Can College Level The Playing Field

Here, as promised, is a podcast we made at the Center for Ethics and Education based on interviews we did with Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, authors of the excellent book Can College Level The Playing Field, which is an indispensable read if you want to understand the relationship between inequality and higher education, and inequality within higher education, in the US. (For CT discussion of a very poor quality review of the book, see here). Also I unabashedly recommend the whole podcast series!

Can college level the playing field? No, it really can’t.

Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson recently published a book, Can College Level The Playing Field?: Higher Education in an Unequal Society, which I’d recommend to anyone who wants to understand the structural position of higher education in the US. Spoiler alert here: Their answer is “No”. Most of the book is taken up with explaining why, by showing the multiple ways in which background inequalities and inequalities in the pre-college education system constrain any efforts higher education might make to level the playing field, and showing how unequal the higher education system is anyway, including – and this seems not to be well understood by politicians or a lot of commentators – how unequal the public sector itself is.

Full disclosure: I’m close friends with both of the authors, and read at least 3 versions of the manuscript before it was published and, I just realized by looking at its Princeton University Press page, wrote a blurb for it. The producer of the CEE podcast series is putting the finishing touches on an interview that we’ve done with them, and as soon as it is published, I’ll post about it encouraging you to listen and, again, encouraging you to read the book.

This (extremely long) post, though, is only secondarily about the book. My main interest is in a genuinely awful review of it, and of another book by Gary Orfield (which, I will emphasize several times, I have not read yet), in Boston Review by Christopher Newfield. I’m writing about it partly because it so irritated me that I want to get my irritation out of my system, but also partly because it illustrates some of the failings that are common to many of the books and commentaries I read about higher education.

Let’s start with Newfield’s criticism of the final two chapters, which articulate a series of measures that legislators and campus leaders could feasibly adopt to reduce somewhat the role of higher education in reproducing inequality. He accuses them of advocating “tinkering toward utopia”. What we need, he says, is bold, large scale, dynamic reforms of higher education. Unfortunately Baum and McPherson reject the two examples of what he calls “the two most significant educational movements of the last decade”: the movements for student loan cancellation, and free college.

“Tinkering toward utopia” is a nice phrase (not Newfield’s own, as he acknowledges). But it’s an odd way of describing proposals which the authors specifically say will not come anywhere close to achieving anything like utopia (because, as I’ve said, their answer to the question posed in their title is a very firm “No”).

And how would what he calls the “two most significant educational movements in the past decade” lead toward utopia? Frankly, it seems odd to call student debt cancellation an educational movement. It really has nothing to do with education. It’s a simple way of putting $1.7 trillion in the hands of people who went to college, on a one-off basis. It would not increase spending in, or funding of, higher education, and it would not make it more affordable for anybody. It wouldn’t alter the inegalitarian structure of higher education: indeed, full scale debt cancellation would give far more money to graduates who were already recipients of higher public subsidies than to people who were subsidized less (because, being from poorer families they attended less selective colleges, on which the government spent and spends less money. As Baum and McPherson demonstrate in chapter 3, this is true within the public higher education system, as well as between it and some parts of the private system). Indeed: student debt cancellation might actually turn out to be a chimera: Biden seems to have been unable to deliver it, thus possibly paying whatever electoral cost is associated with seeming to favour the better educated without harvesting any of the electoral benefit of actually getting money into their hands. (And: one big argument for student debt forgiveness was that it was a fiscal stimulus measure that the President could enact without Congress: surely if Congress were inclined to act we wouldn’t be asking it to give $1.7 trillion just to people who attended college? Progressives, I assume, would want to get at least a little bit of it into the hands of people with no experience of college)

