By
Greta Christina
Libertarian Presidential nominee Gary Johnson taunts Donald Trump on CNN (Screen cap)
“Well, I’m
conservative, but I’m not one of those racist, homophobic,
dripping-with-hate Tea Party bigots! I’m pro-choice! I’m
pro-same-sex-marriage! I’m not a racist! I just want lower taxes, and
smaller government, and less government regulation of business. I’m
fiscally conservative, and socially liberal.”
How many liberals and progressives have heard this? It’s ridiculously common. Hell, even
David Koch of the Koch brothers has said, “I’m a conservative on economic matters and I’m a social liberal.”
And it’s wrong. W-R-O-N-G Wrong.
You can’t separate fiscal issues from social issues. They’re deeply intertwined. They affect each other. Economic issues often
are
social issues. And conservative fiscal policies do enormous social
harm. That’s true even for the mildest, most generous version of “fiscal
conservatism” — low taxes, small government, reduced regulation, a free
market. These policies perpetuate human rights abuses.
They make life
harder for people who already have hard lives. Even if the people
supporting these policies don’t intend this, the policies are racist,
sexist, classist (obviously), ableist, homophobic, transphobic, and
otherwise socially retrograde. In many ways, they do more harm than
so-called “social policies” that are supposedly separate from economic
ones. Here are seven reasons that “fiscally conservative, socially
liberal” is nonsense.
1: Poverty, and the cycle of poverty. This is the big one.
Poverty is a social issue.
The cycle of poverty — the ways that poverty itself makes it harder to
get out of poverty, the ways that poverty can be a permanent trap
lasting for generations — is a social issue, and a human rights issue.
If you’re poor, there’s about a
two in three chance that you’re going to stay poor for at least a year, about a
two in three chance that if you do pull out of poverty you’ll be poor again within five years — and about a
two in three chance
that your children are going to be poor. Among other things: Being poor
makes it much harder to get education or job training that would help
you get higher-paying work. Even if you can afford job training or it’s
available for free — if you have more than one job, or if your work is
menial and exhausting, or if both of those are true (often the case if
you’re poor), there’s a good chance you won’t have the time or energy to
get that training, or to look for higher-paying work. Being poor
typically means you can’t afford to lose your job — which means you
can’t afford to unionize, or otherwise push back against your wages and
working conditions. It means that a temporary crisis — sickness or
injury, job loss, death in the family — can destroy your life: you have
no cushion, nobody you know has a cushion, a month or two without income
and you’re totally screwed. If you do lose your job, or if you’re
disabled, the labyrinthine bureaucracy of unemployment and disability
benefits is exhausting: if you do manage to navigate it, it can deplete
your ability to do much of anything else to improve your life — and if
you can’t navigate it, that’s very likely going to tank your life.
Also, ironically,
being poor is expensive.
You can’t buy high-quality items that last longer and are a bargain in
the long run. You can’t buy in bulk. You sure as hell can’t buy a house:
depending on where you live, monthly mortgage payments might be lower
than the rent you’re paying, but you can’t afford a down payment, and
chances are a bank won’t give you a mortgage anyway. You can’t afford
the time or money to take care of your health — which means you’re more
likely to get sick, which is expensive. If you don’t have a bank account
(which many poor people don’t), you have to pay high fees at
check-cashing joints. If you run into a temporary cash crisis, you have
to borrow from price-gouging payday-advance joints. If your car breaks
down and you can’t afford to repair or replace it, it can mean
unemployment. If you can’t afford a car at all, you’re severely limited
in what jobs you can take in the first place — a limitation that’s even
more severe when public transportation is wildly inadequate. If you’re
poor, you may have to move a lot — and that’s expensive. These aren’t
universally true for all poor people — but way too many of them are
true, for way too many people.
Second chances, once considered a hallmark of American culture and identity, have become a
luxury.
One small mistake — or no mistake at all, simply the mistake of being born poor — can trap you there forever.
Plus, being poor doesn’t just mean you’re likely to stay poor. It means that if you have children,
they’re
more likely to stay poor. It means you’re less able to give your
children the things they need to flourish — both in easily-measurable
tangibles like good nutrition, and less-easily-measurable qualities like
a sense of stability. The effect of poverty on children —
literally on
their brains, on their ability to literally function — is not subtle,
and it lasts into adulthood. Poverty’s effect on adults is appalling
enough. Its effect on children is an outrage.
