Federal Policy and The California Senate Election
California is selecting a Senator that may serve 30+ years. And is almost certain to serve 6.
This post isn’t about Animorphs, it’s just about the California Senate Election. Barbara Lee is getting the all-important Fox’s Faith endorsement. Next week will return to our regularly scheduled programming.
A lot of politics coverage is horse race coverage. Who is crafting what message, how are they positioning themselves, how well they did on the debate, and what the public might be thinking about the issues. I’m going to try and steer clear of all of that. If you are looking for that sort of entertainment, or what the latest gaffe is, or how well the candidates speak on the stump, I’m sure you can find it somewhere. It isn’t unimportant, politicians can advance causes, shape national conversations or cause polarization. However, Congress also commands a lot of power. The federal government collected 4.4 trillion dollars in taxes in 2023, and spending exceeded 6 trillion, including nearly 4 trillion in mandatory spending. Whoever ends up as Senator in California will be a part of the body that commands the budget of the United States.
All of the power to collect taxes, spend on defense, create legal fiat, regulate commerce with foreign nations, and spend and regulate domestically is power directly granted to Congress. Understandably, more coverage usually goes to the president of the United States every four years, but section 8 of the constitution basically grants Congress more power than any other branch of government. So when I think of politics in Congress, I am often thinking of the trillions of dollars commanded by powerful people that have impacts on millions of people inside and outside the United States. It’s worth starting by understanding where that money goes. I’m also not going to bury the lede, I’m voting for Lee. This isn’t about persuading voters, no one reads this blog, but if someone comes across this blog accusing me of some sort of bias, I want to be clear - no s***, everyone has bias. I considered the candidates, watched the debate, and quickly settled on Lee as the least objectionable candidate.
Budget
I can’t say how Schiff, Porter, Lee, or Garvey would command that budget, because not even they can answer every question, but I can attempt to focus a bit more on that power. Most of it, it turns out, flows from normal Americans to normal Americans. For most of this I’ll be referring to the Congressional Budget Office’s report on the budget, so I’m going straight to Congress for their budget. Here is the overview from the 10-year window.
Mandatory Spending
Mandatory spending makes up the largest chunk of yearly spending, over 50% of the federal budget at around 3.7 trillion dollars in 2023. This can be further broken down into
Social Security: Old-Age and Survivors, Disability Insurance
Major Healthcare Programs: Medicare, Medicaid, Premium Tax Credits and related Spending (this is the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare), and the Children’s Health Insurance Program
Income Security Programs: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (sometimes referred to as food stamps), Earned Income Tax Credits, Child Tax Credits, other Tax Credits, Supplemental Security Income, Unemployment Compensation, Child Nutrition, and Family Support and Foster Care
Veteran Programs: Military, Civilian
Other Programs: Higher Education, Agriculture, Deposit Insurance, MERHCF, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, and Education Stabilization Fund.
This is a lot. In addition to all of this, there is hidden complexity and asterisks at every turn. For example, though the EITC and Child Tax Credits are counted here as spending, there are plenty of areas of tax law that are implicit spending but not counted as such, especially when it comes to housing policy it turns out. As another example, if you look at the spending report for 2023 there are actually some offset receipts because of things like premium receipts from Medicare plans. Here is a chart to give you a sense of how those five major categories break down.
As you can see from the chart, the first two categories, Social Security and Major Health Care Programs, end up accounting for most of the spending. If you’ll notice, the offsets for Medicare also end up removing one of the largest chunks from spending. If you want to take a look more granularly in order of spending to see how all this adds up take a look at this waterfall chart.
Discretionary Spending
This is already a lot to get your head around so now let’s complicate matters further by adding in those 1.7 trillion dollars of discretionary spending. Even though it is much less money it’s much more difficult to actually summarize discretionary funding other than separating it into defense and non-defense. To hugely oversimplify things, Congress appropriates discretionary funds every year on a somewhat ad hoc basis with all of the departments asking for money based on last year’s budget, and then the executive branch appoints secretaries to each department that spend the money within the framework of each department’s mission. Here were the outlays from 2023.
