By now it seems pretty clear that Senator Ted Cruz has a plan to occupy the White House. But he doesn’t want people to know too much about it. And he definitely doesn’t want you to know about the special interests that have already begun to bankroll…
AS ANY foreigner can tell you, Americans love their coffee. It is a watered-down percolation compared with the eye-twitchingly strong varieties sold in little thimbles in many European cafés, but it is coffee nonetheless. A decent cup of tea, however…
Whatever the ultimate benefits of Obamacare, it's clear that the rollout of its $400m registration system and website has been a disaster. Healthcare.gov was unusable for millions who visited the site on launch day earlier this month, and the glitches reportedly continue. What went wrong?
Of course, the Obama administration is to blame for the botched rollout, but there are other culprits getting less attention – namely, global tech conglomerate CGI, which was responsible for the bulk of the execution, and in general the ability of big corporations to get massive taxpayer-funded contracts without enough accountability.
Government outsourcing to private contractors has exploded in the past few decades. Taxpayers funnel hundreds of billions of dollars a year into the chosen companies' pockets, about $80bn of which goes to tech companies. We've reached a stage of knee-jerk outsourcing of everything from intelligence and military work to burger flipping in federal building cafeterias, and it's damaging in multiple levels.
For one thing, farming work out often rips off taxpayers. While the stereotype is that government workers are incompetent, time-wasters drooling over their Texas Instruments keyboards as they amass outsized pensions, studies show that keeping government services in house saves money. In fact, contractor billing rates average an astonishing 83% more than what it would cost to do the work in-house. Hiring workers directly also keeps jobs here in the US, while contractors, especially in the IT space, can ship taxpayer-funded work overseas.
Fortunately, then, there are alternatives to outsourcing public functions to big corporations padding their profits at taxpayers' collective expense, and it is time we used them.
To this end the Healthcare.gov experience should serve as a wake-up call to President Obama, who, after all, said early in his first term he wanted to rein in the contractor-industrial complex, and to the state governments doling out multi-million dollar contracts. The revelation here is that an overdependence on outsourcing isn't just risky in terms of national security, extortionate at wartime, or harmful because it expands the ranks of low-wage workers; it's also messing with our ability to carry out basic government functions at a reasonable cost.
Like many contractors, CGI got an open-ended deal from the government, and costs have ballooned even as performance has been abysmal. The company – the largest tech company in Canada with subsidiaries around the world – was initially awarded a $93.7m contract, but now the potential total value for CGI's work has reportedly tripled, reaching nearly $292m.
Sadly, Healthcare.gov is but one high-profile example of the sweet deals corporations get to do government work—even as they fail to deliver. For other recent examples, one need only look at the botched, taxpayer-funded overhauls of the Massachusetts, Florida and California unemployment systems, courtesy of Deloitte.
In Massachusetts alone, professional services giant Deloitte got $46m to roll out a new electronic system for unemployment claims. The company, whose private-sector whippersnappers were expected to lap the crusty bureaucrats the state employs directly, delivered the project two years late and $6m over budget. On top of that, the system has forced jobless residents to wait weeks to months to collect benefits. One unemployed man who filed a claim for benefits instead received an erroneous bill charging him $45,339. A slap in the face of absurd proportions.
Similarly, the rollouts in Florida and California, which each cost about $63m, can only be described as train wrecks: late, over budget and riddled with glitches that delayed payments to the jobless.
It doesn't have to be this way. We can save money, create good jobs, and get more for each taxpayer dollar by simply by in-sourcing government work. Doing so would mean actually having faith that the government can employ top talent instead of making unfounded assumptions that anyone receiving a government check is a waste of space who can't possibly innovate. Think about it: Why couldn't we, the taxpayers, have just directly hired the finest minds in tech to build Healthcare.gov?
Unfortunately, while Obama promised to focus on insourcing at the start of his presidency, federal workers have instead received multiple kicks in the teeth. There are now 20%, or 676,000, fewer federal workers since the size of that workforce peaked in mid-2010. Recall, too, that Obama froze federal worker pay for two years following the 2010 congressional elections. Now the sequester – a fancy word for the government cuts that started this year – is causing further damage, and could cost 100,000 more federal jobs within a year. Deep cuts to state and local governments continue at the same time.
