Parts to Wholes: the Socionomic Systems Nexus

Obligatory Nods: What Terrible Trouble We're In

Let's make the obligatory nods toward acknowledging reality, just so we're all talking from the same baseline. Now we've put up more than our fair share of reviews and diagnostics on things like the economy, budgets, foreign policy, Healthcare, etc. etc. Hopefully our credentials as steely-eyed analysts of accumulated screwing up are well enough established to not need any more wonkcharts to prove it. Another way of taking the temperature of things is by channeling the editorial cartoonists who are good thermometers, even when they don't really get it and react strictly in the moment.

Put another way - they're about as good a zeitgeisterometer and semi-informed opinion monitor as there is. We're going to grab off two composites from Daryl Cagle but his Decade in Review and Year in Review will give you a whole bunch of others. Pick and choose at your leisure and pleasure but we suspect you'll find relative convergence. Sorry for the size but click on through - they're pretty funny, and very painful. But the teeniness lets us use two - this is after all a decade we're talking about. What we did was sort of bookend things, taking the first sample from the beginning of the decade which started with a mild recession, soon followed by 911 and then Iraq. Not to mention the surge of globalization, the Housing Bubble (financiers gone wild 2) and the triumph of 50%+.01 partisan politics, not to mention the Ripublican discovery that being in power meant endless lobbying funding opportunities.

A Deeper Look at the Troubles

Needless to say lots of folks are looking back. NB: can you remember how you viewed the onset of Year00 - probably pretty optimistically despite the market bust, right?

Well, let's pay that super-shrink trick again only this time with something a little more in depth. This graphic made the rounds like wildfire late this week and is a year by year survey by major category (at least major in the view of the more socially conscious, which tells us something about how they view the world). Nonetheless it's worth a minute or three to review it and be reminded of all the things that have changed.

Just to take a personal example - on the floor of my TV/fiction/goofing off room are three boxes of VCR tapes of educational programs. Wonderful stuff which I got circa 2002/2003/2004. Toward the end of that the company (The Teaching Company - VERY highly recommended) started switching over to DVD. But before the DVD revolution really completed online internet access started making lots of interesting stuff readily available 7X24 (have you checked out HULU, or noticed we watch a lot of Charlie Rose's programs on line?). 

A slightly more serious look is this infographic that looks at recent relative news coverage (be interesting to see one for the year, or year by year for the decade though. BtW - we rest our case. The explosion of new user interfaces and re-thinking the media in the last 18 months, particularly the last 6-9, has been phenomenal). On the whole we think the news coverage pretty accurately grasps the relative importance of these issues. Key domestic issues dominated - especially the Economy and Healthcare. Which we've been covering extensively. But key foreign policy issues (Afghanistan, Iran, etc.) got some of their just due. Our rankings would be different of course but this isn't a bad start.

So, How Did People React?

That's always a tough question of course but one way to judge is by an interesting "December Madness" playoff that the Washington Post staged where it "invited" key players of the decade into a "tournament" and had folks pick who they'd thought were most important. Instead of posting the final chart we're going to post the results of the first round. Fascinating and not to far out of line. Of course some of the brackets and seedings were a little artificial - was Paris Hilton really a major factor in the decade? More so than Lance Armstrong. On the surface you'd like to say no (actually we'd like to say hell no but ...). In fact the more we thought about the more relevant and important it was. We greatly admire Lance and all he did and stood for. Our reactions on Paris are just the opposite but being charitable, compassionate and benign we won't give vent to them full bore.

But as an indicator of the attitudes of the culture and society? Paris Hilton was more influential than Lance Armstrong - and that tells you about all you really need to know about what went wrong this decade. It really, truly does. Of course if you want to see the final results, earlier rounds, check out the discussions or find out whether or not your fellow citizens (at least this biased sample) made choices you agree and can live with you need to go to the site.

What's Really Going On Here: Optimism vs. Pessimism and the Renewal of Civitas

Let's come full circle back to my original argument. Despite all the troubles I'm increasingly optimistic for several reasons. Not because the difficulties, costs and timeframes are under-estimated. Not because of some pollyannish blindfulness either. No, for two fundamental reasons. First off the analytical, which we've been covering in detail this whole year. If you look at our various analysis policy and politics the things we put on record years ago as necessary to arrest and fix the problems we were creating are starting to be done. Note: a key word there is starting! Again, this won't be easy, the partisan politics has gotten even worse than it was last decade or in the 90s and the problems are bigger, more difficult and more wrapped up with deep. fundamental changes. That's a recipe for "hard as they come".

No, the reason we're encouraged is we're beginning to see the renewal of a sense of Civitas. Which we've sort of coined and misused but, adapted from the ancient Romans at their ideal best, means being a responsible member of the civitas, the community. That means acting self-responsibly in your own life but equally, if not more important, it means acting in the broader public interest when and as necessary.

You see the real roots of our multiple crisis don't lie in this decade of Hiltonitis, they lie deeper when we decided it was the best of all worlds and the endless pursuit of more instantly became a driving mantra.

Perhaps we're on a journey for the forced re-discovery and re-commitment of the ancient verities?

