Washington needs a spring cleaning
Many dead ideas are institutionalized in law. The farm bill was passed in 1933, when 25% of the country lived on farms. In the year 2009 2% live on farms, and large corporations pocket $10 billion in entirely unnecessary subsidies. Pick almost any law, and you will find unintended consequences that tend to undermine the original goal. No Child Left Behind, special education laws, rules requiring due process for school discipline--these are rich lodes of unintended consequences. The meltdown on Wall Street-- certainly the result of a cultural hubris and regulatory laxity--at least has the virtue of forcing a change in values and law. What I worry about is the power of inertia in less dramatic circumstances. Washington itself is inert, crushed under layers of legal concrete- about 100 million words of law. Congress keeps passing laws, but almost never goes back to see how they're working, or adjust them to changed circumstances.
What's needed is not just to identify dead ideas, but somehow set in motion a continual effort to refresh the law of the land.
This is a really important issue, I think: we have a legal and tax structure that most Americans can't understand or navigate on their own. It allows all sorts of injustices. How many people plea bargain when charges against them should simply be dismissed just because, by fighting they can get tangled in all sorts of punitive arcana? How many people are punished for innocent tax mistakes?
March 24, 2009 12:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I find it a little ironic that you would make such a compelling case that most things the government tries to do tend to have unintended consequences.
The action plan you seem to suggest is a streamlining and re-thinking and re-focusing of the legislation.
Well, first - good luck with that, given the time you cite that our dead ideas stretch back to.
Second, unless the government has an imperative to simplify and steamline - it will end up just re-doing things not improving them.
Given the consituencies and elections involved, neither the first nor the second will ever happen.
March 24, 2009 1:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good point.
Every government aid program gives birth to beneficiaries who are united in their desire to continue the program. As against disinterested, uninterested taxpayers, program proponents always prevail.
March 24, 2009 1:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is why there should be sunset provision for federal laws - make Congress review and re-authorize after a certain period, maybe 10 or 20 years? Maybe allow a supermajority to extend the sunset to 50 years.
March 24, 2009 2:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
A major area for spring cleaning is the Pentagon. After 16 years of the defense department fighting back any efforts to cut their budget using arguments: paying for defense was responding to a patriotic commitment of all Americans; or the threats of reducing the defense budget was "taking money away from our men and women"; or the strategic need to spend billions on weaponry no longer appropriate for today and tomorrow's threats. Get the dusk brooms out; this area of the federal budget demands a real re-examination.
If you thought the anti- health plan lobbies and PR effort was huge back in the 90's, stand by, the Pentagon and its defenders will attempt to run over anyone suggesting cuts to their budget.
There a very significant monies that could be realized to make up for the deficit.
March 24, 2009 4:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I propose a new law. For every new law Congress writes, they have to revoke 3.
March 25, 2009 7:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
#1 should be campaign finance reform, and a movement to publicly funded campaigns. Most of our current problems can be traced to the billions in campaign contributions that have been funneled to politicians on both sides of the aisle since at least the mid 90s.
March 26, 2009 6:04 PM | Reply | Permalink