If you want to understand a world of things that are under the radar of most of us, but that contribute to many of the worrisome outcomes we’re seeing today, you can hardly do better than read Cornell professor Suzanne Mettler’s paper Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era.
Mettler’s “submerged state” is a tissue of corporate, personal and other interests that take government policies, including policies aimed at fostering economic and social equality, and shape them into instruments that benefit themselves.
And the players aren’t just the ones you’d expect: corporations hoping for handouts, corsage-bosomed socialites begging their congressmen for tax loopholes. Take Mettler’s mini-narrative about what happened when President Obama tried to use relatively minor changes in tax policy to pay 45 percent of the cost of his health care plan.
Obama planned to cut tax deductions for the very rich, two deductions in particular: the mortgage interest deduction and the deduction for charitable giving. The public was not especially aware of this detail of his plan, but the parties that would have been affected were. The real estate industry and the Council on Foundations began quiet campaigns (quiet on the public front, loud in the ears that counted) to kill the idea.
That real estate interests would put up a hullabaloo is not surprising, but the philanthropic folks (who were, Mettler explains, divided on the issue)—that’s another matter, and prompts the observation that if we had better health care, we wouldn’t need so much charity (who doesn’t know wealthy people who are generous with their pet causes but yell bloody murder at any sign of change to the basic distribution system?).
The charity groups who opposed the tax change got to Congress, even to liberal congresspeople. Who wanted to be the Grinch who attacked the incentive for charitable giving? “I would never want to adversely affect anything that is charitable or good,” piously remarked Rep. Charlie Rangel, who never wanted to adversely affect anything that was good for Charlie Rangel.
So a plan that might have paid nearly half the cost of health care reform died, not because of gross corruption, but because decent people, nice people, at an historic juncture thought only of a single issue, their own. For more of this kind of information, go to http://government.arts.cornell.edu/faculty/mettler, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era.
