Good Government Backsliding

One of Zohran Mamdani's signature policy initiatives just launched -- a tax on pied-à-terres. The tax would apply to second homes (i.e., those not occupied as a primary residence) worth over $1 million.

I won't claim to be a housing (or tax) policy expert, but this seems perfectly reasonable to me. Admittedly, given the cost of NYC real estate a one million dollar home maybe isn't as opulent as one might imagine elsewhere.  But a one million dollar second home undoubtedly qualifies as a luxury, and it is no foul to ask people who live in luxury to pay a little extra to support the rest of society.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, the rollout of the tax has apparently been beset with problems. The city released a list of 960,000 properties it thought "could" be subjected to the tax, far in excess of the 10,000 units predicted to actually qualify for the assessment. Reportedly, even though the tax is explicitly targeted at second homes, quite a few homeowners received letters telling them they were on the hook for their primary residence. And a relatively quick deadline set for challenging the assessment (near the end of August) has been paired with a malfunctioning mechanism for actually filing the challenge, causing panic amongst a significant quotient of homeowners who were not intended to and should not be covered by the tax:

Ohlerking’s notice said he could apply for an exemption to the tax by submitting proof online that the home was his primary residence. 

But, when Ohlerking, who is blind, logged on to the prescribed website with the help of his friend Jennifer Stadnik, they were met with a nonfunctioning blank white screen.  

So, the pair printed out a cache of documents to take to the Department of Finance’s Brooklyn office—only to be told by employees that the office couldn’t accept Ohlerking’s proof of residency at that time because they were busy setting up a designated intake center for people claiming they wrongfully received pied-à-terre tax notices, Stadnik said.

On Friday, Stadnik said the office called Ohlerking to tell him it would be able to help him on Monday morning.

I'll pause here to say two things. One is that part of good government is good execution, no matter what it is you're doing. Whatever one might think about the policy, the execution seems to have been a screw-up here, and for that the Mamdani administration deserves to take a few lumps. The other is that mistakes happen. No administration ever does everything perfectly. Taking a few lumps is one thing, but stories like this don't on their own justify some sweeping indictment that the Mamdani administration is essentially or uniquely incompetent.

And in an ideal world, that's all that would need to be said. But on BlueSky, I've seen an alarming number of posts not just excusing the rollout mishaps, but taking a tone of sadistic glee that people are being subjected to these mistakes (and an apparently Kafka-esque process for challenging said mistakes). "Oh yes, what a colossal mess, asking wealthy property owners to prove they live in those properties," sneered one journalist. An article in the Free Press titled "Why Mamdani Is Asking My Mom to Pay His Pied-à-Terre Tax" was met with a snarky "I'm guessing he's asking her because she owns a pied-a-terre" -- but the point of the article is that no, she doesn't, this is her primary residence (the author in question is Alex Berenson, and I deeply resent having to say anything remotely defensive on his behalf).

At the risk of being cringe liberal, it is never good to revel in another's suffering for its own sake. If Mamdani's tax is good, it's because it raises revenue from those who can most afford to pay to fund projects necessary for the good of the city as a whole. It's not good because it aggravates people who own lavish second homes in New York that they don't live in. It's certainly not good because it aggravates people who are mistakenly asserted to be owners of lavish second homes in New York that they don't live in. At that point, one is saying that it is good to immiserate the innocent in the service of attempting to immiserate the enemy class. This is not a healthy attitude. Once that sort of atavistic sadism is allowed to let slip, it always leads to dark places.

A few days ago, I said that "Half of Mamdani’s genius is convincing ordinary people that progressive ideas will materially benefit their lives and aren’t scary communism, and the other half is convincing terminally online leftists that basic good government is progressive and isn’t neoliberal shilling for evil corporations." I stand by that, and I don't think this blip falsifies the broader point that for the most part Mamdani genuinely has tried to focus on basic good government and that doing so is part of being a progressive, not a betrayal of it.

