OK, let's look at President Obama's first State of the Union speech as compared to my Presidential platform. Let's see how well he did. (I'm not going to comment on the art of the speech itself, except to say it was ordinary.  It had some pretty good lines--I counted about four or five--but a lot of avoidable awkward expression and transitions.  Am I really saying that I could have done a better job writing that speech?  Damn right, I am.)

Let's just go down the list.

No 1:  Baby Bond-National Service Concept.  Well, there was a tantalizing passage about a future Hatch-Kennedy bill on volunteer and service that helps pay for college.  The President gave no details, and I don't know anything more about this.  If it comes even close to being as bold as my idea, I'll be shocked, however. I'd be happy, though, if it does.

No. 2: Banning the financing of public education via property taxes: Not a word, no suggestion the problem is even on his radar screen.

No. 3: Repealing the 17th Amendment: Not a word, and not a word suggesting that our federal system is out of balance. Not a word about the uses of state governments for policy innovation to be scaled up to the national level. 

No. 4: Getting out from under the divisive impact of the culture war issues: Well, he mentioned none of this last night, but he has spoken of it elsewhere, and I think he gets it.  But has he done anything more about it?  No sign yet.

No. 5: Health care: This is one of the three highest priorities, along with energy and education, but it is disappointing in the extreme to hear so few real ideas and so little serious analysis, and to hear about a review conference of shareholders. One would have thought that a top priority would have already been the subject of serious thinking and sharing and planning. What the hell were these people doing during the transition, anyway?  When you get into office and call for a policy review, you totally blow your chance to strike while the iron is hot. Very disappointing, and no hint, yet, of any understanding of what the real sources of the problem are. 

No. 6: Control biotechnology: Not a single word.

No. 7: Getting a grip on TV and electoral reform: Not a word, but it'd be too early to say that our loud in the present context, even if the man had a clue about what to do here.

No. 8: Reform DHS: Not one word.

No. 9: Reform the USPS: not one word, but, of course, so what?....

No. 10: Reform the IRS: just a reference to eliminating tax breaks for companies that export American jobs.  That's nice, depending on whether that masks protectionist inclinations or not. But it's hardly adequate as a statement about what's wrong with the tax code. 

On the other hand, the President did mention getting ride of direct payments to agribusiness (let's see him even try to get away with that), did mention the importance of preventive care in medicine, did mention that education begins at home with parents taking responsibility, and did mention the idea of creating tax-free universal savings accounts for all Americans (which harmonizes, at least, with the Baby Bond-National Service idea). Great stuff, and it was a joy to hear it. So the speech wasn't a complete wash, although most of the good stuff was very vague in the way it was expressed. And a lot of opportunities, as I have suggested, were missed.

As to the overall tone--striking the right balance between expressing concern and being optimistic--I think he did very well. He used the bully pulpit well. It could have been a lot worse. But I could have written such a better speech for him. Oh, well. .....

We are about to have a health care summit, says the President. And the director of OMB, Peter Orszag, says that fiscal responsibility and reform run right through health care.  He's right. 

Now, folks, if you will refer back to an earlier post, part of my presidential platform (the post for February 15, to be specific), you will see what I think this effort has to achieve to be worthwhile. 

As I noted, and as I will repeat now in brief, there are many reasons for the sharp rise in health care costs.  Some are structural, having to do with technology and the vast new range of diagnostics and treatment we did not before have, and with an aging population. But some are contingent, having to do with dysfunctional governance structures of several types. These dysfunctions are nearly all caused by a series of perverse incentives, and most of these exist because a genuinely free market in health care does not exist.  That said, we don't want a fully free market in health care, because that would mean that many people would not be able to get minimally acceptable health services from some combination of fee-for-service and insurance. Not everything in society is or should be exposed to the forces of the market. (This is obvious when one thinks about it, but people rarely think about it. We don't allow child labor and mugging people to steal their organs, do we? We don't sell justice to the highest bidder either, and so on and so forth -- like duh.)