We've always cycled around multiple, conflicting attitudes and outlooks. Actually not just us, it seems to be human nature. When things get tough people are faced with reality - and they buckle down and figure out how to cope. If for no other reason(s) than we're here to worry about it as the descendants of coping survivors it means it works. It also means that it's also Darwinian - those that didn't cope don't have many descendants. Of course when it works a natural sense of relief is soon followed by relaxation and then relapse into a "heah, I earned this party, dude" attitude. True the first time or the first dozen. If life ultimately is not about wine, women and song what is it about? But you can only drink so much great wine, listen to so many songs and, well...never mind. Then you have to pay for them. Better yet it takes a lot of effort to make a great wine, write a great symphony, paint a great picture, build a better business or develop a new healthcare system. Enormous effort.

At some point though if we partay'd too heartay it's OMG time and people realize it's time to start shifting their attitudes. The police are hear/here, everybody's hungover, the owner wants the bill settled and you realize cleaning up the mess is going to be long, hard, messy and expensive. Just necessary.

So, if we're optimistic, that's the reason. People are still in shell-shock and may curl up in the corner (we certainly admit to the temptation from time to time, but never more than ten a day). But if we have that OMB moment and quickly get to the "All Pull Together" we'll fix this.

The first steps in dealing with problems is admitting they exist, deciding to deal with them and having some clue as to how to go about it. We've started the process and that's encouraging.

 

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Consequences, Challenges & Inheritances

The Recession Begins Flooding Into the Courts New York State’s courts are closing the year with 4.7 million cases — the highest tally ever — and new statistics suggest that courtrooms are now seeing the delayed result of the country’s economic collapse. The Great Recession may be showing signs of easing, but the legal fallout from the financial troubles, the numbers suggest, may have only just begun. And the increase in New York offers a preview of the recession-related cases showing up in courts across the nation. New York’s judges are wading into these types of cases by the tens of thousands, according to the new statistics, cases involving not only bad debts and soured deals, but also filings that are indirect but still jarring measures of economic stresses, like charges of violence in families torn apart by lost jobs and homes in jeopardy. And they said that the data showed that courts nationally would be working through the recession’s consequences for years, much as they did with the flood of cases stemming from the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, even after the epidemic had slowed. “Society’s problems come to us,” New York’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, said. “We are the emergency room for society.” Steve C. Hollon, an Ohio court official who is president of the Conference of State Court Administrators, said court officials nationally had noticed a growing number of people saying their circumstances were so desperate that they could not afford lawyers, turning virtually every kind of case into a journey through the economy’s rough edges. The new statistics in New York show the breadth of the recession-related cases — in family, criminal and commercial courts and on across the judicial system. The cases turn the courts into theaters of the economic crisis. Court administrators said it is likely they have seen only the first wave of recession cases because courtroom battles take time to brew. They said they were bracing for more suits over business disputes, foreclosures, evictions and family disputes as the costs of the downturn continued to be revealed.

4 Problems That Could Sink America If we're lucky, the recession is winding down, and life will start to feel a bit more comfortable before long. But that doesn't mean things will go back to the way they used to be. The global recession that began in America's housing market has shaken the world's economic order and possibly knocked the United States down a notch or two. The spendthrift American consumer is out of money. American wages are flat. Despite some hopeful signs, the U.S. economy could muddle along for years. American innovation has solved daunting problems before and could again. But it would be a mistake to assume that American prosperity will continue on some preordained upward course. Nations rise and fall, often realizing what happened only in retrospect. Here are four problems that are undermining our future prosperity: We don't like to work. Sure, now that jobs are scarce, everybody's willing to put in a few extra hours to stay ahead of the ax. But look around: We still expect easy money, hope to retire early, and embrace the oversimplistic message of bestsellers like The One Minute Millionaire and The 4-Hour Workweek. Unfortunately, the rest of the world isn't sending as much money our way as it used to, which makes it harder to do less with more. White-collar jobs are now migrating overseas just like blue-collar ones. Kids in Asia spend the summer studying math and science while American mall rats are texting each other about Britney and Miley. "We need a different mind-set," says Guillen. "People need to invest more in their own future. Instead of buying stuff at the mall, spend the money on evening classes. Learn a language or skills you don't have." We're uninformed. The healthcare smackdown—sorry, "debate"—is Exhibits A, B, and C. The soaring cost of healthcare is a problem that affects most Americans. It's shrinking paychecks, squeezing small businesses, bankrupting families and swelling the national debt. Yet outraged Americans seem most concerned about fictions like death panels and government-enforced euthanasia, while clinging to the myth that our current system of selective availability and perverse incentives somehow represents capitalist ideals. But let's take a break from that burdensome issue to examine the likelihood that President Obama was born in a foreign country and hoodwinked America into believing he was eligible to run for president. People who lack the sense to question Big Lies always end up in deep trouble. Being well informed takes work, even with the Internet. In a democracy, that's simply a civic burden. If we're too foolish or lazy to educate ourselves on healthcare, global warming, financial reform, and other complicated issues, then we're signing ourselves over to special interests who see nothing wrong with plundering our national—and personal—wealth.

