“The ultimate test of man’s
conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future
generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.”
-- Gaylord Nelson,
Senator from Wisconsin (1916-2005)
In February,
BSB wrote that one of the “First Principles” of American Politics should be to “assume that present sacrifice for future
benefit is the appropriate path,” and that, “The burden of proof should be on
those who would take today and pay tomorrow, not the other way around.”
All too
often, however, whether the topic is wages, housing, pensions, or the fight to
combat the catastrophic effects of climate change, we are quick to sell the
next generation short to avoid sacrificing our own benefits/lifestyle.
As Joanna Weiss highlighted
in the Boston Globe last week, 26 states currently provide
a modified minimum wage for teens, ranging from offering teens 85 percent of
the minimum wage and allowing substantially lower wages for short-term work to
exempting students from the minimum wage altogether. Weiss concluded, “Who’s to say, based on age, that their
work is less valuable than anybody else’s?”
In New York State, teens make the same
minimum wage. However, the State recently enacted a tax credit
that subsidizes the wages of 16-20 year olds, making the effective wage of a teenager lower (from the employer’s perspective).
As important as wages are to success in New
York, perhaps nothing is more closely tied to opportunity than housing. The
dreams of youth coming to Gotham—whether from small, rural towns in
Massachusetts or metropolises from across the sea—invariably run into the
reality of New York’s affordable housing crunch.
Last week, Harry Siegel of the New York Daily News once again noted
what many economists across the political spectrum have said for years about
New York’s housing market, “the more subsidized housing we have, the more
outrageously expensive it gets for everyone not lucky enough to have it.”
And as you would expect given
that housing, like wages, is a zero-sum game, older people are vastly overrepresented among subsidized housing units.
As shown in the table below from the Furman Center’s 2012
Annual Report on the State of NYC’s Rent-Stabilized Housing, people over the
age of 65 are much more likely to
reside in rent-regulated, public, and other subsidized housing than the young.
Most acknowledge that the only
way out of this conundrum—save for an unwinding of NYC’s rent-stabilized
housing program (disclosure: I live in a rent-stabilized unit on
Manhattan’s Upper East Side)—is to build more housing. And the only way to do
that in New York City is to build up.
However, as Siegel adroitly
points out, this solution once again pits the generations against one another,
creating, “a fight between those of us already here, protecting what we
have, and the needs of those who might join us — between the city’s present and its future.”
A third area where this type of generational
clash frequently takes place is government pensions. In 2012, New York recently
enacted Tier VI—a new benefit tier for employees entering City/State service
after April 1, 2013. Tier VI asks future employees to pay more for fewer
benefits than Tier V employees (disclosure: I am a “Tier IV” member),
continuing a long tradition of “pension reform” that solves present problems by
borrowing from future employees. As the Fiscal Policy Institute found,
the average Tier VI employee will receive a pension with a value that is 39.8
percent lower than currently provided under Tier 5.
While some insist that “reliance” on benefits
should prevent them from being impaired in any way, that ideological rigidity necessarily
assumes that the benefits of future workers/veterans should be sacrificed to
maintain the status quo.
Some interest groups have
recognized the generational tension in politics and sought a path forward. Common
Sense Action and the Bipartisan Policy Center have created an Agenda for
Generational Equity (AGE), which seeks to protect today’s seniors and future generations through
entitlement reform and investments in education and development that improve
mobility and opportunity.
However, while AGE is an
ambitious and well-meaning effort, it falls short by failing to use the
language of sacrifice, of tradeoffs, in rendering its judgment.
Indeed, the AGE appears to want readers to have their cake and eat it
to—implying that there is a way forward in which all will be healthier,
happier, wealthier, and without any additional burden (tax or otherwise).
It is yet another example of how sacrifice has become a
verboten term in American politics. How this came to pass is something of a mystery,
particularly given how we have historically revered sacrifice (whether of life,
liberty, or treasure) as one of the pinnacles of a democratic society.
On the other hand, concerns
about generational equity are nothing new. Nearly 30 years ago, Steven
Greenhouse of the New York Times wrote
that the very term “Generational equity” was slowly creeping into the political
discourse as economists, “assert that the
generation in power is blithely passing the bill to its successors.”
No one is blameless in this story—from the politicians who
are too scared to level with constituents, to the constituents themselves, who
allow politicians to infantilize them by reveling in the fiction that solving
problems is painless and that merely saying
that nothing is more important than our children is more important than
actually backing up that sentiment through collective sacrifice.
In the end, sacrifice shouldn’t be a dirty
word in American politics; it should be something to which we all aspire.
No comments:
Post a Comment