| Folks:
Now that it’s been almost a week since the President’s
State of the Union
speech – which I assume you watched, from Alaska to
Virginia – I’d like you
to think about the nature of State of the Union speeches,
and go buy a copy
of the current Atlantic Monthly and look at the state of
the union from a
different perspective.
I believe I noted this past summer that a one-hour speech
can be captured on
one page of newsprint. If you saw the President’s speech
printed in a
newspaper, you’ll see that this rule of thumb is “close
enough for
government work.”
It would be hard to capture much information about how America
is doing
(i.e., the “state of the union”) in just one
newspaper page, and no
President has ever tried to do so. And as the New York Times
article captured
below makes clear, no President since Ronald Reagan has even
tried. It’s all
been “show.”
Each year the speech draws selectively from the past and
makes a case for the
Administration’s proposals based on that selective
viewpoint. The speech then
draws a vision of a future – again very selectively – changed
for the better
by the new proposals, adopted without changes and implemented
perfectly.
There is obviously room for charade here. Just as an actor
in a Japanese “
Noh” play is intended to be seen as mounting a horse
when he is handed a
riding crop, the President does not have to acknowledge budget
deficit
calculations from the Congressional Budget Office if they
have not been
released before the speech – if at all. He does not
have to cost out a war
that has not occurred.
The problem for Americans arises if we think that such a
speech describes the
state of the union. Rene Magritte painted a picture of a
(tobacco) pipe that
included the words “This is not a pipe” (well,
they were in French). A
famous exercise in surrealism, Magritte was noting that it
was only a
picture, not a pipe.
So what would a more thorough, more detailed view of the “state
of the
union” look like? Well, the speech format won’t
do: it’s too slow. You’d
need to have a lot of data about where we’ve come from
and where we are. And
I’d like to see some goals, to give us ideas about
where we’d like to be. To
be really useful you’d need some “policy prescriptions” that
might take us
from here to a better future. And the whole purpose might
be to stimulate
debate, so that we could all act together to move America
to a “higher” state of the union year after year.
That’s EXACTLY what the Atlantic Monthly attempts
to do in its
January/February issue (now on the newsstands), covering
topics such as
trust, national unity, health care, wealth inequality, race
relations, crime,
household debt, welfare & poverty, jobs & productivity,
work & family,
education, the environment, and public capital. Not a bad
list! The
fifty-page
section of the magazine was produced in partnership
with the New
America Foundation (www.newamerica.net), a new-ish (1999)
public-policy think
tank based in Washington.
There are LOTS of numbers. My favorites show up early. The
federal budget
looks like it’s $2 trillion, with two thirds going
to “entitlement” programs
like social security, Medicare, and interest on the debt.
Actually, tax
expenditures (subsidies that influence behavior through foregone
tax
revenues) total another $800 billion. The five largest federal
tax
expenditures are corporate exclusions for pension plans,
exclusions for
employer-paid health care, deductions for home-mortgage interest,
reduced tax
rates for capital gains, and the deductions for state and
local income and
personal-property taxes. Corporations get 11% of the $800
billion. Of the
money included in these five, families with incomes over
$100,000 get 55%,
families between $50,000 and $100,000 get 30%, and families
below $50,000 get
15%. Since median family income is less than $50,000, 50%
of American
families get 15% of the benefits.
You’ll like this one, too: the ratio of dollars spent
per senior to dollars
spent per child is 8:1.
And you’ll love the chart of public school funding
vs. performance on page
116.
Go buy the magazine. You may not agree with the prescriptions,
but you’ll
find the data eye-opening, and a necessary precondition to
thinking about the
state of our union today. And what to do about it for tomorrow – that’s
your
job!
Bob
Knisely
PS: The report includes tax expenditures,
but does not include federal credit
enhancements, such as loan guarantees. It’s a mind-boggling
task to figure
out the government’s exposure to loss from potential
defaulted loans, and
even more difficult to tell what individuals, corporations,
and governments
would have done in the absence of the loan guarantees. But
I’ll bet a
Krispy-Kreme or two that the families earning less than $50,000
don’t reap
many of the benefits of credit enhancements. Any takers?
WebLink Citations:
1) The
Speech That Turns Mere Presidents Into Talk Show Hosts,
By GEOFFREY NUNBERG, New York Times, February 3, 2003
2) What
is the Real State of the Union? Atlantic Monthly
special with the New America Foundation | 