Free public college would, by contrast, have substantial effects on higher education, not all of which are well understood. But it’s worth mentioning that it, too, would not result in increased spending in, or funding of, higher education. Free public college would, at best, keep total spending on public education constant: families that currently pay tuition would keep the money, which would be replaced by funds from the Federal and/or state governments [1]. Higher income students would receive a much bigger handout than low income students because there are many more of them, they attend public institutions that spend more on them, and they stay in those institutions longer, than low income students. And for most low-income students public college is already tuition-free or nearly so, because most low income students in the public sector either attend lower tuition institutions (which, as the previous sentence implies, and as Baum & McPherson’s book shows not coincidentally, receive less State support per student) or, as in the case of UW-Madison and many other flagships, get a package which eliminates tuition. So what Warren and Sanders proposed was a massive transfer of money to families in the upper third of the income distribution which did very little to address the real college affordability problem for lower income students, which is not tuition and fees but living expenses and the educational resources available to the institutions they attend. (Indeed, the Sanders proposal restricted spending on facilities and administration; whereas one of the serious problems that community colleges, which most lower income students attend, notoriously suffer from is a lack of administrative staff, especially counselors, and on other campuses space is a serious issue).[2][2.5]

The most peculiar part of Newfield’s review is the following passage (warning: it’s long):

Equality of opportunity has been a mainstream policy goal for years now, and it is the ethical horizon of these two arguments—the “level playing field” of Baum and McPherson’s title. But a different mainstream operated in the mid-1960s, one that saw equal opportunity as the means to the end of equal outcomes. That goal appeared in a famous commencement address Lyndon Johnson delivered at Howard University in 1965:

Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.

But freedom is not enough. . . You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “You are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. And this is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.

We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact, and equality as a result.

Johnson defined equal opportunity as the gateway to equal results. This could not mean that every individual would end up with equal resources, but it did mean that equal outcomes should hold across racial groups. On average, Black students would graduate from high school at roughly the same rates as whites, go on to university at the same rates, get bachelors’ degrees at the same rates, and so on. (The same would be true of indigenous and Latino students—indeed students from any racial group.) With visible and structural inequalities truly undone, Blacks as a group would come to earn, on average, the same as whites in employment after college, and their family wealth would soon become comparable (rather than get stuck at 15 percent of white wealth, where it has lingered for years). A similar line of thought lay behind the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution: women should earn the same as men. On this conception, justice entails not the right to compete to be equal—as had been done for centuries—but being equal in fact.

If a social system is producing unequal group outcomes, the only reasonable conclusion is that opportunities are not distributed equally.

Johnson said the quiet part out loud—the part that Baum, McPherson, and Orfield cannot bring themselves to say even today. The argument of his Howard speech is the only coherent theory of civil rights: if no racial group is innately inferior to another and opportunity is genuinely equally distributed, then we should expect to see equal outcomes across groups. The upshot is that if a social system is producing unequal group outcomes, the only reasonable conclusion is that opportunities are not distributed equally. This is what Johnson was saying.

Again, I have not read Orfield’s book (though I have read enough of Orfield’s work to find it spectacularly surprising that he suddenly can’t bring himself to say out loud something he’s been saying for decades. Whatever). Baum and McPherson are unequivocal in their assertion of what Newfield says they cannot bring themselves to say even today. The title of their book is Can College Level the Playing Field? and, as I said earlier, their answer to that question is “No”. It’s actually more elaborate — something like this: “No way. You would have to ignore all the available evidence to think that the answer is “yes”. Much of our book is taken up with providing you with the available evidence. Opportunities are so utterly unequal from conception to age 18, and educational interventions so much less efficient year on year as children age that it is utterly impossible to think that college could level the playing field, and you would have to be completely deluded to think otherwise”.

Well, they are politer than that, perhaps because they are politer than me. But the answer is reflected on every single page of the book. They have a view that John Quiggin has occasionally articulated here at CT, and that, of course, Rawls shares and that Quiggin, Rawls, Baum and McPherson all believe because it is true – that if you want equal opportunities, you need to massively restrict and maybe even eliminate inequality of outcome, because unequal outcomes in one generation produce unequal opportunity in the next. It’s quite impressive to read more than 4 pages of their book without picking this up; to have read the whole thing and think that they are unwilling to say it is a spectacular achievement.[3] Later he says “Both books stop short of drawing the obvious conclusion: that American education is trapped in an inequality machine”. (Yet again, although this conclusion has been a central theme of Orfield’s work over many years, I don’t know, just perhaps he has made a volte face and has suddenly decided to stop saying it). But the main message of Baum and McPherson’s book is exactly this: “American education is trapped in an inequality machine”. They don’t, it is true, do any hifalutin’ theorizing or call it “racial capitalism”, or appeal to Foucault, or whatever, but they document the way that the inequality machine traps American education on every page.

