Rich Lowry: The poor have only themselves to blame

I wondered where National Review editor Rich Lowry was going with this. He spends the bulk of his column conceding that, yes, the American Dream is "raggedy around the edges," that if you're born poor in America, you're all too likely to stay poor, that "picking the right parents" seems to make more of a difference here than it does in (say) Finland for your future economic prospects.

So, God bless Lowry for providing some conservative reality-based pushback to Paul Ryan's fantasy of an economically mobile society.

But Lowry arrives at the end of his column—just two paragraphs to go!—and concludes that despite all this, one shouldn't blame America's economic structure—really, the poor have only themselves to blame:

This stagnation is less a statement about the structure of America’s economy than about its culture. As Ronald Haskins, also of the Brookings Institution, wrote in an essay for National Affairs, “economic mobility is constrained above all by personal choices and behaviors.” He argues that society’s leaders “should herald the ‘success sequence’: finish schooling, get a job, get married, have babies.” If Americans finished high school, worked full-time at a job that matched their skills, and married at the rate they did in the 1970s, the poverty rate would be cut by 70 percent.

These old-fashioned bourgeois virtues, and particularly marriage, rarely figure in the public debate. Everyone is more comfortable talking about taxes or the banks, as the America Dream frays.

Let's unpack this a bit, using Finland—Lowry's comparison—as our guide a bit.

First of all, marriage, since that's the item that got my attention. While it's true that the marriage rate in the United States had declined in recent decades, it's also vastly truer that the marriage rate in the United States is much higher than in Finland: 7.5 marriages for every 1,000 people in the population in 2005, compared to Finland's rate of around 5 marriages per 1,000 people in the same year. The decline in marriage rates has happened in just about every developed country around the world (except Sweden, where the rate wasn't that high to begin with) but the United States remains one of the most marrying countries of them all. To a great extent, "old-fashioned bourgeois virtues" have held on tightly here—only it doesn't seem to make much of a difference in our economic mobility rates.

Maybe it's just the poor who aren't married? Nope. A 2004 study from the MDRC suggests that "through their early 30s, economically disadvantaged adults actually are more likely to marry than advantaged adults." The poor are attempting, at least, to embrace old-fashioned bourgeois virtues—but it's also true that those marriages more often end in divorce. That does give rise to a chicken-and-egg question, I suppose: Are the poor economically disadvantaged because they can't build stable marriages? Or can they not build stable marriages because they're economically disadvantaged? I don't know the answer to that question, but I have a hunch. But the overall point is this: The United States is a marrying country, and our poor are a marrying people. The evidence seems weighted against Lowry's point.

I'm going to skip the baby-making part, except to note that having a kid hasn't done anything to improve my economic prospects. Kids eat!

Let's focus on education, instead: It's true that the high school graduation rate in the United States is shamefully low—72 percent, compared to Finland's 92 percent. (It's worth noting that Finland also has a much higher rate of college graduates: 48.5 percent compared to America's 36.5 percent.) I'm skeptical Lowry and his fellow conservatives would recommend adopting the Finnish education system—it's European!—but I could be wrong.

For those who do graduate high school, how easy is it to find a "full-time job that matches their skills?" It's much more difficult these days than it was in the 1970s to find such a job that will pull you out of poverty. We already know that between the 1970s and now, the American economy shifted pretty radically, shedding manufacturing jobs and pushing more people to the service industry. Generally speaking, that's meant a shift to not-as-well-paying jobs: In September, a manufacturing-sector job in the United States paid $980.98 per week; a private-sector service job paid $756.96—provided you weren't in retail, which paid $496.12 per week. These are average wages, not median wages—which would provide a better picture of what a typical worker in those sectors make. Generally speaking, though, the type of full-time job that matches the skills of a high school graduate has shifted away from well-paying to not-as-well paying. That's assuming the jobs exist; the high unemployment rate suggests that's not always the case.

Making babies won't change that dynamic.

