Clarity... Simplicity... Consideration

Yesterday I emailed my Senators and Representative and voiced my concern that there is a fundamental flaw in the system being followed right now in Washington. Bills are too big, they lack focus and clarity, and are being shoved through the system so fast that no one has time to read them. Waxman-Markey is a great example. I even put a video on the blog a while back where Waxman admits that HE didn’t know everything that was in HIS cap-and-trade bill. It’s frightening. These bills have far reaching and extremely significant impact on every American family and the people voting on them don’t even have a chance to read them. The citizens that these bills effect barely know they exist before they are being voted on by our elected officials. These things need to be out in the open, they need to be clear, they need to be limited to the subject at hand, and they need to be available for everyone to see and consider for at least some period of time.

Based on that I urged them to pursue the following reforms:

- Bills should be limited in scope to the actual issue that they are addressing. If a bill is about funding federal highways it shouldn’t contain ear marks for sea otter research. If sea otter research needs to be funded it should be able to stand on its own. No ear marks. No add-ons.

- Bills should be limited in length. Our elected officials are hopefully intelligent enough to be able to articulate their legislation in a hundred pages or less. Certainly some things are complicated and should require more details to truly be useful, therefore rare cases should be allowed to go upwards of five hundred pages, however…

- The length of the bill should be considered before voting. Bills that are a hundred pages or less should be in their completed form and available to the public prior to voting for at least a week. Bills exceeding a hundred pages (but still less than five hundred pages), should be completely compiled and available to the public for at least two weeks prior to a vote in either the House of Representatives or the Senate.

These three changes of limited scope, limited length, and minimum time, would allow the congressmen to be well informed and would give the public enough time to get involved in the process and contact their elected officials regarding bills that are important to them.

This is an important reform that needs to be made. Laws that are straight forward are hard to misinterpret and twist. Bills that are short and focused on a single issue don’t have room for loop holes, pork projects, or political favors. Ideas should be able to stand on their own merits.

Please email your elected officials and urge them to move forward with similar reforms. Here is the list of Senators and webforms to fill out requests. Here is a similar page to find your Representative and send them a message.

Back in the Saddle and Looking for a Change

A week off from work and news is a good thing. A week spent with family and friends is an even better thing. We had the good fortune to do both last week. You would think that four children in a car for four days of driving would be rough, but the boys did great and the van survived the trip, although it took hours to detox it when we got back.

I did some thinking while I was there and I might try a few different things in the future here, just normalizing some of the behaviors that I’ve already been doing sporadically.

I have also been thinking about how best to win people over to certain ideas and concepts. A lot of politics is name calling and mud slinging, which can be extremely entertaining, but rarely gets people to rethink their positions. Rethinking is a good thing.

Of course to rethink you really need to think about something in the first place. It occurred to me that a lot of people just don’t think much about politics. They vote for people that seem likable or for people that have the best rhetoric, in spite of what they are actually proposing.

Politicians have capitalized on this by making policy nearly undecipherable. Bills exceeding a thousand pages are rarely read by the members who vote on them let alone by the people who only pay attention to politics for an average of six minutes a WEEK. The tax code is a painful example, considering lawyers build lucrative businesses on the mere fact that they actually know and understand the ins and outs of the tax code. Lobbying firms make millions of dollars every year to push their clients’ interests into bills. That’s not saying anything against lawyers or lobbyists; quite frankly they are just playing the established game for their own causes and profits. As long as they are ethical in their practices, I really don’t have a problem with their behavior.

Of course I have a huge problem with the system.

Openness and transparency are great buzzwords, but they need to be actual policy, not just lip service or campaign slogans. Bills need to be straight forward, clear, and they need to be public with ample time for elected officials and average Joes to take some time to read them. They should be written about a single issue. No “omnibus”. No earmarks. No footnotes to be filled in later. Clear, simple and straight forward. Every Senator or Representative should have full confidence that they know what they are voting for and every citizen should be able to look at a bill and the vote of their representative and decide whether they agreed with the vote or not.

