Who’s to Blame for Waxman-Markey?, ctd.
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Ryan Avent’s take is similar to Kevin Drum’s, and Tyler Cowen’s is similar to mine. Unsurprisingly I agree with Cowen, though there’s one principle that he cites quite often that seems a bit unrealistic to me:
2. If a policy idea cannot survive the opposition being partisan and also lying about it, I submit the policy idea is not such a good one. You can blame the opposition with all the justice in the world on your side, but still the idea has major, major problems.
In a more perfect political world this would likely be true, but in the world we’ve got I’m not so sure. When it comes to climate policy, for example, a straightforward carbon tax would be at least as good an idea as a cap and trade program, but it’s also much less likely to survive partisanship and misrepresentation and so gain the support of voters (a new tax! … as opposed to something the public can’t identify) or corporate interests (you mean this isn’t a way for us to generate a new market out of thin air?). By my lights, a more accurate principle would state that the goodness of a policy idea is close to inversely proportional to its ability to survive partisan lying; if this makes the political process sound hopeless, then that’s just as it should be.
In any case this bit is spot on:
6. The Democrats do in fact rule by more than one seat in both houses of Congress. So maybe the marginal Democratic legislators don’t have so much bargaining power after all. You can cite 60+ in the Senate but of course this is endogenous to what the Democrats themselves think public opinion will bear. There is a reason why the Democratic establishment does not, as Matt Yglesias so often recommends, abolish the 60+ requirement. Often they prefer inaction, combined with the ability to blame the Republicans for such. See #4. The often-sad truth is that the Democrats as a whole prefer to tailor policy to pander to their "worst" members.
And #4 states:
Both the Republicans and the Democrats share some common problems and they are known as voters. And special interest groups. If your plan cannot survive the influence of voters, and special interest groups…well…see #2.
As Cowen and Robin Hanson have both noted, the Democrats used up a lot of political capital passing the stimulus bill, and the public’s evident exhaustion with grand and costly measures is quite understandable. Progressives had, and indeed still have in principle, the political representation necessary to pass any part of their agenda they’d like, and while blaming the opposition for their failures can make for a nice story, the responsibility is ultimately shared out much more widely than that.
Filed under: environment, politics
I think this debate about policy making fails to account for the institutions in which policy making is embedded. Our government was set up to be profoundly antagonistic to any type of change, democratic or otherwise. Enacting any change, liberal or conservative, are notoriously difficult because the Senate, among other institutions, is profoundly anti-democratic. This institution empowers the will of the minority over the will of the majority. Or said another way it empowers the will of the current stake holders over the will of the potential and future stakeholders.
In addition to this institutional bias towards the status quo, you also have this: public policy is complex, difficult, and in many cases boring. The public knows little to nothing about policy and cares even less about it. Thus, with few exception, policy making is made by stakeholders and elites, not the public.
And so I come to this debate in a bipartisan manner. I think Kevin Drum et al and you and Tyler Cowen are both right. Its true that public policy formulated by liberals needs to account for the sausage making nature of congress. But in parallel to that, an intrinsic component to the nastiness of that sausage is lock step opposition of a minority who fails to engage in constructive dialogue. A key reason why policy that simultaneously favors special interests (corporate and otherwise) at the expense of the public interest, conservative and liberal values, stems from Republicans failure to offer anything aside from “UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE IS SOCIALISM” and “GLOBAL WARMING DOESN’T EXIST AND IF IT DOES ITS NOT A PROBLEM.”
So here’s my question to you: if your concern is about the corruption of our public policy process, wouldn’t it make sense to focus your energy on pressuring republicans and conversatives to engage in a constructive manner with public policy then on liberals for proposing liberal ideas? Bruce Bartlett is an excellent example of that.
For example, with the health care debate, Democrats would clearly be willing to sell their mothers in slavery, if Republicans would be willing to extend universal coverage to the population. In other words, Republicans could have demanded painful cost cutting concessions in return for universal coverage. Instead, we will get an expansion of coverage to more people, but not all, while simultaneously making the health care system more costly. Now as a liberal, I’d rather have the coverage and cost cutting, but if I can’t get the cost cutting then I am going to take the universal coverage, cost cutting be damned.
Yes, it would make sense. But don’t I do that?
As to health care: if “universal coverage” means a mandate, then I think it’s something that I should be opposed. But I agree entirely that Republican opposition to cutting Medicare costs has been stupidly counterproductive.
[...] A hat tip to Schwenkler, who gives us Ryan Avent: But one thing is fairly plain—if Waxman-Markey is a bad bill, then it [...]