Half Changed World

I’m fascinated by the almost non-existence of a gender gap among Iowa caucus goers.  According to these CNN numbers, Obama was supported by 35 percent of both men and women.  Clinton drew 30 percent of women voters, 23 percent of men.  Meanwhile, there was a huge age gap, with Obama supported by 57 percent of the youngest voters, but only 18 percent of the oldest.

I can’t find the stats online, but during the caucus-night coverage, I heard statistics that suggested there was  also a huge age gradient if you look only at women.  I’ve heard explanations for this ranging from "young voters aren’t nostalgic about the Clinton presidency" to "young women don’t approve of standing-by-your-man".  But I think this is much more a comment on what feminism is today.

Whether it’s because we’ve been told all our life that women could do anything, or because we’ve seen for ourselves that having women in positions of power doesn’t change everything (e.g. Margaret Thatcher, Condi Rice), my sense is that young women (Gen X and Y) are much less likely than our mothers (Boomers and older) to think that feminism means we should automatically support a female candidate. 

(see also Jody at Raising WEG on her family’s different takes on Hillary.)

I’ve been rooting for Mike Huckabee to gain some traction in the Republican presidential race for months, but now that he’s actually climbing to the top of the polls, I’m not sure what to make of it.

I was rooting for him for several reasons:

• Unlike most of the Republican candidates, he seems to decide his positions based on something other than the latest polling results. 
• He believes that immigrants and poor people are also God’s children, and isn’t afraid to say so.
• It gave me the opportunity to tsk at the religious right for their hypocrisy in not supporting him.  (It’s obviously a sign that I’m still not as cynical as I need to be that I was shocked that Robertson endorsed Giuliani.)
• In general, I’m a sucker for underdogs.

But now, he’s not looking like an underdog anymore.  And I think that he’d be a hard candidate for any of the Dems to run against in the general election, because it would put those social wedge issues front and center in the campaign. 

The Washington Post website has an interactive "choose your candidate" tool that purports to show you which candidate you should be supporting, based on their public statements on a variety of issues, and how important you say these issues are.  I spent some time playing with it, and it mostly demonstrated to me how close the Democratic candidates are on most of the issues that I care about.  If you can parse the differences between what they’re all saying on Social Security or immigration, you’re doing better than I am.  And while the tool lets you say how much you care about the issue in general, it doesn’t have any way for you to indicate how much you care about the differences in the candidates’ positions.  I think I gave up on it about halfway through, when it was saying I should be supporting Chris Dodd.

Precisely because the candidates are so close together on policy, the areas where they disagree, even a little, are getting a lot of attention, perhaps excessive.  One of the areas where some differences have shown up is on health care.  Kucinich is the only one standing up for a true single payor system, while Obama has criticized Edwards and Clinton for requiring everyone to get health insurance.  He’s dead wrong on this — both because you really do need to get everyone into the insurance pool in order to avoid people freeloading until they actually get sick, and because the attack on "mandates" is likely to come back and haunt him if he actually gets elected.  (I don’t have the energy to go hunting for a full set of links right now, but this has been exhaustively discussed in the wonkosphere. )

So, on one of the few areas of substantive difference, I think Obama’s wrong.  But I still think he’s my pick.  I’m embarrassed by that.  I’m a self-proclaimed policy wonk.  But he makes me want to believe. 

***

On a related topic, this week you’ll see an ad in my sidebar from the fine folks at One.org, who have asked all the candidates about what they’d do to fight international poverty and disease. Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity is a similar exercise focused on domestic poverty.  Check them both out.

From the Center for American Progress, a set of ads on what it means to be progressive.  The ones that play off of the Mac vs. PC are funny, but this one gives me the shivers. 

Since I highlighted Hillary Clinton’s proposals on work-family issues last month, I feel like it’s only fair to point out that John Edwards has released his set of work-family proposals. 
Obama also touched on these issues in his Reclaiming the American Dream speech last week, but hasn’t gotten into the details as much (at least as far as I’ve been able to find).

