Progressives (Liberals)

It.is.true.

A third protest vote ain't nothing but a gift to republicans.
If you're going to do it, at least be honest enough to own up to throwing net votes the republican way.

David Brock is carrying on his disgusting, dishonest attacks against Bernie and anyone who supports Bernie as if he’s still being paid by HILLARY.

And there's Hillary again, in upper case no less.

Except that Maddow and and Hayes are corporate news stooges.

One bright area in these dark days of American politics has been a blossoming of bold and interesting progressive policy ideas, such as wealth taxes, postal banking (offering basic financial services to customers who might not otherwise have access to them) and breaking up the giants of the tech industry. In the spirit of fresh starts, progressives should now confront an even more basic challenge: their complexity problem.

In recent decades progressives have not prioritized making policies and programs easy for most Americans to understand, use and benefit from. Fixing this problem will mean overcoming a streak of perfectionism and a certain intellectual defensiveness, but it must be done if progressives are to make government popular again.

The Affordable Care Act is a good example of the complexity problem. Yes, it was an important policy achievement, and yes, many of its problems can be rightly blamed on industry resistance and Republican efforts to dismantle it.

But the act is also exceptionally hard to understand and discouragingly daunting to make use of. An emphasis on “choice” and “transparency” resulted in a law that only a rational-choice theorist could love. The act made health insurance more complicated, not less, which is one reason that such a high percentage of medical bills go to paying administrative costs, and why the Affordable Care Act is much less popular than it could be.

It used to be said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. Today she’s a liberal who tried to pay a babysitter without breaking the law. It is admirable that Democrats try to tackle society’s thorniest problems with the often unwieldy tools of government, but that is not an excuse for programs that are too complex for their own good.

The truth is that good public policy can actually be elegant and simple to understand, even when the social problem that it’s addressing is complex. Social Security, Medicare, bans on indoor smoking, the “do not call” list (when it worked) and public libraries are examples of government solutions that are easy to understand and to benefit from.

Avoidance of complexity and minimizing choices are hallmarks of good design, as we have learned from the technological revolution in user interfaces. The age of impossible-to-use computers and incomprehensible TV remote controls has given way to the sleek and intuitive interfaces offered by pioneers like Steve Jobs of Apple. What progressives most need now is not more brains, but better policy designers.

One major obstacle to simple, effective public policy is people like me — the expert class. Many of us are in denial, seeing complexity as a necessary evil, an unavoidable feature of answers to hard problems, even a technocratic badge of honor. We criticize conservatives for relying on simplistic slogans like “cut taxes” and “drill, baby, drill” instead of nuanced, empirically informed assessments of economic growth and environmental management.

Progressives are right to consider expertise essential to good policymaking. But policy experts are rarely good at interface design, for we have a bad habit of assuming that people have unlimited time and attention and that to respect them means offering complete transparency and a multiplicity of choices. Real respect for the public involves appreciating what the public actually wants and needs. The reality is that most Americans are short on time and attention and already swamped by millions of daily tasks and decisions. They would prefer that the government solve problems for them — not create more work for them.

To be sure, not every interaction with government can be all sweetness and light. The business of government, after all, also involves confrontation, as when it ferrets out fraud or brings murderers to justice. And some challenges, like financial regulation and ensuring drug safety, are irreducibly complex.

But what the public wants from government is help with complexity, not exposure to it. This generation of progressives, to achieve lasting success, must accept that simplicity and popularity are not a dumbing-down of policy, but rather the unavoidable requirement for its success.

I was there. I was (still am) a Bernie fan. I totally supported him, all the way. He was evidently better than Clinton, but he also knew that Trump was immensely worse than Clinton. So he did what he had to do for the greater good, he campaigned for her, as he had promissed he would if he lost the primaries. This guy Bernie, he's no joker.

Some people adopt a politician for one season, when it suits them, and abandon him the next, out of convenience. Bernie deserves better than that.

Their findings, published Thursday in the journal Vaccine, confirm previous research about those who are opposed or reluctant to vaccinate and the key arguments that resonate with them. Like many who are vaccine-hesitant or opposed to vaccines, the majority of commenters to the Pittsburgh practice were mothers. The top two political affiliations were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, with 56 percent expressing support for President Trump and 11 percent expressing support for Sen. Bernie Sanders, the researchers found.

Among the anti-vaccine themes in the comments were a mistrust of the scientific community, concerns about personal liberty, perceived risks about vaccine safety and the belief that government and pharmaceutical companies are part of a conspiracy to hide information.

Examining Bernie Sanders’s Electability Argument

It’s an article of faith among serious Bernie Sanders fans that he would have avoided Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016 had he been the Democratic nominee — in other words, “Bernie woulda won.” There’s no way to know for sure, but there’s certainly no empirical evidence that he would have done any worse than HRC, as many Democrats suspected earlier in the campaign cycle.

Still, of all the reasons to vote for Bernie Sanders, you wouldn’t expect “he’s the most electable candidate” to rank all that high, as compared to his often-quite-popular policy positions like Medicare for All or free college. Yet there are signs his 2020 campaign will heavily emphasize the claim that he’s the right candidate for those whose main concern is driving Trump out of office. Here’s the Associated Press story on the subject:

...So, what do we know about Sanders’s electability?

