I don't have to!

 

Image by Chloe Cushman, The New York Times.

In a sense, she’s correct, though her words are poorly chosen. There are, I’m sure, dozens, hundreds of democrats who can explain why asylum for undocumented aliens is entirely legal and appropriate.

— Steve (@BroomallSteve) July 5, 2021

I would be shocked if she did. She shows no kind of curiosity. I don't think she's smart enough to realize that she's not very smart.

As Vonnegut wrote, “The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.”

— Steve (@BroomallSteve) July 6, 2021

It's so pervasive though--they all do it up to Cruz who is widely believed to have a brain. They can't imagine we have a reason for any policy and refuse to listen when they're told--their explanation is that we're intrinsically evil.

You can't have any kind of debate with that.

— Specter of Happiness (@Yastreblyansky) July 6, 2021

This is the thing, you know. In that particular thread there were dozens of thoughtful, sober points about the value of municipal authorities not cooperating with ICE, as well as others missing the point or off the wall, but it's not as if Tummy LaRoon there was going to look at any of them. She'd made her point—that "we" don't "owe" anything to "illegals", especially if they're "criminal" as well. (Actually municipalities do owe respect for migrants' Fourth Amendment rights, which ICE often asks them to violate by holding an individual in detention without a judicial warrant, a violation for which cities have sometimes been successfully sued; who they don't owe anything to is federal enforcement, as courts have repeatedly found, and in some states they're not even allowed to cooperate.) She's not interested in whether it's a good thing or not—her argument is just "I don't have to." Like a truculent 13-year-old, "I don't have to," that's a reason.

Another example that popped up on the radio this morning is Biden's program for spending $20 billion a year to fund universal pre-K, an overwhelmingly popular idea for various reasons—how, somebody was asking, do Republicans explain their opposition to it? "Well," the pundit said, "they say it costs too much money." Compared to what? How much is too much? If it's done through taxation, with the economies of scale that provides, isn't that cheaper than asking parents to front the tuition directly? What's the cost of not doing it? A few years back, they'd refer you back to evidence that some programs didn't seem to have a durable effect on the kids—"Head Start doesn't work"—but never to the possibility that it would be a good thing to find an approach that does "work", in the sense of readying kids to learn the things they need to learn, including not just literacy and numeracy but also socializing, in a more diverse population than they might get at home. 

Now there's more positive research coming out, most recently a study based on the lottery system they used to allocate scarce pre-K places in Boston in the 1990s, which elegantly created randomly selected experimental and control groups. It wasn't clear if the pre-K helped children with future test scores, but:

The winners were less likely to be suspended in high school and less likely to be sentenced to juvenile incarceration. Nearly 70 percent of lottery winners graduated from high school, compared with 64 percent of lottery losers, which is a substantial difference for two otherwise similar groups. The winners were also more likely to take the S.A.T., to enroll in college and — though the evidence is incomplete, because of the students’ age — to graduate from college.

These positive effects were similar across racial groups and income groups. They also spanned both sexes, with larger effects for boys than girls. The authors note that their findings are consistent with several other studies, which also found that early education had a bigger effect on long-term outcomes than short-term metrics.

Incidentally, the report didn't come up with any helpful explanations as to why there didn't seem to be a significant effect on the standardized test scores, but I think those results on college enrollment point to a simple answer: those tests just don't measure the stuff they are supposed to be measuring very well.

But it "costs too much money". How much does it save, in sparing kids from the juvenile justice system? How much does it generate, in leading to increased incomes when they grow up, which in turn boosts tax receipts? You can't get them to look at such questions. And I think the issue really boils down to the same thing, "I don't have to." They have to fund K-12 education because somebody already voted that in. They don't have to do more as long as they keep voting it down, and that's the way they like it.

Conservatives continually distract you from the aims of Democratic legislation because they can't argue against them. Who could argue that it's a bad thing if everybody can afford decent medical care? So they don't say it. They say it "costs too much", though the Obama program was designed to cut federal spending and had saved $2.3 trillion by 2019 (I don't know what the figure is by now); or it's "socialism" or a "government takeover", though far from being socialist in any sense including the sense in which healthcare is socialized in France and Singapore, it's designed to protect the profits of private insurers and hugely expand their markets; or finally that it's "unconstitutional", in the claim the Supreme Court just threw out because in the last analysis the Court cares more about insurance company shareholders, as I expected, than it does about the Republican Party. 

And you know what "unconstitutional" means, applied to a public benefit whose aims nobody can disagree with? It's the ultimate "I don't have to! You can't make me!"  

And as long as they don't care how stupid they sound, like refractory 13-year-olds, it's not worth arguing over. If you want to get it done you have to do it without them.