If we're not going to insource work – presumably because anti-government types successfully peddle the useless bureaucrat stereotype – we should at least have a better process for picking contractors that benefit from taxpayer largesse to carry out public projects. It may be hard to believe in light of the Healthcare.gov experience, but there are examples of successful government outsourcing arrangements in IT. One key to their success, a Government Accountability Office study pointed out, is consistent communication with, and monitoring of, contractors. Penalties for cost overruns, failing to deliver by agreed-upon deadlines and other forms of mismanagement would help, too.
Of course, we also need a more competitive bidding process, and a more thorough examination of the track record of any company up for a giant government contract.
Putting all of these systems in place takes time and money, which is one reason why direct government hiring is preferable. But regardless of whether we start insourcing or improving oversight or both, one thing is clear: we need to stop blindly throwing taxpayer money at corporations while not holding them accountable.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
"We choose to go to the moon." So said John F Kennedy in September 1962 as he pledged a manned lunar landing by the end of the decade.
The US president knew that his country's space programme would be expensive. He knew it would have its critics. But he took the long-term view. Warming to his theme in Houston that day, JFK went on: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
That was the world's richest country at the apogee of its power in an age where both Democrats and Republicans were prepared to invest in the future. Kennedy's predecessor Dwight Eisenhower took a plan for a system of interstate highways and made sure it happened.
Contrast that with today's America, which looks less like the leader of the free world than a banana republic with a reserve currency. Planning for the long term now involves last ditch deals on Capitol Hill to ensure that the federal government can remain open until January and debts can be paid at least until February.
The US is not the only country with advanced short-termism; it merely provides the most egregious example of the disease. This is a world of fast food and short attention spans; of politicians so dominated by a 24/7 news agenda that they have lost the habit of planning for the long term. Britain provides another example of the trend. Governments of both left and right have for years put energy policy in the "too hard to think about box". They have not been able to make up their minds whether to commit to renewables (which is what Germany has done) or to nuclear (which is what the French have done). As a result, the nation of Rutherford is now prepared to have a totalitarian country take a majority stake in a new generation of nuclear power stations.
Politics, technology and human nature all militate in favour of kicking the can down the road. The most severe financial and economic crisis in more than half a century has further discouraged policymakers from raising their eyes from the present to the distant horizon.
Clearly, though, the world faces long-term challenges that will only become more acute through prevarication. These include coping with a bigger and ageing global population; ensuring growth is sustainable and equitable; providing the resources to pay for modern transport and energy infrastructure; and reshaping international institutions so that they represent the world as it is in the early 21st century rather than as it was in 1945.
Pascal Lamy had a stab at tackling some of these difficult issues last week when he presented the findings of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations, which the former World Trade Organisation chief has been chairing for the past year.
The commission's report, Now for the Long Term, looks at some of so-called megatrends that will shape the world in the decades to come, and lists the challenges under five headings: society; resources; health; geopolitics and governance.
Change will be difficult, the study suggests, because problems are complex, institutions are inadequate, faith in politicians is low, and short-termism is well-entrenched. It cites examples of collective success – such as the Montreal convention to prevent ozone depletion, the establishment of the Millennium Development Goals, and the G20 action to prevent the great recession of 2008-09 turning into a full-blown global slump. It also cites examples of collective failure, such as depletion of fish stocks and the deadlocked Copenhagen climate change summit of 2009.
The report comes up with a range of long-term ideas worthy of serious consideration. It urges a coalition between the G20, 30 companies and 40 cities to spearhead the fight against climate change; it would like "sunset clauses" for all publicly funded international institutions to ensure they are fit for purpose; the removal of perverse subsidies on hydrocarbons and agriculture, with the money redirected to the poor; the introduction of CyberEx, an early warning platform aimed at preventing cyber-attacks; a Worldstat statistical agency to collect and ensure the quality of data; and investment in the younger generation through conditional cash transfers and job guarantees.
Lamy expressed concern that the ability to address challenges is being undermined by the absence of a "collective vision for society". The purpose of the report, he said, was to build "a chain from knowledge to awareness to mobilising political energy to action".
Full marks for trying, but this is easier said than done. Take trade, where Lamy has spent the past decade, first as Europe's trade commissioner then as head of the WTO, trying to piece together a new multilateral deal. This is an area in which all 150-plus WTO members agree in principle about the need for greater liberalisation but in which it has proved impossible to reach agreement in talks that started in 2001.
