- The commission chairs were serious and bold in their approach to the issue, and in many of their recommendations; and
- The recommendations, if implemented, would not lead to the long-term structural improvements needed to address the public debt issue in this country.
First, let’s address the seriousness and the boldness of the commission’s recommendations. It is a axiom of public affairs that the making of legislation and public policy is like watching sausage being made—to retain respect for it, it is better not to see the process in all its detail. Although no one wants to return to the backroom politics of prior generations, one of the downsides of living in an age of broadened Freedom of Information Act disclosure and Open Meetings requirements, Wikileaks and the Internet, is that the privacy that is often needed for the frank negotiation and development of public policy has almost totally disappeared. This leads to either bland, rehearsed public posturing, or uncompromising pandering to the edges of the political spectrum. Exhibit A for both the positive and negative consequences of this trend is the current heat surrounding the race for Texas Speaker of the House. In this environment, the progress made by the commission in just advancing a serious discussion of this issue is refreshing.
Unfortunately, the deal ultimately proposed by the commission chairs and approved by a majority of the commission members (though not the supermajority needed for guaranteed consideration by Congress), is that it does not address the real, long-term problem that has created this mess: the federal government has expanded beyond its capacity and competence to govern. The commission addresses the federal government as it is and tries to maintain its basic structure, just under more austere terms. But this approach won’t work. Until the federal government is properly re-organized, and the role of the state and local governments are adjusted to assume greater and cost-effective responsibilities, the public debt facing this nation can not be adequately fixed.
Throughout the Federalist Papers, Madison and Hamilton discuss three concepts related to the “federalism” that they describe: the proper objects of governmental action; the proper allocation of responsibility for addressing such objects among the different sovereign governments within the federal system; and the proper spheres of action for each government based on that allocation of responsibility. In McCulloch v Maryland, Chief Justice Marshall long-ago crystallized these concepts applied to the federal government: “…the government of the Union, though limited in its powers, is supreme within its sphere of action.” The current problem was caused by increasing the sphere of action of the federal government beyond the limited responsibility allocated to the federal government, and the supremacy of the federal government over that extended sphere of action.
For at least 80 years, under both Republican and Democratic Congresses, Administrations, and Judicial appointees, the sphere of action of the federal government has been expanded to usurp much of the governmental responsibility that was initially delegated to states and local governments, or left to self-regulation by the people, including regulation of local commercial activities, provision of education, provision of medical care, provision for retirement savings, and provision of charitable aid to neighbors in need. Not only has the federal government created programs that overlap with state, local and private programs, which dictate—due to the supremacy of federal law—much of the budgetary decisions at the state and local levels, but the federal government also has created overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, regulations, laws and programs at the federal level. Each of these overlapping programs not only cost money, but they create their own additional internal bureaucratic costs (and political constituencies). This situation is unsustainable, and if a private organization faced this structural mess and debt level to sustain it, it would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (think: General Motors).
To fix this problem, we don’t need a commission plan to sustain the current governmental structure of an unsustainable extended federal sphere of action. We need to restructure the allocation of responsibilities among the levels of government in our federal system, to return all levels of government to their proper spheres of action. Only then can we dismantle the redundancies that have been created within the public sector and make all of our governments more innovative, and cost-effective, as well as properly return liberty and responsibility to the individual.
To some people, such a restructuring will move the country in the wrong direction in a world that is becoming more dependent on international markets and travel, in which national governments are seen as more effectively providing services that in prior eras were provided by families, communities and states. These critics have for at least two generations re-focused our educational system away from training people to be American citizens to training them to be world citizens. Their criticism of returning responsibility back to state and local governments equates such a return of responsibility to parochialism, tribalism, and isolationism. Such a criticism creates a false comparison and choice.
Let’s remember some fundamental concepts—at the heart of a civilization is a common culture that is accepted and promoted by a society. Societies are an aggregation of relationships of people. Societies can not be created and sustained by moving around the world negotiating economic deals and being perpetual tourists, and any vision of the future that is based on a world society populated by world citizens is nonsense. The relationships that create and sustain societies are grounded in families, friendships, communities, and nations—relationships that ground people ultimately to a place where people maintain their homes. You can be an ambassador in economic and social endeavors, but to be that ambassador, you must start as a citizen with roots in a place, where you have family, friends and a shared community. It is time we re-orient our approach to education to again train our children to first be American citizens, and then to be American ambassadors in the international free trade system we helped create. Such a re-orientation will help us re-organize and sustain a more limited federal government.
As C.S. Lewis noted in his work, “Mere Christianity”,
“…We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man…. There is nothing progressive about being pig headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”
America has been on the wrong road for a long time, and we have reached a key crossroad. We can re-orient and restructure our government and educational system to re-establish the limits to the federal sphere of action needed to begin to fix this mess, or we can merely tweak the problem for the moment, continue down the wrong road and leave our children with a weaker and less-stable country and society than we were given.
The Debt Commission helped start the conversation, now let’s take it in the proper direction to address the real problems that helped create this mess.