I generally agree with nearly everything Slate’s Jacob Weisberg writes, but yesterday’s piece on Bush’s alleged “war on poverty” seems badly mistaken.
Weisberg’s thesis, in a nutshell, is that the president has unveiled a plan, at long last, with real and specific “anti-poverty ideas.” Instead of criticizing Bush’s agenda, Weisberg says, the president’s critics should go along with the ideas.
They should hold back on their specific objections — some of which are valid, some of which are not — and let Bush have his way with the reconstruction. Making New Orleans a test site for conservative social policy ideas could shake out any number of ways politically. But all of us have a stake in an experiment that tells us whether conservative anti-poverty ideas, uh, work. If the conservative war on poverty succeeds, even in partial fashion, we will all be better for its success. And if it fails, we will have learned something important about how not to fight poverty.
Weisberg even goes so far as to say there’s been unusual hesitation on the part of the political establishment — on both sides — because the Bush agenda poses a risk for everyone. Conservatives may find out that “their utopia might not be so dreamy after all,” while liberals might discover that some right-wing ideas “actually work.”
All of this sounds fairly compelling at first blush. Who’s afraid of some policy experimentation? An aggressive leader offers innovative and untested ideas to reduce poverty; his opposition — that actually cares about poverty — shouldn’t dismiss them without considering their merit, even if that means giving the ideas a shot.
But the point I think Weisberg falls short on is appreciating recent history on the subject. Almost none of Bush’s “anti-poverty ideas” are new — and when they’ve been tried, they’ve failed.
Bush, for example, suspended Davis-Bacon Act so that workers along the Gulf Coast will make less money. New and innovative? No, Bush’s father did the same thing after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and it did nothing to help improve wages or rebuild affected areas.
Bush also came up with the idea of giving casinos tax breaks in Mississippi. Worth a shot? The state tried this in 1994 and it had “zero impact.”
Bush has embraced vouchers for religious and other private schools. Pioneering policy? Of course not. Vouchers — and voucher experiments — have been around for years.
Bush has put a political operative (Karl Rove) in charge of the reconstruction effort? A new idea? Maybe so, but hardly something to brag about.
Bush endorsed “Gulf Opportunity Zones.” An idea Dems should consider? Not if they want to see the region actually benefit.
The idea of spurring business activity in needy areas with tax incentives has been tried by both state and federal governments many times before, but economists who’ve looked at the record find no evidence that such schemes work. Urban areas that don’t get tax breaks appear to fare as well as those that do get them, perhaps because business decisions on where to locate are driven overwhelmingly by nontax issues such as proximity to desirable workers and customers or the quality of local infrastructure. Enterprise zones therefore wind up subsidizing businesses that would have invested there anyway. They depress tax revenue without generating any compensating benefit.
Moreover, Mr. Bush isn’t just dusting off a failed policy tool. He’s proposing a particularly bad version of it. Unlike many enterprise zones, the GO Zone offers tax breaks for investment but not for job creation. And unlike nearly all others, it lavishes subsidies not only on desirable businesses but also on dubious ones that clearly don’t need tax incentives.
Weisberg may be under the impression that many on the left reject Bush’s ideas out of hand, reflexively, simply because of their source. In some instances, that may, unfortunately, be true.
But this isn’t the case here. Dems and other Bush critics don’t care for most of Bush’s Gulf Coast plan because we actually believe these are bad ideas. We see little point to experimenting with a right-wing policy agenda that’s already failed in the past.
“Let Bush have his way with the reconstruction”? Given his record, and the record of this agenda, no thanks.