But it's pretty clear that many of his supporters, at least, have not quite internalized the lesson yet.

The Non-Mismatch of Rich Kids

Paul Tough has a bracing article in the New York Times about how collegiate admissions practices systematically favor underperforming wealthy kids who can afford to pay full tuition, framed around efforts to reverse that trend at Connecticut's Trinity College (via).

The short version is that, outside an incredibly tiny slice of hyper-elite schools like Harvard, most universities need tuition dollars in order to make their budgets work (this would include very good schools like Trinity, ranked in the top 50 of U.S. liberal arts colleges). Poorer students, who need scholarship support, represent a loss of tuition dollars -- in effect, schools need to balance our the low-income students they admit with high-income tuition-payers, even in cases where the poorer student is on merit alone a better candidate.

The way this plays out in practice is usually match-ups between high-GPA/low-SAT poorer students versus low-GPA/high-SAT wealthier students, which are repeatedly resolved in favor of the latter. The high standardized test scores are viewed as at least balancing out the low GPA, so it isn't really a case of taking a less-qualified wealthier kid over a scrappier, smarter, but poorer candidate. But often, it turns out, these test scores are themselves an artifact of wealth -- they reflect nothing more than that the student can afford SAT tutors and knows how to "play the game". Once they get to college, they revert back to high school form -- relative underperformers, unmotivated, and not on the level of their peers.

When Angel Pérez arrived at Trinity and took a close look at the way the admissions office had been making its decisions, what he found left him deeply concerned. “We were taking some students who probably should not have been admitted, but we were taking them because they could pay,” he told me. “They went to good high schools, but they were maybe at the bottom of their class. The motivation wasn’t there. So the academic quality of our student body was dropping.” 

At Trinity, Pérez’s predecessors had been able to capitalize on a pattern that admissions officers say they often see: At expensive prep schools, even students close to the bottom of the class usually have above-average SAT scores, mostly because they have access to high-octane test-prep classes and tutors. 

“O.K., you’re not motivated, you’re doing the minimum at your high school,” Pérez explained, describing the students Trinity used to admit in droves. “You have not worked as hard as your peers. But you did the test prep, and you learned how to play the SAT game.” 

If you work in admissions at a place like Trinity was before Pérez arrived, SAT scores can provide a convenient justification for admitting the kind of students you might feel compelled to accept because they can pay full tuition. It’s hard to feel good about choosing an academically undeserving rich kid over a striving and ambitious poor kid with better high school grades. But if the rich student you’re admitting has a higher SAT score than the poor student you’re rejecting, you can tell yourself that your decision was based on “college readiness” rather than ability to pay. 

The problem is, rich kids who aren’t motivated to work hard and get good grades in high school often aren’t college-ready, however inflated their SAT scores may be. At Trinity, this meant there was a growing number of affluent students on campus who couldn’t keep up in class and weren’t interested in trying. “It had a morale effect on our faculty,” Pérez told me. “They were teaching a very divided campus. The majority of students were really smart and engaged and curious, and then you’ve got these other students” — the affluent group with pumped-up SAT scores and lower G.P.A.s — “who were wondering, How did I get into this school?”

The whole article is great, but I highlight this section because it at least gestures at an issue I've been  flagging for years: the potential (but largely unremarked upon) "mismatch" of wealthy students being admitted to universities that they are insufficiently prepared for. The "mismatch" hypothesis was pioneered by Richard Sander as an objection to race-based affirmative action programs which, he contended, systematically place minority students at schools above their intellectual level and thus harm their putative beneficiary. The talented student who would be a great fit for and excel at the University of Maryland instead is admitted to Cornell, where he struggles mightily -- ultimately losing more than he gains.

