Verily we moan about the challenges we face: shaky employment, low economic growth, crumbling infrastructure, and the increasingly divisive debates on social issues.
These issues and others of their ilk will be the stuff of debates in 2014 and 2016, with the participants droning on about their importance (as never before!) and flogging their (purposely vague) solutions.
Little of that pap will mean a damn because none of our esteemed pols will consider the causes of why we are where we are, most of which tie to an intermediate issue: the extreme partisanship, the inability of our parties to work together to get anything done.
And not much will get done until the root causes of that partisanship are addressed. These are the real challenges that confront us -- and you can be sure, no politician will mention them.
1. Campaign Financing: Politicians are bought with bribes before they ever get to Washington. Is it any wonder that their votes are a foregone conclusion? Where is there room for compromise when one's owners instruct how to vote?
2. Gerrymandering: By and large, congressional districts are carved out so as to guarantee that a member of one party or another will be re-elected.In turn, this means that Republicans will be primaried from the right and Democrats from the left, so the parties become increasingly polarized.
The bribes and gerrymandering go a long way to explain why Congress as a whole is held in such low repute while the re-election rate is more than 90%.
3. The Debt: Say what you will about Keynesianism, austerity, and esoteric ratios of all manner, but this much is true: The larger our debt, and the more we have to spend on servicing that debt, the less flexibility we have in otherwise allocating our tax dollars.
4. The MediaTwitterBlogoBleatingsphere: The constant spin of "news" makes thoughtful consideration almost impossible. I don't know that anything can be done about the sources of this noise --I'm one of them--, but there is no reason that a politician who truly believes in public service should feel obligated to respond to every blast of drivel like a ping-pong player returning serve.
When these root causes are dealt with, we can then make progress on the issues that Americans think they care about.
Again: These are root CAUSES... which is not at all to say that jobs, etc., aren't real ISSUES.
ReplyDeleteThe root cause of all problems is ignorance. The "cure" for ignorance is education--a longer-term solution. Shorter-term, your list is accurate, but we will continue to play whack-a-mole with the whack jobs until they die off or receive education. I believe we will be forced to borrow a controversial proposal from Charles Murray in the '80's, i.e., write off an entire generation through attrition (white male >65). Longer-term solutions are inapproprite for them. Do not waste resources on them--let nature take it's toll. @DennySmith45
ReplyDeleteI agree that one of the cures is education. That is a large subject by itself. But we can't "write off" a generation of whacks... they get to vote, too, ... and they have children.
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