• 9 Signs of America in Decline

Reviewing the Decade

The '00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade from Hell Instead, it was the American Dream that was about to dim. Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era. We're still weeks away from the end of '09, but it's not too early to pass judgment. Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want — just give thanks that it is nearly over. Were we Americans alone in our troubles? Hardly. The Asian tsunami of 2004 killed more than 200,000 people. And our financial meltdown quickly spread around the developed world. Yet from our lofty perch overlooking the 20th century — the American Century, TIME's co-founder once labeled it — the fall has been precipitous. Who among us is unscathed? Not many. Even if none of your family members died in combat, you had no money with Madoff and you own your house free and clear, you most likely still took a hit. To paraphrase the question Ronald Reagan posed years ago, Are you better off today than you were at the beginning of the decade? For most of us, the answer is a resounding no. So here's the big question: Why? Why did so much bad stuff happen in this decade? Was it just rotten luck or something more? Sure, some of it was simply randomness, but I think a strong case can be made that it was more than just chance that got things so bollixed up. In large part, we have ourselves to blame. If you look at the underlying causes of some of the most troubling developments of the decade, you can see some striking common denominators. The raft of financial problems, our war with radical Islam, the collapse of GM and much of our domestic auto industry and even the devastation brought about by Katrina all came about at least in part or were greatly exacerbated by:

• Neglect. Our inward-looking culture didn't heed the warning signs from around the world — and from within our own country — that Islamic terrorism was heading for our shores.
• Greed. Our absolute faith in the markets, fed by Wall Street, combined with the declawing of our regulators to undermine our financial system.
• Self-interest. The auto industry disintegrated while management and labor tangoed from one bad contract to the next, ignoring their customers and their competition, aided and abetted by their respective politicians.
• Deferral of responsibility. Our power grid needs an upgrade and our bridges are falling down because we have not mustered the political and popular willpower to fix them. New Orleans drowned because authorities failed to act before Katrina busted the inadequate levees.
• It was almost as if we as a nation said in previous decades, "Why do today what we can put off until the first decade of the 21st century?" But we didn't rise to those challenges. What we just lived through, then, was the chickens coming home to roost

Lousy Decade, Little to Look Forward To This was, nationally and globally, a lousy decade. I hate to put a damper on your holiday season, but the next one has every prospect of being worse. The name never really took, but it's too bad this decade wasn't called the "oughts," because so much that ought to have been done wasn't: controlling entitlement spending, slowing global warming, securing loose nukes. The next decade will be consumed making up for squandered time. Time magazine recently proclaimed this "the decade from Hell" while predicting the twenty-teens would be better. I'd like to talk myself into agreeing with that sunny scenario. Instead, I keep coming up with a down arrow. Arrows, actually: The dysfunctional political system. Congress is "the "broken branch," as Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann have said. Lawmakers seem incapable of rising above political self-interest for the common good. The atmosphere of partisanship has become toxic. The House is divided into extremes reinforced by the decennial drawing of increasingly safe districts. The Senate is captive to the filibuster. The health care debate, with its ugly rhetoric about death panels and unnecessary Christmas Eve votes, underscores the failure of "regular order" to deal with the most intractable problems. The dangerous world. The signal event of this decade occurred on Sept. 11, 2001. The signal achievement of this decade has been that what once seemed inevitable -- another serious attack -- has so far been averted. This outcome is the result of luck augmented by a new realism about America's vulnerabilities and new vigilance in addressing them. But luck eventually runs out. Meantime, the clock is ticking on numerous dangers that ripened this decade. The instability of Pakistan with its nuclear arsenal. Iran's relentless progress to building a nuclear weapon. Finally, there is Stein's law, after the late economist Herbert Stein: Things that can't go on forever don't. Stein's maxim suggests that problems unaddressed for too long will ultimately have to be confronted. The caveat here is that avoidance makes things that much more difficult (entitlement spending) or even impossible (a tipping point on global warming)

• The wasted decade..

The Dimming of a Beacon The 2000s could be termed a lost decade for the U.S. economy. The average American's annual income stood at $39,446 as of October 2009, up only 5.3% in inflation-adjusted terms from the end of the 1990s. That's the slowest growth registered in at least six decades. The average person's net worth fell 13% through September 2009 as stock and home prices plunged. The S&P 500 delivered an inflation-adjusted total return of negative 30% through November 2009. Meanwhile, income inequality grew. Although it's still too early to gauge the full effect of the most recent financial crisis, as of 2007, the highest-earning 0.1% of the population accounted for 8.2% of all pre-tax income, according to economists Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley. That was up from 6.6% in 1999, and the highest level since 1917. Policy makers may be breathing a sigh of relief as the world's largest economy shows signs of emerging from the worst crisis since the Great Depression. But its performance in the 2000s is forcing them to confront an age-old quandary: how to save capitalism from itself. In the 2000s, though, the U.S. quickly went from being the beacon of capitalism to a showcase for some of its flaws. The bursting of the Internet bubble exposed duplicity and cronyism in the stock market, with analysts hyping shares of investment-banking clients. The demise of Enron demonstrated how the U.S. accounting system, which had been held up as a global standard, could be gamed. Consumers spent too much and saved too little, egged on by a housing boom and lax lending standards. The financial sector assumed an ever-larger share of the U.S. economy, devising new investment products that contributed to activity but, in the end, didn't add value. The result: a deep financial crisis that has discredited the idea, central to the U.S. system, that bankers' own interests would guide them to do what was best for the economy.