It was an interesting argument, but I argued then and maintain now that it is one whose logic would apply across many other cases where students are admitted to colleges that are -- at least based purely on academics -- "reach" schools. Athletes are one obvious example, but wealthy students whose case-for-admission relies primarily on (a) their ability to pay and (b) goosed standardized test scores that are also primarily a function of ability to pay would be another. Yet parents, guidance counselors, advisers, employers -- nobody acts as if these students will be hurt if they are admitted to Cornell instead of Maryland. Indeed, the entire structure of the collegiate application system is premised on the opposite -- a mad rush to ensure they do get into the "best" school possible.

Maybe they're all deluded; though it's just as likely that they will instead benefit exactly as they anticipate -- optimistically, from being pushed and forced to find a new gear in themselves, cynically from the value of letterhead. This is the only article I've ever seen even gesture at the possibility that the wealthy admits are themselves being ill-served -- finding themselves in an academic environment they're ill-prepared for, regressing back to their high school mean, and wondering whether they really belong at all (elsewhere in the article, we're told that Pell Grant recipients -- a good proxy for low-income students -- have significantly higher graduation rates than the student body writ large, suggesting that they're on the whole a stronger cadre of students).

But really, the fleeting consideration of this possibility is the exception that tests the rule. Is anybody truly concerned that the wealthy kid who got into Trinity primarily because they could afford to pay full-freight will be damaged for life? We might (and probably do) have sympathy for the meritocracy-based arguments that say he shouldn't have been admitted, but are we really also going to act like the objection to this system is for his own good too? No, obviously. The circumstances where smart, qualified, but poorer students are denied admission to good schools in favor of less-talented, less-qualified, but wealthier candidates is wrong -- but not because it's actually to the disadvantage of the latter group.

"Nah, You're Not Worth It"

The DOJ just announced 50 indictments in a massive bribery ring where wealthy parents paid to give their children an illicit boost in the college admissions process. The unlawful assistance included everything from falsely being "placed" on college sports teams (in sports they did not play), to falsification of test scores (or simply getting a smarter student to take the test instead). None of the students themselves are being charged, as the complaint alleges the parents were the primary actors.

Among those charged is Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman, and that led to this interesting little part of the story:

Huffman is accused of paying $15,000 — disguised as a charitable donation — to the Key Worldwide Foundation so her oldest daughter could participate in the scam. A confidential informant told investigators that he advised Huffman he could arrange for a third party to correct her daughter’s answers on the SAT after she took it. She ended up scoring a 1420 — 400 points higher than she had gotten on a PSAT taken a year earlier, according to court documents.

Huffman also contemplated running a similar scam to help her younger daughter but ultimately did not pursue it, the complaint alleges.

So I have to ask -- who comes out feel worse here? The older daughter, who now everyone knows had her college admission purchased by mommy and daddy? Or the younger daughter, who mom and dad considered "helping" in the same way but ultimately decided she wasn't worth the effort (hopefully -- hopefully -- because she was smart and talented enough on her own to not need it)?

Anyway, this is a massive abuse of the educational system by people already incredibly advantaged by their wealth and privilege, and I look forward to the results of the criminal process here.

Return on Investment

Tom Perkins (whom you may remember for suggesting that the rich were at risk of being victims of Nazi-style genocide) suggests that we apportion votes to tax dollars:

"The Tom Perkins system is: You don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes," Perkins said.

"But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How's that?"

Just like a corporation! Because the idea behind government is that you should get a cut of the proceeds in proportion to your investment! No, wait, in the public sphere that's known as "corruption". My bad.

Also, if I were more of a mathematician, I'd be (even more) offended by this too:

Pressed for examples of how the rich were being demonized, Perkins said that he feared higher taxes.

"The fear is wealth tax, higher taxes, higher death taxes -- just more taxes until there is no more 1%. And that that will creep down to the 5% and then the 10%," he said.

Yeah, not really sure that's how percentages work.

Weekend Roundup: 1/31/14

Very busy at work right now. But I have a vacation coming up in a week. These two statements are not unrelated.