Nor will a shake-up of the international institutions be plain sailing. It is a given that developing countries, especially the bigger ones such as China, India and Brazil, should have a bigger say in the way the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are run. Yet it has proved hard to persuade countries in the developed world to cede some of their voting rights and the deal is still being held up owing to foot-dragging by the US. These, remember, are the low hanging fruit.
Another conclave of the global great and good is looking at what should be done in one of the much tricker areas, climate change. The premise of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate is that nothing will be done unless finance ministers are convinced of the need for action, especially given the damage caused by a deep recession and sluggish recovery. Instead of preaching to the choir, the plan is to show how to achieve key economic objectives – growth, investment, secure public finances, fairer distribution of income – while protecting the planet. The pitch to finance ministers will be that tackling climate change will require plenty of upfront investment that will boost growth rather than harm it.
Will this approach work? Well, maybe. But it will require business to see the long-term benefits of greening the economy as well as the short-term costs, because that would lead to the burst of technological innovation needed to accelerate progress. And it will require the same sort of commitment it took to win a world war or put a man on the moon.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Malala is one of a number of girls being idolized by adults – following a change parallel to the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s
When Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old schoolgirl and youngest Nobel nominee, appeared on the Daily Show earlier this month, host Jon Stewart seemed, for the first time, disarmed. Later, he'd be left speechless by her eloquence but his first, stuttering words to her were: "It's honestly humbling to meet you. You are 16..."
Those two statements sum up an internationally felt, two-part awe: first, how is she so brave and formidable and, second, how is she so young?
Malala has been a campaigner for girls' rights to education since she was 11, when she began blogging for the BBC about life in Pakistan under Taliban rule, but she became an international symbol of peaceful resistance and valour after an attempt on her life last year.
She has said that up until then, despite being told that she was a target, she couldn't believe that anyone would try to shoot a teenage girl. Instead: "I was worried about my father [also an activist] – we thought that the Taliban are not that much cruel that they would kill a child."
Her courage and her achievements are enormous regardless of her youth: she has defied arguably the world's most tyrannical and brutal regime and she not only survived an assassination attempt at 15, but was emboldened by it. In a speech delivered at the United Nations soon afterwards, she said: "The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born."
All this is more than enough to justify the worldwide adulation she has elicited. But what makes her compelling even beyond this, and why she will endure, is the fact of her girlness. Like her, we all find the idea of someone shooting a child in the head unconscionable. But when that child is a girl, it seems more shocking: we are told that girls are vulnerable, more vulnerable than boys. More insidiously, we are told that girls are trivial, dismissible and inherently risible. The word "girl" remains something like an insult – to throw like a girl, to act like a girl, to cry like a girl.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton seemed to acknowledge this girl-scorn and to celebrate its subversion when she joined the ranks of world leaders praising Malala. Speaking in April, she said: "The Taliban recognised this young girl, 14 at the time, as a serious threat. And you know what? They were right. She was a threat. "
Malala, then, is not just an emblem for peace: she's heralding a shift in the way we valorise and lionise girlhood.
Lorde, aka 16-year-old New Zealander Ella Yelich O'Connor, has not survived gunshot wounds to the head or been nominated for the Nobel peace prize, but she is, like Malala, now a near-global teenage heroine. (One who's just released a debut album aptly, if impudently, named Pure Heroine.) There isn't anything novel or remarkable about a teenager topping the charts – youth has always been pop's favourite commodity – but there is everything novel and remarkable about a school age pop star who speaks eloquently about feminism, cites writers such as Wells Tower and Tobias Wolff as influences, and references the relationship between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish. Lorde's poise and precocity are at play in Royals, which has been the number one song in the US for the past three weeks. This has to be the first time that a critique of wealth – sly and knowing and lyrical and written by a schoolgirl – has found itself a number one hit.
Lorde has a fan, and vice versa, in 17-year-old Tavi Gevinson, who began her career at 11 with Style Rookie, a fashion blog so astute that national news outlets suggested it was written by an insider.
In the years since then Gevinson has deftly navigated her way from fashion world curio – a granny-spectacled cutie whom famous people loved having their picture taken with – to a global media powerhouse, a 17-year-old public figure idolised by as many adults as teens. Rookie, founded in 2011, announces itself as a site for teenage girls, but with some of the most enlightened interviews and columns around, it has found as passionate an audience among grown women. I'm nearly 30, but, like every woman I know, I read her website every day.
