Contributing Op-Ed Writer: Is the Safety Net Just Masking Tape?

It's easy for liberals to explain away setbacks to programs and policies that they favor — ranging from infrastructure investment to food stamps to increased education budgets — as the result of the intransigence of the Republican Party, with its die-hard commitment to slashing government spending on nearly every front.

But that explanation is too facile.

Two years ago, Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, opened a productive line of inquiry in a blog post called "Are We at the Completion of the Liberal Project?"

Konczal described two approaches to the liberal state. In the first, "you would have the government maintaining full employment, empowering workers and giving them more bargaining power." In the second, "you would have a safety net for those who fell through the cracks."

These two approaches, according to Konczal, should not be looked at as an either-or proposition, but as mutually reinforcing and interdependent:

"I don't believe those two can exist without each other. Without a strong middle and working class you don't have natural constituencies ready to fight and defend the implementation and maintenance of a safety net and public goods. The welfare state is one part, complimenting full employment, of empowering people and balancing power in a financial capitalist society."

In practice, Konczal writes, the political left has abandoned its quest for deep structural reform — full employment and worker empowerment — and instead has "doubled-down" on the safety net strategy. The result, in his view, is "a kind of pity-charity liberal capitalism."

Konczal's poignant description of the problem goes a long way towards explaining the current struggles of the left. The question is whether there is an effective worker empowerment strategy at a time of globalization, off-shoring and robotization.

Insofar as Democrats concentrate the bulk of their efforts on means-tested transfer programs (on the extension of long-term unemployment benefits, Medicaid and food stamps, for example), they leave the most needy and vulnerable to the vagaries of public opinion.

Survey data find that during hard times people become less altruistic and more inclined to see the poor as undeserving. They turn to the right, not the left, in periods of economic stress.

This argument is made by Benjamin Friedman, an economist at Harvard, in his book, "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth," as well as in a number of related publications. In a 2006 speech, which was printed in the American Economist, Friedman argued that:

"When a society is experiencing rising standards of living, broadly distributed across the population at large, that is precisely the circumstance under which it is likely also to make progress along a variety of dimensions that Western thinking has, at least since the eighteenth century, regarded not only as positive but as positive in explicitly moral terms."

A growing economy, according to Friedman, encourages a "society's willingness to provide opportunities to those who are able and willing to take them," fosters stronger racial and immigrant tolerance, "greater generosity toward those who, through some combination of natural circumstance, market forces and sheer luck, have been left behind," and "rising societies are also likely to move in the direction of strengthening their democratic political institutions."

"Conversely," Friedman notes, "if a society is either stagnating or, worse yet, undergoing a decline in the material realm, it is likely not only to make no progress in these moral dimensions but, all too often, it enters a period of retreat and retrenchment."

There is evidence from other sources, European and domestic, that supports Friedman's thesis.

Konczal and Friedman help explain several widely recognized contradictions.

State governments are eviscerating funding for public schools, despite a growing body of evidence that the American education system is leaving students poorly equipped to enter the job market and is undermining the nation's competitive position in the global economy.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, spending since the start of the recession on K-12 and higher education has nosedived, as shown in Figure 1.

Similarly, the federal government continues a fiscal policy of reduced expenditures in defiance of an emerging consensus among economists, including some conservatives, that austerity has done more harm than good. Figure 2 illustrates the steady decline in overall federal spending.

Finally, government outlays for roads, bridges and other capital construction – otherwise known as "non-defense capital spending on structures" — has plummeted despite findings that the nation's bridges and highways are in danger of collapse. In Figure 3, BCA Research reports that such spending has been on a downward path since at least 2000, with a precipitous decline over the past three years.

The combative conservative stances on spending, education and infrastructure point to the difficulties facing anyone seeking to enact more substantial economic reform. Even so, what are some of policies and programs that progressives contend would produce growth, strengthen the political and economic leverage of workers, and revive opportunity?