If Senator Obama becomes President, it is nearly certain that the Democrats will control both the Presidency and both houses of Congress for the third time in my adult lifetime. The first was under President Carter in the 1977 to 1980 period, and the second was under President Clinton in 1993 and 1994. Both times they blew it, and ended up being repudiated by the voters. To President Carter, the nation’s number one challenge was energy, and to President Clinton, it was the lack of universal health care. Each proposed policies that, whatever their flaws, would have addressed those challenges. But any reasonable proposal on either subject may be expected to generate opposition from those who benefit from current arrangements, including interests prominent in both the Republican and Democratic Party coalitions. Solutions to problems, moreover, including these, often involve sacrifices or disruption in the short run to make things better in the long run. In each case – Carter’s energy policy, and Clinton’s health care policy — the Congress, controlled by their fellow Democrats, yielded to those interests and shrank from any sacrifices, and not only failed to follow the Presidents’ lead but also failed to enact betters alternative Carter and Clinton could have lived with. And years later, while the next President will likely face immediate economic, fiscal, and foreign policy crises on a grand scale, these two issues remain the most important long-term domestic problems the country faces. This time, the Democratic Congress had better not blow it.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, are less a group of people dedicated to particular principles than a group of interest groups seeking to preserve and expand particular unearned privileges. The President, facing a nationwide election, needs to try to do something for the American people as a whole, but for any individual member of Congress, most of whom are relatively safe in their jobs, keeping special interests happy is generally enough to preserve them in office. The federal government as it stands, therefore, consists of a President trying to govern the country and a Congress looking to cut special deals — not what the Founding Fathers intended. So what would a cynic expect a Democratic Congress to do without a Republican President to keep it in check?
Something like what the Republican Congress did under Republican President Bush. Let greed run rampant and produce a disaster that turned the majority of Americans, even those predisposed to agree with it, against it.
I fear a million little grants to a million little groups whose actual purpose, regardless of their purported purpose, would be to provide “jobs” for those with connections to elected officials, and support for their re-election. I fear lots of little tax breaks. I fear provisions to ensure ever-richer retirement benefits for public employees, with the federal government taking over the costs when they become overwhelming, followed by the discovery that there somehow isn’t enough money for Social Security and retirement benefits for other Americans. Instead of infrastructure, we’ll get pork. Instead of Progressives, we’ll get lobbyists and Tammany Hall.
There are, I’d imagine, many Democrats looking forward to extorting all kinds of favors and deals from a future fellow Democrat President Obama in exchange for their acquiescence on major national priorities such as energy and health care. After all, the clock will be ticking very rapidly not from the moment of the next President’s inauguration, but from the moment of his election. It is ticking even now. The rot has gone on too long, and the country can’t wait for some sign of progress. New policies have to be in place with the passage of the next federal budget in October, 2009, so the American people (not to mention the lenders abroad who are keeping us afloat) can begin to seem some results by November, 2010. Or else.
And the Congress cannot even be sure that a future Obama (or McCain) Administration will be in a position to prepare an energy and health care proposal by that time. The United States is facing both the equivalent of a heart attack and the equivalent of cancer, both in its economy and its relations with the rest of the world. The President may be tied up with dealing with the heart attack, for a year or more. In 2000 the incoming Bush Administration was warned to forget about whatever it was hoping to achieve, and focus on the imminent threat of an attack on the United States by Al Qaeda. It didn’t. Given the situation in Iraq, in Iran, in North Korea, in Afghanistan, and in Pakistan – plus the possibility at any moment of a financial collapse – I can only imagine what Secretary of State Rice and Secretary of the Treasury Paulson will tell their replacements (that they haven’t told us) during the transition. Bloomberg News projects a similar crisis-driven administration, according to this article. “The U.S. is facing the worst financial crisis since the Depression” it states matter of factly, and neither candidate has “come to grips with the biggest danger that is going to hit the next president in his first few months in office: the crisis in the capital markets.”
Regardless of whatever other crises are occurring, immediate action on energy and health care will be required, because the cancer of America’s failures in these two areas of policy have, over the long term, caused the economic, fiscal and foreign policy heart attacks we are faced with. Dependence on foreign oil has left us vulnerable to economic blackmail and drained away our national wealth, while forcing us into problematic arrangements that have threatened our national security. Over and above the long-term environmental effects of burning fossil fuels.
Our health care financing system, tied to place of employment rather than provided by a combination of basic governmental-funded assurances and individual purchase, is bankrupting state and local governments and older corporations that provide extensive health care benefits, particularly to retirees, while at the same time discouraging people from starting new businesses for our new economy, because they might end up ill and uninsured. I explained the negative economic effects, over and above the inequity in our heath care financing non-system, in this post. A universal health care financing system at the federal level is the most important thing the federal government can do to stimulate the private economy and prevent severe tax increases and public service cuts at the state and local level.
By October, 2009, the Democratic Congress must pass a new energy policy. If they can’t agree on anything else, as I explained here all they really need to do is put a fossil fuel (and particularly oil) tax in place that goes up as the world market price goes down, to ensure that the price to consumers remains high. That would provide businesses and families with the assurance that if they invest in alternatives (including high-cost domestic oil and gas production as well as alternative fuels), and if people pay more for fuel efficient products or change the way they live to conserve, they won’t be bankrupted and made fools of by a temporary oil price decline, as they were in the mid-1980s.
In that case, over and above anything the federal government might do, state and local governments, corporations, entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations and individual people and families would, over a decade or two, solve the energy and environmental problems themselves, without the Congress or Administration dictating to them. Yes imposing a short term cost (even if theoretical, because the cost is already being paid) would require more political courage than coming out in favor of $1 per gallon gasoline, but as Senator Obama’s stance on the gas tax suspension proved most Americans (and in particular the vast majority of younger Americans) are grown up enough to start getting the country out of this mess.
And by October 2009, the Democratic Congress must pass an equitable, universal health care financing system that among other things separates health insurance from place of work, such as the one I described in this post. It wouldn’t even cost much, net, because the government is already paying for most third party health care as I showed here, and without some limits put in health care is going to bankrupt both the public and private sectors of this country, unless oil imports or the consumer debt disaster do it first.
Are universal health care and a new energy policy in the Democratic Platform? Is that platform a joke? The very meaning of the Democratic Party is on the line, and if they win they’d better deliver. It is almost worth seeing the Democrats sweep the federal government, and the state government in Albany, for that reason alone. If they win I want 60 hours of work per week until these absolute national needs are delivered. Otherwise, it would be a third consecutive failure of the Democratic Congress, with plenty of its members participating in all three. Remember, this is an election for Congress and the state legislature, not just President. And there is another one in 2010.