Attitudes, Culture & Values

Big Government Backlash  President Obama's approval rating has sunk below 50% for the first time, but for our money the bigger polling news is the way his agenda is turning the public against activist government. Last week's NBC/Wall Street Journal survey asked whether voters thought that "government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people" or if "government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals." This is a familiar polling question to gauge the credibility of government, albeit a bit loaded toward liberal social rhetoric. Some 47% nonetheless replied that they thought government is doing too much, while only 44% believed that it should do more. That's a striking change since February, when the views were reversed, with 51% saying the government should do more, and only 40% saying do less. Even more startling, in the latest survey only 18% said they trusted government to do the right thing "most of the time," down from a high of 36% in July 2004 and 27% in August 2005. Some 32% said they trusted government to do the right thing "almost never," up from single digits in earlier surveys when it was a volunteered response. One of Mr. Obama's not so subtle political goals has been to rehabilitate the public's confidence in government as a way to further his policies of expanding the entitlement and welfare state. As he said during the campaign, the President sees himself as the anti-Reagan, seeking to build a new Democratic majority as the party of government. And in his September health-care speech to Congress, he devoted several paragraphs to defending government as an agent of social change. So far, however, his Administration's enormous and helter-skelter expansions of the federal government seem to be having the opposite political effect.

Why We Still Have A Deficit ust in case you have any doubts about why there are deficits, this paper from the American Enterprise Institute with a compilation of polling results about attitudes toward government involvement in the economy and federal spending says it all.  Here are excerpts from the money quotes: Questions that ask Americans whether they would like a smaller government with fewer services or a larger government with more services usually produce a preference for smaller government. But when abstractions about government in general become concrete questions about individual programs, Americans don’t want to cut funding for most programs. In the most recent poll (2008) cited in the paper, foreign aid, the Pentagon, "welfare," and "space exploration" were the four areas where respondents said the federal government was spending "too much."  The much longer list of areas where people said the government was spending too little of the correct amount included:

• Improving & protecting environment
• Improving & protecting nation’s health
• Solving problems of big cities
• Halting rising crime rate
• Dealing with drug addiction
• Improving nation’s education system
• Improving the conditions of blacks
• Highways and bridges
• Social Security
• Mass transportation
• Parks and recreation

Stan Breaks With The Deficit Hawks: A Very Personal Story I’m having increasing trouble identifying with the religious-like fervor many deficit hawks are expressing these days.  I also don’t think the hawks are advancing the debate by their take-no-prisoners attitude that often seems to cross the line to zealotry.I need to emphasize from the start that I’m talking about real, substantively based deficit hawks rather than those who condemn deficits only when it suits their political purposes. This definitely does not include those who only think the deficit is terrible when the other political party is in the majority. In my mind you don’t qualify as hawk if you talk about the deficit but then fail to support the spending cuts and tax increases that would actually reduce it. In case anyone is wondering, you also aren’t a deficit hawk if all you do is support largely symbolic efforts like process changes.

• Are Attitudes Changing About The Proper Role of the Federal Government?

The Adam Lambert Problem The news came in numbers and the numbers were fairly grim, all the grimmer for being unsurprising. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported this week that more than half of Americans, 55%, think America is on the wrong track, with only 33% saying it is going in the right direction. A stunning 66% say they're not confident that their children's lives will be better than their own (27% are). It is another in a long trail of polls that show a clear if occasionally broken decline in American optimism. The poll was discussed on TV the other day, and everyone said those things everyone says. But something tells me this isn't all about money. It's possible, and I can't help but think likely, that the poll is also about other things, and maybe even primarily about other things. It is one thing to grouse that dreadful people who don't care about us control our economy, but another, and in a way more personal, thing to say that people who don't care about us control our culture. In 2009 this was perhaps most vividly expressed in the Adam Lambert Problem. I don't mean to make too much of it. In the great scheme of things a creepy musical act doesn't matter much. But increasingly people feel at the mercy of the Adam Lamberts, who of course view themselves, when criticized, as victims of prudery and closed-mindedness. America is not prudish or closed-minded, it is exhausted. It cannot be exaggerated, how much Americans feel besieged by the culture of their own country, and to what lengths they have to go to protect their children from it. It's things like this, every bit as much as taxes and spending, that leave people feeling jarred and dismayed, and worried about the future of their country.

U.S. Hurting in Wallet -- and Spirit The lingering economic crisis hasn't just cost America trillions of dollars in lost wealth. It's also taking a heavy toll on the national psyche, leaving scars that may take years to heal. This psychic damage has serious political implications, to be sure. It helps explain the souring attitudes toward President Barack Obama and the Democratic party now in charge, has produced a kind of national funk that spells trouble for incumbents of all stripes, and is a principal reason for the rising support for the kind of insurrection represented by the "tea party" movement. But ultimately the impact transcends politics. Look inside the latest Wall Street Journal/ NBC News poll and you will see the damage done to the traditional American spirit of optimism. The findings pose a deeper question: What effect does economic calamity have on a nation's soul? At a minimum, the results suggest that, as an exceptionally difficult year draws to a close, the glimmers of recovery that can be seen at a macroeconomic level aren't fully filtering down to the grassroots of American life: After Americans began expressing more optimism midyear that the country was again headed in the right direction, that sense of optimism now appears to be fading. In the new poll, just 33% of those surveyed said America was headed in the right direction, down from 42% in June. A majority said the country was "off on the wrong track." Despite the slowing of job losses and a stock-market recovery, just 46% said they thought 2010 would be better for the country than this year has been. Two in three said they weren't confident that life for their children's generation will be better than it has been for theirs. Almost the same share of Americans said the country is in a state of decline. A stunning 39% said they expected China would be the world's leading nation in 20 years -- compared with 37% who said the U.S. would be the leader. Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who conducted the Journal/NBC News survey along with Republican Bill McInturff, asked simply: "Where has all the optimism gone?" Jay Campbell, a pollster who works for Mr. Hart, gives a partial answer: "It's hard to have optimism when you can't even pay your bills." One of the striking things about these blows to national optimism is that they aren't hitting just lower-income Americans, who traditionally feel the brunt of pain during a deep economic downturn. The seeds of doubt also are seen among those at the top of the employment ladder.

