Left Center Left

Cross-posted at TPMCafe

Yes, it’s something of a moot point to fret about the success of liberal policymaking when a) liberals are so resolutely out of power at the moment and b) the current administration barely tries to pretend it cares about policy actually designed to solve problems. Still, for anyone who cares about how to use public policy to foster economic development in poorer, urban areas - and particularly for those who thought that Clinton and the New Democrats had promising policy ideas that differed from large-scale welfare state government intervention and from the failures (?) of the Great Society - the news today that Empowerment Zones are failing to bring jobs to urban areas should give us pause for reflection.

Nearly half of the country’s 82 largest municipalities lost jobs from 1995 to 2003, according to a new Harvard University study. By comparison, only one of the surrounding metropolitan areas lost jobs during the same period.

A separate analysis by The Associated Press found that most inner cities targeted by the federal government’s primary urban economic programs lost jobs as well.

In fact, the best-performing cities were not part of the federal empowerment zone and renewal community programs, which provide businesses with billions of dollars in tax incentives to expand and hire workers.

Questions I have:

• Is the Empowerment Zone unique as a policy failure? Or were other New Democrat policy initiatives (environmental tax credits, educational policy) similarly flawed?
• In what way was urban development policy a failure? Was it merely too small an initiative to stem the larger cultural and economic tides of urban development? Did it keep things from being worse? Was it wasted money?
• Were Empowerment Zones presented as good faith policy or were they a combination of feel-good token gesture for equality and interest-group spoils for an urban minority petite bourgeoisie?

I’m eager to entertain a defense of these measures, but at the very least the latest study should temper the hubris of New Democrats (or at least the popularizers like Joe Klein) who boasted that targeted incentives and tax credits were not only more politically palatable but also more effective than older, large-scale policy for solving social inequality.