Newfield seems to really dislike that Baum and McPherson understand what it means for higher education to be trapped in an inequality machine.

Baum and McPherson call for better pathways to degree completion, better advising, and more auditing of colleges to improve “accountability.” We’ve long been doing the last of these, to little effect, and the authors give no reason why their other prescriptions will do much better.Baum and McPherson do say we need to focus on “reducing the differences in opportunities and outcomes between individuals from low-income backgrounds and those with more resources.” Yes—but that’s where the book should start, not where it should end! They add, “There is persuasive evidence that spending more on the education” of students at community colleges and other broad-access institutions “pays off in higher graduation rates.” Yes! So let’s spend more—a lot more! “Inadequate funding of broad-access colleges is a major national problem.” Yes! So let’s actually fund the reduction of racialized outcomes gaps!

Actually Baum and McPherson do want us to spend more. A lot more. But, oddly for people who are supposed not to understand that higher education is trapped in an inequality machine, they want to spend that money on reducing (maybe even eliminating) poverty. They want to reduce the racialized outcome gaps not by spending $60 billion/year mainly on wealthy and white students in higher education but by spending it on pre-school and elementary schools that all black children attend and which are, they think (maybe Newfield disagrees) currently under resourced. (Perhaps their hunch is that spending money on educating black and poor children is more likely to benefit them than spending that same money on white and more affluent young adults. Just a hunch, but maybe not a crazy one). They prioritize improving universal education (especially early years education, where the money will have more effect) over selective education. The reason they are skeptical of debt forgiveness and free public college is that those programs direct money almost entirely into the upper 30% of the income distribution (if you don’t believe this, go ahead, carry on not believing it, but you won’t be able to not believe it if you read their book) and they think that government spending would be better directed at getting us out of, rather than, as Newfield seems to prefer, entrenching, the inequality machine.

Even if you’re going to restrict new education-related spending to giving families involved in higher education money (as Newfield’s headline programs would), Baum and McPherson point out that point out that the $1.7 trillion Newfield recommends for debt relief, most of which would go to higher income earners, would enable us to double the size of the Pell Grant program for 25 years, so that it would cover not just tuition, but for many low-income students, most living costs. Add in the $60 billion/year that free public college would cost (and disqualify for-profits from receiving it) and you have something that, unlike debt forgiveness and free public college, would likely have a massive positive impact on college success for low and lower middle income students.

In reality, the portrait of inequality so scrupulously depicted in these books implies a conclusion their authors effectively recoil from: that we must massively rebuild a full range of social systems on truly egalitarian grounds.

Nope. (Yet yet again, maybe Orfield has had a late life conversion and does recoil from that. I’ll read his book and find out. Or maybe someone can ask him). But Baum and McPherson advocate precisely that we must massively build (I take Newfield’s ‘rebuild’ comment to be a rhetorical bit of golden ageism) a full range of social systems on truly egalitarian grounds.

Ok, here’s a revealing passage:

Both books focus on increasing limited kinds of procedural fairness, clouding the egalitarian vision animating the overall struggle. The result—like so much cognitive dissonance in a mind divided against itself—makes for painful reading. “I’m not a neoliberal,” the ego insists, but the superego plainly is.

The book I’m talking about does not focus on procedural fairness (though it does, as I’ve said, point out that if you did want to achieve that kind of procedural fairness you’d have to pursue an extremely egalitarian social policy agenda). But it does try to understand the constraints under which higher education operates in our, highly inegalitarian, society, and attempts to give guidance to agents operating under those constraints. It’s possible that Newfield mistakes an understanding and description of the state of the world for an endorsement of that state. But description is not endorsement. When Marx said that philosophers had hitherto only sought to understand the world and the point is to change it he did not mean that it was a mistake to understand it. If you want to change it you need to understand it, and that’s what Baum & McPherson (and much of Orfield’s previous work) does. I don’t know how to use Freudian terms, so I won’t, but Baum and McPherson are not neoliberals: they just understand that the agents they are addressing live in a world shaped by neoliberalism, and don’t have the power, right now and within the time horizons they are concerned with, substantially to shape it.

