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ronald reagan
Reagan Was Wrong: Government Can Be Great, Actually
Like so much of what came out of Reagan’s mouth, this clever quip provided a folksy façade for a brutal attack on the most vulnerable Americans. Before Reagan’s election in 1980, homeless shelters and evictions were rare. Then Reagan and a compliant Congress laid waste to our nation’s safety net, including cutting investment in affordable housing by nearly 80%.
As many of our clinic clients can attest, well-trained, dedicated experts who answer to the people instead of some wealthy donors are the gold standard for housing inspection and code enforcement.
The U.S. commitment to affordable housing has never fully recovered. Urban policy scholar Peter Dreier lays the blame where it belongs: “Every park bench in America—everywhere a homeless person sleeps—should have Ronald Reagan’s name on it.”
This vicious Reagan legacy is important to remember as President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans trot out the same anti-government talking points to support a legislative agenda that would gut healthcare and food programs.
The government-harms shtick is just as false today as in Reagan’s time. Study after study shows that government assistance with food, healthcare, and housing makes tangible, positive impacts on people’s lives, from newborns to the elderly. And government programs deliver these essential services more efficiently and inexpensively than private charity programs, not to mention at a scale that even the most ambitious billionaire philanthropy can only dream of.
Our law school clinic’s work representing people facing eviction and living in unsafe and unhealthy rental housing provides us with a very specific example of government working well.
In our community as in many others, a local government agency is tasked with ensuring the safety of housing, including rental housing. Here, the agency is called the Marion County Public Health Department. (Indianapolis is located within Marion County.)
From the Government, and Here to Help
Our clients can simply call the agency’s phone number for housing inspections and describe the situation in their rented home, a situation that far too often includes mold, infestation with bugs or rodents, no heat during the winter, gas leaks, and more. A trained inspector will then come out to the home within days and issue a formal report and notice to the landlord soon after. This article includes a sample of those reports. As you can see, it includes the threat of substantial fines.
The inspectors’ reports often spur landlords to fix the problems. When they don’t, the agency can and does file a lawsuit against the landlord. Tenants can also file a claim of their own asking for rent offset or other damages due to the unsafe, unhealthy conditions.
Low-income tenants face a power imbalance: Landlords are far more wealthy than tenants, have access to attorneys that tenants rarely do, and of course control continued access to the very roof over tenants’ heads. But when this government agency intervenes, it flips the script, putting pressure on landlords to bring the housing up to code.
The agency is not perfect, of course. Our clinic and other advocates have joined with City County councilors to advocate for the agency to reverse their policy of dropping inspections and enforcement after tenants move out. But one of the defining characteristics of government programs is a benefit that no nonprofit agency can ever match: They are accountable to the community. Ultimately, that accountability is exercised at the ballot box for the agency leaders or those who appoint them.
So the advocacy here has borne fruit and the agency now continues to do its important scrutiny even after tenants move out.
The current revival of anti-government sentiment has impacted this local public health agency, with the Republican-controlled state legislature cutting its funding by more than 70%. More of the playbook from the president who asked in 1982, “Wouldn’t it be better for the human spirit and for the soul of this nation to encourage people to accept more responsibility to care for one another, rather than leaving those tasks to paid bureaucrats?”
Nope. As many of our clinic clients can attest, well-trained, dedicated experts who answer to the people instead of some wealthy donors are the gold standard for housing inspection and code enforcement. Those inspectors are from the government, and they are here to help.
Neoliberalism Cannot Be Rehabilitated
In the first three decades after World War II, the typical American’s pay rose in tandem with the nation’s growing productivity. The benefits from higher productivity were broadly shared.
But then, starting in the late 1970s and dramatically after 1980, pay barely grew, even as productivity continued to soar. The benefits from higher productivity went increasingly to the top.
Why?
I’ve been looking into this question for a long time.
I’ve also been living it, as head of policy for the Federal Trade Commission under Jimmy Carter, secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, and an economic adviser to Obama. I’ve chronicled this in my upcoming memoir, Coming Up Short.
Much of the answer has to do with a giant upward shift in power.
It started in 1971, with a memo written for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by Lewis Powell exhorting corporations to play a far more active role in American politics. They did, and their increasingly active role paid off, at least for their CEOs and top investors.
It continued through Reagan’s tax cuts and deregulation, his legitimization of union bashing, and the emergence of corporate raiders who insisted that corporations maximize shareholder value above all else.
And onward through George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement, their support for China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, and their deregulation of Wall Street.
And then through George W. Bush’s tax cut — again, mainly for big corporations and wealthy individuals — and Barack Obama’s bailout of Wall Street after it nearly destroyed the world economy.
Deregulation. Privatization. Tax cuts. Free trade. Stagnant pay for most. A soaring stock market for the top.
That’s the legacy of neoliberalism.
It also brought us Trump — who exploited the anger and resentment stirred up by all this and pretended to be a strongman on the side of the working class (while quietly giving the emerging American oligarchy everything else it wanted, including a giant tax cut; he’s readying another as you read this).
Now some neoconservatives, posing as “moderates,” are hijacking the story and trying to rehabilitate neoliberalism.
Consider David Brooks, who wrote recently in The New York Times that:
— “wages really did stagnate, but they did so mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, not in the supposed era of neoliberal globalism.” (Brooks is wrong. Look at the above chart. Pay did begin to head up again in the 2000s but the pay-productivity gap has continued to widen.)
— there was “a return to higher productivity and higher wage growth, from 1994 to today. That is to say: Median wages have grown since NAFTA and the W.T.O., not declined.” (Wrong again. Look at the chart.)
— “the inequality gap is not as great as one might think.” (Well, I think it significant, and most analysts agree.)
— “the basic approach to economic policymaking that prevailed between 1992 and 2017 was sensible and … our job today is to build on it.” (Sensible only as compared to Trump’s first and second terms. But as I said, hardly sensible when you consider that widening inequality combined with unbridled globalization, deregulation, and union-bashing contributed to the rise of Trump.)
Neoliberalism should not and cannot be rehabilitated.
We need instead a strong, bold progressive populism that strengthens democracy and widens prosperity by:
— busting up big corporations,
— stopping Wall Street’s gambling addiction (e.g. replicating the Glass-Steagall Act),
— getting big money out of politics, even if this requires amending the Constitution,
— requiring big corporations to share their profits with their average workers,
— strengthening unions, and
— raising taxes on the super-wealthy,
— to finance a universal basic income, Medicare for all, and paid family leave.
Those now trying to rehabilitate neoliberalism won’t like any of this, of course, but we cannot return to the path we were on. It will just lead to more Trumps, as far as the eye can see.
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