Self-Interest Protections of the Upscale Present Biggest Roadblocks to Our Most Pressing National Problems
Earlier this month, I cited the rising tide of identitarian grievance culture in our fast-diversifying nation as the most poisonous cultural trend facing the country heading into the new decade. It's hardly the only serious structural challenge facing us, as there are several others that all deserve their own blog entry. But as I thought about the pressing issues of our time, ranging from homelessness to exploding health care costs to climate change, it struck me that there was a unifying theme slowing or preventing progress on these matters, and it comes down to the self-interest protections of a bipartisan coalition of the upper class and upper middle-class.
I'll start with homelessness. Growing up in the 80s, I recall numerous news specials about the rising homeless population, with mental health cuts and public housing cuts by the Reagan administration cited as primary catalysts. It was a struggle to identify the numbers of homeless in America and continues to be today, but the most recent estimates suggest the homeless population in America has doubled since the Reagan years, ticking up particularly strongly in the West Coast where the tech boom has priced even utilitarian housing out of the reach of low-wage workers in city after city. Strict building codes in California in particular have made affordable housing a profitless enterprise for would-be developers, but there's more going on here and is not just limited to the West Coast. Existing homeowners are resisting development in their backyards.
From the perspective of a homeowner, particularly those with children, it's understandable that there would be some resistance to development in their neighborhood since housing the homeless potentially presents a heightened risk to public safety and property values. But from the perspective of the community and the human race, giving the residents of dozens of blocks worth of homeless encampments a permanent roof over their heads with a traceable mailing address is the more pressing priority. But as rising rates of mental illness and drug addiction drive homelessness and perceptions of the homeless among citizens, how can communities convince their homeowners to take one for the team and green light low-income housing unit construction next door to them?
Even with the existing population numbers, it'll be a struggle to house the rising tide of homeless in America's cities, but just imagine how much harder it will be with tens of millions of additional poor people added through immigration. And of course the irony is that most of the same upscale urbanites opposed to development in their backyards to house the existing cohort of low-income homeless are pretty much unanimous in their support of an immigration policy that will bring tens of millions more of the world's poor to their doorstep. And since new impoverished immigrants would be unlikely to settle in any real numbers in places like Youngstown, Ohio, or Flint, Michigan, where employment opportunities are ebbing, it's a reasonable assumption that they'll settle disproportionately in America's booming cities where there are vastly more employment opportunities than housing units for their workers. It's hard to see how this matter resolves itself.
Moving onto health care, an issue where out-of-control cost inflation is driving our current Rube Goldberg system to its breaking point. The stalemate here is also likely to persist primarily because upper-income Americans will have to make the lion's share of the sacrifice to break free of our employer-funded status quo and move toward universal care. The bottom line is that the better job one has, the more likely they are to have a health care plan with lower premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs. Those who have that are likely to pay more in higher taxes to fund a single-payer plan than they currently pay in premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs for their current health care plan...and will thus be harder to persuade to sign on for a single-payer plan that will primarily benefit others.
An excellent example of this demographic would be public employees, most of whom have union-negotiated health care plans. I fit this profile myself....and am quite certain that if Bernie Sanders' health care plan was passed into law, my personal spending on health care would increase while my quality of coverage would likely not. Now I'm an ideologue who would be willing to pay more in taxes for universal health care, but I have serious doubts whether most public employees would feel the same. And it's not just public employees. Plenty of professionals who work for booming technology or financial companies and generally lean to the left politically have really good health care plans through their employers....and will be skeptical and guarded about trading it in for a disruptive alternative. With the Democratic Party now fully dependent on these upscale, college-educated voters to win elections, they're in a very precarious situation politically by advocating for a disruptive health care alternative, even if it's indisputably what's needed to slay the dragon of our dysfunctional health care status quo.
Once again, the irony is that the demographics who would benefit most from switching from employer-based private health care to government-run single payer are the people most likely to oppose it. Whether it be farmers or small business owners stuck in outrageously expensive plans in the individual insurance market or factory workers and grocery store clerks in Middle America with junk plans offered through their employers, their health care costs would typically shrink much more than their taxes would go up if single-payer health care was enacted....but the tribalism of American culture today has convinced them that the primary recipients of single-payer health care would be "those people". The left has done itself zero favors with taking on this narrative when they collectively raise their hands when asked if illegal immigrants get to sign on for government health care. Millions of people otherwise open to the idea of single-payer health care will quit listening to whatever its advocates say if they think any human on the globe qualifies for it if they manage to land one pinky toe on American soil.
And lastly, climate change. It's an urgent problem with existential consequences for inaction or inadequate solutions, yet public support for taking it on appears to be a mile wide and an inch thick. I was taken aback by a poll released just last year that asked Americans if they'd be willing to pay $10 a month more on their utility bill if it went toward combating climate change....and an astounding 68% said they would not. That statistic gives me zero confidence in any public mandate for the much more sacrificial steps that will be necessary to truly take this issue on.
Now there's no telling what the class breakdown is of the supermajority of Americans who doesn't believe climate change is worth $10 a month to them, but those with a bully pulpit on this issue are generally people of means, and insofar as their carbon footprint vastly exceeds that of Joe Sixpack, it makes them incredibly poor messengers. No matter how many "carbon offsets" they profess to buy, anybody who flies around in private jets regularly, which is true of just about every national elected official, has a major credibility problem lecturing Joe Sixpack that he's destroying the planet by using a plastic bag to carry his groceries from his car to his house. This disconnect assures a major backlash to pretty much any sacrificial measure mandated on the public in the name of climate change.
Furthermore, the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau tell quite a story about contemporary settlement patterns. The regions of the country poised to be most affected by climate change happen to be the places experiencing the sharpest growth. The professional class and upper-middle class can't move quickly enough to the soon-to-be-underwater Florida shoreline or the drought-vulnerable, freshwater-insecure deserts of Texas, Arizona, and Nevada. So basically we're looking at the people best positioned politically, financially, and culturally to take on climate change resettling in areas where they will cause maximal ecological harm....and yet it's downscale West Virginia coal miners and Wisconsin dairy farmers who we're shaking our fists at for destroying the planet. The latter group will resent being scapegoated by the former group, and with good reason. The tribalism will almost certainly make meaningful legislation to curb climate change even harder to pull off.
It'll be interesting to assess a decade from now what progress has and hasn't been made on all three of these issues. A very telling poll from NBC News came out earlier this month on party affiliation at the beginning of this decade compared to the beginning of last decade. The topline numbers from January 2010 and January 2020 were identical, with Democrats holding a 42-37 identification advantage among voters. Breaking the numbers down by education level, however, and there was a political earthquake in the last decade. College-educated voters swing 13 points in the direction of Democrats while voters with a high school degree or less swung 16 points in the direction of Republicans. This partisan realignment speaks volumes about of how the public is poised to respond to the solutions undertaken to solve the biggest issues of our time.
It's hard to overstate just how much skepticism there will be to liberal policy diagnoses if the Democrats are perceived as the party of "the college boys". It won't be easy to break this fever, but the first step needs to be for the upper middle-class to show those on the other side of the tracks that they have skin in the game regarding the policies they prioritize. If they're seen as hypocrites protecting their self-interest while diagnosing a different set of rules for others, our tribal fault lines will fracture even more sharply and effective solutions to pressing national problems will be even more elusive.
I'll start with homelessness. Growing up in the 80s, I recall numerous news specials about the rising homeless population, with mental health cuts and public housing cuts by the Reagan administration cited as primary catalysts. It was a struggle to identify the numbers of homeless in America and continues to be today, but the most recent estimates suggest the homeless population in America has doubled since the Reagan years, ticking up particularly strongly in the West Coast where the tech boom has priced even utilitarian housing out of the reach of low-wage workers in city after city. Strict building codes in California in particular have made affordable housing a profitless enterprise for would-be developers, but there's more going on here and is not just limited to the West Coast. Existing homeowners are resisting development in their backyards.
From the perspective of a homeowner, particularly those with children, it's understandable that there would be some resistance to development in their neighborhood since housing the homeless potentially presents a heightened risk to public safety and property values. But from the perspective of the community and the human race, giving the residents of dozens of blocks worth of homeless encampments a permanent roof over their heads with a traceable mailing address is the more pressing priority. But as rising rates of mental illness and drug addiction drive homelessness and perceptions of the homeless among citizens, how can communities convince their homeowners to take one for the team and green light low-income housing unit construction next door to them?
Even with the existing population numbers, it'll be a struggle to house the rising tide of homeless in America's cities, but just imagine how much harder it will be with tens of millions of additional poor people added through immigration. And of course the irony is that most of the same upscale urbanites opposed to development in their backyards to house the existing cohort of low-income homeless are pretty much unanimous in their support of an immigration policy that will bring tens of millions more of the world's poor to their doorstep. And since new impoverished immigrants would be unlikely to settle in any real numbers in places like Youngstown, Ohio, or Flint, Michigan, where employment opportunities are ebbing, it's a reasonable assumption that they'll settle disproportionately in America's booming cities where there are vastly more employment opportunities than housing units for their workers. It's hard to see how this matter resolves itself.
