Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by Michael McShane)

I’m sure that the city of Cerritos, California is a lovely place filled with charming and good hearted people. But just like William Higinbotham’s creation of the video game cannot hide the scorn of creating the Federation of American Scientists, neither can Cerritos hide its shame in trying to continue one of the most counterproductive and harmful trends in American municipal governance: Tax Increment Financing (TIF).

TIF is a tool that municipalities use to try and spur economic development within their borders. Essentially, it freezes the amount of property tax that a property owner owes on a parcel of land or building at what they owed before they improved it, allowing them to keep what would otherwise be owed in taxes as the value of their property increases. So let’s say I buy an empty lot somewhere and decide to build an IKEA on it. If I can get a TIF deal, I’ll keep paying taxes on it as if the parcel of land is still an empty lot, even though the value of the property has gone way up.

Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. At most, it appears that TIF diverts economic activity from one part of a community to another. It doesn’t create new economic activity.  Oh, and here’s another problem, it diverts much needed tax dollars away from city, county, and state services and uses them to line developers’ pockets. Property taxes fund schools, libraries, mental health facilities, and a variety of other necessary functions of government.

But I think the worst part is how TIF, (and other forms of tax abatement, sweetheart deals cuts by civic leaders to developers, and/or outright public funding of stadiums and other facilities) promotes one of the JPGB’s mortal enemies, Petty Little Dictators. Rather than allowing people to decide where they think is best to build a new IKEA, movie theater, or office building, mayors and city councils, via tax subsidies, distort people’s behaviors to try and create their ideal little cities.  It also allows them to reward their friends and supporters with lower taxes while everyone else pays more to make up for it.

And what if you’re a business owner that doesn’t have the connections to get hooked up with TIF? Ask the sports bars around Busch stadium in St. Louis that existed before the city used tens of millions of dollars in TIF subsidies to build “Ballpark Village,” a conglomeration of food and drink options right outside of the stadium. Some saw their business fall by 50%. Great local businesses that saw through the city’s ups and downs for decades, dutifully paying their taxes all along, saw their customers go to their government-subsidized competition.

So what does Cerritos have to do with all of this? Well, California (of all places) decided to ban TIF a few years ago in response to the tremendous financial problems of the state. TIF was particularly costly to California because the state would pay back schools and libraries what local taxing jurisdiction had diverted from them.  So, they wisely got rid of it. Cerritos and several other cities are suing to try and bring TIF back.

The Higgy is given for “individuals whose arrogant delusions of shaping the world to meet their own will outweigh the positive qualities they possess.” Cerritos’s desire to use tax incentives to pick winners and losers embodies this perfectly. That’s why I think it deserves the Higgy.

Kimberle Crenshaw is a law professor at UCLA who is best known for coining the term, “intersectionality.”  As Wikipedia describes it, intersectional theory is “the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination.  There is nothing particularly harmful (or novel) about noting that people have multiple identities and that those identities overlap, sometimes in important ways.  The problem with intersectionality, which makes Crenshaw worthy of The Higgy, is that it has fueled an intellectually lazy and politically disastrous approach to virtually all social issues.

Intersectionality is intellectually lazy because it provides a single, overly-simplistic framework for understanding everything.  As Jonathan Haidt describes it, intersectionality divides the world into victims and oppressors.  In a type of re-warmed Marxism, all victims share the same struggle against the same underlying oppression, because all forms of oppression are connected.  The fight against racism cannot be won without addressing sexism, classism, ableism, etc…

Rather than having to learn about the complex circumstances and histories of different conflicts around the world, all we have to do is figure out who the victims and oppressors are.  Once we’ve forced the world into our Manichean framework, we know who should be helped and who should be stopped.  The problem is that the world is a lot more complicated than that.  People can be both oppressors and victims at the same time, depending on which issue we choose to make the focus of our attention.  And the struggle against one oppression may be completely independent of or even undermine the struggle against another oppression.

For example, the National LGBTQ Task Force decided to exclude an organization that seeks to make connections between LGBTQ communities in Israel and America from holding an event at the Task Force’s national conference in San Francisco.  Invoking the idea of intersectionality, some people convinced the Task Force that LGBTQ people in Israel could not be seen as victims (the good people) because they are oppressors of the the real victims, Palestinians.  Of course, dividing the world into oppressors and victims obscures the complex ways in which Palestinians may be oppressors of LGBTQ people or Jews at the same time that they may be victims of other types of oppression.  People are typically a mix of good and bad, which means that we might want to consider each type of grievance independently and understand it within its own context.  Instead, intersectionality encourages its adherents to label everyone as good or bad abstracted of individual circumstance or history, so we know who should be helped and who shunned (or worse).

To earn the good status of being the victim rather than the oppressor, people will compete in the who has suffered more Olympics, which is hardly a rational way to make moral or political judgements.  The people who claim to have suffered more may not be the most virtuous and those who are prospering may not be the most evil.  And encouraging people to compete for victim status discourages people from doing things that may help themselves so that they don’t risk appearing less victim-like.

In addition to being intellectually lazy, intersectionality is politically disastrous.  By connecting all issues, intersectionality prevents its adherents from agreeing with people on one issue while disagreeing on another.  If certain people are the oppressors and others victims, you can’t make common cause with the “oppressors” for the issues on which you have common interests.  You might think that linking different victims would give them a larger political coalition, but linking different oppressors drives away even more since few are the victims of every oppression.  Almost everyone can be framed as an oppressor in one way or another, all of whom are ineligible from joining your coalition against any particular injustice.

We’ve seen this type of political self-immolation in education reform, most notably at the infamous New Schools Venture Fund conference.  The more people demand that everyone in their coalition join them in opposing all injustices, the fewer people they have left to oppose any one injustice.  Some charter school people who have turned their hostility against private school choice are about to discover how lonely, small, and weak their purified coalition is about to become.  Especially given that Republicans dominate most state governments, purging mainstream Republican ideas from their version of the choice movement seems doomed to fail.  But given that intersectionality may find virtue in failure and sin in success, perhaps these folks don’t mind failing so much.

I don’t know enough about Crenshaw to say whether she has other redeeming qualities, but The Higgy does not demand that its recipients be awful people.  They only have to have done something to detract significantly from the human condition.  Introducing and promoting the concept of intersectionality certainly qualifies Crenshaw for this dishonor.