, or as much as you can.   It's an effort, led by Second Harvest Heartland, one of Minnesota's premier non-profits, to enlist at least 10,000 people  in the Land of 10,000 Lakes to alleviate hunger now and, eventually to end it in our state.  It's a most appropriate thing to do on Martin Luther King Day and Inauguration Day. 

Dane Smith

The anti-government theme and the (alleged) "fall of conservatism''

There’s a temptation in the punditry business to attach too much meaning to the present, to excitedly say "never before,'' and to declare the  "fall of'' and "death of''  this or that.   And in my time I've seen too many premature pronouncements  _ of the death of God, of the decline and fall of liberalism, and even the end of history _ to get too excited.   But George Packer in the latest New Yorker has written an eminently readable treatise  about “The Fall of Conservatism.’’   It was referenced in a Star Tribune editorial Saturday about the Minnesota Republican Party’s state convention, and the Packer piece promises to be prime grist for the mill this summer. 

Packer quotes conservatives themselves who fear that the movement is out of ideas and intellectually fatigued and he draws some amazing admissions  out of Patrick Buchanan about how Republicans consciously and aggressively exploited southern white fury over the civil rights movements to build their counter-attack in the late 1960s.   Packer also does a good job sketching out broader and more defensible non-economic motivations for the rise of conservatism:  concerns about “the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young and the insults to national pride.’’ I've always maintained that "liberalism'' got to be a dirty word because of "free love'' and drugs and flag-burning and goofy dalliances with Marxism, not because of its efforts to alleviate poverty and social problems and gross inequalities in wealth and income.

And Packer gets closest to explaining the conservatives' strategic mistake when he cites David Brooks’ analysis about how conservatives overreached with their hostility to government.  “An anti-government philosophy turned out to be politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American…People want something melioristic, they want government to do things.’’  And in the end, because of a very contradictory conservative view of government as limitless when it comes to security and national defense, conservatives after almost 30 years of dominance  “hadn’t made much of a dent in the bureaucracy, and they had done nothing to provide universal health-care coverage or arrest growing economic inequality.’’   Packer goes on to quote conservative David Frum as saying that “smaller government is no longer a basis for conservative dominance.’’   And he points to young conservatives like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam who are pushing progressive ideas like wage subsidies for low-income workers and tax credits for children with families.    

I don’t want conservatism to fall or die, anymore than I want yin to wipe out yang or night to eclipse day.      And it doesn’t matter what I think because conservatism and the great ideas it stands for _ individual and market freedoms, personal responsibility,  family values, respect for the past, and religious convictions _ will and should always be with us as we try to build a better world.   I just think conservatism needs to return to the healthy accommodation its adherents used to have for other principles _ equality of opportunity, social justice, and a respectful faith that community and the “we” are at least as important as the individual and the “I”. 

Dane Smith

Religious progressives on the move in Minnesota

New energy from religious progessives is one of the more intriguing developments of the 2008 political season. And perhaps the biggest event this year in Minnesota around that theme will play out over three days  next weekend at the Depot in Minneapolis. Some pretty big national stars will be on the stage.

Featured presenters at the "Voting Justice, Voting Hope" conference (register here) will include Christian leader Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourner magazine and a prolific author, Ray Suarez, senior correspondent on PBS's  News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine.  In addition to the speakers, there will be more than two dozen workshops, ranging from "Reclaiming the American Values Debate"  to "Prophetic Advocacy 101.'' 

Growth & Justice will have a booth at this event and we'll be talking to conference-goers about our research and advocacy for investing in the common good and raising the money fairly for that investment.

— Dane Smith 

Well Said, Mr. Nobles, and Happy 25th

It was about 20 years ago and the Office of the Legislative Auditor was getting attention for a series of tough investigative reports on questionable behavior by public officials and poor performance by state government,  which back then was completely dominated by DFLers at the executive, legislative and judicial branches. I was a reporter for the Star Tribune and was impressed by the competence and toughness of the watchdog agency and its director, Jim Nobles. So I wrote a story about Nobles and conveyed the consensus at that time, held by both parties, that he was an inquisitor of unquestioned fairness and tenacity.   

Fast forward to last week and Nobles was in the spotlight again for his agency's tough analysis of Republican Gov. Pawlenty's JOBZ program and the deteriorating state of the state's transportation system. Britt Robson of MinnPost put together a spot-on Q&A with Nobles, focusing on a question about whether the agency was anti-Pawlenty and whether "truth has a liberal bias.''

Nobles' response was a classic statement of the good-government principles that Minnesota has long prided itself on, and which need to be reinforced as we move toward more investments in education, transportation, health-care access and other progressive goals.

MP: So you don't subscribe to the idea that the truth has a liberal bias?

JN: [laughs] No. You know the only way in which that might be true is that I really believe in the important role government can play. But I also honestly believe that once an agency is given a responsibility, it has to be fulfilled in a very serious and cost effective way. I want to bring good value to government. That tends to make me say government is important, if for no other reason than it is extracting a lot of money from the citizens and needs to use it effectively. So I am not one of those who just throw up their hands at government altogether, say they are just a bunch of slugs wasting our money. I believe we can take money and do good things. But I believe you really have to work hard and set high standards. I would like all of government to work the way I manage this office, with great intensity.

Nobles has been the epitome of grown-up integrity and a force for good in Minnesota's public sector for 25 years. He and his office, which had a good reputation before he arrived in 1983, deserve a salute.

Dane Smith

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On WCCO-AM, Talking Presidential Politics (and Growth & Justice)

Writing and speaking publicly in behalf of our fine cause - more and smarter public investment in behalf of the common good, and building a wider prosperity in Minnesota - is  rewarding work. And it's just about my favorite role as president of Growth & Justice, up there with policy research and digging into tax-and-budget spreadsheets. (It's funner than you might imagine). 

But occasionally I'm asked by my former colleagues in the news media to offer my two cents on the broader politics-and-government scene, on the shaky assumption that I might have something useful to say after a 30-year career covering and writing about politics and government for both the Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Of course I ALWAYS acccept the invitations to speak about Growth & Justice. And I USUALLY try to accept the requests for political chatter. I figure I can at least get some words in edgewise, during the latter, about the former. I bring this up because I was honored to be asked twice this month to talk on WCCO-AM about presidential politics, with a focus on the Iowa and Minnesota caucuses. On the evening of Sat. Dec. 15, I was on for an hour with my long-time colleage Dennis McGrath, a senior editor at the Star Tribune, and CCO host Esme Murphy, best known as a veteran and versatile WCCO-TV reporter. Didn't get much chance to sell the G&J message on Dec. 15, but every time in and out of the station breaks, our name and description of us as a progressive think tank was repeated.

Today (Friday, Dec. 28) I got an unexpected early-morning call from CCO, again with a request to talk about presidential politics, this time with the delightfully wry Tim Russell (man of a thousand voices, Prairie Home Companion star).  And this time, on prime drive-time airspace, I got a chance to give the brief Growth & Justice "elevator speech'' and spell out our website address. And also I got a chance to raise some serious doubts about the fairness of presidential  candidate Mike Huckabee's proposal to scrap  the strongly progressive federal income tax,  and the Internal Revenue Service, in favor of a national sales tax.

Dane Smith