As the online magazine Slate put it recently: "People seem to recognise that Tavi Gevinson is doing great things for girls. The truth is actually much more impressive: She is doing great things. Adults need not turn to Rookie out of nostalgia or to experience catharsis. Read it because it is singular."
Among several grown women employed by Gevinson (her staff reportedly refer to her as "tiny boss")is 42-year-old Anaheed Alani, who has said: "I said I wouldn't work for anyone who isn't smarter than me, and it's still the case."
Of the many astute things to come out of Gevinson's mouth, this might be the most important: "Feminism to me means fighting. It's a very nuanced, complex thing, but at the very core of it I'm a feminist because I don't think being a girl limits me in any way."
Figures such as Tavi, Malala and Lorde – girls publicly admired for their convictions and the boldness of their actions – might help us all reclaim "girlhood" as a state of strength. Through them, we might start to think of the term "teen idol" differently. We might, in fact, upend it entirely. Because rather than pubescent celebrities adored by tweens (and monetised by the music and movie industries) for their non-threatening attractiveness, these are teenagers idolised by adults for their intelligence and courage.
Pop culture loves the kick-ass version of girlhood. It's a lineage that began in the girl-power 1990s with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and runs on to Xena: Warrior Princess and Katniss of The Hunger Games. But, to put it bluntly, these girl characters are presented as heroes simply through the violence they enact. They look cool doing it (Jennifer Lawrence smouldering down the sightline of a bow and arrow in The Hunger Games, an avenging Hailee Steinfeld toting a pistol in True Grit, or Chloe Moretz karate-kicking as a superhero in the Kick Ass movies) but, to borrow Malala's words: "If you hit a Talib with a shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly; you must fight others through peace and through dialogue and education."
To put it another way, the heroism of peaceful activism is greater than the slings and arrows of outrageous badassery.
Consider Tuesday Cain, a 14-year-old who protested against the abortion laws in Texas with a sign that read, "Jesus isn't a dick so keep him out of my vagina" and was called a "whore" online. But, writing on women's website xojane.com, she said that the experience hasn't made her any less passionate "about fighting for a woman's right to choose and the separation of church and state".
Ilana Nash is an associate professor at Western Michigan University in the gender and women's studies department and the author of American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture. I ask her why it is that the culture is yielding these real life girl-heroes now.
"Teenage girlhood has followed a parallel motion to the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s," she says. "Just as it was a result of second-wave feminism for women to become political icons, so is it now possible for teenage girls to be admired and publicised as political agents. In other words, girlhood is starting, in a small way, to follow the same trajectory that adult womanhood has in the last generation."
She also identifies as a factor "the student-centred classroom" educational movement of the 1990s, whereby America's public schools put the student and his or her needs first.
"Our shift towards making young people a 'centre' of discussion," she says, "is that we are now more inclined to take seriously the actions of young people. When a young person of either sex does something politically amazing or socially powerful, we are more prone to give it headline space. Especially young females."
The artist Lorde beat to the number one spot is Miley Cyrus, but it would be reductive to take this as some kind of symbolic triumph of thoughtfulness over sexiness (as though the two are mutually exclusive). More noise, after all, has been made over Cyrus's body than Lorde's words. "It is still a world where sexiness and cuteness dominate our images of girls," Nash agrees. "The difference now is that it's no longer the only story being told. There is a widening of the discourse – discussing teen girls as political agents is now part of what is possible."
In a recent interview with Kamila Shamsie, Malala reflected on the Talib who shot her: "He was quite young, in his 20s ... he was quite young, we may call him a boy."
We might – and allowing him his youth is an act of almost superhuman magnanimity on her part. When she calls him a boy, she's virtually pardoning him. In contrast, when we now call her a girl we're simply paying her a compliment.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
In a just universe, America's civil servants would be back at work and Congress would be on indefinite furlough.
Federal workers don't create budget crises, yet whenever we have one, they're the ones getting screwed. This time is no different. They can take some comfort in the rock-bottom approval ratings for Congress – currently hovering somewhere between hemorrhoids and Charles Manson – and specifically for the House Tea Party caucus that precipitated the shutdown. But this is an old story: we all hate Congress, but love our own representatives. Members of Congress don't answer to national polls, they answer to their constituents. And thanks to redistricting, a large chunk of the House Republicans are insulated in ultra-conservative districts that have been gerrymandered to a point beyond all recognition to the rest of the country (while the remainder live in fear of getting challenge in the primaries if they don't go along with the former's reckless endeavors).
