Bitter divisions about the proper role of government in the United States have always been with us. Within broad limits, our Constitution’s response to this reality has been to empower states to adopt policies tailored to their own constituents’ beliefs and values.
So in the wake of an unusually divisive presidential election, vigorous state-level actions to offset specific changes in federal policy are already underway.
A case in point is the response of Gov. Jerry Brown of California to President Trump’s skepticism about the threat posed by climate change. Because effective measures to combat global warming must be planetary in scope, most scientists saw the recent 195-nation Paris agreement as a hopeful step. But many of Mr. Trump’s supporters have urged him to abandon that plan.
In reaction, Mr. Brown, a Democrat, has doubled down on California’s efforts to negotiate carbon-reduction agreements with other states and countries. That strategy, he explained, can serve two ends: to demonstrate that such agreements not only do not destroy jobs, but actually increase employment, and to show that the agreements work, leading to significant reductions in emissions even as the struggle for broader action continues.
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Bitter divisions about the proper role of government in the United States have always been with us. Within broad limits, our Constitution’s response to this reality has been to empower states to adopt policies tailored to their own constituents’ beliefs and values.
So in the wake of an unusually divisive presidential election, vigorous state-level actions to offset specific changes in federal policy are already underway.
A case in point is the response of Gov. Jerry Brown of California to President Trump’s skepticism about the threat posed by climate change. Because effective measures to combat global warming must be planetary in scope, most scientists saw the recent 195-nation Paris agreement as a hopeful step. But many of Mr. Trump’s supporters have urged him to abandon that plan.
In reaction, Mr. Brown, a Democrat, has doubled down on California’s efforts to negotiate carbon-reduction agreements with other states and countries. That strategy, he explained, can serve two ends: to demonstrate that such agreements not only do not destroy jobs, but actually increase employment, and to show that the agreements work, leading to significant reductions in emissions even as the struggle for broader action continues.
Blue-state voters, who by definition tend to favor Democrats, are more likely than others to oppose the Trump agenda. Yet those states are also likely to find themselves in an intriguing financial position as a result of Mr. Trump’s policies.
Consider that blue states send much more money to Washington than they receive, while the reverse is true for red states, which tend to favor Republicans. Blue states also enjoy significantly higher per capita income than red states and are home to a disproportionate share of the nation’s highest earners. The upshot is that if the Trump administration cuts taxes on top earners as expected, the federal tax burden on blue states will fall especially sharply. Those states will thus have new fiscal flexibility, should they choose to offset other aspects of the Trump agenda.
Blue states, for example, are more likely to favor a generous social safety net. For the better part of a century in many states, that safety net has included the services of Planned Parenthood, which include the diagnosis and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, contraception and cancer screening. For every dollar spent on those services, the organization saves society many more dollars in future social costs, not to mention untold human heartache.
But a small percentage of its services involve abortions, and Republicans in Congress have pledged to withdraw federal support for Planned Parenthood entirely. Texas recently took that step at the state level, amid reports that its maternal death rates have soared.
Reasonable people can hold different views about how best to revere the sanctity of life. States that wish to maintain support for Planned Parenthood can do so by imposing higher state levies on those whose federal taxes were cut by Mr. Trump.
Perhaps the most conspicuous problems for the social safety net arise from the Republican pledge to repeal the Affordable Care Act. As with efforts to curb greenhouse gases, the task of providing broad access to health care is much better handled at the federal level than at the state level. The concern is that guaranteeing coverage at the state level could attract new beneficiaries from neighboring states that don’t provide such guarantees, making the program prohibitively costly.
But the health care initiative implemented by Mitt Romney during his governorship of Massachusetts, which was based on proposals by the conservative Heritage Foundation, effectively put that concern to rest. Repeal of Obamacare would mean large federal tax cuts for top earners in every state, creating budgetary headroom for states to adopt their own versions of Romneycare.
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States don’t have absolutely unlimited freedom to impose higher levies on top earners, because if any one state raised its rates, top earners could flee to neighboring states. And there have indeed been examples of individuals who have relocated in search of lower taxes.
But here, too, experience in California is reassuring. Facing budget shortfalls and cutbacks in essential public services, the state’s voters approved Proposition 30 in 2012, which raised the state’s top marginal income tax rate to over 13 percent, significantly higher than that of any other. Opponents predicted that wealthy California taxpayers would flee in droves to Nevada, Oregon and beyond.
But the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington reports that these fears were overblown, citing a recent Stanford University study. It found that million-dollar income earners are actually less likely to move than Americans earning only average wages; fewer than 2 percent of the tiny fraction of those millionaires who did move cited taxes as a factor.
Are wealthy blue-state voters chumps for not fleeing the higher taxes? Perhaps they believe, plausibly, that their lives are better with a more balanced mix of public and private consumption, with good parks and schools, highways and rail systems for everyone, and not just spectacular homes for themselves and their own families. They may also understand that their ability to bid successfully for things they prize — homesites with views, for instance — depends almost entirely on their relative purchasing power, which isn’t affected much when they and their peers face slightly higher tax rates.
Which approach is best? The genius of the drafters of our Constitution was in eschewing attempts to answer such questions theoretically. They understood that progress would be far more likely if the states were free to experiment, often taking positions at odds with those of the federal government. When Democrats controlled the White House in the Obama administration, for example, red states like Kansas employed tax and service cuts to oppose federal budget policy. In the current climate, we can expect blue states to take analogous steps.
Local experimentation cannot undo the reality that national elections have consequences. But, over time, experimentation supports progress. It’s also productive in the short run, even if only in psychological terms. Passivity invites despair.
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