Here’s a very cogent observation from the comments at Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution econoblog:
It seems to me that the American political system is simply broken. Canada could reduce the size of government and keep health care spending in check because in a parliamentary system with strong party loyalty, individual politicans are given “cover” by their parties and are not held personally responsible for the taxes and benefits of their constituents. If the party in power makes a decision to cut benefits which will harm an individual politician’s district, that politician isn’t necessarily on the hook for it. The voters know that he has to vote the party line even if he disagrees with the legislation. He gets re-elected so long as the public feels his party in general is better than the opposition.
In the U.S. system, where every vote is a free vote, each member of Congress has to answer for his/her votes, and this drives NIMBY-ism and ever-increasing benefits without the tax hikes to pay for them, and it also causes wheeling and dealing which ultimately makes large regulatory packages like health care reform incoherent and bloated with pork.
I think American government works well when it's strictly limited. When Americans try to implement Euro-style social democracy, they fail due to the nature of American government. It is uniquely unsuited to centralized technocratic governance.
That would imply that we either:
- Abandon the welfare state and social justice goals altogether (the preferred answer for glibertarians, Club for Growth types, Tea Partiers and increasingly the GOP).
- Adopt significant changes, primarily in the Senate, that allows it to function without the bribery/kleptocratic bullshit we’ve seen recently.
There is of course the non-choice of muddling on with increasingly incoherent voters, driving an increasingly incoherent government (i.e., simultaneously clamoring for more benefits, lower taxes and deficit reduction). The end game there is a larger uglier version of California’s problems. This is where foreign investor lose their appetite for American debt, forcing higher interest rates that then consumes a higher share of GDP to service our debt without any real benefit to the national welfare.
My preferred choice is we need to abandon the “beloved traditions” of the Senate and hew more closely to what the Constitution says about the Senate. I’ve yet to find the anything in the Constitution or it’s amendments that says you need 60 votes to pass anything of significance. The rules have been abused in ways that prevents the federal government from addressing major issues. We deserve better,