So the problem is how to streamline and free the market to create efficiencies in the areas in which we do want it to work, because it is impossible and very expensive to "command" all dimensions of a healthcare system, and decide those areas in which we don't want the market to dominate decisions and outcomes.  Very hard problem. 

We also need to remember, as I said in my February 15 post, that there is no simple technical fix for the problem, because it is at base about moral choices. We cannot afford, and actually need not afford, to make all medical services available to all people. By definition we need some kind of general triage. And it is the toughest issue of all in any society to determine who gets to make those decisions.

As for me, I will consider a health care reform successful if it does three things, and unsuccessful if it doesn't. 

First, we have to rationalize the distribution of technology and services and eliminate the expensive duplication of effort we see now. To do this we have to identify those regional systems that outperform the average, model them and scale them up to apply to the rest of the country. 

Second, we have to refocus efforts on prevention, and on the most basic aspects of human health: diet, exercise, sleep and mental well-being. This is partly an educational issue, but also partly a function of medical practice and training. We waste an enormous among of resources fixing illnesses that never should have happened in the first place and, of course, we over- and mis-medicate ourselves as a result. 

Third, we have got to separate the insurance pools so that the extraordinary expenditures that go into care for those in the last 12-18 months of their lives (as much as 40% of all costs)--people who we know will never get better and have productive or happy lives anymore--do not make insurance prohibitively expensive for so many others. We can't easily stop people these days from making foolish decisions about such care, what with our secular focus and all these damned lawyers everywhere. But we have to segregate its effects on the rest of the system. 

Of course, we also have to reform the insane HIPPA legislation and do a thousand other things. But these three are the keys. If we are more rationale on a national level about how we use expensive resources, if we get back to basics, and if we control for extreme pressures on the insurance market, we will at least have a chance to get our arms around the problem.  If we don't, we won't.  Mark my words.

Well now that my presidential platform is revealed for all to see, I need to think of other things to discuss. What has happened in the world and in the administration during the time I was waxing presidential?  That ought to provide the grist I need.  Answer: A lot, and nothing. 

By a lot I mean that, for example, our Secretary of State made her first trip, to Asia. It was a bust. And her tenure is so far not impressive. 

What Ms. Clinton seems not to fully appreciate, yet, is that you don't really need to say publicly everything you think. If no one asks you a specific question, it's fine to ask them one, or to just shut up until you've thought things through. (Mr. Holden and his "national of cowards" could probably benefit from the same advice.)  Diplomacy is the orchestration of words and deeds. The State Department is not capable of all that many deeds, so it tends to get imbalanced in favor of words--all the more reason to be very careful about the use of them. Two examples.  

You don't call the prospect of a North Korean long-range missile test "unhelpful." That's like calling a small pox outbreak a kind of a nuisance. You call it what it really is: a very threatening development that requires close consultation between the United States, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. If talk you must, you say it's the test case for the Six-Power Talks: They either prove useful at this critical time, or we need to seek another way of addressing the problem. Even Democrats (Ash Carter and Bill Perry) during the Bush Administration saw this kind of missile test as the crossing of a very dangerous red line, and counseled the use of force. Bush thought that was a little premature. It's no longer premature. Alas, what the SectState said was "unhelpful."

You also don't drop the fourth D. You don't say that "smart power" (I cringe whenever I have to type it) is defense, diplomacy, and development. You say it's defense, diplomacy, development and democracy promotion, because if you don't--and if you say that human rights abuses in China must not get in the way of practical cooperation--you are giving the Chinese government a free pass to do whatever they want with impunity. 

Everyone already knows that human rights are not always trump in Sino-American relations, and they shouldn't be. I also stand second to none in opposing the Bush Administration's so-called freedom agenda. I am lavishly in print with criticism, and I did what little I could while in government to limit the damage this completely reality-free, faith-based idea could cause. But there are smart, patient and constructive ways to promote liberal institutions, and there are careless, hasty and counterproductive ways. Accidentally getting a mouthful of sour milk doesn't or shouldn't make a person swear off milk for all time, right? Same here: Just because the Bushies did it wrong doesn't mean you banish the goal from your vocabulary. That's just giving the other side an undeserved gift. If she expects one back from Beijing, she is going tobe sorely disappointed.