I haven’t quite finished venting. Here’s the final annoying passage I want to talk about.[4]

Over the last several decades, public universities have accepted state cuts in large part because it was harder to fight the statehouse than to raise tuition on students. In 1995 states on average allocated $8,922 per “full-time equivalent student.” In 2020 that figure was $8,636, below the 1995 level adjusted for inflation. Public college students spent much of the 2010s getting allocations that were 10–20 percent below those of 1995. The federal government accepted a dramatic drop in the relative value of its main grant, the Pell grant, and a shift of financial aid from grants to loans. It let a good chunk of the federal loan system be siphoned off by for-profit colleges, leading disproportionate shares of students of color toward the worst graduation rates, highest debt loads, and highest default rates in known higher education history.

So, there’s some truth here, and some falsehood. Straightforwardly false: its not true that the Pell grant has diminished in value since 1995. Indeed it was declining in value in real terms for over a decade till 1995, since which it has climbed in value, and the program itself has grown hugely (because more and more low-income students are attending college). It is true that States are now spending less per student on higher education, despite spending more total dollars in real terms, and in many cases a larger proportion of their budgets, on higher education. But this is somewhat misleading. Federal government spending on grant aid and tax benefits for higher education has grown dramatically in that period, offsetting the reductions in state aid/student. Of course, different students benefit from Federal aid than from the direct subsidies to institutions that States provide. Those go to all students who attend (more for the more affluent students who attend the better subsidized more selective public institutions, less for the less affluent students who attend the less and non-selective public institutions, sure, but still, everyone shares in the aid). Pell grants go to low-income students, veterans benefits (which grew dramatically after 2003 for some reason) go to… veterans, and tax advantages go to more affluent students.[5] The recipients are different, but the public is paying.

One thing that’s unambiguously right in the passage is that a non-trivial proportion of Federal loans – and, actually, of Federal grant aid – ends up in the hands of for-profit colleges. Dare I imagine that there is a reason why the two so-called “two most significant educational reform movements” of the last decade have been attempts to distribute resources to people who have graduated college, or have attended college or who are attending public colleges, rather than focusing on regulating or improving or eviscerating for-profits that prey on low-income and non-white students. Maybe it’s an entirely innocent reason – it’s not sexy. But it would be really easy for individual States, if they wanted, to regulate for-profits or, preferably, steer Federal resources away from for-profits and get those resources diverted to public and non-profit colleges. Any State could establish a Pell-top up grant and a Veteran’s Benefit top-up grant of, say, $3k-5k/year for which for-profits would be ineligible, and immediately low-income students would flock out of for-profits, mainly to public institutions, bringing their Pell and Veteran’s Benefit grants with them. Any state where the Democrats hold all branches of government, and perhaps even some where they don’t control the State Supreme Court, could do this, and a few do. But plenty of others could.

Baum and McPherson advocate increases in federal and state grant aid, and better accountability for both for profits and non-profit and public institutions. If Newfield, or Warren or Sanders, want to start an educational movement that would be genuinely egalitarian, they could start by reading Baum and McPherson’s book, where they’d get a lot of help. Which, I strongly recommend, you should do too!

[1] I say at best because I think there are reasonable fears that it would, over time, reduce the level of resources available to public colleges and universities. Two fears I have (that I don’t think Baum and McPherson mention, but I might be wrong). One is: what happens when Republicans control all 4 branches of government? In Wisconsin when Republicans have held the reins of power they have used them to limit state funding of higher education, and have frozen in-state tuition rates. Do we really think that Republicans would act differently at the national level? For that matter, how confident are we that Democrats would? And second, if you suspect, as I do, that would result in an erosion of available resources, do you really think that affluent families will keep spending $30-50k/yr in tuition sending their children to degraded public flagships in other states rather than to financially healthier private schools which will spend the tuition revenues on their children rather than using them to cross-subsidize low-income students and state residents?

[2] How is space an issue? Many more selective public schools have better equipped and less crowded classrooms, more relaxing spaces within which instructors and students might mingle, and less pressure on classroom use, allowing, for example, for students and instructors to chat before or after class, than do many of the regional comprehensives in their systems. They also have more scope for scheduling classes to optimize use of building space, because a higher proportion of their students have flexible schedules being younger, from more affluent families, and residing on campus. Even on flagships: on my campus Kinesiology, a large and one of the fastest growing majors, is stuck in the basement of a terrible building replete with classrooms designed for bad science teaching in the 50’s.