Ok, actually, these aren’t the outlays from 2023, this is like 96% of the outlays from 2023. I took the numbers from the CBO report on the president’s budget for 2024 and summarized the amount for the Environmental Protection Agency and any larger agency in terms of dollar spent. There are other items in the budget that aren’t even under a particular agency.
At every point in choosing how to present what summaries of the federal budget looks like I have to make choices of what to include or not include, what to pool together, what asterisks to try to account for or not. Here’s the thing, even with how thorough its report and data is the Congressional Budget Office decides to make those same decisions. As I said, the EITC tax breaks are included, but much larger tax breaks don’t appear anywhere in the budget as loss of income for the federal budget. The saved costs on any given line item may or may not get counted for or against the final budget.
Can This Be Summarized?
I don’t really need to graph anything on the service to the debt. But suffice it to say that at this point nearly all of that debt is owned by Americans in the form of bonds. I’m trying to make a few points with these illustrations before going on to discuss the Senate. The first point, a very large chunk of the budget is dedicated to going straight into social insurance of everyday Americans. There is this Catholic social teaching idea that sometimes comes up called subsidiarity - the idea being that “matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority” It is often used as a cudgel by right wing Catholics when Catholics like me point out that social teaching of the Catholic Church tends to be more aligned with labor interests, worker ownership of the means of production, everything sharing everything in common,1 and all of that other very socialism sounding stuff. But incredibly robust social insurance, where capital power flows from the powerful to the powerless, is subsidiarity in action. Who are the poor?
If we look at this graph above, the poor are - in order of size - children, elderly, disabled, fully employed, caregivers, students, and unemployed. Children get benefits from Medicaid, SNAP, various tax credits. Elderly and disabled are variously on Medicare, Medicaid, social security, disability. Caregivers and fully employed are usually poor because they are part of a household that contains some non-workers usually elderly, children, disabled, or an immigrant that doesn’t have the same access to these programs. I think it is pretty clear that we as a country are failing them as a whole, but also am glad that a lot of the business of government does go directly toward the pockets of these individuals and their caretakers.
The second point I hope the budget illustrates is that someone offering simple solutions or simple narratives of the problems with the federal government is at best an idiot who has no idea what they are talking about. The idea that there are people in the world who wake up in the morning and think they are up to the task of managing the complexity of the government all alone if only they were given the power is mind-boggling to me. Someone who tells you they alone are grappling with the issue and just giving you the facts is just marketing. There is no simplicity in policy. At every turn in discussions and presentations of policy there are dozens of little choices that creep in of what is focused on, what is contextualized, how much to include, what to leave out. Whose stories get told or left out, whose narratives get pushed are choices made by interest groups, activists, powerful people, weak people, scam artists, and smart story tellers. If you scroll up and look at that graph on Discretionary Spending, you’ll notice how small the bar for the Department of State is - yet I am going to probably devote multiple blogs on just one program that makes up about a third of that bar2.
With that being said, there are four candidates3 applying for the Senate job. We can look at what they might do as Senator and how they might command the power of the Federal Government. What follows are my views on some of what I can find on where they stand on the issues. I’m going to be a bit more housing focused because, like many Californians, it is an issue I think about a lot.
The Issues Prioritized
Claims of politicians always breaking promises and lying are ubiquitous, but I actually find candidate websites illuminating, and occasionally in a race like this one they actually point to specific policy since the people running for office are policymakers. A quick look at how a candidate breaks up topics can also be a window into what they might prioritize and how they think about each issue. Here are the issue topics for each candidate in the order that they show up on their website.