And in case you hadn’t noticed, poverty — including the cycle of poverty and the effect of poverty on children —
disproportionately
affects African Americans, Hispanics, other people of color, women,
trans people, disabled people, and other marginalized groups.
So what does this have to do with fiscal policy? Well, duh.
Poverty is
perpetuated or alleviated,
worsened or
improved, by fiscal policy. That’s not the only thing affecting
poverty, but it’s one of the biggest things. To list just a few of the
most obvious examples of very direct influence: Tax policy. Minimum
wage. Funding of public schools and universities. Unionization rights.
Banking and lending laws. Labor laws. Funding of public transportation.
Public health care. Unemployment benefits. Disability benefits. Welfare
policy. Public assistance that doesn’t penalize people for having
savings. Child care. Having a functioning infrastructure, having
economic policies that support labor, having a tax system that doesn’t
steal from the poor to give to the rich, having a social safety net — a
real safety net, not one that just barely keeps people from starving to
death but one that actually lets people get on their feet and function —
makes a difference. When these systems are working, and are working
well, it’s easier for people to get out of poverty. When they’re not,
it’s difficult to impossible. And I haven’t even gotten into the fiscal
policy of so-called “free” trade, and all the ways it feeds poverty both
in the U.S. and around the world. (I’ll get to that in a bit.)
Fiscal policy affects poverty. And in the United States, “fiscally
conservative” means supporting fiscal policies that perpetuate poverty.
“Fiscally conservative” means slashing support systems that help the
poor, lowering taxes for the rich, cutting corners for big business, and
screwing labor — policies that both worsen poverty and make it even
more of an inescapable trap.
2: Domestic violence, workplace harassment, and other abuse. See
above, re: cycle of poverty. If someone is being beaten by their
partner, harassed or assaulted at work, abused by their parents — and if
they’re poor, and if there’s fuck-all for a social safety net — it’s a
hell of a lot
harder for them to leave. What’s more, the stress of poverty itself — especially inescapable, entrapped poverty —
contributes to
violence and abuse.
And you know who gets disproportionately targeted with domestic violence and workplace harassment?
Women. Especially
women of color. And LGBT folks — especially
trans women of color, and
LGBT kids and teenagers.
Do you care about racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynist violence?
Then quit undercutting the social safety net. A solid safety net — a
safety net that isn’t made of tissue paper, and that doesn’t require the
people in it to constantly scramble just to stay there, much less to
climb out — isn’t going to magically eliminate this violence and
harassment. But it sure makes it easier for people to escape it.
3: Disenfranchisement. There’s a cycle that in some
ways is even uglier than the cycle of poverty — because it blocks people
from changing the policies that keep the cycle of poverty going. I’m
talking about the cycle of disenfranchisement.
I’m talking about the myriad ways that the super-rich control the
political process — and in controlling the political process, both make
themselves richer and give themselves even more control over the
political process. Purging voter rolls. Cutting polling place hours.
Cutting back on early voting — especially in poor districts. Voter ID
laws. Roadblocks to voter registration — noticeably aimed at people
likely to vote progressive. Questionable-at-best voter fraud detection
software, which — by some wild coincidence — tends to flag names that
are common among minorities. Eliminating Election Day registration.
Restricting voter registration drives. Gerrymandering — creating voting
districts with the purpose of skewing elections in your favor.
Voter suppression is a
real thing
in the United States. And these policies are set in place by the
super-rich — or, to be more precise, by the government officials who are
buddies with the super-rich and are beholden to them. These policies
are not set in place to reduce voter fraud: voter fraud is
extremely rare
in the U.S., to the point of being almost non-existent. The policies
are set in place to make voting harder for people who would vote
conservative plutocrats out of office. If you’re skeptical about whether
this is actually that deliberate, whether these policies really are
written by plutocratic villains cackling over how they took even more
power from the already disempowered — remember Pennsylvania Republican
House Leader Mike Turzai, who actually said, in words, “Voter ID, which
is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
Remember former Florida Republican chairman Jim Greer, who
actually said, in words,
“We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good
for us.” Remember the now-former North Carolina Republican official Don
Yelton, who
actually said, in words,
that voter restrictions including voter ID were “going to kick
Democrats in the butt.” Remember the Texas Republican attorney general
and candidate for governor Greg Abbott, who
actually said, in words,
that “their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the
Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats.”
