Listen, I’m not against some kind of DREAM Act-type law that deals with several kinds of hard cases when it comes to immigration (though I want to see the details.) I would actually be in favor of such a law, but the postelection Republican focus on “comprehensive” immigration reform is several kinds of mistaken. First, it is a bad idea to make policy in an atmosphere of despair. Before Republicans start making immigration policy, they should work on constructing a coherent and prudent platform. Just responding to the election results and whatever Obama proposes isn’t going to be good enough. DREAM Act-type laws aside, immigration policy won’t result in any major Republican gains among nonwhites by itself, and waiting a couple of months to think things through won’t hurt. Second, immigration policy, if it is not coupled with a wider agenda, has a chance to hurt the Republicans among middle and working-class voters if they aren’t careful. To a lot of people, Republican immigration expansion rhetoric sounds a lot more like employer interest group politics than a plan to improve the economy in general. Maybe Col. Sanders should pay better. To the extent that the Republicans are the party of ever lower marginal tax rates on high earners and ever lower wages for everybody else, they deserve to be marginalized.
Now this doesn’t mean that the Republicans should do NOTHING on immigration, but it does mean that their economic agenda should focus on issues that would help people in the two middle quartiles (and the last quartile) get what Reihan Salam called “the basics of a dignified middle-class life — affordable high-quality medical care, education, and housing” With that in mind, here is a partial (and I’m not sure totally compatible) list of policies that Republicans should be looking at:
1. Making higher education more affordable along the lines laid out by Texas Governor Rick Perry.
2. Making the tax code both more pro-growth and easier on working-class and middle-class families.
3. Making it easier for those who are employed but do not have insurance through their employers to gain access to affordable health insurance.
4. Encouraging insurance approaches that increase worker take home pay while maintaining access to high quality health care.
If the Republicans want to make gains among the working and middle-classes of all colors and ethnicities, they need to focus on a program that offers more than just the supposed indirect benefits of cutting taxes on “job creators.” That isn’t the end of the story of course. No program can help the Republicans if the voters they need never hear about it.
November 25th, 2012 | 10:27 am
1. Regarding “higher education”, step 1 is to stop subsidizing student loan debt so freely. We supposedly all accept that easy money for houses caused a bubble that crashed spectacularly and was all in all A Very Bad Thing. So why is easy money for college supposed to be A Good Thing? It’s bonkers.
2. Unfortunately, saying the above will get you demagogued as someone who thinks only the rich should go to college. This is because the MSM is composed of nothing but total economic ignoramuses, and too many politicians are cynical cretins.
3. The GOP should immediately propose to make student loan dischargeable in bankruptcy. This will sound good, and will have the effect of suppressing the availability of so much easy loans, so will all in all have much of the desired effect.
4. Making the model for health insurance individual-held high-deductible plans would accomplish nearly everything that advocates for Obamacare say they want (of course, it wouldn’t accomplish anything that they actually want), and would be pretty easily achievable with fairly small changes to the tax code. Unfortunately, it is clear that a majority of folks today don’t actually want health insurance–what they want is for someone else to manage their health care.
5. All that matters in the medium term is reducing the amount of money the government borrows. People do actually care about the deficit and the debt. The fact that the GOP allowed their opponents to present themselves as the side that actually cares about debt reduction made them completely deserving of defeat.
November 25th, 2012 | 1:40 pm
Regarding higher education I think it’s time that we all realize what it is, it’s a 19th century-style institution that is long overdue for bottom up re-engineering. In my opinion our higher educational system has become the biggest obstacle to natural upward mobility in this economy.
Here I would highly recommend Charles Murray’s book on the subject:
http://www.amazon.com/Real-Education-Bringing-Americas-Schools/dp/0307405397/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353867614&sr=8-1&keywords=charles+Murray+education
I work in high tech manufacturing and have seen the wasteful effects the requirement of a piece of paper has on an organization and the natural mobility of talented individuals.