[2.5] I did some investigation that suggested that for both Warren and Sanders what you saw was what you got: literally everything in each of their plans was on their website, suggesting that quite limited thought had gone into them.

[3] I believe Newfield read the book because he has quotes from several parts of it. My first book was reviewed by two different reviewers who I am sure did not read it, one because he criticizes the book for making an argument for exactly the opposite conclusion that it in fact argued for, and the other because the entire review was focused on one of the blurbs, which I didn’t write.

[4] That’s a complete lie. I want to talk about several more annoying passages. For example, this silliness pissed me off: “this cautionary moral is more likely to function as an alibi for the status quo than to inspire action capable of meeting the structural challenge”. But, really, you get the idea.

[5] Federal aid typically comes in voucher form, so it shows up as tuition revenue, whereas state aid typically goes directly to institutions. So if all government funding were in the form of vouchers tuition would look high, even though families would only actually be spending the same amount as if all government funding were direct-to-institution and tuition looked low.

On Constitutional Monetary Moments

Earlier today,  after I tweeted out that “Proposals to mint $1tn platinum coin are designed to circumvent the US constitution’s “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts,” I got lectured by Nathan Tankus for “not grasping the most elementary legal issues in the topic you’re pontificating on.” This turns on the interpretation on the authority granted by Section 31 U.S. Code § 5112. Advocates of the platinum coin naturally like to quote the plain meaning of the text: “(k) The Secretary may mint and issue bullion and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.” The plain meaning interpretation of (k) has been supported by Philip N. Diehl, former director of the United States Mint, who helped write the bill. But Diehl was not in Congress (and in virtue of his former office has obvious incentives to exaggerate its power and his former achievements).

However, the official author of the original bill, Representative Michael Castle, denied this interpretation, and suggested (quite plausibly in my opinion) that the provision was intended to cover collectibles (and not to provide the Treasure with the power to do an end run around any debt limits). I would be amazed if the original legislative record suggested otherwise. The law as we have it was inserted as a provisions into H.R. 3610, the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act for 1997. It would be interesting if the congressional leadership recorded any views on the matter at the time (and that would change my view!) But the revisionary (‘plain meaning interpretation’) wasn’t voiced until May 2010. Even Diehl has admitted at one point that (the ‘plain meaning interpretation’) would constitute an “unintended consequence” of the bill. [Quoted in Grey (2020) op. cit, p. 261.] So, I don’t think this is really in doubt.

Eventually Tankus, who himself has become a high-profile advocate of minting the $1tr coin, referred me to Grey’s very interesting law review article from which I quoted above (and also a fascinating interview that Grey did with Diehl.) Grey (a law professor at Willamette University) meticulously goes through the pros and cons of reading (k) literally (and also provides arguments for the opposing views that anticipate my own), but his main interest is not, I think, in gaming how a constitutional court would rule on using (k) to do an end-run around the fiscal debt limit (also authorized by Congress), but in thinking about the “new possibilities for fundamental monetary reform.”* Grey, correctly, notes that in various crises the FED has gone well beyond the Federal Reserve Act. As I wrote last week here at CrookedTimber (in the context of discussing Lev Menand’s recent book (2022) The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis) the “effect of this process is the development of a super-government-agency that tries to do too much without sufficient accountability and that undermines the legislative process.” So, I am at least consistent in worrying about treating this as precedent!

But this also gets me at the underlying theoretical-political issue that I want to discuss here. And I quote a key passage from his law review article:

