These are confusing times. But, if you stay observant, you can detect consensus on surprising things, among them, an acknowledgment by Congress that on many tough issues, our usual form of congressional lawmaking doesn't work.
Think of the military base closing commission, the BRAC. Why do we have that? Congress created it because it couldn't get out of its own political way on sensitive questions regarding which military bases should be closed. Now, deciding which bases to close ought to be easy enough, right? Ask the military. Let 'em tell ya what they need, what they don't. Cross-examine them, Congress, if you want to, and make sure their reasons are solid, defensible, and correct. But, get the military's recommendations, push back a little, ask questions, vote. Done.
No. Uh-uh. Didn't work that way. Oh, the military was more than capable of making a needs assessment and making recommendations to Congress. It's just that inevitably, if a base recommended for closing fell in a given Congressman's district, then he or she most assuredly was going to vote against the entire bill, or offer an amendment removing such base from the list; and likewise, if it fell in a Senator's state, then he or she was sure to attempt to amend the bill or, if necessary, fillibuster it so that it would not become law. Nothing could get done, in short, on this issue. Our form of representative government didn't work - not for base closings - it was completely locked up.
So Congress created the BRAC, a commission comprised of not a single elected representative of the American people, and delegated to it the task of putting forth base closing recommendations which could not be fillibustered, nor amended, but voted upon in all or nothing fashion with a simple up or down vote.
So why did we need a BRAC? Why did Congress prove incapable of legislating over base closings? In short, it revealed a weakness in our form of representative government: It doesn't work well when the national interest runs counter to local interests. The issues and facts around base closings were too arcane to market to the American people as a national interest or threat. Base closings are not 9/11. They are not $4 gas. So local areas viewed it locally with the simple question, "Are they closing my base?" Actually, it was more with the statement, "They better not be closing my base." Representatives knew this, and voted that way. They were remaining responsive to their constituents, but their constituents were not thinking in the national interest. I submit our form of representative government will break down not just sometimes, but every time when this is the case.
How do you govern on national (or even worse, global) problems unless they are being acutely felt right now (not in 5 or 10 or 15 years, even if experts promise us that unless action is taken now we certainly will feel the problems acutely then)? People who lived near and were perhaps employed by bases recommended for closing couldn't acutely feel the problems which stem from a persistent misallocation of Defense Department spending. They couldn't feel that. But they could feel the loss of their job if the base closed. How many layoffs would occur if boards of directors were elected by employees, especially, if voting rights continued (as with elections) for some time after the layoffs were implemented? Well, nearly none, I'd argue, particularly if being a board member is found as desirable by board members as Congressmen and Senators find desirable being in the Congress.
It's only when long-term problems, left unaddressed because they are long-term, and because addressing them has negative short-term political repercussions, rise up finally and hurt us with some immediate-term pain that we ask the question, "You knew about this for years and you didn't do anything?...Why?!" For instance, if there were some experimental (for now) military system we knew we would need - perhaps a network of "sniffers" to detect airborne smallpox or other weaponized pathogen, or a device for detecting nuclear material in shipping containers, or perhaps a missile-defense system of some sort - but in which we never sufficiently invested because raising taxes and/or realigning current defense allocations (such as from targeted base closings) were out of the question due to long-term repetitions of short-term thinking, and then 100,000 Americans quickly perish on account of some enemy using such device successfully against us, can't you just hear your all too fatuous Congressman or Senator scolding military and Pentagon witnesses at the investigatory hearings after, "What is it you are telling me?...That over the last twenty or more odd years the Pentagon and military have spent billions, ney, trillions of dollars on things THEY KNEW THEY DID NOT NEED instead of on systems which THEY KNEW THEY WOULD just because it was politically EXPEDIENT!! Over 100,000 people are dead! What do you say to that?!!!"
And, of course, an answer along the lines of "You hypocritical bastard," would be more than justified.
Anyway, I hope I'm stating the obvious. Our system of representative democracy works best on legislating solutions to short-term problems. It does least well on long-term problems. This is plain and easy to see. Look where we really stink. Look at Social Security. We funded it for the long-term with a tax rate back in the '80s well in excess of what was needed to pay current retirees, but knew we'd need that higher tax level to cover boomers eventually. We put it on a sound actuariarl footing. Kudos. But, instead of using the surplus in tax receipts to buy, really, anything of long-term asset value - gold, silver, knickel, copper, or metal of choice, a mixed portfolio of currency bonds from major currencies around the globe, real estate, etc - what did we do with it? Just spent it as if it were not from Social Security receipts, but any ol' tax receipt of the federal government. So now Social Security is just as underfunded as if we'd done nothing in the '80s, except we paid much higher FICA taxes all along. And there is no more regressive tax than FICA. Just ask Joe Six-Pack. Or Warren Buffet. It's paid only on the first $90,000 or so of income, and nothing over. For your poor, lower-middle, and middle-income guy, that's their entire wage; for someone like Oprah, who makes around $40 mill a year, it's less than 1/2 of one percent. Our Congress's attempt at a long-term solution was a significant tax increase on average guys, where the government then spent the money on everything but Social Security. All of those hard-struggling Americans deserve to have that money returned.