* * *

A fascinating peek at Utah's efforts to reform police raids.

The White House has announced it is looking to provide clemency to low-level drug offenders convicted in the days of overly-harsh mandatory minimums. Reason Magazine wonders if he's serious (both links via Radley Balko).

Maine Supreme Court rules that rules that banning a female transgender student from the girls' bathroom violates the state's anti-discrimination law.

Ken White at Popehat tackles people who compare critical speech to "lynch mobs", "the Holocaust", "witch hunts", and other like terms. Fair enough, but I again refer back to this post. "Bullying", for example, often includes physical intimidation, but just as regularly is "just" speech -- yet even Ken seems to recognize that this legitimately seriously harmful in a way that he dismisses in other contexts.

Meanwhile, Jon Chait tackles the ludicrous opinion of the Wall Street Journal that maybe rich people really are at risk of a Holocaust-style wave of terror. Kevin Drum takes a closer look at why -- against all evidence -- the rich "feel" besieged.

And Yet Somehow They'll Survive

Wesleyan University has made some waves by announcing it is abandoning need-blind admission. In effect, this means it will give some amount of preference towards wealthier applicants (how much is probably indeterminate). In other words, affirmative action for rich kids.

Now a lot of you will be up in arms about how unfair this is to students of lower socio-economic backgrounds. But I think we need to look to another set of victims: the wealthy students themselves. As beneficiaries of affirmative action, we have to ask -- are they mismatched above their level? Does giving them special preferences stigmatize them, creating the soft bigotry of low expectations? I mean, even wealthy students who could get in without the "boost" are tainted by the policy -- everyone will be left wondering if they got in on the strength of their merit or their bank account.

These are the questions precisely no one will be asking, because the students are not racial minorities and thus there is no need to concern-troll about them. But since I'm guessing that, given the resources and knowledge base available to these applicants, they don't see attending Wesleyan as an exercise in self-sabotage -- well, maybe it isn't so bad for other people who benefit from affirmative action but aren't already advantaged?

Bobby Newport Gets Ambitious

The current Parks & Recreation storyline features protagonist Leslie Knope running for city council against Bobby Newport. Newport is the son of the wealthiest man in town (owner of a candy company), and he is basically an utterly unaware moron. He's not a "bad guy", per se -- in fact, his main flaw is he seems utterly oblivious to how anything matters to anyone. As far as he's concerned, everyone should be happy all the time -- not realizing that not everyone has a trust fund they can dip into when times get rough.

I'm starting to view Mitt Romney as similar. He's not as obviously dumb as Bobby Newport is. But he just seems completely unaware that not everyone has a free pile of familial wealth to dip into when things aren't going well. Responding to the issue of student debt, Romney recommends ... having mommy and daddy give you a $20,000 loan. Of course, I'd imagine a substantial majority or recent college grads don't have parents with a spare 20 grand they can just lend at will. But for Romney, it just seems clear as crystal.

More On Goldberg's Attempt to be a Race Scholar

Oh Jonah, Jonah, Jonah. You've already embarrassed yourself once when you tried to figure out what this whole Black Power thing was all about, conflating together two completely different organizations with wildly opposing outlooks. Why on earth would you think you're in any position to credibly opine on the state of Black people today?*

Goldberg's thesis is that Black elites are no longer connected to their poorer peers, and thus they tend to greatly overemphasize the existence of racism as a barrier to Black success. Since they're largely insulated from the daily struggles of everyday Blacks, it's easier for them to complain about White racism than to "engage in an honest conversation about the other problems facing black America that have little to nothing to do with white racism."

It's interesting that this argument, on face, seems to be an inversion of how most conservative Whites characterize rich Blacks. Normally, the existence of wealthy Blacks is raised in contradistinction to Blacks who have experienced racism and disadvantage, the argument being that a wealthy Black person, by virtue of his or her wealth, suffers no disadvantage due to their race. Goldberg, by contrast, seems to be arguing the opposite -- only wealthy Blacks really worry about racism, because the bulk of the Black community has bigger fish to fry.

