Tom Sgouros: Better Debate Is Possible
Monday, August 15, 2011
So are you enjoying the aftermath of the debt ceiling crisis? The stock market was all over the place last week, and it was neither pretty nor happy. While we catch our breath and wonder what the next self-inflicted crisis will be, I have to wonder, exactly why is it that politics is so broken in our country today? Why can't we deal with important issues in a serious way? The debt ceiling fiasco was just the latest example of a failed debate. Another one that keeps getting my attention is climate change. As a research assistant at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution almost 30 years ago, I worked on a project having to do with climate change (we called it the greenhouse effect back then). My salary at the time was paid by an oil company (who also bought us a huge new 1-gigabyte disk), and I participated in meetings with oil company scientists about the implications of the research we were working on.
At the time, there was no real argument about whether human-generated carbon dioxide emissions were changing the climate. The evidence was obvious then, and it's only become more so in the 30 years since. Our research, and the other research I knew about at the time, focused on the rates of the various processes involved.
So here's a perfect example of how broken things are. It's been 30 years since there was better than decent evidence of a global disaster in the making. What, exactly, are we doing about it? United Senate Republicans killed the House cap and trade bill in 2009, and so now we're doing virtually nothing besides small adjustments to fuel economy standards for cars and trucks. The issue has been pushed off the table, and a hundred years from now no one will remember the budget battles, but they will remember the inaction that killed all the coral reefs, flooded our coastal cities and caused the other disasters they will have to live with.
So how is it that this kind of inaction can coexist with solid majorities of Americans who feel that it's important that the federal government do something to address the issue? (According to a 2009 Brookings survey. Because the issue is so seldom discussed, there isn't much in the way of more recent research, but it seems unlikely opinions have changed significantly since then, for the same reason.) Public opinion has failed to move our government, but why?
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I see two important problems in how we talk about policy issues that I think have something to do with it. For many of us, these are casual and common oversights, but for those who have an interest in clouding voters' choices, they are an important tool. First, we allow people, and not just politicians, to claim a policy position without demanding the specifics that show it to be true. This allows lots of people to claim the same ground. Take the environment. Is it possible to be "pro-environment" while ignoring the most important environmental issue facing our world today? Republican Congressional candidate John Loughlin apparently thinks so, and his web site has plenty of talk about how important "conservation" is to "conservatives", but nary a word about the changing climate.
Then there are the legion of people who claim to be in favor of cutting spending, but who can't or won't be specific about what they would cut. In the negotiations about the federal budget over the past few months, the Republicans who were demanding that trillions be cut from the budget -- Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan -- never once presented a list of cuts that add up to more than a small fraction of that. We need a moratorium on attention for people who demand spending cuts and don't have the guts to specify them. Without these specifics, everyone can claim to be on the same side, and how does that help a voter trying to make a choice?
Why not assess blame?
Second, too many people shy from assessing blame. President Obama says it's a good thing to "move on" while the reality is that this allows us to treat some of our problems like the weather: impersonal forces that weren't caused by anyone in particular. But most of what ails us has a cause, and if we identify the cause we can fix it. Our national deficit has a cause, and because Bill Clinton had a surplus, we can identify the cause as George W. Bush's two wars, his tax cuts, and the disastrous Medicare part D, all of which were passed through a Republican Congress without a dime of new revenue to pay for any of them. The Congressional Budget Office bears out this analysis, and the contribution of Obama's stimulus package to the deficit is quite small by comparison. (See graphic)
In our state, it was Governor Lincoln Almond, and House Finance chair Tony Pires and the rest of the Assembly leadership who started the state on its tax-cutting binge in 1997, and Governor Don Carcieri and House Finance chair Steven Costantino who carried that torch forward, bringing us to the crisis we're in now, with property taxes going through the roof while state taxes are as low as they've been in decades. Is this the "blame game," or just being clear about what happened? In 2007, before the recession's effects had devastated income tax receipts, the projected state "structural" deficit was $379 million. Should we instead pretend that our state's fiscal crisis is something that just "happened?" Is it not relevant to elections to be clear that the people in charge chose it?
In my experience, people who want to put the past behind us are either naive, or implicated in its mistakes. If we want to correct those mistakes -- if we want to give voters a choice they can understand -- is ignoring those mistakes really the right thing to do?
Tom Sgouros is the editor of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter, at whatcheer.net and the author of "Ten Things You Don't Know About Rhode Island." Contact him at [email protected].
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