The problem with Congress

I’ve been pondering the increasing dysfunction in Congress. This isn’t new, and it isn’t just because Congress has a Democratic majority. The problem of a dysfunctional Congress has been growing for decades, under both parties, and even with the collaboration of both parties. But watching how ineffective Congress was at protecting our civil liberties in the past administration, and has been the past few months at trying to craft an effective stimulus bill and an effective climate bill, and watching the problems it is now having trying to craft a health bill, has brought this to the fore.

The common “political religion” or ”political mythology” of America is that the democratic system of free elections is the best system the world has ever seen, and everyone ought to adopt our system. That was certainly the guiding principle of the previous administration, naïve as it has proved to be in some cultures.

And certainly history has little good to say about the more autocratic systems that have existed throughout the world. It’s probably true that a wise elite could rule better than an uninformed electorate, but no one has ever found a way to ensure that the elite are always wise, nor to ensure that the elite can resist the corruption that, as Lord Acton reminded us, inevitably flows from power.

Nor do I think this is the problem of the politicians currently in office. They are doing exactly what the people who financed their election them want them to do, and are responding (for the most part) quite rationally to the pressures on them. No, the problem lies with the election process itself.

In theory, a democracy ought to operate much like a free market. Lots of politicians offer their wares (political positions), and the free market of consumers (voters) chooses freely among them. Those that produce effective results get more business (get elected and re-elected), while the less competent get eliminated (voted out of office).

In practice that is not what happens in American politics. Perhaps it once did, but it certainly doesn’t happen that way now, at least not in Congress. Between gerrymandering districts and the massive advantage that incumbents have in raising campaign money and getting media exposure, it is exceedingly hard to replace a sitting member of Congress. Why else would a Congress whose public approval rating regularly hovers around 20% still get almost 95% of its members re-elected every election?

Money is at the root of the problem. In today’s America media exposure is what wins elections, and media exposure costs money. In the past few elections Congressional incumbents generally have raised 3-4 times more campaign money than challengers, and that translates to much more media exposure. On average, a candidate challenging an incumbent House member in 2004 was outspent by $700,000. The average Senate challenger was outspent by about $4 million.

In addition, incumbents have large government-paid staffs, the Congressional franking privilege (free postage), constant opportunities for free media exposure, and the support of wealthy donors, private and corporate, who hope to influence a sitting member. All in all, it means that unless a sitting member of Congress voluntarily retires or get involved in a big public scandal, they are almost assured of permanent re-election - and even public scandals are often not enough to unseat them.

As a result, the democratic “free market” is not operating as it should. Of course, even with these problems solved, it may well be that the average American voter is not conversant enough with the difficult and complex issues of today’s political world to make good choices. As near as I can tell, the majority of American voters (excepting readers of this blog, of course) understand complex world issues at the “sound bite” level (which is what all that expensive campaign media disseminates), and vote mostly based on emotional issues, candidate image, and party labels.

Still, the system clearly isn’t working as it should, and part of the solution has to be to level the financial playing field between incumbents and challengers, so that elections are based of the candidate’s positions, qualifications and records, and not on the amount of their campaign spending. And certainly the gerrymandering of Congressional districts to create “safe” seats for one party or the other ought to be eliminated.

Here, for example, is the shape of the 4th Congresswoman District in Illinois, carefully designed to make it a safe Democratic seat:


In any case, it is clear that our current system is not up to the task of managing a major power in an increasingly complex world, and we had better find a solution soon or we will soon go the way of past empires.

Priorities

Last Sunday a comet or asteroid hit Jupiter, leaving a hole in the clouds about the size of the Pacific ocean. Good thing that Jupiter's gravitational field captured this object - it helped to keep us safe. But what is worrying is that an object that size was completely undetected until it hit.

As I pointed out in my March posting Why aren’t earth-crossing asteroids a priority?, any rational ordering of priorities would put a lot more money toward finding and tracking all the dangerous earth-crossing asteroids in our neighborhood. The odds of being hit by a large (1km+ in diameter) asteroid aren't large in any given year, but the consequences are enormous. If the one that hit Jupiter last Sunday had hit us instead, probably all life on earth would have been extinguished. One would think that might warrant more attention and money than it seems to get.

Gay marriage

I see that the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in America is once again grappling with the issue of ordaining openly-gay clergy and blessing same-sex marriages, a thorny and explosive issue in most Christian denominations.

Whatever the theological and scriptural arguments for each side of this issue, I find it interesting that the major monotheistic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – have historically all had an almost pathological fascination with controlling sexuality. Celibate clergy, all-male rabbis, the burka, honor killings (killing female relatives who may have “dishonored” the family with their alleged sexual transgressions), and endless teachings focused, not on the quality of relationships, but on prescribed and proscribed sexual practices. A dispassionate alien observer could not help but think that these male-dominated religions must all live in terror of the reproductive capabilities of women.