I vividly recall the aggravated experience of recommending one of the tech’s that I manage to be promoted to a jr engineer position. My supervisor said it was not feasible unless said tech had a degree, this despite the fact that he had 15 years of relevant experience in the very complicated field of vapor deposition and knew more about the subject and its practice than any bachelor level chemical engineer.
So the wise words from my supervisor was that the individual should go to school and finish his degree and then we could talk about such a promotion. In otherwords, the oganization I worked for would prefer for our subject matter expert who was essential to our operations take time away from our organization so that he could take a number of classes mostly irrelevant to his work so that he could at some point in the distant future be promoted to the job he was frankly already performing! In Japanese manufacturing this is what is called Muda, waste!
In his book Murray offers the observation that for many professional positions, something equivalent to a CPA type certification would be sufficient to qualifying individuals. What he is saying is that a method of certifying qualifications should be the gateway to a professional career not a college degree. In making this transition we put the burden of deciding how to gain those qualification on the individual, who could achieve that knowledge through schooling, through a decade of personal experience in the field like the tech I was talling about, or even just hitting the books.
This also brings up another development that should completely disrupt the higher educational status quo. Last year I took an electrical engineering class from MIT. I didn’t have to qualify for admissions, I didn’t have to pay thousands of dollars, infact it was free, and I was able to do it from my home. How? Welcome to the new world of MOOC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
It’s now possible to take the kind of coursework that would qualify you as an engineer (among other careers) in any field, from the greatest institutions in the world, and for free:
https://www.edx.org/
So why am I worrying about the hundreds of thousands of dollars its going to cost me to get my two, now infant, children through college when they reach college age? Does any of this make any sense? And so why are we talking about making higher education affordable when the problem is higher education itself?
We should be focusing our attention on mainstreaming certifications and MOOC’s in todays industries so that the brick and mortar universtities can focus on what they do best, sort of. By which I mean producing academics, research and researchers, and the next generation of Phd’s.
November 25th, 2012 | 3:20 pm
Brian, I’m thinking about you higher ed points, but I do think that a health care program that offers a combination of continued health care security and higher take home pay could be quite politically attractive. But it won’t be easy. Most of the latest crop of Republican presidential candidates couldn’t make a sustained case against Obamacare to Republican primary voters never mind a positive case to the general public.
Pseudoplotinus, I think I agree.
November 25th, 2012 | 11:03 pm
I agree with Pseudoplotinus’s points on higher education, but would point out that any changes that would reduce the need for higher ed credentials, however logical, are unlikely as long as the Democrats are a force in American politics. Higher ed is an industry like any other, and it is emphatically a constituency of the Democratic Party. Plus, needless to say, colleges are a major factor in producing the Dems’ huge advantage among young voters. And inflated tuition creates a demand for government help in paying it, which the Democrats are only too glad to provide.
November 25th, 2012 | 11:54 pm
djf,
That has generally been my suspicion as well. The good news is that if what you say is true, then it makes for a very promising opening for a conservative policy on higher education.
I should note, however, that a lot of the movement on the MOOC front has been coming from higher educational mavricks like Anant Agarwal at MIT, and now president at EDx, and are not, from what I can tell, remotely right of center.
November 26th, 2012 | 11:44 am
Well, pseudoplotinus, one can hope. The Democrats and the Left have a long history of ignoring, fighting against and sabotaging good, constructive ideas from within their own camp. This characteristic is especially florid in the current administration and Dem congressional caucuses, which put one in mind of the New York City Council transplanted to the White House and Capitol Hill.
November 27th, 2012 | 7:52 pm
[...] could spend more of their time on the legitimate public policy concerns that Julia has and focus on conservative policy solutions that would make it cheaper and easier for her to get an educa… As Ramesh Ponnuru wrote today, as long as Republicans lack a policy agenda that speaks directly to [...]
November 28th, 2012 | 8:55 am
So it would be great if Pete were to develop each of his numbered points in separate posts. He’s on a real roll in terms of influence. (Look at the twittering a couple of his posts has inspired.)
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