I need to do some more thinking on this, but this needs to be part of the conservative movement of limited government. A government that is strewn with loopholes, voluminous bills, and incomprehensible laws, is a government that is working against the people. There needs to be a healthy skepticism throughout the process. Argue your ideas, write bills to propose you ideas, but write it clear and let your ideas stand on their own merits, not tagging along something else.

Public Sector vs. Private Sector

I would like to take a couple of posts and explain further the purpose and implication behind one of the main tenants of conservatism, limited government. President Reagan once said it best, “in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem.” An unspoken message from President Obama is, government is the solution to this problem, and every problem.

The government is the solution mantra has led to an explosion in the scope and size of government. We’ve created whole new government positions for advisors, regulators, and administrators that haven’t been needed for the last 233 years, but now are crucial to the survival of our system and our country.

The jump start to the government solution was the $787 BILLION stimulus package which dumped huge amounts of resources into areas that didn’t have the personnel and infrastructure to handle this influx. The choice then becomes to deny the funds, which thankfully some have done, or expand and create an organization that can handle this waterfall of funding.

The theory behind this is that any spending is stimulus and any job created is beneficial to the system. This is true to a very small degree and for a very limited time. The problem with public sector, or government jobs, is that they don’t make money. Think about it. What are public sector jobs? Teachers, fire fighters, police officers, the Motor Vehicle Division, social workers, politicians and their expanding staffs, and the increasingly popular regulators of everything from environmental conditions to bank health and welfare. These of course are just the tip of the iceberg; quite frankly the list is growing every day. All of these are fine and good and yes we need and are thankful for all, well okay, most of these positions, when they are in the correct proportions. But take a look at the list for a minute. Do any of these positions generate money? I don’t mean, do they bring home a paycheck; of course these positions are paid, but do they generate money?

The answer of course is no. These are not profit generating positions. I know that seems to be a bad word these days, “profit”, but it is not a bad thing. Profit is a good thing; a necessary thing.

While none of these positions actually generates a profit, they all COST money and to have them we have to get the money from somewhere. Money doesn’t just fall from the sky and the government just can’t print all of the money that it needs. I have been shocked at the people that I have talked to that seem to think that this is exactly what happens. That’s not the case. The government brings in money in the way of taxes and then spends that money on the critical things including all of the necessary public sector jobs. The problem is that money has to first come out of the private sector. This means that people have to hold private, profit generating positions in order to fund the public sector positions.

Now do you understand my concern, and the concern of many others, when we see the size of the private sector shrinking and the public sector growing? Where does the money come from when you are pulling more and more money from an ever shrinking pool?

You are seeing the answer to that question as well in the form of deficits and debt, which carries its own implications and burdens that I won’t discuss right now.

The problem is magnified when hard times hit and suddenly the private sector is not producing the profits that it use to. A recession in the private sector means layoffs, cutbacks, even companies folding and going out of business. The public sector doesn’t quite work like that because they don’t get funding based on their output, sales, or profit. Their funding is provided through taxes and administered by politicians and other public sector workers or appointees. Instead of decisions made on economic realities, they become leverage for political campaigns.

Ever hear slogans like this:

“We need to fund education!”
“My opponent voted to slash welfare benefits”
“I care about the children, so I will push for increased after school programs.”
“My opponent will slash you Medicare benefits!”
“My opponent wants to get rid of your Social Security!”
“I will push for a universal healthcare”

Understand now? Instead of finding a way to fund a new program but cutting an old one, they just get stacked on top of each other until it becomes a burden that the private sector can’t support.

That is why is hard to cut funding in these areas. That is why public sector jobs are harder to reduce than private sector positions. That is why they need to be created slowly, with great thought and long term consideration, not under the guise of stimulus and unsustainable budgets.

The fact is that we need to reduce the number of public positions to the point where they are sustainable under the worst economic conditions and funding should come, as much as possible, from local and state sources.

This public sector explosion can’t last and more importantly it shouldn’t have started.

Just one reason and one example of why conservatives believe in limited government.