If these religions had ever put anywhere near as much money, energy and real emphasis (as opposed to lip service) on controlling violence, on helping the poor, on social justice, or even on addressing the common dysfunctions in “normal” heterosexual relationships, the world would be a much better place.

Of course most people aren’t rational about this subject – they can’t be, having been indoctrinated since childhood in whatever religious tradition happened to be around them. As the Jesuits astutely noted “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man”. (as I said – a male-dominated religion). Childhood indoctrination, implanted before there are well-developed rational faculties to examine and question what is being taught, follows us all throughout our lives and shapes our world-view until we die.

But if people were rational and un-indoctrinated, they might see that the issues of confirming gay clergy or solemnizing same-sex marriages are very minor and largely irrelevant in the face of the real pressing world issues of the day, and hardly worth all the fuss and controversy they seem to generate and all the energy that is wasted on them.

Recommended: Will the Current Proposals Fix Health Care?

I recommend David Broder's editorial in the Washington Post, Will the Current Proposals Fix Health Care?.

The problem isn't that the first-cut proposals coming out of the Congressional committees aren't perfect. A first-cut is just that - a first try. The problem is that the president and the Democratic Congress are rushing to get a bill through before the administration's honeymoon is over, so we may get stuck with the first-cut -- yet another hastily-assembled and poorly-thought-out bill just like the stimulus package.

Health care certainly needs fixing, but if all we get is a bigger deficit and higher taxes, and yet no fix to the fundamental health care problems, then in a year or two we will be far worse off than we are now.

Another scary chart

As long as we are showing scary charts, here is one just issued by the Congressional Budget Office:

And by the way, this doesn't include the $1-3 trillion (depending on who you ask) new health plan......

Democrats got away from being accused of "tax and spend" policies when Clinton was president, because he really governed as a centrist. But under this administration the liberals have so far gone full force back to tax and spend.

The Obama Team chart

Here is the chart the Obama team used months ago to argue for a stimulus bill:


Note the actual unemployment numbers in maroon. Nuff said.......

Excuse me….. ??

From Time Magazine’s website:

“On July 14, Goldman Sachs posted second-quarter profits of $3.44 billion, more than the company made in all of 2008 and about on par with the precrisis gilded age, while announcing that it had set aside $11.4 billion this year to compensate workers, or $386,489 per employee.”

Excuse me? The government bailed them out with billions when the crisis hit, and now only a few months later, while unemployment soars and the nation remains in a deep recssion, Goldman Sachs is back to their pre-crisis obscene executive payouts?

Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi has reported

“… [T]he number of [current and former] Goldman Sachs employees who are in the government is so—it’s so enormous that it would be impossible to list on this program. But just briefly, you know, there were two Treasury secretaries who were very important: Bob Rubin during the Clinton administration and Hank Paulson during the Bush administration. Bush’s Chief of Staff, Josh Bolten, was a former Goldman Sachs banker. The guy who administered TARP, Neel Kashkari, was a Goldman banker. The current head of the NYSE, the World Bank, the Canadian National Bank, the number two guy at the Treasury, the head of the Commodity Futures Exchange Commission, which regulates the commodities market—all these people are ex-Goldman bankers. And because of that, they have access to these, you know, contacts in government, and they’ve always been able to get whatever they want from government, whenever they want…”

Sounds to me like a cozy deal between the government and Goldman Sachs. Sound to me like something is rotten in Washington.......

Recommended - Bleeding the Economy Back to Health

So far the government, under both the previous administration and the current one, has adopted the arguments of Keynesian economics - the way out of a depression is for the government to spend lots of money. But there are alternate views, and I recommend Louis Woodhill's July 17, 2009, article Bleeding the Economy to Health in Real Clear Markets for one of the more cogent alternative arguments.

It may be true that it is still too early to judge the effectiveness of the stimulus package, but the signs so far aren't promising. Unemployment continues to skyrocket, and may well reach 14% or higher in the next few months. That means a lot of people without jobs, and they certainly aren't going to be spending much to help the economy recover. Credit remains tight, and consequently new investment is way down. Far more companies, big and little, are going out of business then are starting up. Something had better change for the better in the next few months or it will be clear the stimulus approach assembled by this Congress doesn't work.

Of course there is already talk of a second stimulus package -- adding more leeches because the patient isn't recovering. I am reminded of Einstein's definition of insanity: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Recommended - A Reckless Congress

I recommend the July 17, 2009 editorial A Reckless Congress in the Wall Street Journal. Here we are with a whopping Federal debt inherited from previous administrations, augmented by a whopping stimulus package (and perhaps a second one later this year), Medicare and Social Security entitlements that will exceed the entire gross national product in a few years, and yet Congress is hell-bent on pushing through another $1 trillion+ program. This is insanity!!

