(if I were the) King of the Forest

…prioritizing and making tradeoffs is infinitely more difficult when the government has made promises in flush times that it is hard-pressed to keep in lean times. And yet that seems to be the default mode of operation: commit windfalls when the economy is strong to long-term and popular causes, like entitlements and salaries and program expansions, that are politically difficult to rescind when the windfall evaporates.

If revenues were estimated and allocated based on the mean over some suitable period — say a typical business cycle — then decisions about priorities could be made in a relatively stable fiscal environment without the periodic panics that characterize the present budgeting process.

THAT debate format would actually tell us what the candidates believe in depth, give us a sense of how they analyze problems and what kinds of advisors they listen to, give us a real knowledge about their plans on a particular topic (and about what topcis they think are important), and give us a fighting chance at assessing the source material they rely on in forming their opinions and plans.

Now that this site has moved into its own domain I suppose I ought to provide a link back to its original home, which is still relevant. Here it is:
I Want A Choice
It provides a brief commentary — and some recommendations — on our electoral process.
-apl
Update: The domain “IWantAChoice.com” has now been turned […]

In March 2007 The Boston Globe published an opinion piece by Peter H. Schuck of the Yale Law School and Richard J. Zeckhauser of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard which described the adverse effects of so-called “bad apples” and “bad bets” on the effectiveness of government assistance programs. By “bad apples” they […]

Given that the moral purpose of the death penalty is its symbolic import, we can formulate an alternative death penalty that both preserves that purpose and protects the innocent from unjust execution. The key is to separate the sentence of death from the implementation of that sentence. The imposition of a death sentence communicates our moral intent; the execution of the condemned merely closes the account.

I read today in the New York Times online that the Senate will soon (again) take up the subject of tort reform (specifically malpractice reform), and I want to offer a suggestion I’ve been making to whomever would listen – which has, it turns out so far, been no one – for several years. Please consider this when the issue again comes before Congress for debate.

It occurs to me (and I am sure to others) that an effective approach to getting the most out of the current negotiating opportunity in the middle-east would be for the President to appoint a special envoy rather than to handle it through the Secretary of State and the State Department. That would not only leave the Secretary free to focus her attentions on the rest of the war on terror but would also give the negotiator both additional moral authority (as the personal appointment of the President and his personal representative) and less “official” baggage (as someone not actively engaged in other aspects of American foreign policy).

My nominee for the post: Bill Clinton.

In other words, well over 90% of the electorate never hear the candidate accuse his or her opponent of anything, never hear the candidate sling mud, never hear the candidate trot out misleading statistics or distortions of their opponents’ records, because 90% of the electorate never hear the candidate at all. What they hear is what the media reports about what the candidates said, and what the media has accepted for airing as paid advertising.

Improving campaign ethics, then, is in large part as simple as getting the editors and ad managers for the local media to adopt their own ‘code of fair campaign practices’, the primary and fundamental rule of which would be:

Refuse to report (or pass through, in the form of advertising) what candidates and their supporters say about their opponents’ records, characters, positions, or politics unless and until they disclose the specific source(s) of their allegations.

I started this book by announcing I knew how to reform the health-care system; it seems appropriate, then, that I end it with my health-care reform proposal.

Finally, to your warning about the eventual overreaction, to everyone’s detriment, to the creeping problem of general, portable access to health-care: I concur, and have for a long time. I have described this as the revolt of the officially voiceless: people with reasonable, legitimate, but inconvenient concerns – over access to health care, or over welfare, or over affirmative action, or over discrimination, or over campaign financing, or over free speech, or over taxes, or over regulation, or over some other issue – are told by the politicians, by the press, by academics, by the arbiters of social norms that they are heartless, or bigoted, or ignorant, or unreasonable, or unrealistic, or hateful; they are told that their concerns do not really exist, or are parochial, or are irrelevant, or must be borne with stoicism on behalf of some greater good; they are told they are unworthy of attention and respect; they are told, in effect, to shut up. And they do shut up – while their problems fester and swell, with animosity added to inconvenience – until they are, in the over-used phrase, “Mad as hell, and not going to take it any more.” And then we all suffer as the sledge-hammer solutions born of this groundswell of frustration create new problems and new animosities.