DC Confidential. David Schoenbrod
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Название: DC Confidential
Автор: David Schoenbrod
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Зарубежная публицистика
isbn: 9781594039126
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Another reason Congress resorted to the Five Tricks is that it had begun finding it tougher to make the hard choices needed to achieve compromise. Its Democratic and Republican contingents, once overlapping in ideology, were increasingly ideologically distinct, as political scientists have found. Moreover, as has also been found, while members of Congress had once communicated with their constituents primarily through broad-based organizations with ideologically diverse memberships, such as the Kiwanis or Elks, legislators were increasingly finding themselves dealing with organizations dedicated to fiercely advancing a particular agenda on a single issue, such as environmental protection, abortion rights, right to life, or lower taxes.28
Thus, members of Congress prefer to pass something-for-nothing legislation rather than make hard choices for which they would take heat. In writing the Medicaid and Medicare statutes in the late 1960s, Congress left to future Congresses and states the job of raising most of the money needed to pay for caring for the poor and aging in the future. In writing the Clean Air Act and other environmental statutes in the 1970s, Congress left it up to federal agencies and states to impose most of the duties needed to protect health.29
Congress could get away with something-for-nothing legislation because our government’s past successes made it seem credible. Because our government presided over the world’s richest economy, it could afford medical care for everyone, or so people thought. Because it had sent humans to the Moon, it could make the air absolutely healthy on Earth, or so people thought. Besides, to question such legislation was to coddle unfairness. Democrats and Republicans joined in passing these statutes.
Although something-for-nothing legislation takes many forms, they all share one essential feature: The current Congress and president leave to some other body—a federal agency, the states, or future Congresses and presidents—the task of defining the burdens needed to actually deliver the benefits. This shifts most of the blame for the burdens that come with delivering the benefits, or the failure to deliver them, away from the members of the current Congress.
Once federal legislators had gotten away with claiming the credit yet shifting the blame for Medicare, Medicaid, the 1970 Clean Air Act, and other early instances of something-for-nothing legislation, they resorted to such trickery throughout the entire gamut of federal activity (see chapters 4 and 7).
In designing Congress, the Constitution sought to put a virtuous circle at the center of our government (discussed in chapter 2). Subsequent eras brought many important changes in the structure of American government. In the late 1960s came the trickery and, with it, the illusion of legislation that could produce something for nothing. Judge (now Justice) Stephen Breyer has shown how something-for-nothing environmental statutes produce a “vicious circle,” by telling the EPA to produce benefits by imposing burdens—burdens that the legislators failed to acknowledge in passing the statutes.30
When the EPA has attempted to implement the statutes and constituents voice objections to the burdens, legislators have pressured administrators not to impose those burdens. This, in turn, means that the agency has failed to deliver the promised environmental quality. As a result, environmental advocates blast the agency and complain to members of Congress, and Congress responds by ordering the agency in yet-more-absolute statutes to protect the environment, still of course without taking responsibility for the required burdens. The result of this vicious circle, as Breyer showed, is that the EPA sometimes fails to stop major environmental harms for modest costs, and sometimes stops trivial environmental harms at huge costs.31
Not only in the environmental arena but in general, something-for-nothing legislation has turned the virtuous circle into a vicious circle, by promising benefits government fails to deliver and burdens legislators fail to forewarn us of. As a result, all sides feel cheated.
Voters, of course, know that the promises of something for nothing, or very little, are too good to be true, and so we sense that trickery is going on even though we don’t quite understand how it works. The sense that cheating is going on negates the broad agreement on the fairness of a democratic system that is able to, in political economist and professor James M. Buchanan’s thinking, maintain legitimacy despite rancorous politics (see chapter 2). With cheating in the air, people grab for what they can get.
By using the tricks, Congress fails to perform its function described in chapter 2—to set realistic expectations and thereby provide a context in which society can prosper and its members can individually pursue happiness. To the contrary, Congress tells everyone, in essence, that he or she is entitled to butt in at the head of the line, much as the corrupt officials in The Hunger Games tell each and every combatant, “May the odds be ever in your favor.” The conflicting expectations that Congress creates set up our government to disappoint. No wonder we think our government is broken.
Moreover, by failing to face up to the inevitable trade-offs between benefits and burdens, Congress fails to educate voters about what makes sense and is fair. Legislators tell us what they are against rather than what they are for. Most legislators say they are against killing children with pollution. Most legislators say they are against killing jobs with regulation. What they say depends upon whom they are talking to. Such absolutism is possible in sound bites or tricky statutes, but not in deciding how much to cut emissions of a pollutant, where trade-offs between health and jobs are inevitable. Similarly, by using the Money Trick, legislators can position themselves as against cutting spending or raising taxes, yet avoid saying in concrete terms how they would restore balance. But only when government leaders focus on the concrete rather than the abstract can they tap into our shared sense of fairness.32
You might not remember all the ins and outs of the Clean Air Act when you finish reading this book, but please do remember the lesson that its story illustrates: The tricks let federal legislators avoid personal responsibility for hard choices. This helps them keep their jobs but prevents them from doing their duty—to forthrightly decide issues of legislative policy through open debate. The Constitution assigns them this duty in order to soothe divisions within society. When they fail to do their duty, these divisions get aggravated. Thus, a Congress that indulges in such tricks is antisocial, like a jerk who butts in line, but with far-greater destructive consequences because Congress has so much power.
Four Tricks of the Legislative Trade—and How They Deceive Us
In enacting domestic legislation, members of Congress and presidents use four key tricks. This chapter will describe these tricks, how the nation prevented them for over a century and a half, and how Congress then came to get away with them.
The Money Trick
In the Money Trick, Congress enacts policies that will lead to such a huge gap between spending and revenue over the long run that it would not be possible for the government to borrow enough to make up the difference. So, future officials will have to close СКАЧАТЬ