Recommended: The Deep-Pockets Mirage

I recommend the editorial The Deep Pockets Mirage, in the July 15, 2009 Washington Post. As others have pointed out, the idea that the rich can somehow pay for all the goodies a Democratic Congress would like is absurd. But politicians keep recycling this myth because it sounds good, plays well to their base, and some of them may even believe it.

But as the editorial points out, we have an even more severe problem looming - the need to eventually pay down the Federal debt we have been building for decades (and expanding precipitously in recent months). And taxing the rich may be needed for that task even more than it is needed for paying for health care.

In any case, taxing the rich never produces as much revenue as politicians claim it will, because the rich, like big corporations, can afford good accountants and tax attorneys and any number of clever schemes, legal and illegal, for avoiding taxes. Only we suckers in the middle class have to pay the taxman the full amount.

Creation "science"

I wrote this for my granddaughter, who is about to begin a course in advanced placement biology, but others may find it of interest as well

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About “Creation Science”

You are about to embark on a year-long study of biology, focused heavily on the mechanisms of evolution. We will not deal with “creation science” at all, despite the fervent efforts of a small but vocal minority of Christian fundamentalists to have “creation science” taught along with evolution as competing theories. Creation science is not science – it is theology. Nonetheless, it is instructive to explore exactly why “creation science” isn’t really science – it will help to define what science really is.

Creationists believe, based on a literal reading of the Bible, that everything was created in seven days, calculated by some theologians to be about 6000 years ago. They believe that human beings were created just as they are, from scratch, rather than evolving over eons from predecessor species, most recently the apes. This may sound silly to you, but millions of people, including millions of Americas, really believe this. You may even know people who believe this.

Now it is certainly possible they are right (or that the Pueblo Indians are right, and we all emerged from an underworld through a hole in the floor of the kiva, or that the Hindus are right…. or….). But if their creationist theory is right, they have to explain a lot of other observations that don’t fit – ancient fossils in rocks, light from galaxies billions of light years away, carbon dating results, etc, etc, etc. It is certainly possible that God put all those things in place during seven days of creation just to fool us, but that presents even more difficult questions – like, “why bother?”

So what makes a scientific theory different?

First of all, let’s be clear that despite the sloppy thinking and writing of many non-scientists, there is no such thing as a scientific “fact”. Everything in science is a theory. Some scientific theories are new and untested, others have been tested for hundreds of years and withstood every test. Those that have a lot of evidence to support them are sometimes called “laws” or “principles”, but in fact they are still theories and someday someone may find a flaw in them.

For example, Newton’s “laws” of mechanics have been used for centuries, and were believed to be fully accurate descriptions of the way the world worked. Then along came Einstein and showed that although Newton’s “laws” of mechanics were pretty good approximations at slow speed, when speeds get up close to the speed of light they are less accurate, and relativity theory provides a better approximation. No doubt someone in the future will show that relativity theory also breaks down under some extreme circumstances (perhaps in the middle of black holes, for example) and some new theory is a better approximation under those circumstances, and so on.

Understand that all scientific theories are attempts at useful approximations of how things work in the world. The history of science teaches that nature is immensely complex and deviously subtle, so almost certainly our approximations are wrong – some just a little bit, some completely wrong. The best that can be said about the scientific method is that it keeps us moving forward to ever-better approximations.

So what makes a theory a “scientific” theory? Why is it that “creation science” is not a scientific theory but the theory of evolution is a scientific theory?

For a theory to be a “scientific” theory it must do four things:

1. It must make testable predictions. That is, it must make one or more predictions about the real physical world that I can go out and test.

2. It must be falsifiable. That is, one must be able to conceive of a practical test that would show that the theory is false or incorrect.

3. It must rely for explanation entirely on natural forces. That is, it cannot rely on the actions of gods, angels, supernatural beings, or invisible aliens to explain phenomena.

4. It must adequately explain all past observations, as well as any new predictions it makes.

Finally, a “good” scientific theory uses the simplest explanation possible, with the fewest variables.

It is quite possible, of course, that the “true” (in some objective sense) explanation is not the simplest. It is quite possible, of course, that there are supernatural agents in the world making some things happen. It is quite possible, of course, that some things are true that are not testable.

Nonetheless, for a theory to be a “scientific” theory it must live within the constraints above. And that is because those constraints give us some way to sort out useful (in a practical sense) theories from possibly true but useless (in a practical sense) theories.

Newton’s “laws” of gravitation allow us to predict the orbits of our spacecraft. It may be ‘true” (in some objective sense) that the spacecraft really follows those orbits because some god pushes them there, or because invisible aliens steer them with tractor beams, or because they “want” to follow those orbits, etc, etc, but those “theories” are of no practical help to us, whereas Newton’s theories, as a practical matter, allow us to successfully put spacecraft into orbit.