Schiff
Plans: Adam’s Accomplishments, Defending Democracy, Affordability Agenda, Housing and Homelessness, Protecting our Planet
Porter
Key Issues - Clean Up Corruption, Empower Workers, Housing and Homelessness, Immigration, Unrig the Economy, Combat the Climate Crisis, Health Care, Education, Veterans, Child Care, Older Americans, Racial Justice & Freedom for All, Public Safety and Gun Violence, Disability Rights, Abortion Access, LGBTQIA+ Rights, Global Leadership
Plans: Housing for All, Planet for Our Future
She also has a Substack
Lee
Issues: Climate Action, Health Care for All, Reproductive Freedom, Global Security & Peace, Economic Justice, Education, Affordable Housing & Homelessness
Garvey
Steve’s Vision: Solving the Homelessness Crisis, Improving Californians’ Quality of Life, Addressing Crime and Public Safety, National Security, Supporting Our Ally Israel Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, Reforming Immigration with Sensibility, Prioritizing Water Management, Empowering California’s Agricultural Heartland, Championing Environmental Stewardship, Elevating our Education System, Supporting Ukraine Against Russian Aggression
Ok, so if you are completely unfamiliar with the California Senate Race, I have a rapid fire quiz for you, see if you can guess the answer based just on the above. I’ve tried to put them in order from easiest to hardest. Which of these candidates is Republican?Which of these candidates is ahead in the polls? Which of these candidates led the impeachment trials against Trump? Which one of these candidates is the only one to oppose earmarks? Which one of these candidates has the most links to actual bills in Congress?
The answer to these questions is Garvey, Schiff, Schiff, Porter, and probably Lee. The last one might have thrown you based on how much smaller the lists are for Schiff and Lee. But I went through the websites of Schiff, Lee, and Porter and as far as I could tell Lee referenced the most specific policy written into bills in Congress. There are, of course, a couple of caveats to that. If you were to try the same exercise you would quickly find that it is very easily to quickly count up all of the Acts Lee mentions because the references are so explicit. Schiff turns out to have almost as many bills referenced but it’s more difficult to pinpoint particular bills he is referencing. And to be fair to Porter, she writes quite a lot and has some interests that don’t intersect with some of mine. So there is a chance that she has a lot more bills that she sponsors or cosponsors that I am unfamiliar with the policy so wouldn’t even know immediately how to find them based on what she has written.
After a day of reading through their websites and writing down as many of the bills that I could find that were referenced. I added a handful of bills with the most cosponsors that were authored by Schiff, Porter, and Lee as well in case I missed them in reading their websites. Here is a quick look at the list I had compiled.
The first column is the name of a bill. The second is how many votes the bill got on the final roll call vote or the number of sponsors if it is still in Congress. The number of sponsors is a rough indication of how close a bill might be to passing if it comes to the floor. With 435 seats in the House a bill needs 218 to pass. The next three columns indicate whether or not the three candidates voted or cosponsored the bill. Bills are allowed to have unlimited cosponsors and members of Congress are able to cosponsor unlimited bills, so it is just an indicator of support. Not being a cosponsor is, of course, not necessarily a clear indication of hard opposition as there are often many similar bills floating around. Sometimes when a particular issue becomes important to a caucus a large number of bills will be combined for the purpose of reform. Sometimes this will be specific to a major policy area, like the Affordable Care Act targeting healthcare reform, but other times bills will be rolled up in budget negotiations or more general deal making. I consider the Inflation Reduction Act to be in the category of more general deal making.
One thing you’ll notice from the above chart is that Schiff, Porter, and Lee tend to agree on a wide array of policy issues. Especially when looking at bills more likely to get passed. This shouldn’t be too surprising; the California electorate is solidly to the left of the rest of America. Anything more in the center of the Democratic Caucus is going to be more likely to find agreement from a candidate for California Senator. So where are there differences between the candidates?
Foreign Policy
For the first difference emphasized by Lee in her website, she was one of a small minority of Congress to oppose the Iraq war and broad expansion of presidential police powers in the wake of 9/11. Schiff was in his first term and voted in favor of both The PATRIOT Act and authorization of use of force in Iraq. The decision of the Iraq war is long in the past, but foreign policy is one of those areas where the situation in the world can change fast and we have to rely on the judgement of leaders. Based on watching Schiff’s response during the debate regarding Gaza and Iran it seems like his instincts are still interventionist and excessively focused on force. I’ve brought up Gaza before, and it hit me pretty hard that after over 30,000 deaths and millions displaced, mostly children, Schiff wasn’t willing to call for a cease fire and Porter’s cease fire conditions include a complete release of all hostages. I don’t understand why the American approach to lives of other countries so often has no sense of proportionality, of value of human life, or of dignity. The policy and rhetoric is utterly bleak. Lee comes out so clearly on top here, and in a strange way foreign policy ends up being one of the areas that a California Democratic Senator can make a big difference. The tendency toward wrath and war in foreign policy is disturbingly bipartisan.
