At the Minnesota budget summit a week ago, Martin Sabo made a profound assertion: ‘There should be one pledge, and that is not to make pledges.’ He meant that legislators and congressional representatives need the flexibility to agree on solutions to problems and should not handcuff themselves with campaign promises to never raise taxes or never cut spending.
We are not going to solve the problem of a burgeoning national debt, and the subsequent economic damage that it brings, nor the problem of inexorably growing deficits here in Minnesota, until candidates pledge to stop making pledges. And that is not going to happen until voters change their expectations and attitudes.
The old saw that, under democracy, people get the government they deserve, is true. Nations with intractable economic problems have them because of fundamental failures of their political systems.
Our fiscal problems in Minnesota and the United States stem from two sources. First, there are voters who refuse to countenance cutting myriad existing spending programs, or who demand expensive new ones, like Medicare drug benefits. Secondly, other voters adamantly oppose all tax increases, regardless of circumstance. In many cases, including some Tea Party protesters I know, a single individual holds both positions simultaneously.
It gets down to an issue that is as old as representative government. Do we choose elected officials who, before the fact, promise specific votes on a list of specific issues? Or do we elect candidates on the basis of their values, character and ability, and trust them to make good decisions, weighing all the considerations, including the inevitable necessity for political compromise, and then trust them to make their best effort?
History shows that where electorates choose the second course, economic and social outcomes are better than when they insist on the first. But U.S. voters increasingly seem to opt for pre-election vows.
The media, new and old, contribute. Debate moderators egg candidates on to make sweeping promises. Radio and Internet demagogues rouse their followers against candidates who refuse any of a list of demanded vows. And voters fall in line.
Candidates who show character and wisdom by refusing to bind their hands can’t get contributions and are winnowed out in primaries.
Tea Party protesters and talk-show callers or town meeting attendees from both ends of the political spectrum accuse elected officials of breaking the vows of their offices or ignoring the wishes of the voters who elected them. I think the contrary is true. They are too slavish to contradictory voter demands. They vote against tax increases and vote for continued spending.
George H.W. Bush showed moral courage but political stupidity by breaking his “read my lips” anti-tax pledge. But his action, together with the moderate tax increase initiated by the Clinton administration in 1994, was responsible for decreases in deficits over the 1990s culminating in three years of roughly balanced budgets at the end of that decade. And U.S. economic growth benefited rather than suffered as a result.
His son called for tax cuts, partly on the grounds that forecast surpluses would erase the national debt by 2012; the cuts harmed the economy. We then entered into expensive wars in two countries. A Republican majority engaged the Democratic minority in a bidding war to offer the most generous drug package to all seniors, regardless of need. But neither party was willing to fight for taxes to fund either major new spending program. Deficits once again surged.
Now, the worst financial crisis in 80 years and the harshest recession in 60 have cut federal revenue and increased outlays.
Nevertheless, a Democratic president and congressional majority want major new programs. But President Barack Obama took an unwise vow to raise no taxes except on a tiny fraction of high-income households. Republicans stand ready to demagogue against any move to cut the deficit, even by restoring tax rates to the levels that prevailed in the 1990s.
Here in Minnesota, Gov. Tim Pawlenty — who as a legislator had been active in lowering state income taxes from the 1990s levels that produced successive surpluses — refuses any consideration of raising taxes as the state faces deficits, not only for the current biennium, but going forward.
Indeed, these longer-term fiscal problems motivated the calling of the summit, attended by two Republican former governors but shunned by Pawlenty.
These ongoing stalemates don’t result from officials refusing to fulfill their oaths. It is the result of an unthinking electorate that demands the impossible and throws hissy fits when the impossible doesn’t happen.
© 2009 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.