“Everybody knows that ordinary Americans are a bunch of idiots,” a Health and Human Services official told Benjamin Ginsberg. “Why do you need to do a survey to find that out?”
Actually, he was not surveying Americans for their IQs and knowledge levels. He was surveying Washington insiders. Like her.
She hadn’t been listening.
Ginsberg and co-author Jennifer Bachner have a new book out, What Washington Gets Wrong (2016). “We found that public officials,” Ginsberg told C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb last month, “the people who really govern this country . . . don’t think much of ordinary Americans.”
Surprise, surprise. This has been an “open secret” for some time. Washington insiders “are wealthier,” “better educated,” and “think ordinary Americans don’t really know very much.” More alarmingly, they think that the government should “not pay too much attention to what ordinary folks think.”
According to Ginsberg and Bachner, this has been a long time coming. Progressive Era reformers transformed government in an effort to make it less partisan.
They succeeded — only to make it less accountable and less . . . American.
In ancient times, great administrative states were run by eunuchs, men gelded to curb their appetites the better to serve their sovereigns (pharaohs; emperors; kings). Not their own interests.
Is it time to bring back the practice?
Just joking. Instead, Congress can tame the bureaucratic leviathan it has created by trimming its ranks and pulling back on pay and benefits until they’re more in line with the private sector.
Let’s hope the House’s recent passage* of the REINS Act, requiring congressional approval of major regulations, is a sign that Congress’s lackadaisical attitude about the bureaucracy is changing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Let’s hope the Senate follows suit.
It’s all about the money.
Well, that is what Senator Elizabeth Warren believes.
Grilling Republican Congressman Tom Price, the physician turned congressman Donald Trump picked to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, Warren demanded that Price answer a simple question: would he swear on a stack of medical books that he would never, ever “carry out a single dollar of cuts to Medicare or Medicaid eligibility or benefits.”
Trump had said he would not cut either program. But Price, who is known for his skepticism about the efficiency of government programs and has proposed cuts to the programs before, worries Warren.
So she demanded an answer, using words like “guarantee” and “safeguard.”
Price said neither “yes” nor “no.” Instead, he evaded the question.
Thoughtfully.
“What the question presumes is that money is the metric,” Dr. Price replied. “In my belief . . . from a scientific standpoint, if patients aren’t receiving care, even though we’re providing the resources, then it doesn’t work for patients.”
Elizabeth Warren, the doyen of progressive politicians for several years now, was mighty upset about Price’s attempt to switch the standard (“metric” is the buzzword for this) for judging a program to the practical from the simple, easy-to-demagogue-with disbursement tally.
She could have said, “We demand inefficiency; all we care about is the money. Actually helping people? Too complicated. But we sure can score points in debate when you try to cut something.”
What she said* was, “The metric is money.”
Same thing, actually.
Thus it is that government grows while real human welfare is ignored.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Peter Suderman, over at Reason, sums it up like this: “What Warren seems to want from Price is a commitment to spend more regardless of a program’s results.” Suderman calls Warren’s reaction “a surprisingly blunt expression” of a view “that undermines the programs it is designed to defend.”
The 2016 presidential election will go down in history as a doozy. The Trump win was a surprise, even shocking many of his supporters. But the most obvious lesson we learned pertains to the modal Obama-Hillary voter.
Well, make that lessons. Plural.
Blankout.
Tomorrow the President-elect becomes President. And Resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue*. As skeptical as some of us may be (myself included), we owe it to ourselves, our neighbors, and the country — perhaps the world — to give the president a chance. At least, take a deep breath and let him make a mistake before pouncing.
Meanwhile, let’s also stop denigrating half the country — that is, those who voted for Trump. Consider their alternative.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Part-time? Will he really spend a lot of time in Trump Tower?
In his Washington Post op-ed, “The dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father,’” Mychal Denzel Smith argues that “responsible fatherhood only goes so far in a world plagued by institutionalized oppression.”
He asks:
If black children were raised in an environment that focused not on bemoaning their lack of fathers but on filling their lives with the nurturing love we all need to thrive, what difference would an absent father make? If they woke up in homes where electricity, running water and food were never scarce, went to schools with teachers and counselors who provided everything they needed to learn, then went home to caretakers of any gender who weren’t too exhausted to sit and talk and do homework with them, and no one ever said their lives were incomplete because they didn’t have a father, would they hold on to the pain of lack well into adulthood?”
Hmmm. The first question answers itself. If all children get everything they “need to thrive,” it is assumed they’ll thrive. The second question is impossible to know . . . at least until the creation of that perfect utopia with universal material abundance, a flawless education system and indefatigable single-parents.
Fatherlessness is not just a black problem. And let’s agree there are great single-parent (or no-parent) homes as well as terrible two-parent homes.
Still, fathers are nice. Oftentimes they help children thrive, in part by providing “electricity, running water and food” as well as “love” — both tough and nurturing. Proclaiming that fathers would not matter in a society where everything’s automatically supplied is . . . simple-minded.
Often called socialism.
Smith raises the issues of “racist drug laws, prosecutorial protection of police officers who kill, mass school closures . . . the poisoning of their water.” He’s right: having a father won’t magically solve those.
But it would solve the problem of not having a father.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Original photo by Sunil Soundarapandian on Flickr
It’s neither “iconic” nor “ironic.”
“Storm fells one of California’s iconic drive-through tunnel trees, carved 137 years ago,” Travis M. Anderson’s title informs us. Calaveras Big Trees State Park is famous for its hollowed-at-the-trunk Pioneer Cabin Tree, a sequoia you have seen in hundreds of photos.
It fell, almost certainly, because of a storm. The ground got wet, undermining the sturdiness of the tree’s root system. And the winds got fast, sending the tree crashing to the ground.
But that’s not the hole — er, whole story.
The obvious reason it fell down is that the “hollowed-out” tunnel amounted to a huge cut. It is almost as if loggers started the felling job nearly seven score ago, and it took all that time to fall.
That is not “ironic,” in case you were wondering. It’s to be expected. The real wonder is that it stayed up so long.
Which should remind us: more than one cause can contribute to a singular effect. We are always tempted to focus on only one factor when we argue about an event. But in society, as in trees and forests, multiple influences are always at work.
Life isn’t monocausal, to put it in professor-speak.
Anderson dubbed the tree “iconic.” Now, an icon is an image used to stand in for other things that look similar. That tree didn’t stand in or represent, did it, other trees in the forest? It stood in memory by standing out as different, distinct — one of a very few hallowed, hollowed California sequoias. The opposite of “iconic.”
Still, in using the tree’s toppling as an object lesson in complexity, the fallen timber might be iconic. It stands for a common sense view of how tragedies happen.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Corporations can buy unfair favors from government…because government has unfair favors to sell.
Big Government is the problem.
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Just when you thought it was safe to ignore Hillary Clinton . . .
Out from the Land of Might Have Been blurps the “news from nowhere” as to what Mrs. Clinton’s cabinet would have been. Some are calling it the “ghost cabinet,” the sadder version of a shadow cabinet.
And top on the list? Secretary of State John Podesta!
Mrs. Clinton’s own recklessness regarding secrets and security protocols while she was Secretary of State was apparently not enough. It turns out she aspires to insecurity, for she had planned to give her old job to the man who protected his computer with the immortal, hard-to-guess password “p@ssw0rd.”
The sheer effrontery here — or is it just witless, callous incompetence? — is astounding.
And the insanity* gets better. At least, if the public source for this information, former Politico chief political reporter Mike Allen (now of start-up news source Axios) can be trusted, “The Environmental Protection Agency and/or the Department of Education were to go to an African-American candidate. . . .”
Ah, tokenism!
Notice what is not mentioned: who. Just the what. The only admitted qualification being: skin-color.
Democrats are obsessed with racism these days. They never tire of charging anyone they disagree with as racist. And yet selecting someone because of their race is . . . suspiciously close to being racist.
Of course, Democrats do not see it that way.
They live in a race-based bubble. But like the Podesta-Clinton security measures, it may have just been hacked — er, compromised.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Other names have been leaked. Here is a list courtesy of The Daily Caller:
Attorney General — Current AG Loretta Lynch
Treasury Department — Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
Labor Department — Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz
Defense Department — Michèle Flournoy, a former Defense Department official
Health and Human Services — Center for American Progress executive director Neera Tanden
Bernie’s plan will SAVE MONEY through Government Efficiency!
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Because BIG BROTHER is okay as long as enough people vote for him!
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