My lazy American students  By the time students are in college, habits can be tough to change. If you’re used to playing video games like “Modern Warfare’’ or “Halo’’ all night, how do you fit in four hours of homework? Or rest up for class? Teaching in college, especially one with a large international student population, has given me a stark - and unwelcome - illustration of how Americans’ work ethic often pales in comparison with their peers from overseas. My “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have - despite language barriers - generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants. Chinese undergraduates have consistently impressed me with their work ethic, though I have seen similar habits in students from India, Thailand, Brazil, and Venezuela. Often, they’ve done little English-language writing in their home countries, and they frequently struggle to understand my lectures. But their respect for professors - and for knowledge itself - is palpable. The students listen intently to everything I say, whether in class or during office hours, and try to engage in the conversation. Too many 18-year-old Americans, meanwhile, text one another under their desks (certain they are sly enough to go unnoticed), check e-mail, decline to take notes, and appear tired and disengaged. Of course, it would be wrong to suggest that all American students are the same. I’ve taught many who were hardworking, talented, and deeply impressive. They listened intently, enriched class discussions, and never shied away from rewrites. At their best, American students marry knowledge and innovation, resulting in some astoundingly creative work. But creativity without knowledge - a common phenomenon - is just not enough. Too many American students simply lack the basics. In 2002, a National Geographic-Roper survey found that most 18- to 24-year-olds could not find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Japan on a map, ranking them behind counterparts in Sweden, Great Britain, Canada, Italy, Japan, France, and Germany. And in 2007 the American Institutes for Research reported that eighth graders in even our best-performing states - like Massachusetts - scored below peers in Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, while students in our worst-performing states - like Mississippi - were on par with eighth graders in Slovakia, Romania, and Russia. We’ve got a knowledge gap, spurred by a work-ethic gap.

Partisanship, Polemics and Posturings

The Republican Party's Health-Care Hypocrisy Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has emerged as one of the harshest critics of what the right likes to call "Obamacare." After spending the first half of the year working with Democrats to find a bipartisan compromise, Grassley has spent the second half trying to prevent one. He attacks the bill now being debated on the Senate floor as an indefensible new entitlement. He complains that it expands the deficit, threatens Medicare, and does too little to restrain health-care inflation. At a town-hall meeting in August, the 76-year-old Iowan warned, "There is some fear because in the House bill, there is counseling for end of life."  One might credit the sincerity if not the validity of such concerns were it not for an inconvenient bit of history. Not so long ago, when Republicans controlled the Senate, Grassley was the chief architect of a bill that actually did most of the bad things he now accuses the Democrats of wanting to do. As chairman of the Finance Committee, Grassley championed the legislation that created a prescription-drug benefit under Medicare. The comparison of what he and his colleagues said during that debate in 2003 to what they're saying in 2009 exposes the disingenuousness of their current complaints.  Today the Medicare prescription-drug debate is remembered mainly for the shenanigans Republicans pulled to get the bill through. Bush officials threatened to fire Medicare's chief actuary if he shared honest cost estimates with Congress. House Republicans cut off C-Span and kept the roll call open for three hours to cajole the last few votes they needed for passage. Majority Leader Tom DeLay was admonished by the House ethics committee for threatening to vaporize the son of one Michigan Republican in an upcoming election. The real significance of that episode, however, is not their bad manners but the policy Republicans produced the last time health care was on the menu. Their bill, which stands as the biggest expansion of government's role in health care since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, created an entitlement for seniors to purchase low-cost drug coverage. Simply stated, the law is complicated as hell, costs a fortune, still isn't paid for, and doesn't do all that much—though it does include coverage for end-of-life counseling, or what Grassley now calls "pulling the plug on Grandma."  In their 2009 report to Congress, the Medicare trustees estimate that the 10-year cost of Medicare Part D is as high as $1.2 trillion. That figure—just for prescription-drug coverage that people over 65 still have to pay a lot of money for—dwarfs the $848 billion cost of the Senate bill. The price of prescription coverage continues to escalate because the law explicitly bars the government from using its market power to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers or establishing a formulary with approved medications. And unlike the Democratic bills, which the Congressional Budget Office says won't add to the deficit, the bill George W. Bush signed was financed entirely through deficit spending. Former comptroller general David M. Walker has called it "probably the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s." 

• GOP lawmakers change tune on costly health plans
• How Healthcare Reform Reveals Bigger U.S. Woes

Republican Rigidity It's an article of faith among right-wingers, especially the tea party crowd, that all of the United States' ills happen because Republicans in Congress don't stand for principle. They believe that whenever you compromise with evil, the result is evil, so every politician should support conservatives' principles come hell or high water, damn the torpedoes. For example, their position on health care reform is that it's pure evil--it's unconstitutional for the government to force anyone to buy health insurance, to tax anyone to pay for someone else's coverage or interfere with the free market in any way, even if people die as a consequence. The right-wing solution to the uninsured is simply to define them out of existence. As Dr. John Goodman, one of John McCain's health advisers, explained to the Dallas Morning News last year, "The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American--even illegal aliens--as uninsured….So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved." His Orwellian logic is that hospital emergency rooms are by law available even to those that cannot pay; therefore, everyone by definition has health coverage.

A Dangerous Dysfunction Unless some legislator pulls off a last-minute double-cross, health care reform will pass the Senate this week. Count me among those who consider this an awesome achievement. It’s a seriously flawed bill, we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it’s nonetheless a huge step forward. It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional. After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill. Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that — or, I’m tempted to say, any of it — if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate? Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we’ve managed so far. But it wasn’t always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past — most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation. The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

• Senate Debate on Health Care Exacerbates Partisanship
• Parties risk it all on health care reform
• Middle ground shrinks in debate

Lindsey Graham: New GOP Maverick in the Senate Lindsey Graham, however, is not your average Republican. In an era when the GOP is defining itself by saying no, the South Carolinian stands out as one willing to say, "Maybe, let's talk." On hot button issues from Afghanistan and climate change to immigration, Graham is often the only Republican in the room. And as past mavericks have turned away, such as Obama's erstwhile opponent John McCain, Graham has stepped up. He is the first call White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel makes for advice on how to handle Senate Republicans; he's a popular co-sponsor of bipartisan legislation; and he's become a sounding board for top Dems. Not surprisingly, such unorthodox behavior doesn't come without cost. With tea party activists increasingly dictating the party's agenda, moderate Republicans are getting eaten by their own, and it didn't take long for some of Graham's once loyal supporters to turn on him. The Charleston County Republican Party voted unanimously last month to censure Graham on a litany of complaints. They claimed that South Carolina's senior senator "in the name of bipartisanship continues to weaken the Republican brand and tarnish the ideals of freedom, rule of law, and fiscal conservatism." The group, closely aligned with the Tea Party movement, accused Graham of holding the GOP "hostage" for engaging on global warming and even lambasted him for having "stated on many occasions that his primary concern is to 'be relevant.'" Graham, who won reelection in a landslide last year, isn't worried. "I've never felt threatened by people who say that it's a crime or sin to work with the other side because most Republicans and Democrats understand that for the good of the country you have to do that," he said in an interview just off the Senate floor. Make no mistake, Graham's conservative credentials are rock solid. He has a 90% rating from the American Conservative Union. The only difference is he's willing to look for compromise. "Two senators from opposite parties sat down today and discussed solving a problem," Graham says with a wry shake of his head, "the fact that that's news is sad. That's where we've come as a country. That's why the [approval rating of] Congress is at 25%."

The Rise of Republican Nihilism Does the Republican Party have any ideas? The query may have a familiar ring. Five years ago, the question of substance was demanded incessantly of the Democrats. Indeed, in one of those intellectual fads that periodically sweep through Washington, the political class became obsessed with the notion that conservatives had unambiguously won what everybody was calling “the war of ideas.” In reality, both parties have plenty of ideas that they would like to implement if given the political power to do so. Republicans’ policy ideas primarily involve cutting marginal tax rates and regulations. The question isn’t whether the Republican Party has any ideas. The question is whether the party has any relevant ideas. In the days following the 2008 election, some Republicans predicted that the party would retool itself in response to reality--not just political reality but the actuality of policy challenges. “Republicans,” wrote conservative Ramesh Ponnuru in Time, “will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks.” Nothing like that rethinking has happened or will happen. Whatever the merits of President Obama’s agenda, it is clearly a response to objectively large problems facing the country. By contrast, it is impossible to dismiss the problems Obama has chosen to address. In all three areas, the Republican Party has adopted a stance of total opposition, not merely because it disagrees with aspects of Obama’s solutions, but because it cannot come to grips with the very nature of the problems of modern American politics. Partisan self-interest--an accurate belief that Obama’s legislative failure offers Republicans the most likely road back to power--surely accounts for some of the party’s obstinacy. But at least as powerful is the deepening hold on the GOP of anti-government ideology. Rush Limbaugh, speaking at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, boasted, “Conservatism is what it is and it is forever. It’s not something you can bend and shape and flake and form.” This is true of the general principles, but utterly false of the particulars. The specifics of the reform they oppose have been in constant flux for a century--from child-labor laws to integration to health care reform. The tone of apocalyptic hysteria at the prospect of reform remains constant.