Remember Doug Preisse, Republican chair of Franklin County (Ohio’s
second-largest county) who
actually said (well,
wrote), in words, that Ohio Republicans were pushing hard to limit
early voting because “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t
contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read
African-American — voter-turnout machine.” (And no, the “read
African-American” clarification isn’t mine — it’s his.) Remember… oh,
you get the idea.
Disenfranchisement is not some accidental side effect of
Republican-sponsored voting restrictions. Disenfranchisement is the
entirely intentional point.
And on top of that, you’ve got campaign finance laws saying that
corporations are
people, too — “people” with just as much right as you or I to donate
millions of dollars to candidates who’ll write laws helping them out.
When you’ve got fiscal policies that enrich the already rich — such as
regressive tax policies, deregulation of businesses, deregulation of the
financial industry — and you combine them with campaign finance laws
that have essentially legalized bribery, you get a recipe for a cycle of
disenfranchisement. The more that rich people control the political
process, the richer they get — and the richer they get, the more they
control the political process.
4: Racist policing. There’s a whole lot going on
with racist policing in the United States. Obviously. But a non-trivial
chunk of it is fiscal policy. Ferguson shone a spotlight on this, but it
isn’t just in Ferguson — it’s all over the country. In cities and
counties and towns across the United States, the government is funded,
in large part, by
tickets and fines for municipal violations — and by the meta-system of interest, penalties, surcharges, and fees on those tickets and
fines, which commonly turn into a never-ending debt amounting to many, many times the original fine itself.
This is, for all intents and purposes, a tax. It’s a tax on poor
people. It’s a tax on poor people for being poor, for not having a
hundred dollars in their bank account that they can drop at a moment’s
notice on a traffic ticket. And it’s a tax that disproportionately
targets black and brown people. When combined with the deeply ingrained
culture of
racism
in many many many police forces — a police culture that hammers black
and brown people for the crime of existing — it is a tax on black and
brown people, purely for being black or brown. But Loki forbid we raise
actual taxes. Remember the fiscal conservative mantra: “Low taxes good!
High taxes bad!” High taxes are bad — unless we don’t call them a tax.
If we call it a penalty or a fine, that’s just peachy. And if it’s
disproportionately levied by a racist police force on poor black people,
who have little visibility or power and are being systematically
disenfranchised — that’s even better. What are they going to do about
it? And who’s going to care? It’s not as if
black lives matter.
What’s more: You know some of the programs that have been proposed to
reduce racist policing? Programs like automatic video monitoring of
police encounters? An independent federal agency to investigate and
discipline local policing, to supplement or replace ineffective,
corrupt, or non-existent self-policing? Those take money. Money that
comes from taxes. Money that makes government a little bit bigger.
Fiscal conservatism — the reflexive cry of “Lower taxes! Smaller
government!” — contributes to racist policing. Even if you, personally,
oppose racist policing, supporting fiscal conservatism makes you part of
the problem.
5: Drug policy and prison policy. Four words:
The new Jim Crow.
Drug war policies
in the United States — including sentencing policies, probation
policies, which drugs are criminalized and how severely, laws banning
felons convicted on drug charges from voting, and more — have pretty
much zero effect on reducing the harm that can be done by drug abuse.
They don’t reduce drug use, they don’t reduce drug addiction, they don’t
reduce overdoses, they don’t reduce accidents or violence that can be
triggered by drug abuse. If anything, these policies make all of this
worse.
But they do have one powerful effect: Current drug policies in the United States are very, very good at
creating and
perpetuating a permanent black and brown underclass. They are very good
at creating a permanent class of underpaid, disenfranchised,
disempowered servants, sentenced to do shit work at low wages for white
people, for the rest of their lives.
This is not a bug. This is a feature.
You don’t have to be a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist to see how
current U.S. drug policy benefits the super-rich and super-powerful. It
is a perfect example of a “social issue” with powerful ripple effects
into the economy. And that’s not even getting into the issue of how the
wealthy might benefit from
super-cheap prison labor,
labor that borders so closely on slavery it’s hard to distinguish it.
So people who are well-served by the current economy are strongly
motivated to keep drug policy firmly in place.
Plus, two more words: Privatized prisons. Privatized prisons mean prisons run by people who have
no interest in reducing the prison population — people who
actually benefit
from a high crime rate, a high recidivism rate, severe sentencing
policies, severe probation policies, and other treats that keep the
prison population high. It’s as if we had privatized fire departments,
who got paid more the more fires they put out — and thus had every
incentive, not to improve fire prevention techniques and policies and
education, but to gut them.
