Is there such thing as “Slow Policy”?

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion (and criticism) about the pace of policy making, both in Washington and around the country. While many who voted for the President are unhappy that he is making changes too slowly, Republicans have advocated for a return to the drawing board with health care reform and an overall slowdown of policy making. In hearing this push from Republicans, I am struck by the timeliness of the Winter 2010 edition of Good Magazine, which is devoted solely to all facets of the Slow Movement. Originating with the Slow Food Movement, which advocates eating only local, sustainable, more nutritious, and eco-friendly foods, the Slow movement has spawned a number of offshoots, including the Slow Cities Movement, the Slow Money Movement, and even the Slow Parenting Movement.

This begs a question: is there such thing as “Slow Policy”? What can the Slow movement teach us about public policy and policy implementation? The answer may lie in the Slow Design Movement. While Slow Design advocates argue longer design processes with more time for research, contemplation, real life impact tests, and fine tuning, Slow Design also incorporates longer cycles of human behavior and sustainability into the design. Its focus is to design something that has a lifecycle longer than its current user. The design process advocates openness and collaboration, and designers are seen as the ones who make the informed decisions about what to include and what not to include in the design. Saul Griffith, a Slow Designer and MacArthur Genius grant recipient, advocates for “heirloom” design, which is an object that will last multiple generations because of its function, timelessness, and beauty. While the Slow Design process and philosophy was started as a way to approach the design of tangible items (furniture, cars, etc), the principles of Slow Design can be applied to public policy, with elected officials and public administrators serving as the lead designers.

A week ago on this Blog, Craig advocated for voters to move beyond looking at the personal failures of our leader and focus on the larger issues at play. A second failure with democracy is that every politician will do what they need to do to win the next election. This leads politicians to focus on short-term results. In Slow Design, short-term thinking and short product life cycles lead to a cultural sense of a world speeding up. Through one lens, the results of the special Massachusetts Senate election can be seen as slowing movement. But from a Slow Movement perspective, the result is a speeding up of the policy design process by focusing on the immediate rather than the longer-term, regenerative policy solutions that are needed at this time.

American Democracy: An Incomplete Experiment

Sir Winston Churchill, on November 11, 1947, is famously quoted as having said, “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe… democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms…”

So why would a former British prime minister, who was a public servant for the better part of a century, a Nobel Prize winner and the first honorary citizen of the United States – the oldest democracy in the world – say such a thing? A simple conversation with an average voter or a look at a newspaper will highlight the inherent problem with American democracy.

Effective policy is, to most Americans, boring; scandal and sound bites are much more entertaining. Americans are, and always have been, driven by emotion. People don’t get excited when the VA releases a report that they have many of the highest performing hospitals in the country or that Medicare overhead costs are nearly ten times lower than the average health insurance plan, which are both true; but the first time one of these programs does not work perfectly, it is “proof” that government is fundamentally “broken.”

Don’t get me wrong. Government should be held to a higher standard in providing for the public good, but not at the expense of recognizing the positive impact government has on our lives. Capitalism is driven by business failure, but the first time government – which free-market proponents argue should be run more like a business – fails, everyone is up in arms, quickly forgetting businesses fail more often then they succeed.

Elected officials and media understand this public appetite for scandal and controversy. The people want to know why Tiger Woods cheated on his wife, why Peter Orszag has a child on the way with someone other than his fiancée and why Senator Vitter and former Governor Spitzer turned to prostitutes. This is why elected officials prefer to bash an opponent’s personal shortcomings than talk about long-term solutions to our most important challenges; it is simply easier to divert the conversation with an attack than to counter sound policy proposals.

Americans are never going to quit reading about scandal (for various reasons), but they should also make sure they base their votes and opinions on something more substantive. When that happens and voters are voting for candidates for the right reasons, democracy shines and we prove that it is, as Sir Churchill argues, (at least) better than the other forms of government.

Why Tax Increases Are Inevitable

If you haven’t heard of Club Wagner, you may start hearing more about it in the coming months. While not a reference to a night club, the actor who portrayed Dr. Evil’s Number 2, the former mayor of New York City, his senator father, or the two schools named after him, Club Wagner is an unofficial collection of public policy thinkers who dare to advocate what everyone knows, but few publicly acknowledge: tax increases are inevitable.