Maybe it doesn't make sense to blame taxes and bankers for that shift, but the issue is definitely one of economics—not just or even mostly, as Lowry tries to suggest, about poor people having bad habits. The numbers indicate that the poor are trying; the opportunities aren't there. Whose fault is that?

Surprise me

Forgive me a brief, personal interlude, but something I've noticed about myself: I enjoy reading conservative writers like David Frum, Conor Friedersdorf, Rod Dreher, and Nicole Gelinas because, frequently, they stray off the reservation. I thought I just appreciated un-orthodoxy, but now I suspect that I enjoy reading them (too) because they sometimes agree with and confirm my own personal biases.

I'm trying to think of any writers I enjoy who might be described as A) liberal and B) unorthodox. No names come to mind. And that worries me about my own writing here, to be frank: I try to be on guard against hackery and tribalism, but it's damned hard to avoid those temptations when writing about politics.

Contrarianism for its own sake is just as lazy as any other unthinking ideological conformity, of course. But who can I read who will surprise me? How can I train myself to surprise myself on occasion?

Regulatory uncertainty: Still not the problem

Kevin Drum sums up a new report: "I'm not sure how many ways it's possible to debunk a single meme, but in this case it's a helluva lot. It turns out that (a) Obama has issued fewer regulations than Bush, (b) adjusted for inflation, they cost less than the average over the past 30 years, (c) this doesn't take into account the benefits of any of his regs anyway, and (d) only about 0.3% of mass layoffs during the Great Recession were related to new regulatory issues."

Read the whole thing.

Philadelphia: Does George Bochetto really pay more than half his income in taxes?

Stu Bykofsky, always the contrarian, uses his perch in the Philadelphia Daily News today to let the "Top 1 Percent" respond to the Occupy Wall Street protests. I found this excerpt to be particularly confounding:

How do the members of the "1 percent" feel? I asked three - Renee Amoore, Tom Knox and George Bochetto - each a local, unapologetic, self-made millionaire. They believe they already pay their "fair share" in federal taxes.

"I don't only pay the 35 percent," says Center City lawyer Bochetto, who was raised in an orphanage. "I also pay Social Security tax, state and city income tax, property tax. More than half of my income goes to the government. That's my fair share."

Due respect to Bochetto and his rise to riches from the orphanage. Good for him! But does he really pay more than half his income to the government? If so, he needs to hire a new accountant—immediately.

Why do I say that? Because the effective tax rate for the top 1 percent of earners—and this combines and includes federal, state, and local taxes—was 30.9 percent in 2008. Here's a chart from Citizens for Tax Justice:

Granted, this is a national overview that's several years old. And granted, Philadelphia can be a little tougher on the pocketbook than a lot of places. But is it so much tougher that Bochetto loses and additional 20 percentage points off his income? Really, really doubtful—especially since the Social Security taxes actually take a bigger bite out of the incomes of low-wage earners than they do millionaires like Bochetto.

We can argue about appropriate tax rates and the responsibility of the rich to help provide services and opportunities for the rest of us. But that argument should be grounded in reality instead of unchallenged hyperbole. Bykofsky didn't help anybody by quoting Bochetto uncritically today.

Did the Bush tax cuts increase or reduce revenue?

During my segment on the Morning in America show with Steve Hayward today, I tossed out the idea that—contrary to Laffer Curve expectations—the Bush tax cuts didn't actually increase revenue to government. That apparently resulted in some controversy after I left the air, with callers saying that I'm dead wrong on the topic.

The easiest response here is to note that before the Bush tax cuts were enacted in 2001 and 2003, the federal government had a surplus of money to fund its operations and pay down the country's debt. After the tax cuts were enacted, we started borrowing money on a full-time basis.

That's not proof on its own, of course, because we tacked on some new spending obligations during the Bush Era—most notably the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, increased national security spending aside from those wars, and the expansion of Medicare benefits to cover prescription drugs.

