Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Democratic Heresies

My husband and I have had a long-running argument about primary elections. (Hey–you argue with your spouse about whatever is important in your house, and we nerds will argue about what preoccupies us…)

My husband insists that primaries have contributed mightily to political polarization. It’s unarguable that the people who turn out for primary elections are more partisan and ideological than other voters, and he’s nostalgic for the smoke-filled rooms where party elders chose candidates more likely to appeal to the moderate middle.

My rejoinder has been that more democracy is good, and smoke-filled rooms had their dark side. We just need more competitive primaries, and more people voting in them.

Now, a respected scholar at the Brookings Institution has weighed in…on my husband’s side.

Noting the recent resignation of the Speaker, she writes

John Boehner became Speaker at a point in time when four different reform ideas—all enacted with the best of intentions—interacted in ways that made his job impossible. These are structural and will impede the job of the next Speaker as well.

Primaries. The United States is one of the very few democracies in the world that uses primaries to nominate the members of the legislative branch. That means, for all practical purposes, anyone can become the nominee of a political party simply by declaring, running and winning. It also means that defying the party leader, in this case the Speaker, has very few consequences. While Boehner has been able to strip some of his problem members of committee assignments that has not proven to be a very powerful tool. Unlike leaders in parliamentary parties, Boehner cannot decide to keep someone off the list for bad behavior. And primaries are notoriously low turnout events in which a small group of ideologically motivated voters can control outcomes. Thus it is no wonder that Members of Congress have come to fear being “primaried” more than they fear displeasing the leadership.

She identifies three other “reforms” and their unintended consequences: parties (actually, their loss of power; they have less clout than billionaires with SuperPaks), privacy (which has diminished, taking with it the ability to negotiate in relative confidence), and pork (eliminating the goodies that everyone criticized also eliminated the ability to wheel and deal and actually get stuff done.)

I hate it when my husband turns out to be right….

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Electing Our Future/Why Should I Care?

Media attention is already firmly focused on 2016 and the presidential race, and that’s understandable, given the amount of cluelessness and buffoonery being displayed by the current crop of “candidates” (note the quotation marks, because, really–who can take some of these people seriously?).

Most recently, Ben Carson has replaced Donald Trump as  the preferred mouthpiece for bigotry and unintended irony : almost immediately after defending his offensive stereotyping of all Muslims, he defended his own scientific ignorance by complaining that people were denigrating him for his faith. You really can’t make this shit up.

As fascinating as all this continues to be, 2016 is next year. Indianapolis will hold municipal elections this year. 2015. And those of you reading this who live in Indy need to pay attention to that election, because in a very real sense, we will be electing our future. Monday night, at Central Library, a large group of civic organizations held the first of three planned events intended to provide voters with the information needed to understand how and why local government affects them.

Take some time and view the embedded video, courtesy of WFYI. You’ll be more informed for the investment!

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Useful Fantasies

Yesterday, I noted with some alarm the fact-free nature of the GOP debate.

A recent report from the Brookings Institution offers a useful reminder that–inconvenient or not– facts really do matter, particularly when economic policy decisions must be made.

The dog days of August have given way to something much worse. Congress returned to session this week, and the rest of the year promises to be nightmarish. The House and Senate passed budget resolutions earlier this year calling for nearly $5 trillion in spending cuts by 2025. More than two-thirds of those cuts would come from programs that help people with low-and moderate-incomes. Health care spending would be halved. If such cuts are enacted, the president will likely veto them. At best, another partisan budget war will ensue after which the veto is sustained. At worst, the cuts become law.

The putative justification for these cuts is that the nation faces insupportable increases in public debt because of expanding budget deficits. Even if the projections were valid, it would be prudent to enact some tax increases in order to preserve needed public spending. But the projections of explosively growing debt are not valid. They are fantasy.

The remainder of the article–which is well worth reading in its entirety–explains that projections of deficits result from the use of “conventions” (assumptions) that do not reflect current reality, and are evidently not intended to do so.

I do not pretend to understand the utility of these conventions for budgetary purposes, but   to the extent they produce “projections” that do not reflect reality, their use as ammunition in the effort to reduce government to a size that can be “drowned in a bathtub”–to use Grover Norquist’s phrase–is pernicious.

But what if we did face persistent deficits?

The assumption seems to be that the only avenue open to policymakers would be budget cuts. It’s as if we have taken tax increases off the table–despite the fact that America’s tax rates are historically low, America’s wealthiest enjoy a wide range of unconscionable tax loopholes, and America’s most profitable corporations continue to evade taxes by parking their profits offshore.

I don’t understand the dogged determination of the “morality party” to ignore the facts in order to protect the perquisites of the already advantaged at the expense of those who have little or nothing.