• Women’s Suffrage and Other Visions of Right-Wing Apocalypse

Back Where We Started  America's politics have gone on a wild, full-circle ride over the past decade -- a journey that has left Americans just as divided as they were at the outset, but more cynical than before. For a brief period after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it appeared the decade would turn out quite differently. In the wake of that searing national trauma, political divides were bridged, ideological differences faded, and a sense of genuine bipartisanship took hold. But divisions soon reappeared. By some measures, America's two major parties are now more polarized than ever, and voters harbor deep doubts about government's ability to solve basic problems. "However bad we thought partisan polarization was in the late 1990s," says William Galston, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution, "it's worse now." What seems to have been lost along the way is the ability of the two parties to find ways to compromise -- a result, perhaps, of the disappearance of leaders such as the late Sen. Kennedy, who knew how to make deals. Thus, a historic, $787 billion economic-stimulus package passed early this year with exactly three Republican votes in all of Congress. An equally historic piece of legislation, the health-care overhaul now working through Congress, may well pass with no Republican votes at all. As that picture suggests, when political power is balanced so finely between the two parties, they fight all the harder for every small advantage. That leads them to jockey nonstop, which makes them less inclined to compromise -- and more inclined to punish those within their ranks willing to do so. "Politics 20 years ago was about the art of compromise," says Kenneth Duberstein, White House chief of staff for Republican Ronald Reagan. "Now compromise is a four-letter word because it's all about campaigning." In both parties, the ranks of moderates in the middle have dwindled over the decade. Analyses of congressional voting patterns by Keith Poole, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has found that the two parties are more polarized than anytime since the Civil War. In the Senate, Mr. Poole has found, there now is literally no ideological overlap between the two parties; the most liberal Republican has a more conservative voting pattern than does the most conservative Democrat. Many voters appear to be reacting to the partisan divide by turning away from both parties. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 42% of those surveyed identify themselves as politically independent, up from 34% 10 years ago. Perhaps more telling: As the decade ends, almost one in three say they "almost never" trust the government to do the right thing.

Opposition Strategy 101 Nate is going to be writing a post at some point about the risks facing Republicans for their general tendency toward nay-voting and, in particular, their opposition to healthcare reform. The Democrats have been peddling hard a "Party of No" narrative--I get what seems like an email a day from the Democratic National Committee with some update or twist on this theme--though I have no idea whether this meme about the GOP is resonating or not with the broader public. In any case, I think it is actually wise--as a general rule, and specifically to healthcare--for the GOP to vote against reform. Mind you, this has nothing to do with my opinions about the bill or its significance; I'm speaking here solely about political calculus. To demonstrate my point, consider the opposition party's situation as a simple game with two possibilities for the quality of legislation the majority passes--a generally "popular" bill or a generally "unpopular" one--and two options for how minority party members can vote on those bills, either voting with the majority or against. Presumably, legislators have some notion of how popular the legislation will be, but their information is incomplete.

Attitudes & Opportunities for the Future

'He Just Does What He Thinks Is Right'  Cannon to the left of him, cannon to the right of him, cannon in front of him volley and thunder. That's our president's position on the political battlefield now, taking it from all sides. And the odd thing, the unique thing in terms of modern political history, is that no one really defends him, no one holds high his flag. Wait—it's Christmas. Let's not. There are people who deeply admire the president, who work with him and believe he's doing right. This week, this column is their forum. They speak not for attribution to avoid the charge of suckupism. We start with a note from an accomplished young man who worked with Mr. Obama on the campaign and in the White House. He reminded me this week of a conversation we'd had shortly before the president's inauguration. "I remember you asked me back in January if I loved my guy. And in light of all that's happened in this first year, I still do. Even more so. And I also have a strong sense—based not just on polls but on a lot of folks I've talked to who don't always pay attention to politics—that he DOES have that base of people who still love him too. The president, he suggested, tends toward the long view and the broad view. "Here's what I know about him. He still has this amazing ability to tune out the noise from Washington, read the letters from the people, listen to their concerns, listen to his advisors, hear both sides, absorb all the information, and make the decision that he honestly feels is right for the country." He does this "without worrying too much about the polls, without worrying too much about being a one-term president. He just does what he thinks is right. And that consumes a lot of his time. Most of it, in fact."

Harsh lessons we may need to learn again The best that can be said for 2009 is that it could have been worse, that we pulled back from the precipice on which we seemed to be perched in late 2008, and that 2010 will almost surely be better for most countries around the world. The world has also learned some valuable lessons, though at great cost both to current and future prosperity - costs that were unnecessarily high given that we should already have learned them. The first lesson is that markets are not self-correcting. Indeed, without adequate regulation, they are prone to excess. In 2009, we again saw why Adam Smith's invisible hand often appeared invisible: it is not there. The second important lesson involves understanding why markets often do not work the way they are meant to. There are many reasons for market failures. In this case, too-big-to-fail financial institutions had perverse incentives: The third lesson is that Keynesian policies do work. Countries, like Australia, that implemented large, well-designed stimulus programs early emerged from the crisis faster. The fourth lesson is that there is more to monetary policy than just fighting inflation. Excessive focus on inflation meant that some central banks ignored what was happening to their financial markets. The costs of mild inflation are miniscule compared to the costs imposed on economies when central banks allow asset bubbles to grow unchecked. The fifth lesson is that not all innovation leads to a more efficient and productive economy - let alone a better society. Private incentives matter, and if they are not well aligned with social returns, the result can be excessive risk taking, excessively shortsighted behavior, and distorted innovation. We will soon find out whether we have learned the lessons of this crisis any better than we should have learned the same lessons from previous crises.  Regrettably, unless the United States and other advanced industrial countries make much greater progress on financial-sector reforms in 2010 we may find ourselves faced with another opportunity to learn them.