What about Medicare? Well, we wrote and passed it with the promise of a bunch of benefits. Then we expanded on those benefits during the Bush II administration with prescription drug coverage. Did we do as we did with Social Security?..i.e. set its tax rate at some long-term level? Nope, we didn't, which proved the right move given what we did with the Social Security surplus. If we'd done that with Medicare too, then Medicare would be every bit as broke as it is now, even though we would have been paying a much higher Medicare tax for years. The next time they decide to "fix" Social Security the way they did last time, I hope they just don't and say they did, since it's exactly the same thing. Oh, and Medicare is underfunded now (based on current benefits) by an estimated, I don't know, $60 trillion or something. No kidding. Ok, I just looked it up - it's $34-$70 trillion, depending whom you ask. Wiki says it's $34, so let's go with that. It's a number so large that it doesn't exist. What do I mean? I mean it will never be paid, the program is destined to become so deeply, deeply slashed. For those who say, "Well, not necessarily, Joe, we could raise taxes," let me reiterate - $34 trillion, $34 trillion, $34 trillion. Depending on which number is truly correct, you're talking about a number which is from 3 to 6 times the size of the entire, accumulated national debt of this country! You can't tax your way out of that...we don't have it to tax!
So, apparently, the Founding Fathers need revision. They gave us a "republic, if [we] could keep it," but one with a bicameral Congress of House and Senate members with no incentive, and therefore no capacity, to legislate solutions to long-term problems until the long-term is no longer the long-term but the immediate-term acutely felt (we are not alone in this; consider John Kennedy's book, Why England Slept, where the long-term England failed to address was but a mere 20 years away, i.e. the start of the second World War). John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) said in the movie, A Beautiful Mind, "Adam Smith needs revision," because he realized markets don't operate in reality from the cumulative result of individual interest, but rather the individual preception of cumulative interest, and what is in the individual's best interest based on that. The real John Nash won a Nobel for that. As he should. Winning Nobels is often about expressing something that always was, like E=mc². Until we account in our form of government for something that always was, the tendency of people and therefore their representatives in government to act out of short-term local interest, rather than longer-term national interest, we shall always be unprepared for the long-term problem, and government of, by and for the people shall necessarily mean governing from one crisis to the next.
Joe,
A very good post here. I agree with nearly everything you have to say. While I read this I had this nagging thought that you might be hinting at something that, oddly enough, is endorsed not by left-centerists like yourself, but by conservatives: limited federal government.
The founding fathers never intended the government to be so pervasive in our society, which explains perfectly why it's not built to handle long term problems.
Now, there is an argument to be made that perhaps, at certain times in history, perhaps even in our own, a bigger government is needed to overcome the kinds of challenges that will take many years to resolve. I'm not wise enough to know if the problems we're facing now are considered long term challenges, but I do know that if you're right in your thinking, that the current supernova of government growth we're seeing is only going to make things much, much worse.
Posted by: Javier Plumey | March 04, 2009 at 11:46 PM
One more comment. The beauty of the system that our founders instituted can also be easily seen in that they themselves understood that the Constitution will necessarily need to be amended to handle the changing demands of the future. In their wisdom, perhaps they had the vision to see that some day we may need changes to handle long term challenges.
Posted by: Javier Plumey | March 04, 2009 at 11:48 PM
Thanks for the comments. I think the Constitution will need some structural change to account for the long-term, to see that some fraction of government spending and initiative is dedicated to the long-term. In our own lives, we have short-term saving (for short-term needs, that next refrigerator, heat pump, or car) and long-term (for retirement). We break up our current income (current saving) into those two buckets. We do it in a very conscious, calculated way. Our Congress for the most part is designed to focus on the immediate-term, when the country has long-term problems as well, and always will. Some amendment, some adjustment or redesign is needed to guarantee that some portion of government spending and problem-solving is always dedicated to the long-term.
Posted by: Joe Intili | March 06, 2009 at 09:14 AM