Notice, by the way, that “string theory” isn’t yet a valid scientific theory, because it has yet to produce any testable predictions. Until it does produce a testable prediction, it remains a fascination mathematical concept, but not yet a scientific theory.

So now let’s go back to “creation science” and see if it fits the criteria for a “scientific” theory.

Recall from above, for a theory to be a “scientific” theory it must do four things:

1. It must make testable predictions. That is, it must make one or more predictions about the real physical world that I can go out and test. What testable prediction does “creation science” make? I am not aware of any, nor have supporters ever proposed any.

2. It must be falsifiable. That is, one must be able to conceive of a practical test that would show that the theory is false or incorrect. What test could possibly falsify any prediction about the actions of an all-powerful deity? What test could falsify creationism? Whatever the outcome of any test, supporters would just say it was the will of God, and who can understand the workings of God?

3. It must rely for explanation entirely on natural forces. That is, it cannot rely on the actions of gods, angels, supernatural beings, or invisible aliens to explain phenomena. Creationism clearly fails this test as well, since it relies for its explanations entirely upon the inscrutable actions of God.

4. It must adequately explain all past observations, as well as any new predictions it makes. Again, creationism has trouble meeting the criteria, because it can’t explain all sorts of things in the observable natural world around us, like fossil beds and traces of continental drift.

Now it has been useful to examine “creation science” in this light, but there are lots of other examples in the everyday world of people making ”scientific” claims that aren’t real science – to sell diet plans or pills to cure who knows what, to justify dubious political actions, etc. etc. Keep an eye out for them and see how many you can spot.

By the way, “creation science” fails to be real science for one other important reason – real scientists know they don’t entirely understand the world in all its complexity and are trying to figure out how the world works and how it all came to be, while creationists are sure they already know the answers to these questions from the Bible. Anyone who is sure they already know all the answers by definition isn’t a real scientist!

A moment of silence ??

Congress was sufficiently moved by the death of entertainer Michael Jackson to have an official moment of silence in honor of his passing, and President Obama was moved to send a personal message to the family. An email that has been circulating from a marine on duty in Iraq asks a simple question worth pondering - why does a wealthy entertainer rate a Congressional moment of silence and a personal note to the family from the president, but none of the 4,300+ (and still growing) military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan rate such honors?

It does seem to me a reflection of the shallowness of our society that we think more of entertainers than of the military men and women who go in danger's way every single day in far off parts of the world.

Recommended: The Art of the Political Comback

I recommend Adam Nagourney's July 11 article in the New York Times, entitled The Art of the Political Comeback. As he points out, both parties have in recent decades had periods when they seemed to be on the way out as a political force, and time and time again they have reinvented themselves and come back to take Congress and the White House. This may (indeed, probably will) happen again with the Republicans. The only question is whether they can do it quickly, or whether they will need to suffer a decade or two in the wilderness before they come to their senses, dump their more extreme positions, and reinvent themselves closer to the center.

Recommended: The Human Equation

I recommend Bob Herbet's Op Ed in the July 10 New York Times entitled The Human Equation.

In fact, thus far only about 14% of the huge stimulus package has been spent. As the Washington Post pointed out months ago, Congress in its rush to reward every special interest group they could think of, crafted a stimulus bill which won't have much effect for 12-18 months, at a time when the economy needed a stimulus ASAP.

Rightly or wrongly, we have about reached the point where in the public mind the Democrats now own the economic problems, and can't blame it much anymore on the Bush administration. Things that President Obama has kept in the executive branch, like foreign policy and the restructuring of the auto companies, have been going pretty well. Things he has delegated to Congress, like the stimulus plan, the climate bill, and the health plan, are mostly turning out to be disasters. I think the President needs to take a firmer, more assertive stand with Congress, or the Democrats will once again manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and lose the White House next time around, despite the inept performance of the Republicans.

Recommended - The Bookwyrm's Hoard

My daughter has just started her own blog, The Bookwyrm's Hoard, about books (naturally - we are a book loving family). If you are a book lover, I recommend following it.

Recommended: "Af-Pak: Obama's War"

I recommend Immanuel Wallerstein’s recent article Af-Pak: Obama's War. He argues that Obama’s recent policy decisions regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan are perhaps the most important foreign policy decisions he will make in his administration, and in retrospect perhaps the biggest mistakes he will have made. Worth thinking about.

Recommended - Vince Lombardi Politics

Along the same lines as my last two posts, I recommend David Brook's article Vince Lombardi Politics, in yesterday's New York Times. He seems to have some of the same concerns I do about President Obama's willingness to let Congress shape the policies.