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Easy Political Wins
Last week, I attended a users’ conference for a software provider. One concept that came up repeatedly was the importance of “easy wins”; i.e., small changes that noticeably move the ball in the right direction without too much effort (switching analogies, you might call them low-hanging fruit). They don’t constitute a full strategy or policy, but they make life marginally better by removing some pain points, while — equally importantly — building trust that useful things can and are being done.
This concept has a lot of political salience. Should the Republicans win the presidency in 2016 while holding Congress, we’re going to have a lot of big projects to set about (repealing Obamacare and reforming middle-class entitlements). While it’s vitally important to our country’s welfare to tackle these sort of issues, these are going to be high-casualty fights whose outcome is uncertain and for which we’ll likely have very little to show for years (I’m being optimistic). Before we tackle those issues, it would be wise to give ourselves some relatively easy tasks as an opportunity to build confidence and — who knows? — celebrate some small victories. Columbus might never have gotten his men to the West Indies if he hadn’t first shown them that he could lead them to the Canary Islands.
All this begs the question: what are some small, achievable policy victories the GOP could have under its belt by, say, the end of 2017? Ideally, these should be simple to implement, non-controversial, and politically feasible. Likely, they’ll be more a matter of stopping the government from doing something bad, rather than reforming something big or complicated. Wedge issues such as a partial-birth abortion ban — which, for the record, I would heartily endorse — aren’t the ideal answer here, as it would quickly turn into a political bloodbath, albeit one Democrats would lose badly. The objective is to get some small-but-subtantive things passed quickly and with minimal controversy in order to create momentum and show that Republicans are serious about governing.
I have two suggestions — both based on suggestions from Ricochet members — but I’m certain there are others out there:
- Amend the Controlled Substance Act to recognize state-specific drug legalizations (i.e., have the Feds recognize marijuana legalizations in Washington and Colorado).
- Revise federal asset forfeiture standards along the lines many other states — most recently, New Mexico — have to remove some terrible incentives for law-enforcement.
What say you, Ricochet?
Published in General
No, back in the late 80s when we did a lot of car travel in Canada there was a good program that actually explored both sides of issues, such as gun control, and gave an intelligent hearing to parties on both sides. I never heard anything like that on NPR. The CBC stuff called my attention to the fake nature of the interviews on NPR, where reporters pretend to interview other reporters to get information.
But even back then, CBC had some news presenters who were astonishingly ignorant on matters of the economy.
Does anyone know any small agencies — preferably, small enough to be relatively unknown — ripe for scrapping.
Again, I’m all for ditching the Dept. of Education, but we’re not going to get that immediately. What’s a little agency we can trash without the Dem outrage machine kicking into high gear?
Often true, but not always true.
At the software conference, the engineers were promising these huge, world-changing enhancements that would take months to complete (at best) and would be controversial among users.
It took me and some others a lot of effort to corner them to talk about some small problems that were driving us insane but — once we did — they were all like “Wow, these are easy to fix and I had no idea they were causing that much trouble.”
There is no such agency other than the DoD. You have to deal with the Dem outrage machine. There is no other choice. I agree that we should pick the battles carefully, and pick on something on which we can garner the necessary support. But the Dem hate machine WILL be out in full force. You have to deal with it and you have to win, or else it’s all over for another generation.
What if we made the argument to simplify agencies? DHS doesn’t need its hands in so many cookie jars. How much of that job is already covered by DOJ,DOS, and DOD? There are a lot of agencies that could be simplified, or “restructured” into oblivion without really getting rid of the service, just the bureaucracy.
Software is like that. Government is not.
I like the incremental approach in both software and government. (I still love Rep. Barber Conable’s self-description as a “raging incrementalist” and like to apply it to myself.)
But the difference is that in your software system you may be able to persuade the one or two people who have much of their career invested in the one small piece you want to eliminate that there is still a place for them in the new design. In government, any action to cut government, using cost-benefit analysis or constitutional principles, will be seen as an existential threat to the whole edifice. The only way you can get the governing class’s support is to provide it with a bigger bureaucracy with a bigger budget and more jobs to replace the old one. It’s commonly done under the umbrella of “transition costs.” In other words, the only way they will go along with it is if you make the problem worse. So you have to fight them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t peel off some support by appealing to long-forgotten liberal principles from back in the days when the left was liberal. For example, the left has long been in favor of cutting corporate welfare (so long long as it was just rhetoric and didn’t mean actual cutting of corporate welfare).
But we can pretend they meant what they said, and we can cut the Ex-Im bank, which is an issue coming up for renewal pretty soon anyway, isn’t it?
Keystone pipeline anyone?
Ending the personal mandate.
I think Keystone might count.