Now, Goldberg's surmising that there is a gap between how wealthier versus poorer Blacks think about racism is unsupported by any evidence -- unsurprising, since the data we have indicates that there is no significant class divide in how Blacks rate the prevalence of racial discrimination. And as Jamelle Bouie points out, the entire premise of Goldberg's class disconnect hypothesis is demonstrative of Goldberg's lack of knowledge of the Black community.

Here’s the deal: one result of Jim Crow and its economic disenfranchisement is that the black middle class is a relatively recent event in American history. The same is true of the black elite class, which is—and has always been—quite small.

The byproduct of this is that the temporal distance from working-class life to prosperity is fairly short for many black Americans. So short, in fact, that black elites were often the first in their families to obtain a college degree. On a day-to-day level, what this means is that affluent black families share close connections to lower class African Americans—they are parents, grandparents, cousins, or even sibilings. This simply isn’t as true of affluent white families.

Wealthy Black families are far more likely than their affluent White peers to be well-connected to the thoughts and life goings-on of their poorer brethren. It's unclear why Goldberg doesn't recognize this, except for the obvious answer that Goldberg doesn't actually know anything about this topic and yet feels free to pontificate about it anyway. Which isn't, you know, a departure for him or anything, but still.

* I suppose the right answer is, "because it's not like there's another subject he's more credible on". Why should the lack of knowledge stop him now?

How Many GOPers Does It Take To Recognize a Collective Action Problem?

Warren Buffet recently took to the New York Times to argue that the very rich -- like himself -- were under-taxed. It's not even that bold of an argument -- tax rates for the ultra-wealthy are exceptionally low, and the American government needs revenue. But obviously, for the death-before-taxes wing of the GOP (i.e., all of it), this was heresy.

My former co-blogger Michael Van Der Galien was the first person I saw to snidely comment that Buffet was free to donate as much money as he wanted to charity (or the IRS), of his own volition. I thought about responding to point out that the question of tax rates for the rich is a collective action problem -- Buffet obviously was not declaring that he alone could solve America's budget crisis if only he were allowed -- but I figured it was a one-off, and decided to let it lie.

But alas, as usual, I can't set my expectations low enough. Jon Chait collects the same argument being made by Michele Bachmann and the Wall Street Journal. In addition to making the obvious collective-action point, Chait also notes that -- between the "why don't you just donate" then argument made against folks like Buffet, and the "class warfare" charge made against everyone else -- it turns out that nobody has standing to argue against raising a top marginal rate that currently is 15 points lower than where it was for the majority of the Reagan administration. Neat trick, that.

Wealth Circles

One of the interesting factoids about race in American life is the degree to which even relatively well-off Black and Hispanic Americans are still deeply tied into structures and neighborhoods we associate with poverty. Some new census data helps paint the picture:

The average affluent black and Hispanic household -- defined in the study as earning more than $75,000 a year -- lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average lower-income non-Hispanic white household that makes less than $40,000 a year.

"Separate translates to unequal even for the most successful black and Hispanic minorities," says sociologist John Logan, director of US2010 Project at Brown University, which studies trends in American society.

"Blacks are segregated and even affluent blacks are pretty segregated," says Logan, who analyzed 2005-09 data for the nation's 384 metropolitan areas. "African Americans who really succeeded live in neighborhoods where people around them have not succeeded to the same extent."

Ta-Nehisi Coates has some great analysis.

On the one hand, this is obviously pertinent to the typical "it's not race, it's class!" rejoinder deployed against those who still think that racial injustice is a serious problem in America. I've already explained the most basic flaw in this analysis -- that race is not an independent source of disadvantage in American life -- but the continuing fact of segregation also reminds us that part of the benefit of wealth is being surrounded by wealth.