It’s not an easy question...

The Office of Management and Budget is required by law to produce a widely neglected annual report, the Information Collection Budget of the United States Government (ICB), which quantifies the annual paperwork burden that the government imposes on its citizens. The most recent ICB finds that in 2015, Americans spent 9.78 billion hours on federal paperwork.1

The Treasury Department, including the Internal Revenue Service, accounted for the vast majority of the total: 7.36 billion hours. The Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for 696 million hours imposed on (among others) doctors, hospitals, and the beneficiaries of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. The Department of Transportation accounted for no less than 214 million hours, including elaborate requirements imposed on truck drivers, automobile companies, railroads, and airlines. Comparatively speaking, the 91 million annual hours that came from the Department of Education might not seem like much, but for administrators, teachers, and students, they were pretty burdensome.

The ICB does not make for riveting reading, but it is worth pausing over those 9.78 billion hours. Suppose we insisted that for the entirety of 2019 all 2.7 million citizens of Chicago must work forty hours a week at a single task: filling out federal forms. By the end of 2019, they would not have come within four billion hours of the 2015 total. The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) was enacted in 1980 in an effort to reduce this burden, but it doesn’t appear to be living up to its name. (Disclosure, or perhaps confession: from 2009 to 2012, I served as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs [OIRA], and in that capacity I oversaw administration of the PRA.)

If we use the average value for an hour of work as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics—$27—then those 9.78 billion hours are the equivalent of $264.06 billion. That is more than double the budget of the Department of State and the Department of Transportation, and more than triple the budget of the Department of Education. And the monetary figures greatly understate the problem. Paperwork burdens can make it difficult or impossible for people to enjoy fundamental rights, such as the right to vote or to obtain life-changing benefits—or to avoid crushing hardships.

(...)

For many people these costs prove overwhelming. That helps explain the low participation rates for many important federal and state programs—and the immense difficulty that people often have in obtaining permits or licenses of various sorts. Behavioral economists emphasize that an assortment of human biases amplify the real-world effects of administrative burdens. For example, it is often tempting to put off administrative burdens until another day. That day may never come, even if the consequences of delay are quite serious.

Herd and Moynihan offer a series of case studies. In some of them, burdens are a serious problem, but in others, Congress and federal agencies have worked hard to ensure that they are negligible. Their star performer is Social Security, which is simple and in important respects automatic. As they put it, “the biggest bookkeeping organization in the world banished burdens.” The Social Security Administration (SSA) does almost everything and generally requires citizens to do very little. It tracks people’s earnings and determines eligibility and benefit levels—automatically. If you are eligible, you can enroll online or go to one of the nation’s 1,200 field offices. Waiting times are usually short. After you become entitled to benefits, you are likely to receive direct deposits into your bank account within a month.

(...)

Medicare is a nearly universal program aimed at older people. If you are eligible for Social Security, you are usually eligible for Medicare too. The sludge comes from the astonishingly complex process faced by Medicare enrollees who are choosing among services. What is the right supplemental insurance plan? What is the right prescription drug plan? Is a Medicare Advantage Plan a good idea? These can be difficult questions, and as Herd and Moynihan point out, they are especially challenging for older adults, who often suffer from cognitive decline. They quote a Medicare beneficiary who complains, “That’s what gets me, they wait until we retire to make it complicated.”

There is a lot of evidence that Medicare beneficiaries are making bad choices and losing a lot of money in the process. For such programs, Herd and Moynihan argue that the government should “reduce choice and simplify options” with the use of online tools, telephone assistance (with shorter waiting times), and customized recommendations. In many cases, federal agencies have the legal authority to adopt such approaches on their own. The real question is whether there is political will—and whether burden-reduction is sufficiently urgent to lead anyone to take action.

(...)

The Fifteenth Amendment, forbidding denial of the vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” was ratified in 1870, but for decades, administrative burdens have been used to disenfranchise African-Americans. Literacy tests were a favorite instrument until they were finally forbidden by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In recent years, administrative burdens have become less onerous; voting is more convenient and registration is generally easier. But obstacles continue to exist, and in some states, they are mounting. Worst of all, they are being used as a political weapon, above all by Republicans seeking to increase their prospects for winning elections.

Some states are purging people from the voter rolls if they have not voted for a specified number of years or responded to a notice. As a result they are required to register again. Others are purging voters on the basis of flawed technologies designed to prevent noncitizens or felons from voting. Some states require a state-issued photo ID. That might not seem so taxing, but according to some estimates, about 11 percent of Americans do not have one. States have increased residency requirements and mandated proof of citizenship. Administrative burdens of multiple kinds are working to disenfranchise African-Americans, the elderly, and people with low incomes.

(...)

There’s a long-standing lefty theory that, in sharp contrast to the ancient belief that candidates closer to the political center are more electable, more explicitly progressive candidates can energize the party base without losing a significant share of swing voters. The current atmosphere of polarization, and the obvious problems Hillary Clinton had in maintaining her party’s base in 2016, reinforces the idea that someone like Sanders can thread the needle between mobilization and persuasion strategies.