This is why Representative Ted Yoho, described by the New York Times as "a freshman Florida Republican who had no experience in elective office before this year [who] said the largest economy on earth should learn from his large-animal veterinary practice", suggested "if they're not working, they shouldn't get paid", regarding those federal workers he helped put out of work. Yoho wasn't just spouting off; he was at a town hall meeting responding to a caller from his home district who complained about the federal workers "at home watching Netflix or whatever", as if being furloughed had been their choice.
In the end, even Congressman Yoho went along with the rest of the House, which unanimously voted to provide back pay to furloughed workers whenever the shutdown ends. But the promise of a check at some uncertain, future date doesn't cover rent, groceries or electricity bills now for the 800,000 workers affected, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck. Federal workers have reported taking out loans, selling possessions on eBay, and getting second jobs (the Department of Energy helpfully posted guidelines for moonlighting: bartending is OK, lobbying for energy companies is not). In a member survey by the National Treasury Employees Union, 84% reported cutting back (pdf) on necessities, and nearly half have delayed medical treatment to save money.
Elizabeth Lytle, a furloughed administrative program assistant with the Environmental Protection Agency in Illinois and retired navy reservist, says:
The shutdown has put tremendous financial stress on my family. There's no money coming in. In September my husband was laid off, and I was furloughed the first of October. And if the VA doesn't get any money, I won't get my disability check at the end of the month.
As for back pay, "I'll believe it when I see it." Lytle notes that as a result of the EPA shutdown, cleanup at a nearby superfund site in Waukegan (the former location of a large outboard-boat-motor manufacturing plant and a former railroad tie, coal gasification, and coke plant facility) has stopped.
Yet it's not just a matter of a handful of stubborn legislators. Politicians like Yoho reflect a nasty political current within a part of the American electorate: that civil servants like Lytle are not real workers, that they don't matter, that their livelihoods are expendable for the sake of some broader ideological agenda.
It's reflected by conservative radio host Laura Ingraham gloating "Starve the beast!" in response to furloughs at the IRS, by Tea Party protesters heckling White House police with calls of "brownshirts" and "Stasi".
Starve the beast! "@politico: Furloughs to shut down IRS for a day: https://t.co/eKANDoRnpN"
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) May 15, 2013
It could be seen during the last round of furloughs resulting from sequestration (for which workers did not receive back pay), when Fox News' Neil Cavuto wondered out loud if this isn't a good thing:
Maybe we have too many federal workers in the first place period, if there's any place to cut it's got to be there.
Civil servants make a handy punching bag. They're to blame for deficits, although total expenditures on federal employees (both civilian and military) make up about 13% of the federal budget far less than Social Security or Medicare, and, according to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, firing every single federal worker in the country would only shrink the deficit by a third. It's an easy sell to balance budgets on the backs of civil servants: the last budget crisis resulted in federal workers being denied cost-of-living raises for the third straight year, along with agency budget cuts and layoffs. In their competing budget proposals, both President Obama and Paul Ryan agreed to cutting federal employee retirement benefits; the only question is by how much.
Anti-government hysteria has fueled everything from congressional kamikaze attacks on Obamacare to actual kamikaze attacks on federal buildings, and those who get hurt are inevitably people doing their jobs.
Bureaucracies are easy to despise when they make us wait at the Department if Motor Vehicles and take for granted when they fix the roads, but no society of laws can function without one. Now that veterans' and Social Security claims are going unprocessed, food is not being inspected, parks are closed, and Head Start programs are not staffed, maybe the anti-government caucus will change its tune. But don't count on a salmonella outbreak or two changing much. Things might be different if voters elected more federal workers to Congress.
House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio addresses reporters at the Capitol, Oct. 10. House Republicans are still weighing a short-term debt-limit increase. Op-ed contributor Jeremy D. Mayer writes: This deal 'won’t eliminate the debate over spending…
Never before has a minority party linked controversial legislative demands with a threat to shut down the government or imperil the global economy. But House Republicans would have you believe otherwise. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal this morning…
Government shutdown theater has given us some surreal moments. Heard of the "trillion-dollar coin"? Obama actually mentioned it on Monday. It's a half-serious solution that some wonks have floated to solve the debt ceiling crisis, if "floated" is the right word for a coin that figures into most people's imagination as a giant, sweepstakes-style money cartoon.
