As the economy continues to stagger along, and federal relief passed early in the coronavirus crisis runs dry, we are increasingly getting a sense of the deep damage being inflicted on state and local governments around the country. Reports like this recent one from The New York Times describe states losing big chunks of revenue, as the economic downturn affects the amount of taxes they’re able to collect. Whether it’s states like Alaska and Wyoming hit by the drop in oil prices, or Florida and Nevada hobbled by dwindling tourism, the damage seems to have spared no state in the union. Economists warn that we increasingly run the danger of doing long-term damage to our economic growth.
As the Times story takes pains to highlight, the downturn is affecting states governed by both Democratic and Republican governors and legislatures. This point is crucial, as Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has framed his opposition to further aid to states as wanting to avoid a so-called “blue state bailout” that would unfairly benefit profligate Democratic-led states.
The logical and time-tested next step at this point would be for the federal government to send money to the states to compensate for their tax losses. This would not only stave off cuts in vital services, but equally importantly would support the national economy by ensuring that state spending continues to help fuel the economy even as the private sector struggles with economic headwinds. Since states can’t run deficits, the federal government has a necessary role to play in stabilizing their finances.
Yet we are still seeing opposition from Senate Republicans to a fuller rescue of states, even as their argument that it would disproportionately benefit Democratic states has been shredded by reality. There’s a gathering consensus among many on the left that McConnell and other Republicans would be more than fine with crippling the economic recovery by withholding spending that would prop up the economy, so that Democrats take the blame in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election — a destructive strategy that already worked out for them in Obama’s first term in office. Based on the evidence to date, this certainly seems to be McConnell’s plan.
The question about how to counter not just this, but other manifestations of GOP obstructionism, will obviously be central to the success or failure of the Biden presidency, and thankfully I have already seen some strong ideas floated for how to do so that I hope to discuss soon. But to stay with the question of aid to the states for now — one thing that jumps out at me is how the Republican Party tries to make it seem as if the states are actually units of an entirely different country, to which the federal government owes no obligation. This rhetorical alienation is most profound when Mitch McConnell specifies certain states as “blue states,” in which the fact of Democratic leadership sets them outside the bounds of national responsibility. Yet, the obvious truth is that people living in such states are as much American citizens as anyone else. If an American state needs a bailout, why shouldn’t the federal government help? Underlying the Republican sleight of hand is that, where federal spending is concerned, Americans are no longer to be thought of as Americans, but as Californians, or Nevadans, or Minnesotans. Mysteriously, through the misfortune of living in actual states, we learn that our status as American citizens is in fact a shadowy, tenuous thing.
This attempted nullification of citizenship is closely related to a second Republican sleight of hand — the idea that federal money that might be sent to the states is more or less the same as the United States sending aid to a foreign country. Vigorously obscured is the fact that when we talk of sending money to a state, it is actually. . . our money. It is money paid to the federal government by taxpayers from every state. For a party that makes such a big deal about being opposed to taxes, the Republican Party is awfully quick to forget that congressional appropriations are not drawn from a Private Congress Bank account, but are distributions of public money. The same idea goes for any disbursement made possible by deficit spending — as in fact much federal spending relies on at the moment — in which it is ultimately the prospect of the American people’s future taxpaying that makes such spending possible in the first place. Instead, the GOP pretends that the country can’t afford to spend the money when, in fact, it is our money to collectively spend as we see fit. While much of politics does in fact revolve around what or what not to spend money on, the Republican insinuation that the money is not ours to begin with is a particularly annoying trope.
A third bit of obfuscation strikes me as so glaring that it is less a sleight of hand than a sort of clumsy grope at concealment. Republican reluctance to compensate states for revenues lost through no fault of their own is often couched in language that suggests the money would not be well spent, or would not serve any particularly important purposes. Such a cynical and misleading pose is harshly contradicted by the reality of state spending cuts. The New York Times notes that “an overwhelming majority of state and local job losses have been in education"; meanwhile, other states are contemplating cuts in such supposed Republican priorities as law enforcement. I am curious what moral or political principle would guide Republicans to argue that schoolchildren should somehow be held responsible for an economic downturn, or, more pragmatically, that we should sacrifice future economic growth by allowing the education of the next generation to falter. Meanwhile, some states fear they may need to cut back on childhood vaccination programs, an especially noxious possibility in view of our current pandemic. Yet those in the GOP opposed to aid for states would rather not talk about such obviously painful and destructive cuts, preferring instead to mutter on about wasteful state spending, as if states were in the habit of collecting taxes so that they could then pile cash in great liberal, satanic bonfires. In a time of national crisis, both on the economic and health fronts, continued Republican efforts to alienate the American people from the proper powers of their own federal government, and to casually act as if states are no better than foreign nations asking for handouts, is truly breathtaking.