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The Light Begins to Dawn…

America has long had a “bandwagon” approach to policy; our penchant for simple solutions leads us into all manner of fads: the New Public Management, outsourcing and privatization, untested education “reforms,” and others.

For the past couple of decades, the answer to virtually every management challenge has been “privatization.” As I’ve indicated previously, there are times/situations where contracting out (which is what our version of “privatization” really is) makes sense, but thanks to our penchant for jumping on the bandwagon, government agencies have employed this method of delivering public services without the sort of rigorous analysis–or often any analysis–that should accompany decisions to turn tax supported programs over to private vendors.

Lately, however, citizens and public officials are beginning to recognize the downside of inappropriate contracting. A newspaper in North Carolina recently editorialized on the results of that state’s privatization of mental health services:

[A]ccess to services was confusing; services became unavailable to clients, and the number of people with mental illness who ended up in emergency rooms and jails significantly increased.

According to the Orange County Register, privatization’s consequences for Costa Mesa, California, were similar.

When the Costa Mesa City Council attempted to privatize large portions of municipal operations, it did so without conducting any analysis about whether its actions would save money – or whether it would cost more, which it did….

Southern California has provided fertile ground for other failed outsourcing initiatives. In the 1990s, Seal Beach thought it was on the cutting edge of local government privatization. The beach community managed to save about $30,000 in its first year of privatized jail services, and local officials were quick to pat themselves on the back for what they thought was really smart governing.

But what privatization delivered was two decades of lawsuits, two in-custody deaths, improper responses to medical emergencies, inadequately trained staff and a steady stream of violations uncovered by state regulators and health officials. Privatization of Seal Beach’s jail has resulted in so many serious problems that the city is now spending a reported $1.2 million just to start the process of bringing jail services back in-house.

The county of Orange’s most recent information-technology debacle provides yet another cautionary tale. After the county entered into a staggering $132 million contract with Xerox to upgrade phone and computer networks, performance by Xerox was so poor that the Board of Supervisors appears to be poised to sue over the broken promises and cost increases.

The article cites other examples, and notes that enthusiasm for contracting may finally be on the wane:

Across the country, governments of all sizes are rethinking the outsourcing of services as they discover its many unwelcome consequences, including lack of transparency, cost overruns, lack of competition for contracted services, and glaring weaknesses in accountability and oversight.

It’s hard to argue with her conclusion:

Services provided by public entities should be judged by what is best for the health, well-being, civil liberty and security of the public. Inserting a profit motive is an open invitation to graft and corruption and, more often than not, results in services that cost more and serve the public less.

We’ve noticed.

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Public Service is NOT Amateur Hour

I had a disquieting exchange yesterday with a very nice woman who is apparently enamored of Ben Carson, and considers him qualified to be President. Because he’s a brain surgeon.

Carson–as political observers have noted and as his interviews have made painfully clear–is a seemingly nice man with no previous experience in government who has displayed a truly appalling ignorance of the issues America faces, the operation of our legal system and the current world situation.

And of course, I need not remind readers of this blog that the current front-runner for the Republican nomination is Donald Trump, who–in addition to sharing all of Carson’s deficiencies–is so monumentally narcissistic and un-self-aware that he is a walking joke.

Here’s the thing: none of us–including Ben Carson and Donald Trump–would hire someone to do a job who lacked any relevant experience, training or basic understanding of the most rudimentary requirements of the position. So why do so many Americans consider ignorance of how government works a virtue, and why do so many candidates seem to think that parading that ignorance should win them votes?

I teach in a school of public affairs. One of the majors we offer is public management–a course of study intended to prepare people for public sector positions. The skills we teach as essential for even entry-level bureaucrats include public finance (which–surprise!–is considerably different from balancing your checkbook), statistical analysis, the ways in which law constrains public policy, the effects of globalization, the operation of the policy process…the list goes on.

Like it or not, we live in a complicated world. Americans expect government to protect us from terrorists and e coli, to regulate utilities, to administer social insurance programs, to encourage economic development, to ensure that our air is breathable and our water drinkable, to prevent economic monopolies, to control air traffic, to wage our wars, to educate our children, to pave our streets and highways, and much more. Most of those functions require specialized expertise, and managing the public servants and contractors who provide these services is no small task.

Running a city, a state or a country is not a job for amateurs, or for people who have only the dimmest understanding of the  myriad foreign and domestic challenges the nation faces on a daily basis, and the often difficult and surprising interrelationships among them.

It isn’t brain surgery–and the ability to do brain surgery, or to star in a television reality show, doesn’t make someone even remotely competent to run a country in the 21st Century.

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