There are other examples, too. Where was the boss when Richard Holbrooke and Richard Boucher engaged in a shouting match in front of their staffs as to whom officials should report to? Reported in the Nelson Report and elsewhere, this argument was typical in a set-up, as we have described here before, where it's not clear who is in charge.  Tony Zinni understands the problem...... The Bush Administration was notoriously inept at establishing unity of command in complex political warfare. It was one of its major failings, and cost lots of lives, not to be able to integrate what government types call the kinetic and non-kinetic aspects of a policy. Looks like the Obama Administration, so far anyway, is even worse. But let's wait until the President notices the problem and tries to fix it.  Maybe he will. George Bush never really did.

(By the way, I asked Richard Boucher, whom I know reasonably well, in an email to his private email address (no, you can't have it so don't ask) what really happened. He has not answered, diplomat that he is..... But he will, face-to-face with no paper or electron trail. Later.)

It has also been entertaining watching the afterspin from the stimulus bill. There are actually four possibilities ahead of us, not just two. 

First is that, as the administration hopes, the economy will rebound and the stimulus bill will be shown to have helped a lot, or spun to make a lot of people believe that. A lot rides on it politically looking to the 2010 mid-term elections.

Second, the economy may rebound naturally, and the stimulus program will have had nothing to do with it. In this regard, today's Washington Post lead really arrested my attention: "Government Gets Chance to Prove It Can Work." That's a capital I on It. 

Well, that's right. And here's a prediction based on both theory and experience.  Government will work if by "work" you mean spending money on things government organizations already know how to do. There are sharp limits to how much new money government can spent efficiently, however, and diminishing returns on investment will set in soon.  But if the Administration is asking government to "work" by doing things it has not done before, government will not work--not soon, not cost-effectively and probably not at all. 

Here's why: Our government is a beautiful late-19th-century-style hierarchy; we've perfected it, finally. Alas, the world has pulled the reality-rug out from under its feet. The world is a networked, distributed system that operates much faster that the U.S. government can cope with. We have, in short, a design problem. So if government is expected to work like a vending machine--put in money, pull handle, out comes service--it will work wherever government standard operating procedures are aligned with reality. Where it is not aligned, it won't work absent a new redesign effort. Those parts of the stimulus meant to be transformational (few though they are, regrettably) will therefore probably not work. 

And one final comment here on possibility number 2: The closer the money is spent to the problems it is trying to solve--namely, on the state and local levels--the more likely it won't be wasted, all else equal. State and local government is outrageously inefficient in many cases, true; but it is still more likely to align with reality, according to the unbreakable, unshakable rules of metis and subsidiarity (see earlier blogs, or a dictionary), than spending from Washington that would presume to reach long-distances into local communities. "I'm from Washington and I'm here to help you" really is one of the funniest lines in American politics.

Third, perhaps the economy won't rebound quickly or much at all, and may continue to sink into 2010 and beyond, and the stimulus will be irrelevant to this because the mass psychology abroad in the land will have trumped the psychological power of the stimulus. This will be true if my hunch that this is not a ordinary business cycle is correct (see Feb. 10 post). It will be even truer if Tim Geithner looks to be the empty suit he appears to be. Bank on it.

And fourth, maybe the economy won't rebound quickly or at all and the stimulus package, because of the new debt it piles on top of the old debt, will make everything worse by stimulating massive inflation and an even worse credit crunch. 