My family was quite well off. And that was very advantageous for me! But a goodly portion of that advantage also came from the fact that we lived in a wealthy, well-connected neighborhood. The fact that the whole area was well off meant that the schools had a larger than average tax base. The fact that families had considerable disposable income meant that there were more resources to support extra-curriculars. The fact that I was surrounded by high-performing individuals meant I had potential role models for virtually any high-end career I possibly could have imagined. And so on and so forth. Wealth is good on its own, but its utility multiplies dramatically when it isn't lonely. That many people of color, even those who are well off, still live in much poorer neighborhoods, with much worse services, and much fewer connections, is a detriment.

But Ta-Nehisi also points out the need not to pathologize everything. There are benefits to growing up and being able to walk in more than one world. And even if life circumstances aren't ideal, people value where they came from. I don't have much to say about that side of his post, other than recognizing its import and not wanting it to get lost.

Bidding War

I was definitely in the camp of those who thought the mini-flap over Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) ordering an expensive bottle of wine was silly. The problem with Paul Ryan is that he promotes policies which would be utterly disastrous for the vast majority of people in this country while enabling the very rich to get richer. That Rep. Ryan is, in fact, in the rarefied class of persons who would benefit from his policies is already well-known and hardly relevant.

But kudos to Matt Yglesias for at least making a decent segue from expensive bottles of wine to a real policy point. I didn't think it could be done, but it's actually a solid observation.

Oh, I Think You'd Be Surprised

Proposing to create a new tax bracket for the ultra-rich (annual income of $1 million and above), James Surowiecki writes:

There would be political advantages, too: the reform could actually make tax hikes on top earners more popular. Critics like to describe tax hikes as hurting small business, because small-business owners make up a sizable percentage of people in the top two brackets and because small-business owners, unlike Wall Street traders, are popular on Main Street. It would be harder to mount a defense of millionaires, which may be why this year a Quinnipiac poll found overwhelming support, even among Republicans, for a millionaire tax.

I think you drastically underestimate the ability of the political classes to mount defenses of policies benefiting the hyper-rich.

Let's Make a Deal

The Washington Times, of all places, has an editorial taking its conservative peers to task for being far more forgiving of legacy admissions than they are of affirmative action. The meritocratic arguments against AA are obviously stronger, if anything, when applied to legacies. Yet you don't see right-wing groups rushing to put initiatives banning the procedure on state ballots across the country.

A lot of times I've talking to conservative opponents of AA who rush to assure me "I oppose legacy preferences too," as if that's some sort of ward against unfairness. I say, if you're truly concerned about establishing this pure meritocracy, an excellent gesture of good faith would be to work on barring legacy admissions first. Regardless of your opinion of how affirmative action relates to the broader goal of equal opportunity, its clear that if changes have to be made, the burden should not initially fall on the already disadvantaged. Carleton, for example, gives preferential admission to wealthy students in the 15% of our admissions process that is not need-blind. Clearly, that's got to go before we even start thinking about tinkering with race-based affirmative action.

I'll be honest -- I'm not categorically opposed to some legacy admissions. I think that they help maintain institutional memory and can strengthen the broader college community. Carleton, I feel, is benefited by the large number of second and third generation Carls who really help emphasis to current and prospective students the loyalty this place inspired. But that is not, in the conservative mind, a sufficiently "meritocratic" argument, any more than the benefits of racial diversity is.

The point is that liberals are, I think quite reasonably, concerned that this push for "meritocracy" will be applied only against Blacks, Latinos, and other marginalized minorities. It will not be applied against the wealthy or the well-connected. Even if conservatives feel some vague unease about such admissions standards, they will never organize or pressure to stop it. A good way -- normatively and politically -- to diffuse that anxiety would be to lead the charge against those who can most take the hit.

So let's make a deal. Attack legacy and wealth preferences first. Then we can talk about what to do about race-based affirmative action.

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates.