Bipartisanship is Driving Us Into the Poor House

Enough already with this constant media complaint of Congress' lack of bipartisanship.   Have you seen the results of bipartisan legislation?   Have you really?!  The briefly heralded bipartisan 'job' bill that came out of the Senate Finance Committee represented all that is wrong with our maladjusted means of spending our collective wealth.   It contained spending and tax cuts to net out to another $85 billion of debt.  There is more spending for state and local government road projects and lots of goodies for businesses, though, on the good side it supposedly plugs a few tax loop holes.

As for 'jobs', the Congressional Budget Office analyzed that even the best of the tax cut proposals, a break on employer paid social security, would produce only 8 to 18 jobs for every $1 million of new federal debt.   I think even that is optimistic, as most of the tax avoidance would come from routine rehiring for existing positions.   Employers will simply give preference to hiring candidates who've been unemployed for 2 months (the minimum to qualify for the tax break) or more.  It might redistribute employment a bit, but isn't going to produce a wave, or even ripple, of increased hiring.  Tax cuts for business entities don't produce jobs, increasing demand for products and services produces jobs.

The spending side of the proposed bill wasn't any better, possibly worse, at creating jobs in the appropriate sectors, though it certainly insures plenty of work for those who've had it.  The bill was initially overlooked for its details by the media, and instead triumphed as a huge success in achieving bipartisanship.  Fortunately, one side blinked before it went too far, and now a new proposal, only slightly less objectionable is going forward for debate.

There are 535 people who vote on a budget of trillions of dollars.  Those people are driven by a need to pass a test to get into their next term of office, and 435 of them face that test every two years, and the other 100 must raise on average $5,600,000 (The Campaign Finance Institute, 11/06/2008) every six years as an additional qualification for a new term.   Roughly one half of them is working to get the approval of one economic group and the other half is working to get the approval of another economic group.  Who, legislatively, is looking out for the economic health of the United States?  No one, really.

We can't even presume that if every member of the present Congress were to develop amnesia simultaneously, thus forgetting who they had to please in order to get reelected, it would have any appreciable impact upon legislative results.  That's because the political dye has already been cast by a bi-polar electoral system, whereby every viable nominee in the general election has resolute political views in tight alignment with a 25% minority of the electorate at one end, or the other, of the political spectrum.  

Some of the problem is just simple human psychology and a failure to have structured our government to account for it.  What can be done?  For one thing, we need to revert to the original Constitutional concept of insulating the Senate from popular whims and common intellect.  James Madison is surely smirking, with an 'I told you so' grin from his celestial view of our experiences with and use of the document which he largely authored.   Sure, we had many problems with legislative appointments of Senators, primarily graft, but we were so unimaginative as to how to deal with it that we kicked a leg out from underneath ourselves.  Doh!

Another affliction with which we have burdened ourselves is a politically bi-polar legislative body.  The public financing of political party nominating processes, known commonly now as 'primaries', has entrenched the two parties into the psyche of the electoral body much like deep tire tracks in a snow and ice covered road, tainting alternative candidates with the lack of any popular endorsement.  Oddly, enough, primaries were the supposed cure to another problem in the process of choosing members of Congress, that of the major political parties selecting candidates in a clandestine manner, producing special interest minded legislators.

Is there a means whereby we can have the electorate equally consider candidates for the House of Representatives, without the influence of party affiliation, and yet allow political alliances to coalesce behind a single candidate?   Let's think on it.  You know, that thing that James Madison once did.

-RLee