Mindful of this possibility, the President has promised to cut the deficit by scrutinizing the Federal Budget he will soon present to Congress. Obama is a budget hawk, and good for him--at least that is his instinct, and it is sound. But Ronald Reagan was too, and the best he could do was slow the growth of government, a fact obscured by the other fact that as the economy grew (in all the wrong ways) after 1982 government share of GDP dropped.  But the point is that government still got larger, Reagan notwithstanding, and Reagan had a bunch of small government Republicans in Washington to help him. Wait until Obama gets a load of how Congressional Democrats will oppose most of the budget excisions he will want to make. Until he really attacks the K Street mafia and the transactional culture, he will not be able to really shrink the pork and the others kinds of fat out of the budget. Until he attacks the middle class entitlements, which does not fall under discretionary spending and which he cannot touch, he will not get at the guts of the problem. 

Moreover, this budget, though the Obama Administration will present it, is not really its budget. The budget process for any fiscal year is three years long, at the least. It is a bear, a huge effort. The budget the President introduces a year from now will be the first that will even possibly really bear his stamp. He has got to know this, right? He has got to know that he cannot go line by line through the Federal Budget and make much of a dent after only a few weeks in office. Right? Well, you at least should know it, so don't expect too much when the budget proposal is introduced.

Which of these four possibilities is most likely?  I'm guessing possibility 4, sad to say. 

As for what hasn't happened, well, a lot of nominations. But that's enough for now.

Now for the tenth and final plank of my presidential platform (after which a few more semi-random comments, as often, if not always):

No 10. The IRS has to go.

I am not qualified to judge whether a flat tax is wise or practical, or a consumption or VAT tax. I’ve never studied the matter in earnest. But I do know that, even well short of any revolutionary change to the way the Federal government funds itself, I have roughly the same problem with the IRS code that I have with the USPS manual: It is excessively, bizarrely and unnecessarily complicated. 

As with the USPS, Medicare and so on, these complications add vast transactional costs to the system, slow everything down (which imposes other very real costs), and increase the rate of error.

If there were a compelling reason—concerning fairness, say, as in education issues—for such complexity that would be one thing. But there isn’t; again, quite the reverse. The complexity of the system advantages those who can afford to hire expensive lawyers, lobbyists and accountants to navigate and exploit it, and that, invariably, is corporate in nature either directly or indirectly: It’s either the company or the high-placed corporate employee who can afford it. This is not fair.

So flat tax or no flat tax, Congress needs to cut the present IRS code by at least 90 percent in length. I am not entirely content to leave exactly how to do this to experts, but I can't do it myself. If it cannot be done, then we need to abolish the IRS as it now exists, and as Sen. Richard Lugar once proposed, and just start over. 

If a normal, typical American citizen cannot do his or her taxes in a few hours without the aid of a lawyer or an accountant, something is seriously wrong. A recent poll revealed that most Americans would rather go to the dentist than do their taxes. O holy cow (as Phil Rizzuto used to say)!

Worse, the $200-$300 that even average-income families have to pay to get their taxes done amounts to another kind of tax, a tax collected not by government but by businesses that have manipulated the government for their own private benefit. This is an outrage, and if I could swing it I’d start a national tax revolt—basically an ultimatum to Congress: Fix this mess within one year or something like fifty million Americans will refuse to file their taxes next April 15. Think you can arrest fifty million Americans? We dare you to try.

Some of my ten ideas are compatible with a “small is beautiful”, “government is the problem” ideological perspective. But others demand that government, including the Federal government, do more, not less. This may seem contradictory to small or rigid minds, but it isn't contradictory at all. I am a liberal of a certain kind, but one with a conservative temperament. 

I am a lot like, I think, William Allen White who, I suppose, might have influenced me many years back.  (Don't know who he was?  Pity....) I am the sort of liberal, now evidently obsolete, who thinks that government's role is to insure a level playing field and maximum feasible democratic participation at the governmental level and about the issues where it matters most. I am not for government "getting out of the way" but I am also not for government "getting in the way", as when government doesn't level the playing field but occupies, dominates and smothers it with social engineering schemes that can never work as intended. As explained several posts ago, the original 19th century liberalism tilted to the former impulse, postwar American liberalism toward the latter. I like the more balanced kind in between the extremes championed by the first Roosevelt more than  the second, the balanced liberalism whose goals need to be approached carefully, i.e., with a conservative temperament. 

