Issues – Responsibility

Introduction
Decades of irresponsibility in Washington have taken a severe toll on the heart of the American economy. The current culture of politics is to choose power over doing the right thing for the American people. This choice has led to an allegiance to special interests, a campaign focus of negative personal attacks instead of policy, and an unwillingness to confront the critical issues that face our country.

Now is the time to begin the hard work of rebuilding America ourselves. We must focus on returning responsibility and accountability to government, creating the conditions under which our private-sector can thrive to create jobs, and securing our future prosperity from its current precarious position.

I) RESPONSIBILITY

Both parties have made Washington ground zero for irresponsibility. We must rebuild responsibility and the electorate’s trust throughout government– in our fiscal affairs, regulatory oversight, and in our electoral system to ensure that Washington works for the people again.

1. Generational Responsibility
Our present path will leave behind a debt of $180,000 per person in the next few decades. This national debt of over $50 trillion dollars includes the known shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, as well as our current debt. Current unprecedented deficits cause this number to increase daily. This path of fiscal irresponsibility is unsustainable and amounts to selling our children into indentured servitude to our creditors.

Congress must determine the effectiveness of expenditures to cut and fix what is not working to address current debt and deficit levels (-$12 trillion) . The proposed Cooper/Wolf Bill in the house is one such structural solution that creates an independent board, similar to the Defense Base Closure committee, whose recommendations must be voted up/down by Congress eliminating the pork barrel machinations of individual members to protect their district funds. Further measures such as implementing a pay-as-you go system, common to what almost every state and municipality has, will also force fiscal discipline.

Social Security (-$6 trillion) is an important program that keeps 40% of those 65+ out of poverty. First, Congress must acknowledge the looming crisis currently masked by “IOU’s” which hide the real $6 trillion dollar hole in the program. Only then can we begin crafting a long term solution. Any honest solution must recognize longer life spans, broadening the social security revenue pool, and other tweaks to preserve this vital program. Like other problems, the difficulty of fixing it increases the longer we wait. Our choice is a little pain now or a lot of pain in the future.

Medicare and Medicaid (-$35 trillion) are the biggest concern as they project a shortfall almost three times greater than our current national debt. The programs are victim to unfavorable demographics (record retiring boomers) and skyrocketing costs in the overall healthcare system. We must first reign in costs to ever solve the problem of improving access to health care. This requires a broad range of solutions from tort reform, comparative effectiveness studies, increased competition and transparency in service pricing, and drug pricing reform. Only by reforming the health care system can we save Medicare/Medicaid and the US federal budget. Current legislation in the House and Senate, while productive for starting the conversation, do not go far enough to control costs.

2. Private Sector Responsibility
We have recently privatized billions of dollars in profits in the hands of a select few and socialized trillions in losses to the American taxpayer. The word socialism has been thrown around lately but it certainly seems appropriate here. It is the government’s responsibility to referee the private sector to protect us, the general public, from paying for their mistakes. Instead, the opposite has been true with Congress acting as an enabler to this shameful behavior. Heads, these companies win. Tails, taxpayers lose.

The financial crisis has been extremely painful for both businesses and families alike. The average American family has not been bailed out yet financial services companies had the red carpet rolled out to “save them”. Congress must shift their priority from aiding the large companies that caused this crisis to ensuring we don’t have a repeat in our near future. Too big to fail means too big to exist, and Congress must act to break up these banks. Other necessary measures include bringing back a revised Glass-Steagall Act to separate the casino-like behaviour of investment banking and trading from our every day banking, limiting leverage, regulating derivatives in a transparent marketplace, and holding ratings agencies accountable for their judgments.

Financial services through their campaign contributions have bought Congress’ help and inaction while this and future crises brew. It is the responsibility of government regulation to ensure that society does not bear the true costs of the private sector’s profits. We have witnessed the painful results when Congress abdicates their responsibility to the general public.

3. Electoral Responsibility
The depth of irresponsibility in our government is tied into the current state of our electoral system which encourages fierce partisanship and a “winner take all” culture. The current system limits competition, which allows entrenched interests to preserve their power, and we are often left without a real choice of someone who will advocate for our best interests. This power is further consolidated by special interest funding that is hidden behind excess complexity, by a voting process that suppresses true choice, and by manipulating voting districts to choose their voters vs voters choosing their officials.

Today, winning elections is closely tied to raising more money than the ‘other guy’. Special interests hold a disproportionate influence on legislation as it is largely their money that flows in the hallways of Washington. We must change how elections are funded to return government to working for the people. Public financing through a matching program for candidates who reach a certain threshold of individual donations («$500) would help achieve this. The cost to taxpayers is a drop in the bucket compared to the large amounts of welfare given to corporate and special interests directly as a result of their monetary contributions.

Strangely, many politicians end up choosing their voters vs voters choosing their elected representatives. Voting districts are created by the party in power using computers to create bizarre boundaries that seek to consolidate power. Political ‘wisdom’ holds it is better to push all the Republicans into one district to create two Democratic strongholds, than to have three districts that could vote either way in each election. Politicians increase their chances of reelection and push our country increasingly to the fringes of partisan politics. This practice needs to be ended and replaced with a non-partisan jury based system that seeks to create common sense boundaries encouraging true representation.

Officials realize they must limit our choices when we cast our vote to get away with such brazen behavior. They do this by creating a perception that you can “throw your vote away” or select one of them. Instant run off balloting solves this problem, but both parties, like good monopolists, prefer you not have a choice. Instant run off balloting allows you to rank your candidates in order of preference. If your first place vote is not going to win, then your second place vote becomes your first. This process continues until a candidate has a majority of votes. This way every voter can choose their ideal candidate without fear of “wasting their vote”.

These electoral reforms ensure that we have true choice to select representatives who are truly accountable to the people and not narrow groups of special interests.

4. Legislative Responsibility
The majority of Americans do not trust the government. This is because we are not sure what is truly happening behind the Washington curtain. Government is nameless, faceless, and unaccountable. Ultimately, given its importance, we must reform government and make it accountable to the people again. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we must begin to push the expenses, legislation, and government programs out from the shadows. In public, they can receive the attention and scrutiny needed to ultimately make them more effective, curb excess waste, and expose any outright corruption that exists.

It is not enough to simply publish all data– we must make it available digitally in a format such as XML that allows customization and analysis. This includes publishing all bills electronically with a revision history that allows everyone to see who made amendments and revisions. By hooking these changes to the campaign finance data stream, we can then immediately see the relevant campaign contributions having to do with the bill and understand what potential conflicts might exist.

Approximately three trillion dollars is spent by the government every year. Yet, little is truly done to track effectiveness and to eliminate waste. We must create objectives, metrics and deadlines that can be publicly tracked to determine, for each department and program, success or failure. In order to bring our annual budget to a responsible level that we can afford, we must first have a handle on what is and is not working in a similar vein to the private sector. This data will be used by the bipartisan committee that will recommend restructuring (requiring re-funding) or eliminating those programs which failed to meet their goals. If the government continues to operate in the dark, we will continue to have a government that we work “9-5″ to pay for but that doesn’t work for us.