“It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid.

“You say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age, fine. You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simple model,” he said. “Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”…

“What do we say to poor kids in poor neighborhoods? Don’t do it. Remember all that stuff about don’t get a hamburger flipping job? The worst possible advice you could give to poor children. Get any job that teaches you to show up on Monday. Get any job that teaches you to stay all day even if you are in a fight with your girlfriend. The whole process of making work worthwhile is central.”

Let’s put aside for the moment that, as Corporation for Enterprise Development’s Andrea Levere pointed out, “in many low-income families, not only do their parents work one job, but many of these families work two jobs and three jobs.”

And let’s put aside what message our society sends poor kids when many have parents who have the phenomenal work ethic to work two or three jobs and yet are barely keeping their heads above water.

If you were worried about society’s values, why at a time when everyone but the 1% are struggling to find a job if they’re out of work would you be focusing on poor kids?

Put it another way: is it Harlem’s or Wall Street’s values we should be trying to fix right now?

I think Gingrich has the right general idea. It just needs a little tweaking. Instead of improving poor kids’ values by having them clean toilets, let’s make bankers and hedge fund managers do it.

But we don’t want to take away jobs from janitors. So instead of cleaning school toilets, our morally bankrupt friends could go to the homes of elderly janitors and housekeepers and clean their toilets.

Because right now there are an awful lot of elderly janitors and housekeepers who make places like New York City run smoothly that could really use some help — they can’t afford to retire because of what Wall Streeters and Banksters did.

Think of the moral and spiritual message President Bush could have sent in 2008 when he bailed out the banks. He could’ve told the banks that they wouldn’t be getting a free ride. They would have to earn it by cleaning toilets in the poorest working families’ apartments so they could see firsthand the damage they had done to our communities. Talk about cleaning up your moral hazards.

We could even use it to help revitalize poor neighborhoods. If we are providing all of this valuable moral training, why shouldn’t morally fallen pay for it? For every session hedge fund managers and banksters spent cleaning elderly janitors and housekeepers bathrooms, they could pay these hard-working folks for the privilege. And they could pay clergy in the neighborhood to meet with them after each session to talk about how to rebuild their moral values and live a more righteous life. In doing so they would not only rebuild their moral core, they would also infuse a much-needed stimulus into poor communities and the overall economy. And taxpayers wouldn’t have to pay a cent.

If Newt wants to send a clear-cut moral message to poor kids, I can’t think of a better way to do it.

 
P.S. Newt, if you need more help with fleshing out this idea, including a valuable historical perspective, my rates are very reasonable.

At one level, my framework has to respond to economic policy wonks like Krugman. Their argument is essentially that it just ain’t gonna work. As we saw when it came to the government’s role in the climate crisis, Krugman argued that “a ‘command and control’ fix that issues specific instructions in the form of regulations” would run into problems:

But while the direct regulation of activities that cause pollution makes sense in some cases, it is seriously defective in others, because it does not offer any scope for flexibility and creativity…

greenhouse gases are a direct or indirect byproduct of almost everything produced in a modern economy, from the houses we live in to the cars we drive. Reducing emissions of those gases will require getting people to change their behavior in many different ways, some of them impossible to identify until we have a much better grasp of green technology. So can we really make meaningful progress by telling people specifically what will or will not be permitted? Econ 101 tells us — probably correctly — that the only way to get people to change their behavior appropriately is to put a price on emissions so this cost in turn gets incorporated into everything else in a way that reflects ultimate environmental impacts.…

A market-based system would create decentralized incentives to do the right thing. (Emphasis added)

But when you talk to many folks, including some of my friends, their caution about solutions that involve government aren’t based in abstract economic theory. It comes from a gut sense about what’s going on in the world. My framework needs to address these deeper feelings and fears that are based in painful real-world experiences:

1) The World Is out of Control. I can barely keep my head above water. The world is changing – and not for the better. I don’t have a say in it.

2) The Government Is Not on My Side. When folks say they don’t want big government, they almost never mean they want to get rid of Medicare or Social Security. I think what a lot of folks – or at least the folks I want to talk to, the folks who are sane and unselfish – are really saying is that they don’t think the government is on their side. When the government acts, it only helps out the Big Guys – the bank bailout being Exhibit A. Who stands up for me? And why would I want the government to do anything more if I don’t believe it’s got my interest at heart?

3) Liberals/Elites Are Arrogant and Condescending. These folks think they know best. I shouldn’t get a say, because “the experts” have all the answers. They spend their time implying I’m no good and telling me how I should behave to be a better person. They’re hypnotized by fancy ideas without ever thinking through the real-world consequences (Exhibit A: folks who say the best way to solve the climate crisis is to raise the gas tax). And I can’t really trust them, because they aren’t authentic: they operate – or at least they pretend to operate – at a distance from the raw emotions most folks have.

4) The Government Is Incompetent. A lot of people say they don’t want more government because they think the government is incompetent. That’s certainly what you see in surveys about Americans’ mixed feelings towards government in healthcare. But I think – and this is based on just talking with folks, not any solid evidence – that incompetence is really a proxy for the government isn’t on my side and that I can’t trust policy elites not to hose me. Let me put it this way. If most folks really meant it when they said their biggest problem with government is that they don’t think it’ll do a good job, then efforts to get government to run better would get a lot more traction. More on this later.

In short, my framework has to respond at 2 levels: to the nuts and bolts economic arguments of folks like Krugman, and to the deep-seated, reality-based feelings held by many folks I respect.

SERENE JONES [President of Union theological seminary]: You ask how you would define this crisis? I think it’s a crisis of value. We have misplaced, in deep ways, the ruler that we use to measure what matters most in life. And it has become completely exhausted by monetary value. …

How do we help [my theological students] understand the crisis in such a way that the remaking of the fabric, which can allow our democracy to thrive, happens? And, again, I just keep thinking it’s the simple concepts. How do we get people to rediscover love? …

BILL MOYERS: But isn’t it a fantasy to think that love can tame capitalism. …

CORNEL WEST: … love is not a real small thing. Love is not just the key that unlocks the door to ultimate reality. But there would be no weekend if there were not a trade union movement that loved justice enough, and loved working people enough, so that bosses wouldn’t treat them like commodities to be marginalized.

There would not be racial, the racial justice that we have of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Phil Berrigan. There wouldn’t be, without the love that you all had for justice, and the love enough for black people, to say, “Quit niggerizing these people. Quit intimidating them. Quit trying to make them so scared that they won’t stand up and fight.” Love is a serious thing. When you love your mamma, you take a bullet for her if she’s treated unjustly. That’s why justice is what love looks like in public.

SERENE JONES: But this thing about the story of love that we have the capacity for includes, within it, a recognition of the harshness and the brokenness and the darkness of our lives. And love exists in that. It doesn’t exist despite it.

CORNEL WEST: That’s right.

BILL MOYERS: I’m not sure you haven’t confused love with justice.

SERENE JONES: Justice is nothing but love with legs. Justice is what love looks like when it takes social form.
(Emphasis added)

As an economic policy geek, I feel a little silly talking about love and the economy. How do you talk about it without sounding like a complete idiot? Well, here’s Exhibit A. And Serene Jones’ line gets it just right: “Justice is nothing but love with legs.”

I’m not sure how I’m going to fold this kind of approach into my economic model. Maybe I’ll fail miserably and look like an idiot. But I’d rather run the risk of making a fool of myself than build the economic model that, like the one that blew up this fall, fails because it hides from reality.