William Allen White was a Republican (after all, he was from Kansas) and a liberal, as I have just defined it. He admired small town America and small town values and virtues. He feared gigantism, but had nothing against the efficient mass production of basic goods. It raised living standards and put a dent in real poverty. What he would have thought of putting the country's finances in hock in order to buy tons of crap from China I think I can guess.

Alas, our troubles are too many and too complex to be approached with a simpleminded ideological fixation. We need to really think about our circumstances, not substitute labels for thought instead. I don’t worry about others not being about to understand that my ideas are in fact ideologically consistent. Besides, I myself worry about them being effective in solving real problems more than I worry about consistency. That's too much a luxury when there's work to be done.

So, dear non-existent reader, if we institute a Baby Bond program of national service, ban property tax-based public education, repeal the 17th amendment, devolve controversial moral questions and health care issues to the state level, get a better grip on biotechnology and the distorting effects of television on our political process, redesign DHS, and put both the USPS and IRS out their Kafkaesque miseries, we will have really accomplished something in my first presidential term. (And I have lots more good ideas for my second term.) Think that's impossible to do in one term? Maybe,  but go back and look at what TR accomplished between re-election in 1904 and the end of 1908. You'll be startled if the past quarter century is all you have to go on as precedent.

“Is that all?”, you ask? No, of course not. We have to rationalize immigration policy, as President Bush tried but failed to do. Our drug laws are stupid and counterproductive. The way we deal with student loans is somewhere between shady and imbecilic. Obviously, our financial system has evolved in ways that have outrun minimal regulatory frameworks, and we need to fix that. As suggested already, our agricultural subsidies are a deeply destructive rip-off that, among other things, contributes to an increasingly dangerous food safety problem. But most intelligent people know all this already.

We could, by the way, stimulate a productivity explosion and reduce workplace accidents if we’d institute a national afternoon naptime, like other civilized societies have done in history (I’m serious). We could get an even larger productivity boost if we could ban per-hour pay for services (from your plumber, your electrician, your carpenter, your gardener, your ratty lawyer, too) and pay for everything on a by-the-job basis. (Think about that one for a moment in terms of incentive structures, and you’ll see what I mean.)

But I’m realistic. Instituting a Baby Bond-National Service Program would be simple compared to tearing agribusiness parasites away from the public teat. Elect me President, and I’ll do it. I promise. Hey, I didn't do so well in the 2008 election, but there's 2012 just ahead. Harold Stassen's got nothing on me. (Never head of him either?!)

The ninth plank of my presidential platform is about the USPS, which I already wrote about at some length back on February 9. But I'll repeat the plank here just to keep things in order. If you think you already understand my view, you can skip to the bottom for other diffuse remarks--except for one comment that needs to come now.

Since I wrote what is posted below, and after I wrote my February 9 comment here, the USPS announced that first class rates would rise to 44 cents in May. The reason given: increased costs of operation. No one, as far as I have heard, raised a word in question. 

But folks, this is bizarre. Increased costs?  How?  What?  Everyone with a brain is worried about deflation, the signs of which are everywhere. Even the USPS' fuel costs, despite the spike in prices last summer, look to be lower than usual for the year past and for the year ahead. What increased costs?  If the USPS is suffering increased costs, despite the oversight of the Postal Regulatory Commission established in 1996, then it's because they have to be the worst managers in the country. 

No. 9: Repair the USPS.

The USPS, our postal service, is a disaster. For many years now, the cost of service for ordinary citizens like me has been rising way faster than inflation while the quality of service has diminished. Somehow, the more labor-saving technology the USPS introduces, the more expensive its service becomes. There is no other sector of the American economy where this is true, so why should it be true in the post office?

