Metrics for “Hope”

I watched the president’s speech last night with two of my Republican friends, who, despite the occasional doctrinaire outburst that they don’t bother defending (“tax cuts work! we just need more tax cuts!”), raised some valid criticisms.  The best question of the night in my mind came from an ABC reporter, who asked, “how can the American people gauge whether or not your programs are working? Can they — should they be looking at the metric of the stock market, home foreclosures, unemployment? What metric should they use when and how will they know if it’s working or whether or not we need to go to a Plan B?”–sometimes the best questions are the most straightforward.

The President’s response was that he was looking first to create or “save” 4 million jobs.  The problem is that neither of these numbers seem easy to measure.  One of my friends went to the extreme with this and said that as long as 4 million people are still employed by the end of this stimulus package then we can declare the program a success.  Thats a bit extreme in my mind, but it raises the fair point that there is no clear, measurable result yet for all of this spending.  Creating jobs is just as hard to measure in terms of a direct cause and effect relationship.  Ultimately, the president said that the true measure of success is getting the economy growing again, but that is too obvious to be the real answer.  As of right now, we have no idea about how to determine if spending a trillion dollars will have any direct effect on the problem.  I find that worrisome.

We’re supposed to pay taxes?!

I don’t have much knowledge about the tax code other than the fact that it is extremely complicated.  I once went to a luncheon with a tax attorney I worked for about the various different legal entities that doctors could create to shield their practices from law suits and tax liability.  The speaker talked non-stop for an hour and was nowhere near giving a comprehensive introduction on the subject.

Now three of President Obama’s nominees have been exposed for having tax issues–one of them will oversee the IRS, another of them actually helped write the tax code.  The latter of these two examples, Tom Daschle, has now withdrawn his nomination.  While there is no real excuse for either of these men not figuring out how to pay their taxes, the fact that it can validly be considered a “mistake” for someone to not pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes should give us pause.  Does the problem lie with the individual or is it more a problem of the tax code?  Of course both are flawed, but it seems to me that the tax code is the bigger problem.  This raises more questions.  Perhaps most importantly, why do we have such a complicated tax system?  There are good reasons to have some complex tax policies in order to smooth income across socio-economic groups or reward/punish certain behaviors, however, we have clearly gone too far when some of the most intelligent people can’t get it figured out.  So, when was it enough and how did we go too far?  How do we fix it?

“Politics as Usual” works the way its supposed to…at least for once

The withdrawal of Tom Daschle as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, while unfortunate, makes good sense.  Former Senator Daschle seemed like an extremely knowledgable leader of a healthcare transformation and clearly knew how to work with congress since he’d been the Senate majority and minority leader.  However, his issues with taxes aside, he has apparently been a lobbyist in everything but name only.  The democrats seemed willing to look past this clear fault, but republicans–undoubtedly for political reasons only–shed light on the fact that this candidate really violated Obama’s own standards on ethics and influence.  The tax problem really seemed like a separate issue (more on that in a separate post).

In this case, I think the old partisan ways worked.  Obama came into office putting forward sweeping ethics changes and challenging the role lobbyists play in Washington.  By challenging and ultimately forcing the withdrawal of his nominee, they are holding the new president to his word.  More importantly, they are hopefully raising a very necessary discussion on what should be the role of lobbyists and de facto lobbyists alike.   A friend of mine raised the very good point that lobbyists, in some form, should be involved in government.  They are not only knowledgable on their subject matter, but knowledgable on the desires of important concentrated interests.  Eventually we will need some balance on this issue that maintains a certain distance between government and influence but nonetheless absorbs the knowledge that lobbyists have to offer.  Any thoughts?