I argue that in “constitutional monetary moments” like those generated by debt ceiling crisis, it is important—not only positively but also normatively—to recognize that contemporary operational constraints on money creation are self-imposed, institutionally contingent, and ultimately legal rather than material in nature. It is important to do so because in such instances it may be not only appropriate, but socially optimal, to subject existing legal constraints to creative interpretation, or even ignore them outright, in order to challenge and disrupt the social myths they uphold, as well as the political dynamics that they produce. As noted legal realist Thurman Arnold argued: “You judge the symbols [upon which society is built and depends] as good or bad on the basis of whether they lead to the type of society you like. You do not cling to them on general principles when they are leading in the wrong direction.”
By denying from the outset the possibility that debt ceiling crises are, in fact, constitutional monetary moments in which it may make sense to abandon outdated monetary symbols, we close off the full range of political possibilities and legal options available to us to improve fiscal policy administration, and with it, our economy more broadly. In other words, it was not sufficient then, and it is not sufficient now, to merely assert as a positive matter that our current social myths about the nature of money preclude exotic or even “radical” legal solutions such as HVCS from serious consideration. Rather, it is incumbent on us to question whether the social myths in question are in fact worthy of preservation, or at the very least, how sure we are that the alternatives that would likely emerge to take their place would lead to socially inferior outcomes.–Grey, Rohan. “Administering Money: Coinage, Debt Crises, and the Future of Fiscal Policy.” Ky. LJ 109 (2020): 289. [HT Nathan Tankus]

For Grey a constitutional monetary moment occurs when “partisan disagreements over proper exercise of the “money power” pushed monetary issues to the forefront of the popular and legal imagination.” (p. 288) Now, let’s grant Grey this stipulation.

Interestingly enough, as Grey recognizes political battles over the deficit limit need not become constitutional debates over money power. In fact, as Grey recognizes in the last few decades, the Democrats have tended to win the battles over the deficit limit by sidestepping “the deeper constitutional questions.” (p. 288) That is, rather than using the debates over deficit limits, the threat of default, and annoyance at legislative gridlock as an occasion to debate changes in the constitutional arrangement — that is, the proper exercise of the money power –, the Democrats have played ordinary (non-constitutional) political hardball. And even if they did this merely based on opinion polling and without any fundamental respect for the constitution, the significance of  this fact is that fights over the deficit limit are not necessarily constitutional monetary moments by definition. I would hope that Grey agrees with me about that.

Of course, performatively, Grey would like it if a fight over the deficit limit were to be constitutionalized because for various reasons Grey rejects the contemporary status quo.* And, in fact, I can imagine that some kind of debt ceiling crises might well make me agree with Grey. Once the US defaults on debts and market turmoil starts hitting the real economy or the acrimony over the debt ceiling leads to street turmoil or even a revolutionary moment as bad or worse than January 6, that would quite rightly be treated as a constitutional monetary moment. But one shouldn’t wish for being in such turmoil, and one should recognize that debates and even games of chicken over the debt ceiling have been normalized in Washington, DC. (The US –and I will grant the MMT folk this much –has a lot more monetary sovereignty for such games than, say, the UK government (as was revealed in 2022) or most Euro member states, which lack any such sovereignty.)

Now, I am no friend of the current practice of setting a debt ceiling while simultaneously authorizing expenditures and borrowing that go beyond it. I don’t mind a demise of this status quo. And I also don’t mind ways of poking the irresponsible Congressional Republicans in the (proverbial) eyes. But I notice that Grey (and the proponents of minting such special coins) are not really worried by the Imperial presidency and the lack of checks on its power.+ That they lack this worry even after experiencing a Trump presidency and near usurpation (as well as the various ways in which courts were not a check on the Trump presidency) is something I cannot fathom.

But I view the tax and coin [sic] power of Congress as one of the few would-be-effective checks on the risks of the very real and ongoing erosion of liberty from an imperial presidency. If anything, while I dislike Republican control of the House, it is high time if Stateside the pendulum returned to the post-Watergate situation of the 1970s, and re-established Congressional authority. So, in so far as I offer a political-theoretical argument against seeing the situation as a constitutional monetary moments that is ripe for monetary innovation, I do so because the US needs a considerable restoration of the power of the legislative branch — which after all is also, despite everything (and yes that includes quite a few sins), still the most democratic element of the US constitutional arrangement — not a further strengthening of the Executive branch. And while one may not reasonably hope that this Congress would use such power reasonably or for noble ends, it is to be hoped that such enhanced power would attract better legislators and more effective citizen participation in the future.

 

 

• This post first appeared at Digressions&Impressions with modest modifications.

 

*In fact, from reading the law review article, and Tankus’ enthusiasm for it, I suspect that Grey is a proponent of MMT (Modern Monetary Theory).

+I am much more sympathetic to arguments that view section 4 of 14th amendment as a reason to reject constraints of budget deficit limits if (and only if) these lead to default. But it is surprising to see left-wing commentators defend the sanctity of public debt!