Ineffectiveness

Walter Russel Mead has a piece in The American Interest, Bureaucrats Swindle Greens in Cancun, in which he argues that Cancun was a win only for UN bureaucrats, who can keep the "process" going (more all-expense paid trips, more jobs) even though they are doing nothing effective about the underlying problem.  The piece is worth reading in its own right, but it made me stop for a moment and re-asses how effective the US government has been over the past couple of decades at addressing any of the major issues of the day.

To my way of thinking , the US faces at least six major long-term issues these days (the current economic problems are not included because, bad as they are, they are relatively short-term issue, though they have an impact on long-term issues).  Most of these issues are faced by other nations as well, but the issues of particular concern to the US include :

1) Unsustainable government debt at all levels, national state and local.
2) Climate change.
3) Over-dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels.
4) Impending water shortages.
5) Terrorism in a modern society whose infrastructure is highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
6) Nuclear proliferation among rogue nations or nations unfriendly to the US.

Now think, has anything truly effective been done about any of these six issues in the past two decades, under either Republicans or Democrats?  I can't think of any effective steps that have been taken -- lots of symbolic steps, pledges, rhetoric and campaign promises, but no effective steps I can think of.

There certainly haven't been any effective steps taken on the debt crisis in the US.  Indeed, the bipartisan agreement on tax cuts just negotiated between Obama and the Republicans just makes the debt problem $900 billion worse.

Climate change is a joke.  The Kyoto agreement, weak and ineffective as it was, wasn't followed even by the nations that signed it, and now is effectively dead with nothing to replace it.  And the US can't seem to do anything meaningful to help.

On the issue of our dependence on oil nothing effective has yet been done. Oh, we subsidize ethanol production (which takes more oil energy to produce than it replaces, but subsidizes corn-belt farmers and their politicians) and build a few wind farms. But we have yet to do anything that would have a significant impact on the problem.

The water shortage problem hasn't even gotten on the US political radar yet, even though we have major cities on the verge of water shortages, and a major battle in California's central valley over water rights.

About terrorism, as far as I can tell our adventures in Afghanistan just moved Bin Laden's organization to Pakistan and Yemen, and all our Iraq adventure has done (besides cost us a fortune and a lot of American lives) is to remove pressure from Iran and help recruit more terrorists. The massive new Homeland Security bureaucracy has proved even more cumbersome and expensive, and somewhat less effective, than the array of agencies it replaced.

And on nuclear proliferation, nothing we have done has stopped India, Pakistan, North Korea or Iran in their (largely successful) efforts to master nuclear weapon technology.

Yes, one can point to the occasional small gain here or there on these issues, but nothing that has actually significantly reduced the magnitude of any of these problems. I conclude from this that the current political system - Republican and Democratic alike - is simply not up to the task of addressing today's major issues.  It may be time to start thinking about a wholesale replacement of the current political establishment with a third party. (and no, I don't think the Tea Party is the best candidate for this).