The ACA and the Working Class - Kevin Drum Festschrift

My festschrift contribution for Kevin Drum, who's recovering from a stem cell transplant in treatment for multiple myeloma, is up on Mother Jones. Kevin, give thanks, is doing very well, and managing to keep blogging on policy as well as track his treatment experience.

For those interested in the editing process -- as anyone who's ever edited inevitably is -- I thought my piece was skillfully shaped by Mother Jones managing editor Clint Hedler. Mostly he cut caveats and qualifications, which I've highlighted in the full draft below. Left to my own devices, I would leave the first and last highlighted sections in place and let the other cuts stand -- and I can see the case for all of them. I should be better at doing this to myself, as I spend half my day-job hours doing it to other people's articles.
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One thing I've always appreciated about Kevin is that his commitment to economic justice is grounded in political realism.  That balance was on display in his postmortem on the Democrats' drubbing in November:

when the economy stagnates and life gets harder, people get meaner. That's just human nature. And the economy has been stagnating for the working class for well over a decade—and then practically collapsing ever since 2008.

So who does the WWC [white working class] take out its anger on? Largely, the answer is the poor. In particular, the undeserving poor. Liberals may hate this distinction, but it doesn't matter if we hate it. Lots of ordinary people make this distinction as a matter of simple common sense, and the WWC makes it more than any. That's because they're closer to it. For them, the poor aren't merely a set of statistics or a cause to be championed. They're the folks next door who don't do a lick of work but somehow keep getting government checks paid for by their tax dollars. For a lot of members of the WWC, this is personal in a way it just isn't for the kind of people who read this blog.

And who is it that's responsible for this infuriating flow of government money to the shiftless? Democrats. We fight to save food stamps. We fight for WIC. We fight for Medicaid expansion. We fight for Obamacare. We fight to move poor families into nearby housing.

This is a big problem because these are all things that benefit the poor but barely touch the working class. 

As Kevin acknowledges, this is an age-old problem for Democrats. It's "unfair" in that there's overwhelming evidence that safety-net programs like food stamps, Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit "have positive effects on health, educational attainment, earnings and employment years later," as Jared Bernstein recently wrote. Conversely, programs popular with the middle class, such as the mortgage tax credit and tax-sheltered college savings plans, bestow the bulk of their benefits on the affluent. The distinction between "the poor" and "the working class" may also be too neat, given the volatility of Americans' incomes and the erosion of stable jobs at working class pay levels. An awful lot of working people access the benefits that Kevin lists, or have family members who do, (e.g., a large majority of food stamp beneficiaries). All that said, the perception that Kevin fingers is a political force, and partly grounded in reality, in that safety net programs (for the non-elderly at least) do most directly benefit those at the bottom of the income distribution.

Program note: Kevin Drum festschrift

I will be contributing to the Kevin Drum festschrift organized by Mother Jones as Kevin undergoes treatment -- thankfully, going quite well so farm and endured with grit and good humor --  for multiple myeloma. Kevin has perhaps been surprising himself with pretty active blogging through his chemo rounds, while Mother Jones staff and outsiders pitch in. Work on my contribution (finished, and running next week) along with this project has left this blog pretty fallow this week.

I note in the Mother Jones piece that I've always appreciated that Kevin's commitment to economic justice is tempered by political realism. His perceptions and assessments of Obama these past six years have also tracked pretty closely with -- and no doubt helped shape -- my own. That is, he sees Obama as "a sober, cautious, analytic, mainstream Democrat" who's substantively advanced a lot of progressive priorities while necessarily also disappointing liberal hopes on other fronts.

Where I've parted company from Kevin (and this is not the focus of next week's piece) is in reaction to Obama's rhetoric. He sees Obama's 2008 speeches and catch-phrases as "nothing more than typical campaign windiness." I see his rhetoric as an expression of the pragmatism Drum admires, articulating a nuanced, incremental sense of how progressive change occurs. That argument played out here and here.