Then there's Senator Ted Cruz reading children's books on the US Senate floor, a move that will undoubtedly give future historians and/or alien visitors curious ideas about the possible role of star-bellied sneetches (Cruz is a fan of Dr Seuss books) in our legislative process. Constant references to hostage-taking and suicide bombers will provide those same analysts with an exaggerated (though not by much) picture of gun violence in the early 21st century.
But you haven't witnessed the truly crazy until you turn on Fox News or browse the right-wing websites.
Here's a piece of absurdism you can appreciate right now: the image of a janus-faced conservative media talking head, with one mouth defiantly denouncing the impact of the government shutdown, and the other wailing at the costs of keeping government going. Sean Hannity, no great advocate of consistency anyway, has sputtered these two thoughts within minutes of each other. "The government is not totally shut down! Seventeen percent is it!" he told listeners Monday, before confiding that he believes the GOP will prevail, since "the public will side with the group that's willing to talk".
Laura Ingraham her listeners that she was "beginning to enjoy" the shutdown; she also tweeted out her apparently earnest concern that the closure of a parking lot on federal land meant that "ppl risk their lives pulling off the GW Pkwy".
Fox News has been a funhouse of these distorted twin thoughts, not surprisingly, with guest after guest mocking the seriousness of the shutdown; in a particularly Orwellian stroke, someone at the network even did a search-and-replace on AP stories run on the site, replacing "shutdown" with "slimdown". At the same time, they've given breathless coverage to a highly-selective pool of "slimdown" victims: first, the second world war veterans who faced some inconvenience at the war's memorial, and, more recently privately-funded parks and – incorrectly – the nation's missing-child "Amber Alert" system.
Let's unpack this rhetoric, since it's wholly representative of the coverage that conservative media has given the shutdown. With one side of your head, you need to remember that government is bad, and that the less of it there is, the better. Supporting that thought is the belief that a government "slimdown" won't disrupt any of the government's more important functions.
With the other side of your head, you need to dredge up righteous indignation at the loss of some government functions. It almost doesn't matter which ones, though it's helpful if they are services that strike a sympathetic chord without being, you know, necessary. The right-wing Washington Examiner has some examples to get you started, including "Lake Mead, NV property owners" and "tourists".
Now, try to stand up. Do you feel a little dizzy? Seeing double? You better sit back down.
How is it that so many conservatives seem able to not just stand, but stand for hours and hours and hours holding both these thoughts in their heads? It would be easy to dismiss them as cynics, that perhaps they don't believe either proposition. But as the remarks about "being willing to compromise" caught on a hot mic between Republican Senators Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell show, at least some of their convictions are sincere – maybe especially this part, "I know we don't want to be here, but we're gonna win this, I think."
Conservatives' problem is not so much that these are two ideas with no basis in fact, but that both ideas have some basis in fact.
That government is unpopular is the easy part. There's a long and even somewhat honorable history to that tenet of conservative philosophy. In fact, that's pretty much argument that the leaders of the shutdown strategy made over the summer to skeptical lawmakers and not-so-skeptical Tea Party activists.
There is one important difference between the small-government philosophy as espoused by, say, the Anti-Federalist Papers and the arguments made by the Tea Party Patriots and Heritage Action: the anti-federalists argued from logic, these modern-day PACs used a misleading poll. They asked voters in conservative districts if, "in order to get … Obama to agree to at least have a 'time out'" before implementing the Affordable Care Act, "would you approve or disapprove of a temporary slowdown in non-essential federal government operations, which still left all essential government services running?"
Well, if you put it that way … And, of course, they did put it that way, and found that voters supported a totally painless shutdown by a 2-to-1 margin.
And this gets us to the half-truth behind the outrage at "slimdown targets": however much you dislike the faceless bureaucracy of "the government", there are very few people who truly want to live without the services it provides. The traditional basis for party divisions has been in deciding what services it provides, and to whom. It makes us hypocrites; it makes us human. Most of us don't really try to argue two different philosophies at the same time, we cave to realism and sentiment. We agree to feed the children of poor families and pay for safety regulations to be enforced. We haggle over the small things because sometimes the big ideas are too large to be contained in a single debate, and it's foolish to even try.
F Scott Fitzgerald once called "hold[ing] two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain[ing] the ability to function" the "test of a first-rate intelligence", but when it comes to the GOP, the jury's out on the "functioning" part.
