Opinion: Congress – The theater of the absurd


Against my own better judgment, I have been closely following the fiscal cliff process in Washington. It appears that the wisdom of our Founding Fathers was insufficient to ensure that this collective group of elected officials would address a major crisis in any useful way.
I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t the end of the great American experiment in democracy. We apparently have reached near total paralysis, where the big issues are ignored or dealt with in a cursory fashion. I don’t see how this country can operate with a debt load so big and growing so fast that much of the resources our children create will have to be dedicated to paying off this burden. Our tax code promotes rather than reduces income inequality, and our defense budget reportedly exceeds that of the next 17 nations combined. We are faced with a climate crisis that could submerge coastal cities, and cripple our agricultural productivity and water supplies, yet the best Congress can do is extend the tax credit for wind energy by a single year, which grants almost no certainty to industry, utilities, and regulators. Our medical system costs more and delivers less than in most other industrialized countries, yet the majority of our elected officials are unwilling to make the full spectrum of changes required to contain accelerating costs and deliver decent service to all. (See “The Healing of America” by T.R. Reid for how other countries address health care.) And on and on…
I see little positive in the just-passed temporary resolution of the fiscal cliff. Tax rates have not even been restored to pre-Bush II levels, except for the very wealthy. The argument that is made is that if tax rates were raised for all, this would cut spending and push us back into another recession. But the real driver for the Great Recession was credit expansion and the resulting housing bubble. And, at least based on what I have seen reported, the efforts to actually help people resolve their inflated mortgages have mostly flopped. So Congress is once again not addressing the underlying problem.
Allegedly, Congress will address the expenditure side of the equation in the coming months. But unless some other force comes into play, I would expect a repeat performance, with nothing really solved. Counter-productive tax breaks continue, like the mortgage interest deduction, even though the benefits are greater to the rich, who “need” it less, and the ultimate cost is borne by renters, who are likely to “need” it more. Interest rates are held artificially low, penalizing savers and re-inflating the housing bubble. If Congress is going to encourage home ownership, then a simple lump sum payment would at least be more equitable.
Our elected officials need to face up to some global scale facts of life. People are living longer, so the ratio of potential retirees to workers will increase over time. Expanding the working population, e.g. by allowing more immigrants, just stresses all our systems even more, as they get closer to their carrying capacity, or exceed it. We, and the other industrialized countries, need to acknowledge that if fewer people are working to support more, we cannot guarantee the same relative standard of living – all retirement programs, whether government or private, ultimately depend on what workers produce. There is no magic financial trick around this.
A related fact of life is the emergence of China, India, etc. as global economic forces. So long as their wage levels are below ours, we should expect that they will produce goods and even services (at least those that are transportable over the internet) more cheaply than we can. Unless we heavily invest in education and infrastructure, so we can sell as much as we buy, we will just keep on giving away our assets or go more into debt, with no real way out.
Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution says that “(the President) may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses…” Obama needs to lay out the critical issues facing our country, and then call a special session, which will continue until the work gets done. I suspect that after a few months of having to endure their own ideological rants and political manipulations, a substantial Congressional majority would support real compromise and long terms solutions. At least I hope so.


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