OurFuture.org Blogs: Andrea Batista Schlesinger

Don't worry, says the American Enterprise Institute. Be happy!

Andrea Batista Schlesinger — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:50:23 -0400

I'm not surprised that the new head of the American Enterprise Institute is an expert on happiness. They must need a dose.

It is the home, after all, of the discredited John Bolton, the discredited Paul Wolfowitz, the discredited Richard Perle, the fiction writer Lynne Cheney, the fiction perpetrator Dick Cheney, and lots of other people whose ideas have left us poorer and humbler, surveilled and bankrupt, unpopular and... unhappy.

Arthur Brooks writes about happiness a lot. It was in response to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that I wrote this letter to the editor, which, to their credit, they printed. Brooks maintained that billionaires were happy not because they were rich, but because they were able to create value, their motivating factor. In response, I said:

I couldn't agree more with Arthur Brooks ("What's Wrong With Billionaires?" March 19) that money, by itself, doesn't bring happiness. Indeed, it is success that brings happiness, and money is simply an indicator of success. We have been too hard on our misunderstood billionaires, who are actually driven by a burning desire to successfully create value, not to accumulate more money. His exhibit A: the fact that most of the billionaires on the Forbes Magazine top 949 earned their own fortunes.

This is one of the primary reasons that I support a healthy estate tax. I do not want to begrudge any American the opportunity to create his or her own wealth. If that were to happen -- if most billionaires were to simply be handed their wealth -- they would not have the opportunity to create value and to, therefore, attain happiness.

And the added bonus of keeping a healthy estate tax is that we allow today's billionaires to do precisely what Mr. Brooks maintains they have the willingness to do -- give it away. In this case, they can fund the public systems, such as schools and police and public colleges, that will enable future generations of Americans to attain the kind of success that "spills opportunity and economic abundance onto all of us, directly or indirectly." And that, of course, makes them happy.

Brooks' writing seems - how do I phrase this tactfully - inane in the context of the pressing issues facing our nation. His analysis is so simplistic in the pursuit of the approval of support of his ideological agenda that it inspires no response but... huh? For example, one finding of his new book, Gross National Happiness, is that "Work, not leisure, makes us happy. Ninety percent of Americans like their jobs, and 70 percent of Americans say that they would continue to work in them even if they were financially independent." The only catch? People don't like their jobs when they sense that they can't move up. Precisely! So the next question would be.... how do we create jobs in our present economy that will enable people to take care of themselves and their families while also allowing for people to contribute as best as they can to their workplace, to their communities, to their society? Brooks is not interested in this. Instead, he is compelled to offer up little tidbits that he thinks challenge orthodoxy, and therefore will be of interest on the op-ed page, a motivation that I typically observe in the intellectually understimulated. For example, "Despite the stereotype of grim conservatives and happy-go-lucky liberals, the truth is that people on the political right are nearly twice as happy as those on the left." Let's see... what are the policy implications of such a statement? Juicy! Or, "Marriage makes people very happy, but children have the opposite effect: The happiness of couples, and the quality of their marriage, falls after the birth of the first child." Let's see. Could that have something to do with the economic realities that present themselves after childbirth, beginning with America being in the company of only Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland in a survey of 173 countries for offering no guaranteed paid leave to new mothers? No comment.

Or this: "The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that don't have guns." (Well, to be rigorous about it, 36% of gun owners were "very happy" compared to 30% of people without guns being "very happy," so nobody is exactly running through the streets in any case, but this is a small point to make in a substance that suffers from lack of analysis. For example, Brooks asks rhetorically, "Why are gun owners so happy? One plausible reason is a sense of self-reliance, in terms of self-defense or even in terms of the ability to hunt their own dinner." As one head of a think tank to another, let me welcome you to something called causation. If you want to make an assertion that gun owners are happier because they can defend themselves, ask if gun owners are happier BECAUSE they own a gun! But anyways.)

We couldn't agree more with Brooks when he says that "The big challenge for the new person coming in is figuring out why A.E.I. is so successful." Indeed... why? It can't really be their success in making America a stronger or safer country thanks to their access to the Bush administration.

But hey, if Brooks and his Fellows are happy working so hard, what else matters!

The More Americans Demand Change, The More The State Of The Union Address S

Andrea Batista Schlesinger — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:30:05 -0500

DMI’s Rapid Response to the 2008 State of the Union

Click here to read the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy’s full analysis of the President’s domestic policy prescriptions – complete with statistics and talking points -- online at www.drummajorinstitute.org/sotu2008

The American people want change. Every Presidential candidate, Democrat and Republican, has made this a mantra. But the State of the Union Address reveals no alteration from President George W. Bush. This year the President labored to keep breathing life into the same worn out ideology that has repeatedly failed America’s current and aspiring middle class.
The President continues to proclaim the foundation of our economy sound when so many current and aspiring middle-class Americans are losing their spot in the American Dream. He prioritizes ideology over proven methods of stimulating the economy and providing health care. He uses the language of consumer choice to dress up what really amounts to unbridled corporate power and profiteering. He continues to assert that the market will right itself, if only people understand it more and restrict it less, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

Despite the praise-worthy components of President Bush’s address tonight – his signing of the Energy Independence and Security Act, his cooperation with Congress to pass a stimulus reform that would include millions of low-income Americans he initially intended to exclude, his newfound interest in supporting military families – his approach reflected a commitment to ideology, as opposed to willingness to see how that ideology has actually impacted current and aspiring middle-class Americans.

After years of insisting that the economy was doing great as middle-class families were squeezed by stagnant wages and a rising cost of living, it takes weak corporate profits to make the President recognize that times are tough.

* Because the President’s ideology insists that tax cuts are always preferable to government spending, the stimulus proposal includes costly and ineffective incentives for business rather than a fast and efficient expansion of unemployment benefits that would both boost the economy and help the middle-class households hardest hit by the downturn.

* Looking at the corporate recklessness and lack of government oversight that created the subprime mortgage crisis, President Bush avoids regulating the industries at fault. Rather he touts a plan that allows banks to decide on a purely voluntary basis whether they care to work out a payment plan with beleaguered homeowners. We don’t imagine that’s the kind of volunteerism he heralded elsewhere in his address.

* A middle-class standard of living is defined by things like access to education, health coverage and the opportunity to hold down a stable, well-paid job, yet from education to health care to tax policy, the President preferred to experiment with market-based solutions that won’t help aspiring Americans work their way into the middle class. It was particularly shocking that the President urges Congress to make his failed tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, despite their failure to help the nation recover from the last economic downturn.

The President tells us that he trusts the American people. The more important question is whether the American people have any reason to trust the White House. The President’s support of choice in this State of the Union address reveals that he is choosing not to heed the call of the American people for common-sense solutions to the challenges they face.

Yet, what is most important this address, is not the President delivering it, but the ideas represented. This State of the Union can either serve as a blueprint for continuing to move backwards, or a line of demarcation away from a policy outlook that has caused irreparable harm to America’s middle class. While the President’s years of imposing dangerously flawed policies on the nation are drawing to a close, future leaders, in Congress and the White House, will determine whether his distorted worldview lives on, and continues to afflict the middle class and the nation.

* * * * * *
You will find DMI’s full analysis of the President’s domestic policy prescriptions online at www.drummajorinstitute.org/sotu2008

Click here to read DMI’s analysis of what Bush’s State of the Union address means for:

Economy (including the foreclosure crisis)
Budget
Energy and Environment
Healthcare
Education
Veterans
Immigration
FISA Immunity