Today’s nytimes carries a story about American politicians in the upcoming election distancing themselves from their party (link). We’ve got a system where an individual politician can get reelected to a lucrative comfortable enjoyable job even when his constituents aren’t happy with what the government is doing. This is simply not possible in most of the world’s democracies, where a party is held accountable through the parliamentary system. The U.S. system results in much more stability, in that incumbents are almost invulnerable (especially after Gerrymandering the districts so that they can choose their own voters). We can be sure that mostly we’ll see the same faces in power next year. But as I’ve noted recently in some responses to reader comments, it seems that the U.S. system is less able to adapt when things aren’t going well.
From a recent comment: Sweden, for example, was able to scale back its welfare state in the 1990s after a period of economic decline (taxes as a percentage of GDP have declined in Sweden (source)). The United Kingdom, right now, is dramatically cutting spending in ways that would be unthinkable in the U.S. (they’re going to cut government spending by roughly 8 percent of GDP; in the U.S. that would be $1.1 trillion in spending cuts, equivalent to eliminating the military ($660 billion) and Medicare ($530 billion)). The UK Prime Minister has taken to flying on commercial airlines rather than chartering massive private jets (source). See this Bloomberg article for what they’re up to.
One could argue that the U.S. system can’t be that bad, since we’re still here after 223 years (1787 to 2010). The government was successful in responding to the crises of the Civil War and Pearl Harbor. It looks to me, however, as though the U.S. government is best at responding to crises that are challenges to the power of the government and to which a reasonable solution is growth in government size and power. When the crisis is “Americans aren’t doing well”, the response often includes growing government but does not ameliorate the problem.
Let’s consider slavery. It was observed even in 1787 that black slaves were not enjoying a good life. Yet it was not until the 1950s that black Americans enjoyed full civil rights, e.g., with Brown versus Board of Education. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was launched 46 years ago in response to a poverty rate of 19 percent; after literally trillions of dollars in spending and millions of government workers hired (the U.S. had 845,000 social workers in 2006 (source)), the poverty rate is expected to be 15 percent in 2010 (Washington Post). The [First?] Great Depression of the 1930s was prolonged by government action, according to The Forgotten Man. Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs 39 years ago and we’ve spent more than $1 trillion on law enforcement and incarceration yet the availability of drugs is similar to what it was in 1971.
Thus it looks like our political system can be effective when government power is threatened and the government needs to grow in order to maintain its power. But our political system does not seem to have a strong record of success where the solution requires shrinking the government or where the problem is that individual Americans aren’t enjoying the quality of life that they might.
I’d be curious to know your thoughts on term-limits for senators (and perhaps reps) as a solution to this problem. I’ve argued with my friends and family for years that until there aren’t any long-term power incentives for senators, we’ll never see any real change out of congress.
That $1.1 trillion is roughly the cost of the war just in Iraq and it is not included in the military budget you posted above since it all comes from separate funding. CBO’s estimate is even higher at 1.9 trillion.
And I would argue that the war on drugs has way higher cost considering that we just wasted the money on all the public education for all those incarcerated, disabled or dead primarily young people. Their families are left in shambles leading to more government benefits and generally poor education for their kids.
Tekumse: The $1.1 trillion that we’d have to cut from federal spending to match what the Brits are doing is annually; the Iraq war has been painfully expensive as you note, but I think the $1-3 trillion that we’ve spent on it has been over the life of the war (somewhere between 9 years and infinity depending on when you think a U.S. president will decide to order the troops back home). So even an executive order ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan immediately would not be comparable to what Cameron is doing in the UK.
Scott: Have term limits solved a lot of problems for California? Don’t their politicians still do things that are against the public’s interest in order to get reelected? (notably grant enormously valuable pensions to public employee unions in exchange for their votes) In principle, I guess, I would be happier seeing 80-year-old guys on the golf course instead of making telecommunications policy, but I don’t think it would be a very dramatic change compared to switching the U.S. to a parliamentary system.
philg:
You are in good company when you say the US would be better off with a parliamentary system. Both President Wilson (in Congressional Government) and Walter Bagehot (in The English Constitution) expressed this view and made the case quite persuasively.
