Tag: reform

Categories
Common Sense

The Immovable Non-movers

bureaucracy, bureaucrat, government, reform, interests

You can’t suspend the law of gravity. Nor, apparently, the laws of bureaucratic lethargy and inertia.

Diana Rickert was a policy analyst with the Illinois Policy Institute who accepted a job with the administration of Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner.

She lasted six weeks.

The assignment: combine and streamline several governmental departments. After years of “railing against government,” she felt she must accept this opportunity to improve government from the inside. Or else forever wonder whether she might have made a difference.

She’s learned her answer. She could not. Not as an insider. Not without the authority, at a minimum, to fire useless employees, who abound in Illinois’s state government. 

And whose uselessness doesn’t always preclude outrageous expectations about salary and position.

Whether trying to get working computers or to get workers to work on simple but unfamiliar tasks, Diana and the few others eager to get stuff done were constantly thwarted by the apathy and sense of entitlement of the majority — and by endless arcane and senseless rules. Rather than imply tacit acceptance of such a broken, unfixable system, she resigned.

All this sounds familiar, an inevitable feature of government bureaucracy with its glued-​in vested interests and lack of market-​style profit incentives. Old news if you’ve ever been to the DMV. 

So what’s the answer? Give up?

No. Illinois is “ready for change,” Diana Rickert says. But it’s outsiders who will have to change it — from the outside … “because the insiders never will.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability local leaders moral hazard national politics & policies term limits

Renewed Interest in Self-Service

Michigan, term limits, scam, reform

“Michigan’s strictest-​in-​the-​nation term limits law will force nearly 70 percent of state senators out of office in 2019 and more than 20 percent of representatives,” reports the Detroit News, “a mass turnover that is fueling renewed interest in reform.”

What?!! Could term limitation laws actually make our poor underpaid and overworked politicians vacate their powerful perches … even when they don’t want to? 

Heaven forbid!

Who could have foreseen this strange turn of events, whereby limits on the number of terms politicians can stay in office would mandate that politicians, having reached that limit, would be summarily cast out?*

Of course, that “renewed interest in reform” comes not from citizens, but politicians.

Oh, and powerful lobbyists and special interests. 

The paper continues: “Term limits remain popular with the voting public, but critics say Michigan rules have thrust inexperienced legislators into complex policy issues they may be ill-​equipped to address.”

Rich Studley, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce’s head-​honcho, argues that “experience really matters.” His lobbying outfit, “an influential business group with significant financial resources,” is working to organize a ballot measure to weaken the limits it has long opposed.

“Any reform plan is unlikely to extend or repeal term limits,” explains the News, “but may instead allow legislators to serve longer in the House or Senate.”

Come again? If legislators could serve “longer” than currently allowed, that would clearly “extend” the limits.

I smell a scam swirling around Lansing. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The “mass turnover” consists of 26 of 38 senators termed-​out and 24 of 110 in the House. Yet, there were 25 senators and 34 representatives termed-​out in 2010, and the state survived.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability education and schooling free trade & free markets general freedom local leaders national politics & policies responsibility too much government

SEZ Ed

education, free trade zone, Shenzhen, Chicago, Detroit, regulations, reform

The great barrier to educational advance in our time is the federal government. The second great barrier? Your state government. The third great barrier? Your local government.

Proposals to break up government-​subsidized and ‑enforced school monopolies have ranged from tax credit proposals and voucher programs to charter schools and (the biggest success so far) home schooling.

But it may be time to advance something a little … more daring. Break the stranglehold of government on dysfunctional schooling.

How?

Apply the “free trade zone” (FTZ) idea to education.

We remember the FTZ proposal because of its rise in popularity amongst academics and policy wonks in the 1980s and 1990s. But the notion is an old one. And in China, where they are called “special economic zones” (SEZs) — and it is this term that is catching on — they have been amazingly successful, the former fishing village of Shenzhen being the most obvious example.

What about America? Take a devastated region, like inner-​city Chicago or Detroit,* and simply nullify the regulations and rules. (This probably would require federal enabling legislation on top of state leadership.) With the ensuing freedom and opportunity, entrepreneurs, established businesses and schools, teachers, community groups and activists could cook up new solutions to the oldest schooling problem there is:

actual education.

I’ve heard whispers of this Educational SEZ idea for some time now.

It is time for rational and quite public discussion.

And then the shouting. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Of course, any area could work. The reason to focus on demonstrably failed educational regions is that such areas have lost hope, and thus the politically resistant are likely to give in and allow it.

Printable PDF

 

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Best Plan Is No Plan

Obamacare, ACA, Healthcare, reform, replace, policy, insurance

“Republicans would create chaos in the health care system because they are stuck,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says, “between a rock and a cliché.”

Oh. Off by a word or two. But I don’t need to fix it.