One reason is that efficient service for the public isn’t anymore the system’s main purpose. Rather, the USPS has become a vehicle for a corporate subsidy. Businesses get highly preferential rates for advertising through the postal system. We are told that the revenue from advertisers makes a profit for the post office, but this is true only in a surrealistically narrow sense. If you add in the transactional costs made necessary by an almost unbelievably complex rate system, and add the fact that most of the advertising is also tax-deductible for corporations, the numbers start to look very different. On the USPS’ two-column accounting system the advertising ink may be black, but the rest of us are knee deep in red fleece.

Our postal regulations are so complex that they make the Social Security and Medicare systems look simple, and that isn’t easy to do. The people who make up the rules, too, seem to be …how to say this nicely?…..complete idiots. It now costs 42 cents to mail a 1st-class envelope, as long as it weighs one ounce or less. For an additional ounce, you need another 17 cents—that being a reduction from before, when each additional ounce cost 24 cents. (Don’t ask why; no one knows.) But when you get to 3.5 ounces—not 3 and not 4, but for some woolly reason 3.5 ounces—the whole rate system changes and now you must refer to the “large envelope table.”

Ah, but this is where the problem begins. There is one rate table for packages heavier than 3.5 ounces that are bendable, or have no "stiffening matter", and a different, higher rate table for those that do have stiffening. Since what is and is not a “stiff” package is not entirely obvious, you can take the same package to two different postal clerks and get two different answers as to what it costs to mail it. The bozos who thought this up, and the lesser clowns who allowed this to go forward, should be taken out and shot—at least with pellet guns. Since Ben Franklin founded the U.S. Postal Service, and since his face appeared on the first U.S. stamp in 1847, no one has ever done anything quite as moronic as this.

Not that the imbecility of the USPS is really as pressing a national problem as the others I have discussed, but sometimes a thing is just so ugly you can’t stand it. And the USPS mess is symptomatic of system wide problems, namely the lack of attention to organizational design as a part of management and the ubiquitous role of Congress (with its unlimited appetite for feeding special interests who in turn feed their campaign coffers) in screwing things up.

In any event, here is what needs to be done. 

First, the President should direct that Congress hire a competent and above all independent auditor to analyze the USPS and recommend management changes. The Postal Workers Union should not be allowed to prevent this overhaul; it is one of the main reasons for the wild inefficiency of the USPS, because it has become almost impossible to fire a derelict employee, no matter what the reason. (I have nothing against trade unions, quite the contrary. But I do have something against public sector featherbedding at citizens’ expense.)

Second, the rate structure needs to be radically simplified. There should be just one rate scale for 1st-class mail, one for advertising, and one for parcel post. That’s it, with equally simply structures for international mail. No zip+4, no bulk rates, no machinable discounts—forget it. We just have to average income and costs over a range of functions as we always used to do, enabling a much simpler, cheaper and faster system with the same overall revenue balance. That would get rid of the thousands upon thousands of USPS middle managers taking up acres and acres of expensive office space whose completely pointless jobs are devoted to servicing the ornate corporate rip-off the USPS has become.

Obviously, this will make advertising by mail more expensive for businesses than it is now, so there will predictably be less of it. Good: Who needs all that crap anyway? Everyone knows that if you tax something you get less of it, and if you subsidize something you get more of it. We should not be subsidizing a function as non-productive as advertising; if anything, we should be subsidizing the exchange of goods via the mail among individuals and businesses, and between individuals and businesses. We can make individual/individual, business/business and individual/business exchanges cheaper, which plainly helps the economy. I can't think of a responsible business that wouldn't trade a significant reduction in its shipping costs for a hike in its advertising budget. In short: Advertising revenue should support basic services; basic services revenue should not support advertising, as it does today.

The postal manual for domestic and international mail, now hundreds of pages long and heavy enough to induce a hernia, must be made to fit into no more than 18 pages. It used to, so there is no good reason why it cannot do so again. This simplification of the rate structure will save huge amounts of money: after all, gratuitous complexity is very expensive.