Family Leave
This is an area that is sort of frustrating. We are coming off of a Congress that did the most of any Congress on climate change in my lifetime. This came at the expense of a failure to pass a massive overhaul of the care economy, the Build Back Better plan that went up in flames. All three candidates would have supported the plans in Build Back Better, but that plan would have increased costs for childcare on middle class parents. This plan would have been better than the status quo. Childcare and elder care would have been more robust over the next few decades. But it had its drawbacks. Some of the flaws within the Build Back Better proposals would have been solved by the FAMILY Act, which Porter and Lee are cosponsors of but Schiff is not. My position on this is basically similar to Matt Bruenig, so you should read him. As far as the politics, this doesn’t matter too much one way or another, if anything gets passed it would likely be more means tested. There is always hope that when the median Senator isn’t Manchin or Sinema that an act like the FAMILY act, or maybe even better than it, might pass. I would give Lee and Porter the upper hand here but not by a huge amount, Schiff’s principles suggest he is persuadable on this I just don’t think it is as high on his priorities.
Taxes - A mixed bag
Careful readers may have noticed I just skipped over the Mental Health Justice Act. While true that Schiff isn’t a cosponsor on the latest, he has been in the past. Taxes are one of those issues that unfortunately both parties are not ideal at in my view. Part of this probably flows from the fact that taxes in the United States are confusing, interact in stupid ways, and enforcement is so rare that people don’t realize when they’ve made a mistake4. Proposition 13 in California is a noose around the neck of California housing connected to a slowly lifting rope that is slowly lifting young Californians by the neck as we struggle more and more to get purchase on the ground to gasp any last breath of the possibility of remotely affordable housing. Proposition 13 essentially grants a property subsidy for homeowners that increases the longer they are in their home.
As a rule, when creating an efficient tax, you want something that taxes externalities, economic rents, and consumption. Ideally this would mean something like a combination of VAT, Payroll Tax, Land Value Tax, and Destination Based Cash Flow Tax. Progressive taxation without cliffs or sudden marginal jumps are also better, unfortunately a lot of compromise on taxation leaves us with means testing and work requirements that cause huge distortions.
I’m going to be honest, the views on taxes from every single candidate aren’t entirely coherent and I keep changing my mind on what the right read on them is. I can’t find a bill that Schiff is cosponsoring that would increase funding for the IRS, but this would be basically free money. We should fund the tax police because it is a win-win-win situation for everyone involved and would bring in money from wealthier individuals in the US. But Schiff, along with Porter, also wants to increase the cap on State and Local Tax Deductions, which would mainly benefit people as they get richer and pay more on their home. Schiff also has a plan to suspend the gas tax for awhile which seems like it would be very bad for the climate. Thankfully no one has signed onto that bill, but Porter and Lee support expanding a tax credit for Electric Vehicles but are not signed on to Schiff’s bill that would extend tax credits to more accessible micromobility ebikes.
Porter and Lee support an elimination of one marriage penalty area of Tax policy, but frustratingly are not cosponsor to the most important marriage penalty. They also are both more in general in favor of taxing corporations and the rich on wealth and income. I’m sort of fine with this, it isn’t the most efficient tax and in general the focus tends to be so narrow that it doesn’t really impact the budget. Seriously, funding the IRS will have a much larger impact. To me, this falls under the umbrella of taxing externalities.