What needs to be fixed is the whole system. “Head clown”* Schumer gloats that it cannot be done. The “delicate balance” that is the Affordable Care Act makes it impregnable. For all Republicans’ talk of repeal, “for five years now they’ve had nothing to put in its place.”

Schumer sees the trap. He set it when he and his comrades voted Obamacare in without reading it. Any new program with any new constituency always presents a set of … political hurdles … that quickly become “impossible” to jump.

The President-​elect, he notes, has supported three of the “most popular” regulations in Obamacare: “pre-​existing conditions,” “26-​year-​olds on parents’ plans,” and sex equality re: insurance rates.

What Schumer fails to mention is that these are three huge drivers of spiraling insurance prices. The Affordable Care Act “delicately balances” medical markets by shifting who pays for what, hoping that the biggest losers† don’t complain too much and the obvious winners never cease protesting‡ any change.

The truth? Obamacare can be repealed. But replacing it would be a disaster. The best plan is no plan. Repeal all the regulations. The federal government should completely deregulate the markets, and prevent states from ruining interstate markets in insurance and health care.

Do what the Commerce clause was designed to do.

Schumer is counting on Republicans to do nothing. Despite signs they’re cooking up something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

*What Trump called Schumer. And in the same tweet dubbed Obamacare “a lie.” Truer words never spoken?

† Obamacare presents a huge burden on the self-​employed, self-​insured, and on the previously insured, since it is these people who most obviously pay for all the newly insureds. Of course, in the end, everybody pays … from increasing prices and decreasing rates of progress.

‡ At least they are the focus of advocacy groups. The poor neatly serve as innocent shields of the spoliators.

N. B. Adapted from this weekend’s Townhall column.

Printable PDF

Obamacare, ACA, Healthcare, reform, replace, policy, insurance

 

Categories
Accountability general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

A Broken Fix

carrot, sticks, congress, compromise, influence, illustration, Common Sense

It is universally acknowledged that Congress is all screwed up, but ideas differ on how to reform it.

Representative Paul Ryan (R‑Wisc.), in accepting the Speaker of the House position, admitted, “The House is broken. We are not solving problems. We are adding to them.”

But how to fix what is broken?

In my opinion — and according to virtually every survey of Americans for the last 20 years — term limits would be the best first step.

Speaker Ryan, sadly, is no term limits fan. But at least he calls for “opening the process up” and a “new spirit of transparency.” Ryan promises “not [to] duck tough issues,” while seeking “concrete results.”

Chris Cillizza, writing “The Fix” blog for The Washington Post, predicts Ryan will “probably not” succeed.

Cillizza cites four big problems, the last two are obvious, though undefined: “3. Polarization in the country” that results in “4. Polarization in Congress.”

His No. 1 reason for the dysfunction in the House? The ban on earmarks. “Without a carrot to offer wavering members on contentious legislation,” Cillizza complains, “leadership had to rely almost exclusively on relationships and goodwill.”

Forget persuasion on the merits; apparently, congressional leadership should bribe members for their votes.

Next, Cillizza bemoans the “rise of outside conservative groups” able to speak against incumbents they oppose and for those they support. This means “the party leadership could no longer choke off campaign funds to those who refused to fall in line.”

“Falling in line” isn’t the right reform goal.

Meet another member of the Washington press corps with a strange hankering for boss rule.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

carrot, sticks, congress, compromise, influence, illustration, Common Sense

 

Categories
Common Sense general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy term limits

Conflicts Perplexing Prominent Politicians

In Disguise

When does the same old song-​and-​dance, performed by yet another self-​selected committee of the political elite, become “a unique process” that “Nobody’s ever done …”?

When the much-​liberal Denver Post reports the “much-​respected” Daniel Ritchie saying so.

Every election cycle for a decade, it seems, a cabal of big-​spending politicians and big-​receiving special interests form a “prominent” and “bipartisan” group to propose making citizen initiatives more difficult, weakening term limits, and circumventing the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (or TABOR, which limits spending and requires voter approval for tax increases).

This cycle’s iteration is “Building a Better Colorado,” now being formed for a September launch by Ritchie, the former Denver University chancellor.

Sunday’s Post provided the group of “prominent civic and business leaders [not to mention politicians]” ample coverage: “The project — developed behind the scenes for months and detailed in exclusive interviews and documents obtained by The Denver Post — is perhaps the most concerted effort in recent memory to address what organizers see as inherent conflicts in how the state is governed.”

Conflicts?

“Those conflicts, they say, are impeding Colorado’s ability to build new roads, put more money in classrooms, engage an increasingly disenchanted electorate and prepare for the future.”

“I’ve seen this game played too often in Colorado,” remarked the Independence Institute’s Jon Caldara. “It’s like a Kumbaya committee. We are going to get all these people who are marginally diverse and at the end of this long process … the conclusion is to raise taxes.”

While the “new” group isn’t “advocating any specific policy outcome” and plans to engage the public at town hall meetings, the meetings’ agenda has been pre-​set … by “experts.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

In Disguise