The Ratchet Effect
by David Atkins
Kudos due to Digby and Atrios for keeping a keen eye on the planned cuts to middle class benefits, made in exchange for cuts to wealthy benefits that will quietly disappear when the bright spotlight is off after the Presidential election.
This phenomenon is part of what Hacker and Pierson refer to as a ratchet effect: one in which the institutions of government are squared more and more firmly against the interests of the 99%, usually through policies made through toothless "compromise" measures. Think big tax cuts for the wealthy with "expiration" dates that are never really meant to expire, in exchange for little-noticed middle-class tax cuts that barely make a dent. Or trading short-term unemployment benefits and treaties for long-term tax cut extensions. Or changing the structure of Medicare and Social Security in exchange for closing easily re-insertable and malleable loopholes in the tax code. Or handing over the entire health insurance market to private industry in exchange for more universal coverage that continues to increase in cost regardless. Or the recent institutional acceptance of the 60-vote filibuster threshold, which makes real reform to help the 99% almost impossible, but is accepted by Democrats partly because it helps them stop things like Social Security privatization should Republicans take a Senate majority--without realizing that Social Security and programs like it will die a death of 1,000 cuts without institutional reform.
The provisions that hurt the 99% usually stay in effect permanently, while the provisions that hurt the wealthy quietly disappear. As I said a while back about the debt ceiling:
The longest-lasting impact of this whole farce has been to create yet another structural impediment to progressive change in Washington. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson describe this sort of thing in their tremendous new book Winner-Take-All Politics as a "ratchet effect": hidden, arcane structural effects whose result is to create nearly unstoppable advantages for big business, and insurmountable obstacles economic justice for the American People. Other ratchets include the filibuster, unequal vote apportionment in the Senate, "phased out" tax cuts that never really phase out, changes to the way unemployment is calculated, etc.
Now the debt ceiling can be added to that list as perhaps one of the biggest, most important such ratchets of all time.
These ratchets are the tools of the GOP terrorist trade. If Democrats are actually serious about countering this sort of terrorist activity instead of just talking about it, they will move to eliminate as many of these structural hurdles as possible. That should already have happened with the broken filibuster rule, but Senate Democrats didn't have the guts to pull the trigger on it.
What is being prepared in the deficit commission is yet another ratchet. The cuts taken by the poor and middle class will become permanent fixtures of the landscape, while the minor haircuts taken by the rich will disappear. And all the "Serious People" will golf clap at the "compromise."
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