So, hey, let's look at the revenues:

Bruce Bartlett writes: "According to a recent C.B.O. report, (The Bush tax cuts) reduced revenue by at least $2.9 trillion below what it otherwise would have been between 2001 and 2011. Slower-than-expected growth reduced revenue by another $3.5 trillion.

"Spending was $5.6 trillion higher than the C.B.O. anticipated for a total fiscal turnaround of $12 trillion. That is how a $6 trillion projected surplus turned into a cumulative deficit of $6 trillion."

But don't just take the CBO's word for it. Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economics professor, once called advocates of the lower taxes/higher revenue theory "charlatans and cranks": "I used the phrase 'charlatans and cranks' in the first edition of my principles textbook to describe some of the economic advisers to Ronald Reagan, who told him that broad-based income tax cuts would have such large supply-side effects that the tax cuts would raise tax revenue. I did not find such a claim credible, based on the available evidence. I never have, and I still don't."

Mankiw, of course, was one of George W. Bush's top economic advisers from 2003 to 2005. He wrote the paragraph above in 2007. And he was an advocate of the tax cuts—not because they raised revenues (he didn't believe they did) but because he believed they helped spur demand in the face of a challenging economy at the time. So: Not even Bush's own economic advisers who favored tax cuts believed they raised revenues. If that's the case, why should the rest of us?

On a related note: after I left the air Steve apparently chastised me a bit for not providing a top tax rate that's appropriate in a market economy like ours. Fair enough, I guess, but I think it's something of a mug's game to pick a number and stick to it. Different tax rates will be appropriate at different times, depending on the economy, the needs of government—being at war, for example, is more expensive than not being at war—and so forth. I'm not interested in confiscatory levels of taxation—unlike some liberals, I don't hearken back to the Eisenhower-era 90-percent marginal rate on top earners—but I also think we're a long way from there. Perhaps the answer "it depends" isn't rigorous enough, but it also has the advantage of being true.

Welcome "Morning in America" listeners!

Thanks to all of you who listened to me with Steve Hayward this morning. I co-write the RedBlueAmerica column with my conservative friend Ben Boychuk. We also co-produce a regular podcast—our latest episode is a discussion of the "Occupy Wall Street" phenomenon with City Journal's Nicole Gelinas. Give it a listen!

More guns, more death

Whenever a gun massacre happens—at Virginia Tech, say, or someplace else—we usually get a revival of the mostly neutered gun debate in this country. Some liberals decry lax gun laws, some conservatives suggest that if only everybody was armed you'd somehow see less gun violence.

A new study from the Violence Policy Center suggests the conservative analysis is wrong:

States with higher gun ownership rates and weak gun laws have the highest rates of gun death according to a new analysis by the Violence Policy Center (VPC) of just-released 2008 national data (the most recent available) from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

The analysis reveals that the five states with the highest per capita gun death rates were Alaska, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Wyoming. Each of these states had a per capita gun death rate far exceeding the national per capita gun death rate of 10.38 per 100,000 for 2008. Each state has lax gun laws and higher gun ownership rates. By contrast, states with strong gun laws and low rates of gun ownership had far lower rates of firearm-related death.

And here's the graphic overview:

This makes sense, of course, because the only purpose that guns have—when used—is to inflict injury and death. More guns naturally means guns will be used more, which naturally means more people will die. This isn't complicated.

This is particularly notable because, as Frank Bruni discusses in the New York Times today, there's a move among Republicans in Congress to force states with tight concealed-carry laws to recognize and allow concealed-carry permits from states with laxer regulations. (Thanks to the vagaries of Pennsylvania law, we in Philadelphia sometimes find ourselves awash in Florida-permitted guns ... with permit-holders often being people who have never been to Florida.) It's basically a law that would permit Wyoming to export its death rate to Massachusetts.

Second Amendment advocates, I suppose, will talk about Constitutional rights and the costs of freedom. But we should recognize those costs. Guns are not benign instruments.