Are Americans dumb? This is a question that has been debated by philosophers, begrudging foreigners and late night TV talk show hosts for decades. Anyone who has ever watched the Tonight Show's "Jaywalking" segment in which host Jay Leno stops random passersby and asks them rudimentary questions like "What is Julius Caesar famous for?" (Answer: "Um, is it the salad?") might already have made their minds up on this issue. But for those of you who prefer to reserve judgement until definitive proof is on hand, then I'm afraid I have some depressing news. America does indeed have a problem in the smarts department and it appears to be getting worse, not better.
On Tuesday, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the results of a two-year study in which thousands of adults in 23 countries were tested for their skills in literacy, basic math and technology. The US fared badly in all three fields, ranking somewhere in the middle for literacy but way down at the bottom for technology and math.
This shouldn't be all that surprising as there is a well documented pattern of American school kids failing to keep up with their tiger cub counterparts in other countries. But these results are the first concrete proof that this skill gap is extending well beyond school and into adulthood. The question is, do the study's results imply, as the New York Post so delicately put it, that "US adults are dumber than your average human"? Hardly, but it does suggest that many Americans may not be putting the smarts they have to good use, or, more likely, that they are not getting the opportunity to do so. Put another way: it's inequality, stupid.
Just a quick scan of the countries that fared really well in all three categories (Norway, Sweden, Japan, Finland and the Netherlands) compared to the countries that fared really badly (America and Britain) gives a pretty good indication that the inequality that is rampant in the (allegedly) dumber nations might have something to do with their pitifully low scores. A closer look at the results is also revealing. The incomes of Americans who scored the highest on literacy tests are on average 60% higher than the incomes of Americans with the lowest literacy scores, who were also twice as likely to be unemployed. So broadly speaking, the better off the American, the better they did on the tests.
Now this is just a wild guess, but could this possibly have something to do with the fact that the kind of schools a poor American kid will have access to are likely to be significantly inferior to the kinds of schools wealthier kids get to attend? Or that because of this, a poor kid's chances of getting into a good university, even if she could manage to pay for it, are also severely compromised? And let me go one step further and suggest that the apparent acceleration of America's dumbing down might be directly connected with the country's rising poverty rates.
Before I go on, I should say that even I can see some holes in the above theory. You only have to look at certain members of congress (read Republicans who forced the government to shutdown last week), for instance, many of whom attended some of the finest universities (and make bucket loads of money), to see that even an Ivy League education may be of little use to a person who is simply prone to stupidity. I should add also that many people believe that it's the large immigrant population (of which I'm a member) who are responsible for bringing down the nation's IQ, which further complicates the dumb American narrative. Indeed one could argue all day about the reasons Americans are falling behind, (Woody Allen blames fast food), but we should at least be able to agree on the remedies.
Here's the thing, most economists agree that in this technology driven age, a highly skilled workforce is key to any real economic recovery. It doesn't bode well for the future then that so many American students, particularly low-income and minority students, are graduating high school without basic reading or math skills. Nor does it inspire confidence that students who leave school without basic skills are not acquiring them as adults. So America's alleged dumbness has a lot to do with inadequate schooling for (poor) children and teenagers and a dearth of continuing education opportunities for low-income adults. By contrast, the OECD study found that in (more equal) countries that fared better in the tests, like Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands, more than 60% of the adult population have engaged in continuing education programs or on the job training.
The smart thing to do then surely would be to pour resources into early and continuing education opportunities so that American adults will be equipped with the necessary skills to compete in the global economy. This is where the dumb argument really gets a boost, however, because the opposite is happening. Those same congressional geniuses I alluded to earlier are also responsible for forcing through the cuts known as sequestration, which among other things cut 5% from the federal education budget. Because federal education funding is doled out according to the number of low-income students in a given school, it is poor children, the ones who most need the help, who are being disproportionately impacted by the cuts. Furthermore since 2010, almost $65m, over one-tenth of the entire budget, has been cut from adult education grants.
So are Americans dumb? The answer appears to be yes, some are. The dumb ones are not the poor minorities or low skilled adults who fared badly on the OECD tests, however, but a certain privileged and selfish elite, who have suffered from no want of opportunities themselves, yet seem to think that denying millions of struggling Americans an equal (or indeed any) opportunity to get ahead is a sensible way forward. The results are in now and clearly it isn't. The question is will enough Americans be smart enough to do something about it?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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