Privatization of prisons is a conservative fiscal policy. It’s a
policy based on the conservative ideal of low taxes, small government,
and the supposedly miraculous power of the free market to make any
system more efficient. And it’s a policy with a powerful social effect —
the effect of doing tremendous harm.
It’s true that there are some conservatives advocating for criminal justice
reform, including drug policy reform, on the grounds that the current system isn’t
cost-effective. The problem with this, as
Drug Policy Alliance
Deputy State Director Laura Thomas points out: When you base policy
decisions entirely on whether they’re cost-effective, the bottom line
will always take priority.
Injustice, racism, corruption, abuse — all of
these can stay firmly in place. Human rights, and the human cost of
these policies? Meh. Who cares — as long as we can cut government
spending?
6: Deregulation. This one is really straightforward. Deregulation of business is a conservative fiscal policy. And it has a
devastating effect on marginalized people. Do I need to remind anyone of what happened when the banking and financial industries were
deregulated?
Do I need to remind anyone of who was most hurt by those
disasters? Overwhelmingly
poor people, working-class people, and
people of
color.
But this isn’t just about banking and finance. Deregulation of
environmental standards, workplace safety standards, utilities,
transportation, media —
all of these
have the entirely unsurprising effect of making things better for the
people who own the businesses, and worse for the people who patronize
them and work for them. Contrary to the fiscal conservative myth, an
unregulated free market does not result in exceptional businesses
fiercely competing for the best workers and lavishly serving the public.
It results in monopoly. It results in businesses with the unofficial
slogan,
“We Don’t Care — We Don’t Have To.” It results in 500-pound gorillas, sleeping anywhere they want.
7: “Free” trade. This one is really straightforward.
So-called “free” trade policies have a horrible effect on human rights,
both in the United States and overseas. They let
corporations
hire labor in countries where labor laws — laws about minimum wage,
workplace safety, working hours, child labor — are weak to nonexistent.
They let corporations hire labor in countries where they can pay
children as young as five years old less than a dollar a day, to work 12
or even 16 hours a day, in grossly unsafe workplaces and grueling
working conditions that make Dickensian London look like a socialist
Utopia.
And again — this is not a bug. This is a feature. This is the whole
damn point of “free” trade: by reducing labor costs to practically
nothing, it provides cheap consumer products to American consumers, and
it funnels huge profits to already obscenely rich corporations. It also
decimates blue-collar employment in the United States — and it feeds
human rights abuses around the world.
Thank you, fiscal conservatism!
This list is far from complete. But I think you get the idea.
Now. There are conservatives who will insist that this isn’t what
“fiscally conservative” means.
They’re not inherently opposed to
government spending, they say. They’re just opposed to ineffective and
wasteful government spending.
Bullshit. Do they really think progressives are in favor of wasteful
and ineffective government? Do they think we’re saying, “Thumbs up to
ineffective government spending! Let’s pour our government’s resources
down a rat hole! Let’s spend our tax money giving every citizen a
solid-gold tuba and a lifetime subscription to Cigar Aficionado!” This
is an idealized, self-serving definition of “fiscally conservative,”
defined by conservatives to make their position seem reasonable. It does
not describe fiscal conservatism as it actually plays out in the United
States. The reality of fiscal conservatism in the United States is not
cautious, evidence-based attention to which government programs do and
don’t work. If that were ever true in some misty nostalgic past, it
hasn’t been true for a long, long time. The reality of fiscal
conservatism in the United States means slashing government programs,
even when they’ve been shown to work. The reality means decimating
government regulations, even when they’ve been shown to improve people’s
lives. The reality means cutting the safety net to ribbons, and letting
big businesses do pretty much whatever they want.
You can say all you want that modern conservatism in the United
States isn’t what you, personally, mean by conservatism. But hanging on
to some ideal of “conservatism” as a model of sensible-but-compassionate
frugality that’s being betrayed by the Koch Brothers and the Tea Party —
it’s like hanging onto some ideal of Republicanism as the party of
abolition and Lincoln. And it lends credibility to the idea that
conservatism is reasonable, if only people would do it right.
If you care about marginalized people — if you care about the
oppression of women, LGBT people, disabled people, African Americans and
Hispanics and other people of color — you need to do more than go to
same-sex weddings and listen to hip-hop. You need to support economic
policies that make marginalized people’s lives better. You need to
oppose economic policies that perpetuate human rights abuses and make
marginalized people’s lives suck.
And that means not being a fiscal conservative.
“What in the hell do you have to lose?” indeed.
