Conservative Economics and the Lower Class

Ezra Klein has a long post about the perennial question of why poor (white) people vote for Republicans. He contrasts Thomas Frank's famous thesis that they're distracted by cultural issues with his own hypothesis that they're distracted by security issues. But like most discussion of this question, his post makes a crucial assumption -- that Democratic economic policies are better for the poor, and therefore poor people voting on economic issues will rationally prefer the Democrats. But I think this is an unjustified assumption. I've listened to my share of lower-class Republicans, and they emphatically do not agree with a strong liberal economic program. In fact, I've heard far more negative commentary from these folks about Democrats economic policies than about their cultural or security policies, far more worry that Obama was a socialist than that he was a Muslim. Joe the Plumber wasn't enough to win the election for John McCain, but he clearly tapped a strong vein of support for conservative economic policy among a significant portion of the lower class.

Sometimes this arises from believing that they themselves are -- or may soon be -- above the cutoff such that they'll be among the people that money is being taken from in order to be redistributed down the scale. But there's also a powerful moral component. Many poorer people believe that liberal economic policies (particularly raw money redistribution, which is the first one to come to mind for such voters) are unjust, even if they benefit from them. "I've always worked hard; I don't need a handout from the government" is the mantra here.

Imagine a political party ran on a "give Stentor Danielson a million dollars" platform. I would not vote for that party, despite its clear economic benefit for me, because I think such a policy is unfair. Lower-class (white) voters often think the same thing about liberal economic policies in general.

The Frank, Klein, and Danielson hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, of course. But liberals would be better off if they admitted the possibility that conservative economics can appeal to lower class voters, and therefore were willing to make a moral rather than just self-interest appeal.

Obama on Fire

Bill Gabbert points out that the Obama-Biden campaign put out a 2-page position paper on wildland fire (pdf). It's fairly general and not especially radical, but it does hit two key policy priorities that any reasonable fire policy ought to include:
1) Creating a dedicated funding source so that the Forest Service doesn't keep raiding other areas of its budget to pay for firefighting (thus inhibiting both pre-fire fire management and other types of forest management).
2) Focusing fuel reduction on areas closest to the wildland-urban interface rather than in the backcountry. This makes the fuel reductions more effective and reduces conflicts with ecological goals that could arise from large-scale mechanical thinning.
There are also a lot of references to involving the public and local governments, which is good but not concrete enough to merit a bullet point of its own.

The one big oversight I see is that the Obama-Biden plan doesn't directly address the core of Bush's fire policy (which was in turn the core of his environmental agenda) -- restrictions on environmental reviews and appeals with respect to fire mitigation projects. These restrictions were justified by exaggerating the problem of lawsuits by environmental groups holding up the Forest Service's work, and resulted in removal of accountability (see Vaughn and Cortner's book for a good analysis). Some of these restrictions were put in place by Congress through the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, but others can be altered by executive order. Obama's team has apparently put together a list of some 200 policies he will immediately set about fixing without needing to go through Congress, such as repealing the "global gag rule" on foreign aid recipients talking about abortion, and allowing California to enact stronger greenhouse gas policies. Hopefully the full list includes rolling back the appeal-limiting aspects of Healthy Forests.