Clinton and Edward’s proposals got a lot in common, and both would be a vast improvement over the current policy.  Here’s some of the similarities and differences that jump out at me:

• Both Clinton and Edwards would make the Family and Medical Leave Act apply to employers with 25 or more employees, down from the 50 employee cut-off that currently applies.  (Obama has said he’d expand it, but I haven’t seen a specific cut-off cited.)
• All three would provide a minimum guarantee of 7 paid sick days a year.
• All of them would try to expand paid family leave by providing incentive funds to states that develop state paid leave programs (e.g. like California does now).  Clinton offers $1 billion a year, and sets a goal of having all states adopt a program by 2016.  Edwards offers $2 billion (presumably each year, although that’s not entirely clear from his website) and sets a goal of having everyone covered by 2014.  He also says that tax incentives to businesses wouldn’t count — it would have to be a statewide plan.  Advantage Edwards, I think.
• Both Clinton and Edwards talk about the need for improved child care and expanded subsidies.  Clinton says she’d increase the Child Care and Development Block Grant (which provides subsidies) and "work with Congress to reform the Dependent Care Tax Credit to address its shortcomings."  Edwards has specific proposals for increasing the amount of the tax credit and making it partially refundable, but doesn’t say anything about CCDBG.  Advantage Clinton.  I just wrote a paper on the subject, and child care credits just don’t work very well for low-income families, even if refundable.  The problem is that you have to be able to afford to lay out the full cost of care up front, and not get paid back until you do your taxes the next year.
• Both suggest that families with stay-at-home parents should also benefit from child care subsidies. Again, Clinton says this would apply to subsidies under CCDBG, while Edwards talks about the tax credit.  I’m a lot more comfortable applying it to the low-income families who qualify for subsidies than for the full income range.  Also, at that point, I don’t see why you don’t just expand the child tax credit and not force people to document their child care expenses.
• Obama says he’d double spending on after-school programs.
• Clinton and Obama both talk about prohibiting discrimination based on parental status, and encouraging flexible scheduling.
• Edwards talks about benefits for non-traditional workers — contractors, part-time workers, temps — and cracking down on misclassification.

Update:  here are some good comparisons of the proposals from elsewhere:

• Mothers Movement Online
• Take Care Net
• Progressive States

As you probably know if you have kids, you can claim a child tax credit of up to $1,000 per child.  As you might not realize if you’re not low-income, this credit is only partially refundable, meaning that the lowest-income families don’t benefit at all from it.  The threshold for partial refundability started at $10,000 a year, but goes up each year with inflation, even though the wages of low-earning families often don’t keep up with inflation.

The House passed AMT patch bill includes a modest expansion of the refundability of the child tax credit, pushing it down to $8,500 a year.  This would reach an additional 13 million low-income kids.  The Senate Finance Committee is deciding this week whether to include such a provision in their bill.

If you can call your Senator and ask him or her to support this provision, it could make a big difference. 

Here is some background on the Child Tax
Credit from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

FAMILIES HELPED BY THE CHILD TAX CREDIT EXPANSION WORK HARD IN LOW-PAYING
JOBS: Nursing Home Aides, Cooks, Pre-School Teachers, and Construction Workers
Would Get a Boost By Sharon Parrott and Arloc Sherman

IMPROVING THE REFUNDABLE CHILD TAX CREDIT: An Important Step Toward Reducing
Child Poverty By Aviva Aron-Dine

I don’t have the words to say how appalled I was by today’s Washington Post article on how Senator Schumer has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the hedge funds.  If being a Democrat doesn’t mean that it’s a no-brainer to vote for closing a loophole that lets people who earn tens of millions of dollars a year pay taxes at a lower rate than people earning the minimum wage (because payroll taxes are over 16 percent), then being a Democrat doesn’t mean squat.

Last week, I listened to most of the Ways and Means Committee debate over Rep. Rangel’s one-year patch bill, which would fix the AMT for one year, extend a bunch of expiring credits for a year, and also help some low income families by extending the refundability of the child tax credit.  No one argued against any of these things, but all the Republicans were saying that they didn’t need to be offset with tax increases anywhere else, because taxes are too much of the GDP already.  The Democrats were all responding by saying that it would be irresponsible to increase the deficit.

It’s sort of bizarre that the Dems have become the spokespeople for fiscal responsibility (at least on the House side).  I listened to a radio show a few weeks ago where a bunch of traditional fiscal conservatives sounded totally shell shocked about how little today’s Republican leadership cares about running deficits. In principal, I agree that modest deficits aren’t inherently a bad thing, if they’re supporting investments in future productivity.  (And I’d add that government spending needs the flexibility to be countercyclical — e.g. to expand when the economy gets bad).  But given the Republicans’ willingness to mortgage the future, I think there’s more to be gained than lost from "paygo" rules (e.g. where any tax cuts or spending increases need to be offset).