Created by David Leonhardt on the New York Times Economix Blog back in July, this assortment of thinkers is named after the 19th-century German economist Adolf Wagner, who predicted that taxes would rise as societies became wealthier. Economix’s bi-partisan list Club Wagner members include John D. Podesta, former White House Chief of Staff under President Clinton, former Director of the Obama transition, the head of the Center for American Progress; Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner; former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan; Peter Orszag, the Director of the OMB; New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks; and Bruce Bartlett, the former domestic policy advisor to President Reagan.

So, why should public sector practitioners care about this? Because the next phase of the economic recovery is going to impact public sector financing and government deficits. For example, a December 22nd Washington Post article reports that many states will begin to exhaust their funding for their unemployment benefit programs in 2010. According to the projection,

“…[T]he budget gaps are expected to spread and become more acute in the coming year, compelling legislators in many states to reconsider their operations. Currently, 25 states have run out of unemployment money and have borrowed $24 billion from the federal government to cover the gaps. By 2011, according to Department of Labor estimates, 40 state funds will have been emptied by the jobless tsunami.”

The situation is reinforced by a recent study by the National Association of State Workforce Agencies that found that the number of people applying for benefits has increased (no big surprise in this economy), while the payroll tax rate supporting those benefits is at historically low levels. So, in an effort to encourage and support businesses in their state, legislators cut the payroll taxes, exposing the program administrators to risk if there should be an increase in the number of unemployed. With the economic downturn, they find their unemployment benefits substantially underfunded.

Everyone who balances a checkbook knows that you need to have more income than expenses, and when you don’t, you need to find more revenue from another source. For these benefits, which are separated from each state’s general fund, there are two options: cut benefits or raise taxes. However, while the policy makers in each state choose which challenge to address, providing benefits or creating jobs, the program administrators have been boxed into a corner. The news of the increase in underfunded programs is likely to spark a debate among policy-makers about whether to cut benefits or borrow more to cover a temporary increase in demand.

Where do these difficult choices lead us? Unless each state makes the hard decisions about their long-term fiscal strategy that are necessary today, we could end up with what David Ignatius calls the “Californization of America”, where the opposing forces of spending big and taxing small result in federal bailouts to the states. In today’s economy, there is a general paralysis in taking any action that is seen as having a negative impact on business. However, with bipartisan support for increasing taxes growing with Club Wagner, public officials need to look at tax increases as a common sense solution to budgetary shortfalls.

The Path to Healthcare Reform

The healthcare debate has taken so many twists and turns that nobody will truly get what they want. Sure, some Democrats will still talk about how great the bill is and how they are turning a page in history. But in their most honest moments, they will admit that this does not go far enough in either of their two major goals: increased access and decreased costs.

The liberal goal, at the beginning of this debate, was to have a robust public option so that the healthcare system could change its tendency to treat healthcare as a luxury and start to consider it a human right. Conservatives had a different idea; they believe strongly in a free market that self regulates.

However, instead of talking about the merits of a more inclusive system and the limitations of infinite access, we got sidetracked into talking about death panels, abortion, immigration and socialism.

Once the debate became more about scoring political points then solving the healthcare crisis, America lost. Heck, the Republicans even filibustered the Defense Appropriations bill (with funding for the two wars), just to slow down the healthcare bill! Democracy works best when we get people talking honestly about their differences and working together on solutions. That moment never came in the healthcare debate. It is unlikely that 2010 will be any different.

The closest we came to a substantial compromise was when Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) championed the idea of “triggering” the public option. This means that if healthcare costs increase at too high of a rate in a state, the public option takes effect. This will encourage appropriate behavior from healthcare providers, but, as long as they set modest, realistic and affordable prices, they will still compete in an open, capitalistic system.

This idea, of asking healthcare companies to not take advantage of their quasi-monopoly on a basic need and, if they do, allow the government to step in to provide healthcare access from a system based on patient health and not profit margin, is not a radical idea. It’s a fundamental responsibility of government: to balance out the market.

At the end of the day, the Democrats are probably right. If the Republicans response is to not do anything then it probably makes sense to pass something, regardless of its substantial imperfections, and then amend it little by little in subsequent years.

What a shame that members of each party could not put politics aside and come together to pass the best policy for America. I wish I could at least say they tried.