On the other hand, the problem with a parliamentary system as in used in the UK or here in Australia is that the members may have been elected locally, but when they get to work, they don’t vote for what is best for their constituents, they vote the party line.
That makes a mockery of the “representative from your area” idea and you may as well get rid of it altogether, by going for a proportional representation system.
Under such a system, you usually end up with a coalition government where no party has absolute power, like in your Sweden example.
What that means in real terms is that it enables government to make unpopular policy changes (like raising taxes or cuttin welfare when needed) without a specific party being held accountable for it and losing a lot of votes in the next elections. Not enough to not be part of the next coalition anyway.
It also gets rid of wasteful wild policy changes every time another party gains power.
Countries with a coalition government (Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, to name a few) tend to be stable and do quite well when it comes to prosperity. Yet for some reason, ending up with a “minority government” or “hung parliament” as in the last UK and Australian elections seems to scare the bejeezus out of people not used to such a system.
maybe often repeated comparison, but i used to think in US, senators/congressmen disagreeing to party line and holding their own opinion is good. other way round in india, party line is what the leadership decides and MPs try to appease the leadership and agree with them to get seats or coveted positions, people are thrown out for disagreeing, hardly any disagreement will be heard. but now i think having atleast the way of majority party could be good than endless bickering and trying to convince everybody to get something done. but one good thing is the primary system for choosing the candidates – in India, candidates are also chosen by parties by which we often choose between bad and worse.
Here is a thought.. The Senate is fundamentally un-democratic and un-representative of the population at large. It is an archaic legacy to times past when it made sense, when states were fundamentally self sufficient in governing and some even issued their own currency(ies)!!!. I don’t have the exact numbers handy but it seems quite unfair that 2 senators who represent, say North Dakota, a very small percentage of the population have the same sway over American Laws and Policy as the 2 who represent, say California.
RN, that is hardly a new thought. And as soon as you can get 2/3rds of both houses of Congress and 3/4ths of the states to agree to it, you can change it.
Parliamentary systems do have the flaw that minority parties can have undue influence on policy. Many of Israel’s more contreversial positions are made to appease small religious parties who determine the ruling coalition. This can happen in the US system as well with third candidate “spoilers” and whatnot but it seems less persistent than in some parliamentary based countries…
I would point out that much of the issues you raise can be solved by going back to the original design of the US government.
Senators should be appointed by each state legislature, as the design of the US was that each state is sovereign and senators represent that sovereignty (with their veto power, for instance) and their purpose is to serve the best interest of that state.
This would serve as a great check on the power of the Federal government, and its ability to expand. The 17th Amendment was a mistake and should be repealed.
It doesn’t seem like any nation has been particularly good with shrinking their governments (in peaceful ways). Even under the parliamentary systems, there does seem to be an unrelenting growth in governments for the most part.
The only check against this growth seems to be apportioned taxation and the gold/silver coinage originally mandated by the U.S. constitution. Under those rules, the govt would reach its limits and it would be more apparent to the public. They could no longer ignore the size of govt indefinitely and govt would be bound to how much gold was actually present. However, those rules no longer exist, so it’s easy to hide a lot of the growth or just keep right on growing.
During that time, govt was tiny in the U.S., however, like you said, important social issues waited decades (if not nearly a century) to be fully addressed.
“– our political system does not seem to have a strong record of success where the solution requires shrinking the government or where the problem is that individual Americans aren’t enjoying the quality of life that they might.”
In Running Scared (Atlantic article), Anthony King compares the US political system to other Western democracies, and suggests that the problem is more general than that. He argues that US politicians, far from being complacent, are actually much *more* vulnerable to pressure than a typical Western politician. They face primary challengers, they need to raise tons of money, they face re-election frequently. So they spend a lot of time campaigning and fund-raising; how much time do they have left for governing?
If King’s analysis is correct, the US will always find it hard to grapple with any problem that’s large enough to require significant policy changes. Any change in policy will have costs and benefits, and therefore winners and losers. A change which affects any one group negatively (no matter how much it benefits the country as a whole) can be counted on to generate angry opposition. In a parliamentary system, where elections typically happen every four or five years (not every two years), politicians often figure that by the time the next election comes around, people won’t be that angry about it any more. They’ll have had time to adjust to the change. Not in the US; politicians are much more reluctant to vote for a policy against public opposition.