Moving onto health care, an issue where out-of-control cost inflation is driving our current Rube Goldberg system to its breaking point. The stalemate here is also likely to persist primarily because upper-income Americans will have to make the lion's share of the sacrifice to break free of our employer-funded status quo and move toward universal care. The bottom line is that the better job one has, the more likely they are to have a health care plan with lower premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs. Those who have that are likely to pay more in higher taxes to fund a single-payer plan than they currently pay in premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs for their current health care plan...and will thus be harder to persuade to sign on for a single-payer plan that will primarily benefit others.
An excellent example of this demographic would be public employees, most of whom have union-negotiated health care plans. I fit this profile myself....and am quite certain that if Bernie Sanders' health care plan was passed into law, my personal spending on health care would increase while my quality of coverage would likely not. Now I'm an ideologue who would be willing to pay more in taxes for universal health care, but I have serious doubts whether most public employees would feel the same. And it's not just public employees. Plenty of professionals who work for booming technology or financial companies and generally lean to the left politically have really good health care plans through their employers....and will be skeptical and guarded about trading it in for a disruptive alternative. With the Democratic Party now fully dependent on these upscale, college-educated voters to win elections, they're in a very precarious situation politically by advocating for a disruptive health care alternative, even if it's indisputably what's needed to slay the dragon of our dysfunctional health care status quo.
Once again, the irony is that the demographics who would benefit most from switching from employer-based private health care to government-run single payer are the people most likely to oppose it. Whether it be farmers or small business owners stuck in outrageously expensive plans in the individual insurance market or factory workers and grocery store clerks in Middle America with junk plans offered through their employers, their health care costs would typically shrink much more than their taxes would go up if single-payer health care was enacted....but the tribalism of American culture today has convinced them that the primary recipients of single-payer health care would be "those people". The left has done itself zero favors with taking on this narrative when they collectively raise their hands when asked if illegal immigrants get to sign on for government health care. Millions of people otherwise open to the idea of single-payer health care will quit listening to whatever its advocates say if they think any human on the globe qualifies for it if they manage to land one pinky toe on American soil.
And lastly, climate change. It's an urgent problem with existential consequences for inaction or inadequate solutions, yet public support for taking it on appears to be a mile wide and an inch thick. I was taken aback by a poll released just last year that asked Americans if they'd be willing to pay $10 a month more on their utility bill if it went toward combating climate change....and an astounding 68% said they would not. That statistic gives me zero confidence in any public mandate for the much more sacrificial steps that will be necessary to truly take this issue on.
Now there's no telling what the class breakdown is of the supermajority of Americans who doesn't believe climate change is worth $10 a month to them, but those with a bully pulpit on this issue are generally people of means, and insofar as their carbon footprint vastly exceeds that of Joe Sixpack, it makes them incredibly poor messengers. No matter how many "carbon offsets" they profess to buy, anybody who flies around in private jets regularly, which is true of just about every national elected official, has a major credibility problem lecturing Joe Sixpack that he's destroying the planet by using a plastic bag to carry his groceries from his car to his house. This disconnect assures a major backlash to pretty much any sacrificial measure mandated on the public in the name of climate change.
Furthermore, the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau tell quite a story about contemporary settlement patterns. The regions of the country poised to be most affected by climate change happen to be the places experiencing the sharpest growth. The professional class and upper-middle class can't move quickly enough to the soon-to-be-underwater Florida shoreline or the drought-vulnerable, freshwater-insecure deserts of Texas, Arizona, and Nevada. So basically we're looking at the people best positioned politically, financially, and culturally to take on climate change resettling in areas where they will cause maximal ecological harm....and yet it's downscale West Virginia coal miners and Wisconsin dairy farmers who we're shaking our fists at for destroying the planet. The latter group will resent being scapegoated by the former group, and with good reason. The tribalism will almost certainly make meaningful legislation to curb climate change even harder to pull off.
It'll be interesting to assess a decade from now what progress has and hasn't been made on all three of these issues. A very telling poll from NBC News came out earlier this month on party affiliation at the beginning of this decade compared to the beginning of last decade. The topline numbers from January 2010 and January 2020 were identical, with Democrats holding a 42-37 identification advantage among voters. Breaking the numbers down by education level, however, and there was a political earthquake in the last decade. College-educated voters swing 13 points in the direction of Democrats while voters with a high school degree or less swung 16 points in the direction of Republicans. This partisan realignment speaks volumes about of how the public is poised to respond to the solutions undertaken to solve the biggest issues of our time.
It's hard to overstate just how much skepticism there will be to liberal policy diagnoses if the Democrats are perceived as the party of "the college boys". It won't be easy to break this fever, but the first step needs to be for the upper middle-class to show those on the other side of the tracks that they have skin in the game regarding the policies they prioritize. If they're seen as hypocrites protecting their self-interest while diagnosing a different set of rules for others, our tribal fault lines will fracture even more sharply and effective solutions to pressing national problems will be even more elusive.
posted by Mark at 9:14 PM
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