Budget Games
Mar. xv, 2019
The fine art of political spin has been around forever, from the ancient Greeks who crafted rhetoric to enflame the masses, to Woodrow Wilson's wartime propaganda arm of the federal authorities. But lately information technology seems that spin—the deliberate crafting of words for purely political gain—is all we have. Sometimes it feels similar our public life is fiddling more than a prepare of competing messages, all meant to manipulate.
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Aye, it's gotten worse because nosotros take a president who demonstrably, brazenly lies and who seemingly has no core convictions, just, honestly, our epidemic of spin predated Trump and knows no party or ideology. Which brings us to our own Jim Kenney, who went on 6ABC'southward public affairs prove, Inside Story , last Sunday, hyping his $v billion spendapalooza of a proposed upkeep, a whopping 25 percent increase over the $3.9 billion budget he inherited. "If a candidate is running primarily on repealing the soda tax," Kenney said, "you lot're also repealing pre-K and you lot're also running on repealing rebuild."
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It was, politically speaking, a smart construction; Kenney knows that both his primary challengers, Alan Butkovitz and Tony Williams, oppose the revenue enhancement but support the programs it is meant to fund. Simply what came adjacent confirmed that this was also Kenney flexing his political spin muscles.
"What if they say they'll discover the money somewhere else?" asked host Tamala Edwards, referring to the mayor's challengers.
Kenney smiled a knowing smile. "This is my 29th budget," he said. "There's no actress $80 one thousand thousand laying around the upkeep. Then these folks who are telling you they tin can discover information technology in efficiencies and this or that, they're just pulling the wool over your eyes."
What makes this commutation an instance of cynical spin? Well, those folks Kenney claims are telling you they tin can replace the soda taxation by finding budgetary efficiencies? He was i of them. Even so here he is, cyberbanking on voters' short attention span in pursuit of his own political ends.
Those folks Kenney claims are telling you they tin replace the soda tax by finding budgetary efficiencies? He was 1 of them . Nonetheless here he is, cyberbanking on voters' short attention span in pursuit of his own political ends.
Here'due south the background: When Kenney ran for mayor in 2015, many of the states were excited by his calls for pre-Chiliad and rebuilding rec centers and parks. His plan to pay for those programs called for no new taxes. Instead, he was going to squeeze out of the organization $80 million—yes, he fifty-fifty put a number to information technology—by adopting the practice of zero-based budgeting.
What is that? It'due south an innovative accounting organisation that beginning came to light nether President Jimmy Carter back in the '70s. Instead of having department heads submit their usual request for a percent raise in their budgets each year, aught-based budgeting requires them to kickoff define their core mission and and so start their budget at zero and build it—until they meet that mission.
Nix-based budgeting is a reform that is gaining traction around the country. Some 35 municipalities practice some version of it, and, last twelvemonth, a Republican Congressman from Florida proposed a federal zero-based budgeting bill . When he was a candidate, Kenney committed to it after seeking out the advice of Josh Shapiro, who, prior to becoming our Chaser General, zip-based away a $10 million upkeep pigsty and $49 1000000 structural deficit in his first year as Montgomery Canton Commission Chairman. By forcing stewards of public dollars each year to justify all expenses to encounter their mission, zippo-based budgeting in Montgomery County and across the nation has exposed bloated spending by identifying expenditures that both rise in response to political debts and that are the inevitable residue of mission pitter-patter over time.
Surprise, surprise: Kenney's zero-based budgeting programme fell by the wayside in one case he was given the keys to City Hall. Instead, we got yet more taxes in the nation's most taxed-metropolis this side of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
And now, when information technology'south politically convenient, Kenney contradicts his former cocky past arguing that in that location is no bloat, no savings to be had whatsoever, in his $five billion budget. You tell me: What are the chances that this upkeep is that pristine and tight, keeping in mind that the same assistants making that claim took months and months to find $33 1000000 in missing revenue on its books, and, according to the Controller, committed $924 million in accounting errors ?
Kenney'southward spin automobile didn't stop there. In response to Edwards' insightful questions on the Channel 6 interview, (full disclosure: I was a guest panelist on the evidence), Kenney struggled to define a unifying vision for Philadelphia outside this one response: "Education," he said, noting that his upkeep calls for $1.ii billion in education funding over half-dozen years. "The only way out of poverty is education."
Sounds good, right? Kenney deserves credit for taking back accountability over our schools and for thinking long term by investing in didactics. Simply is it true—equally might appear on the face—that the only mode out of poverty is education?
"Teaching is a supply-side policy," writes economist Jared Bernstein. "It improves the quality of workers, not the quality or the quantity of jobs. A danger of overreliance on instruction in the poverty fence is that skilled workers finish up all dressed up with nowhere nice to go."
A torso of enquiry would suggest that it is non. "Education is a supply-side policy," writes economist Jared Bernstein, Joe Biden's longtime principal economic adviser. "It improves the quality of workers, not the quality or the quantity of jobs. A danger of overreliance on pedagogy in the poverty debate is that skilled workers end up all dressed up with nowhere squeamish to go."
Bernstein and many other experts maintain that, merely as in that location are multiple determinants of poverty, at that place needs to exist multiple responses. Education is key, yes, simply and so is intervention relative to race, family structure, economic growth and structural inequality. He cites inquiry showing that, between 1969 and 2000, improved education did indeed lower family unit poverty by nearly 4 percent points; at the same fourth dimension, though, economic growth lowered poverty by 5.7 percent.
In 2015, Matt Bruenig—a socialist policy annotator—demonstrated why in a study headlined Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty . Bruenig proves that, since the early on '90s, nosotros did indeed raise the nation's educational level without seeing a corresponding downturn in poverty. "Handing out more high school and higher diplomas doesn't magically create more than good-paying jobs," he writes. "When more credentials are chasing the same number of decent jobs, what you get is credential inflation: Jobs that used to require a high school degree now crave a college caste; jobs that used to require an Associate caste now require a Bachelor's degree, and then on…2d, having more education does non necessarily increase people'due south productive capacity…Third, poverty is really about non-working people: children, elderly, disabled, students, and the unemployed. The big things that crusade poverty for adults over the age of 25 in a low-welfare capitalist society—one-time age, inability, unemployment, having children—do not go away just because you have a ameliorate caste."
In other words, equally we all know on some level, our challenges are more complicated than Mayor Kenney's one-liners can fairly address. This is why we need a mayoral entrada, because we demand a real conversation about our seemingly intractable issues. Because bromides like "there is no extra $eighty million laying around the upkeep" and "the only way out of poverty is educational activity" just don't cutting it.
Kenney calls his $v billion budget "prudent." "We call up we're moving forward in the correct direction," he said on Channel six. "Unemployment is down, the population is up, development is up, we accept a solid fund balance."
Seems like, if not spin, then a rather selective list of reelection metrics, no? No mention of the unchanged, worst-in-the-nation poverty rate, or all our suffocating taxes, or our anemic job growth, or the exploding murder rate, upwards 3 per centum and so far this year, after jumps of 8 and fifteen pct, respectively, the concluding two years. Shouldn't leadership actually confront our challenges, rather than try and spin them away?
Photograph via YouTube 
Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/budget-games/
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