Given this situation, politicians find it difficult to get anything done. So US policy tends to drift. There’s a lot of shouting, but not much action. Things have to get really, really bad before anything happens.
For a concrete example, consider the sustainability of Social Security. Canada, which has a parliamentary system, faced an analogous problem with the Canada Pension Plan back in the mid-1990s. The federal and provincial governments got together and figured out how to solve the problem, back in 1997.
@RN: Somehow I don’t think giving California more power in the federal system is going to help. Physician, heal thyself.
Your article is predicated on the concept that excess government spending is wasted. Do you have any facts to support this?
After all, US government spending goes directly into American jobs, and so the money goes back into the economy… as long as the money flows around, where is the loss?
David: Do I have any evidence that our government tends to be wasteful? Aside from the multi-million dollar pension obligation that state and local governments tend to incur on behalf of every public employee (many of whom can retire in their 40s), the world’s most expensive health care system (more than half paid for by the government) that produces mediocre life expectancy and terrible customer service, the multi-trillion dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we seem to be losing, and the fact that the federal government pays its workers so much that they almost never quit (http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/federal-employees-continue-to-prosper/ )…. no.
In fact, if we conclude that government spending is just as efficient as private spending, the logical conclusion would be to move to a 100 percent planned economy, as they had in the Soviet Union. Central planners in Washington would ensure that every industrial resource was used and that every worker had an appropriate job.
@patrick
You’re absolutely right about the Senate. Senate is *supposed* to be an anti-majoritarian body, but with that amendment, it became little more than another House of Reps.
With that, term limits, and a repeal of all campaign finance reform laws (which are all a 1st Amendment violations anyway), I think most (though of course not all) of the advantages to the incumbents go away.
I forgot were I read it, but there was some research done that said for the first 100 years or so of the USA, the entire Congress would have 50% new members every two years. Nowadays, even ‘big’ swings like 2006,2008,(and probably 2010 as well) will only muster maybe a 10% change in members – 90% will keep their jobs.
Hi Phil,
Sorry – I obviously didn’t make my point clearly: What do we mean by wasted?
If all the government money goes to American workers, who then spend that money in the mall, etc. the money just flows back round the system. It doesn’t disappear, any more than money spent with an American company.
Indeed, given the tendency of American companies to subcontract abroad, there’s a much higher chance of money going to them disappearing from the US economy than there is with money going to the government.
So what exactly is ‘waste’?
My conclusion is that the success of the free market is based inefficiency, not efficiency! I.e. the mistake the Soviets made was to just have one company designing cars, whereas in the West we have dozens of companies duplicating the same work. This provides jobs for everyone and creates wealth.
Of course there are a couple of ideas that flow from that:
1) That large corporates are too efficient and so strip jobs out of the system (effectively back-door Communism). Is is a coincidence that the US Auto Industry, once so heathy, is now a basket-case since it merged to become three huge companies?
2) While individuals companies are efficient, as a system capitalism is (brilliantly) inefficient – creating lots of extra jobs and so wealth. However, this implies that using it in a system that needs efficiency (such as, say, a health system) would be good for jobs, but bad for cost-effectiveness (c.f. US healthcare).
Where would the creativity come from? If there’s no market, people can’t compete and try to make better products.
Tim: I don’t think it is guaranteed that a centrally planned economy will be uncreative. People seem to enjoy being creative even when there is not a huge financial incentive for creativity. The Soviet Union, for example, had tremendous achievements in a lot of creative areas, e.g., art, music, engineering, science, etc. Now that the U.S. is at least 50 percent centrally planned (maybe more if you look at how capital is allocated; the money that the Politburo handed to the Detroit automakers was equal to about four years of venture capital funding (see http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/2010/01/venture-capital-activity-crosses-20b-for-2009-q4-2009-sees-55b-of-funding-with-year%E2%80%99s-highest-number-of-deals/ for how about $20 billion was invested in 2009)), the history of the Soviet Union will probably have great predictive value for our own lives here.