At the end of looking of the shades of difference among the candidates when it comes to taxes I come out slightly in favor of Lee, followed by Porter. But Schiff does have some argument for him, as I said, I go back and forth. It’s also hard to tell what exactly the principles are of how the candidates think about taxes. Part of the principle is obviously taxing rich more than poor, which is good, but after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Democrats have also been negatively polarized into supporting SALT deductions which are bad and should just be replaced by better welfare programs and simpler standard deductions and taxes.
Housing
Lee gets this on account of authoring the most bills on housing as well as having the firmest grasp on the current state of policy and what it would take to get to a better position. There are two important pieces of legislation that are essential to addressing homelessness and housing, and a third that is less essential but may become necessary over time.
The first is unfortunately not going to get solved at a federal level. I mentioned proposition 13 already, it is one of the barriers to addressing housing supply in California. Zoning laws at local levels are preventing new housing for richer people like me, and only recently have the majority of districts in California which are out of compliance with the housing element been facing consequences for preventing building. Lee understands this and if you are very into housing you would have noticed her answers in the debate demonstrated understanding of the issue. Oddly enough though Schiff’s focus on systematic democracy reform, especially in the courts, may have the larger federal level. The builder’s remedy will be litigated in California courts and I’m worried about how the Supreme Court would rule.
The second, and potentially more important5, is moving section 8 from discretionary funding to mandatory funding. This would mean that everyone with an Area Median Income of 30% or less would be able to get a section 8 voucher. This would potentially be awful for my personal household. My spouse works in housing services and her job would be completely transformed to the point where she may need to switch jobs or move. Nearly all of her built up understanding of the way section 8 has worked in Los Angeles would be instantly obsolete. We would be over the moon delighted. Every single candidate endorses this position. It would cost in the ballpark of 100 billion a year, so it would have a pretty substantial impact on the budget.
The third is the area where there is some daylight between the three candidates, the policies that address renter protections, equity between renters and homeowners, and aid for renters. Once again, Lee comes out on top. The median American is in a household that owns their home. Over 60% of American households hold some amount of equity. For those of us who are renters, we face a much more precarious market. Lee has bills that address a bunch of different pieces of this, from preserving renter protections, to addressing moving costs and rental deposits, to extending the same tax breaks that homeowners get to renters. Admittedly, I would prefer to remove the tax preference for homeowners before extending it to renters, doing away with preference for the rich, but other than that her plans move mostly in the right direction. Porter and Schiff have signed on to a number of these but have not yet for some of them.
Wrap Up
When everything is taken together, I am voting for Lee. She is mainly better on foreign policy, but seeing her at the debate I think she also had a better command of understanding policy than Schiff or Porter. Diving down into the details on domestic policy it is hard to read the tea leaves exactly, but Lee seems to have a slight upper hand over a range of issues addressing the poorest Americans.
Wait, What About Abortion
This is a Catholic blog, so if a Catholic comes across it who is unfamiliar with my work, I’m sure they will “what about abortion” even though there is going to be no difference between whoever wins when it comes to abortion policy at the national level. But let’s look at abortion numbers post Dobbs ruling. The latest numbers we have come from the Society of Family Planning which is about a six months lag. Matt Bruenig graphed some of those numbers so I’m going to steal his visualization.
Abortion has been on a downward trajectory with better sexual education, contraceptive use, and generally less sex among young people over time. Post-Dobbs there has been essentially no drop. This sucks, and it isn’t like there aren’t societal trade-offs or costs here. I’m no concern troll here, I think in the face of this evidence it is pretty clear that bans aren’t going to be the thing to decrease abortions that aren’t medically necessary.
Wait, What About Steve Garvey
What about him?
Acts 4:32
Why? Because it turns out that program accounts for over 20 million lives.
Actually there are far more, but I’m making a choice just to focus on those that made the debate. See, making choices has to happen! And this choice worries me, as leaving out one Republican means maybe I am making it more likely the other gets top 2. I hope not for the sake of the candidate I want.
This is bad! If you are making a mistake on your taxes you want it caught right away so you don’t have back taxes or penalties on your taxes years down the road.
I am forced to say this is more important as it is more important for the poorest and my spouse thinks it is more important. And personally, I think my spouse is probably more reliable than me on the issue of housing.