In honor of election day, this week’s book is The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, by Matt Bai. 

Bai is (was?) a reporter for the NY Times Magazine, and the book is based largely on his experiences covering the 2004 and 2006 campaigns.  Much of the book was vaguely familiar to me, but Bai provides more details on some topics, such as the origins of the Democracy Alliance (a group of very rich individuals who are making a concerted effort to build a progressive infrastructure).   He provides nice sketches of Markos (whom he describes as a natural entrepreneur who built Daily Kos into the leading Democratic political site almost by accident) and Jerome Armstrong (whom he describes as a jack of all trades who discovered his calling in campaigns).  He’s scathing about the bloggers at Firedoglake, and glowing about Gina Cooper.*  All this is very well written, although there’s so many characters that I started to lose track of them by the end.

But the meat of the book is Bai’s claim that Democrats don’t stand for anything in particular, other than being not-Bush.  And by "Democrats," he doesn’t just mean the presidential candidates, or the Congressional leadership, but the whole left-wing apparatus — bloggers, billionaires, think-tanks, etc.  And from where I sit, that’s just not true. There’s a bunch of organizations laying out progressive agendas. I think EPI is doing the best job of articulating the overall vision in their Agenda for Shared Prosperity.

Bai seems to dismiss all this as "same old New Deal."  As far as I can tell, his litmus test for something being a new vision is that it has to involve substantial change to Social Security.  If you’re not willing to slaughter the sacred cow, you must be trapped in old think. (At the same time, he seems to think that Mark Warner is a visionary, for reasons that are never quite articulated.) But Social Security isn’t really in all that bad shape. Yes, there’s a funding issue, but it could be resolved with relative small increases in the cap on taxes and the retirement age, and decreases in benefits.  (Medicare’s a whole ‘nother story.)  And Democrats and progressives acknowledge that, by and large.

More good discussion at TPMCafe.

*  I had never heard of Gina Cooper — she’s the person who took the lead on organizing the first YearlyKos.  I’m thrilled to hear that she’s getting some recognition, because from Bai’s description, she seems to have taken on the classical female role of doing the critical behind the scenes work while Markos was running around chatting up reporters. 

Laura at 11d and Megan McArdle are going back and forth about child care subsidies today.  The comment that struck me was this one from "buffpilot" at Megan’s blog:

"We don’t need to give a subsidy to anyone, but making a means-tested
welfare, would be fine with mean. But base it on the income needed in
Mississippi – since you can move! If you want to live in NYC make the
money, don’t have kids, or move. Its YOUR choice. But don’t ask me to
give you money so you can live your lifestyle without making any
sacrifices. That’s what you want."

Similarly, when Bitch PhD posted last month about how unaffordable housing is, even given that her family has a good income, she got lots of "that’s what you get for living in California" type comments.

I really don’t have a good answer for the public policy question of how to handle cost of living disparities.  As has been pointed out repeatedly during the SCHIP discussion, a family in NYC living on $60,000 is in a fundamentally different situation than a family in Iowa with the same income.  But at least some of that difference is a matter of choice.  Are you willing to tax an Iowa family with a potentially lower income level to help that New York family?  Or do you tax the New York family more?  In spite of the federal tax deduction for state income and property tax payments, richer states — with higher costs of living — tend to pay more in federal taxes than they get back.  This is justified in the name of progressivity. But if you you take the cost of living argument seriously, progressivity might cut in the other direction.

As I’ve said here before, I’m not quite ready to get on the Hillary bandwagon.  But I have to give her kudos for the set of work-family proposals that she laid out at her YWCA speech yesterday.  No one else in either party is talking about these issues at all, and she’s got all the key points there — child care, paid sick days, expanding the FMLA.  She’s even included a "right to request" flexible work conditions, modeled on the UK law.

If you had told me in 1992 that one day Hillary Clinton was going to be a candidate for president, this is the kind of thing that I would have expected from her.

Hopefully it will make the other candidates, at least on the Democratic side, feel that they have to address these issues as well.  I know that one of Obama’s senior aides used to work on these issues, so I’m sure she’s got a list of suggestions.