Special Report: America’s route to recovery Youngstown is an extreme but by no means unique case in America. On a basic level, it represents some of the challenges facing the country today in the wake of the longest and deepest downturn since the 1930s. After two economic expansions based not on sustainable growth but on asset bubbles -- the dotcom boom of the 1990s then the far more damaging housing mania this decade -- longstanding problems have been brought into sharper focus. Even during the recent good times, the U.S. manufacturing sector, the muscle behind U.S. post-war economic might, was buffeted as corporations shipped low-cost production overseas. "The easy, blue-collar shot to the middle class is gone," said Mike Rollins, president of the Austin Chamber of Commerce. "It's going to take a lot more work to get there now." In short, the world's largest economy is at a crossroads. With a smaller manufacturing sector and a consumer base less able to keep leveraging future earnings, where will sustainable, long-term prosperity come from? And more immediately, where will jobs come from? This is a debate that is taking place at the local level around the country, from Youngstown to El Centro, California, and many places in between. But it is also a discussion that few see taking place at the national political level. "Washington just doesn't get it," said Shane Savage, a real estate agent in Pensacola, Florida, smoking a cigarette outside the home of a client who needs to sell fast in a down market. "It's going to take a long time to fix the mess that we're in and our politicians don't have a clue how bad it really is out here."

Keeping America's Edge The United States is in a tough spot. As we dig ourselves out from a serious financial crisis and a deep recession, our very efforts to recover are exacerbating much more fundamental problems that our country has let fester for too long. Beyond our short-term worries, and behind many of today's political debates, lurks the deeper challenge of coming to terms with America's place in the global economic order. Our strategic situation is shaped by three inescapable realities. First is the inherent conflict between the creative destruction involved in free-market capitalism and the innate human propensity to avoid risk and change. Second is ever-increasing international competition. And third is the growing disparity in behavioral norms and social conditions between the upper and lower income strata of American society. These realities combine to form a daunting problem. And the task of resolving it turns out not, by and large, to be a matter of foreign policy. Rather, it compels us to consider how we balance economic dynamism and growth against the unity and stability of our society. After all, we must have continuous, rapid technological and business-model innovation to grow our economy fast enough to avoid losing power to those who do not share America's values — and this innovation requires increasingly deregulated markets and fewer restrictions on behavior. But such deregulation would cause significant displacement and disruption that could seriously undermine America's social cohesion — which is not only essential to a decent and just society, but also to producing the kind of skilled and responsible citizens that free markets ultimately require. Moreover, preserving the integrity of our social fabric by minimizing the divisions that can rend society often requires government policies — to reduce inequality or ensure access to jobs, education, housing, or health care — that can in turn undercut growth and prosperity. Neither innovation nor cohesion can do without the other, but neither, it seems, can avoid undermining the other. Reconciling these competing forces is America's great challenge in the decades ahead, but will be made far more difficult by the growing bifurcation of American society. Of course, this is not a new dilemma: It has actually undergirded most of the key political-economy debates of the past 30 years. But a dysfunctional political dynamic has prevented the nation from addressing it well, and has instead given us the worst of both worlds: a ballooning welfare state that threatens future growth, along with growing socioeconomic disparities.

Big business, big government and the big balancing act If you step back and look at the big economic policy issues-- health care, financial regulation, immigration, education reform, the budget deficit -- they appear to boil down to one fundamental question: What is the best trade-off between fairness, stability and social cohesion on the one hand and disruptive and growth-inducing innovation on the other? At its most simplistic level, this debate plays itself out as the choice between big government and small government, between regulation and deregulation, between European-style socialism and Anglo-American free-market capitalism. Jim Manzi provides a perceptive analysis of these trade-offs in the latest issue of National Affairs, … Like many in the business community, Manzi is concerned that the pendulum is about to swing back too far, that the United States is on the verge of turning itself into France. In truth, those fears are as overblown as they are self-serving, and have less to do with reality than with the abiding disrespect the business community has for the political process. But the debate, it seems to me, needs to go beyond simply determining where the pendulum should come to rest. For equally important is how effective the two sectors are in actually delivering all that social justice and growth-inducing innovation. Americans understand that free markets are the best vehicle for generating innovative products and ever more efficient ways of producing them. But recent experience also reminds that innovation and the competitive dynamic are not always what they are cracked up to be. The question is not simply whether innovation will be "stifled," as the business community likes to suggest, but whether those innovations serve a larger social purpose. At the same time, just because markets have recently failed us does not excuse giving a free pass to those who argue for tougher regulation or bigger government. History is replete with examples of well-intentioned regulation that turned out to be easily evaded or resulted in unintended and unwanted consequences. And too much of what passes for vital public expenditure turns out to be nothing more than special interest rent-seeking and economy-distorting subsidies. "An America that wants to keep its global edge cannot neglect the necessity of innovation and growth, any more than it can ignore the necessity of social cohesion and stability," Manzi writes at the conclusion of his essay. The political challenge for the next decade is not only to strike the proper balance between them but to perfect the public and private institutions that can deliver on those promises.