Third, at the same time, the rate structures need to be modernized. It’s dumb to divide the postal rate structure into discrete ounces below a pound. It used to be that the cost of delivering a package was a function mainly of its weight, but that hasn’t been true for years: The variable that matters most now isn’t weight but how many hands or pieces of machinery have to handle a package from starting point to end point. It does not cost significantly more, or less, to deliver a 4-ounce envelope than it does to deliver a 7-ounce envelope, so there is no justification for charging different rates for them. A dramatically simplified and modernized rate structure will speed up service and further reduce costs. We are fools to have tolerated the bizarre complexification of what is, in essence, a simple and straightforward government function.

Fourth, just for fun, the USPS should introduce a special 2-cent red, white and blue stamp called a “My Two Cents” stamp. This stamp would be used exclusively for citizens to write to their elected federal, state and local officials, at the specially discounted rate of 2 cents per ounce. There’s a subsidy we can really use.

And now for number 8:

No. 8: Redesign the Department of Homeland Security

The creation of DHS was not a mistake by way of concept, but it has been a huge mistake by way of design. As it now exists, DHS cannot make America safer; it can only make us more vulnerable. It is a clear and present danger to us all.

The original proposal for a Department of Homeland Security—developed before 9/11, by the way, by the Hart-Rudman Commission on whose staff I served for more than two years—recognized the need for some coordinating mechanism for domestic security comparable to the National Security Council for American national security policy in the wider world. We had our three main border security agencies—the Border Patrol, the Customs Service and the Coast Guard—in three different Executive departments (Justice, Treasury and Transportation). This made absolutely no sense. Also, the INS was an internal contradiction: half of its job was keeping certain people out of the country, and the other half of its job was letting certain people in. You don’t have to be a management professional to see how stupid this was.  

The original DHS proposal was to amalgamate these three relatively small agencies into one new Executive Department, and bring FEMA in, as well, to serve as its organizational framework. FEMA always had a small Washington footprint, with most of its assets pushed out in its ten regional centers, close to where problems and their first-responders were. The idea was to create a DHS that, like FEMA, had a small Washington presence and that pushed resources and responsibilities out to the regions. This was subsidiarity and common sense at work.

There was no good reason to make DHS more centralized than that, anymore than, on the foreign policy side, the NSC needs to swallow the Defense and State Departments and the intelligence community. There would be an EOP (Executive Office of the President) office for domestic security comparable to the NSC, and the new Executive department, DHS, could be comparable in size to, say, the Department of Education, or maybe even smaller.

That’s not what happened. There is an EOP office for homeland security, but DHS as it exists today is a bureaucratic monstrosity, a slow and ponderous behemoth that has not one hope in a million of operating within the decision cycle of terrorist adversaries who want to strike us in our homeland. It has swallowed other agencies whole, and buried them beneath multiple layers of bureaucracy. 

Even so, DHS does not control more than 25 percent of what the government spends on homeland security. It is a textbook case of how not to align strategy, resources and operational capacity. DHS is also understaffed for its size, which shows you what happens when people who don't really believe in government design a new department or agency. This has led it to depend overwhelmingly on contractors, but its staff is even too small to manage that right.  What a mess.

DHS today is not reformable anymore than it is manageable. It needs to be ripped apart, and reconfigured according to the original design. As it stands, DHS is more a liability to our security than it is an asset.

OK here's number seven, followed by an afterword -- after it, of course, or else it would be a foreword....

No. 7: Control the destructive effects of television advertising on national politics.

All professional politicians in the United States know about the invisible 800-pound gorilla over in the corner: It’s called television. The way to win statewide and national office these days is to buy more and better TV advertising than your opponents. To do that, you have to raise really huge amounts of money to buy air time and hire the professionals who make the ads. To do that, you’ve got to devote an inordinate amount of time and staff to fund-raising that would be better spent talking and listening to voters, and to thinking about and planning how to actually govern if elected.

 
Worse, having to raise all that money raises troubling questions about corruption. There are only so many places a candidate can get huge sums of money, and all those places have vested interests in the outcomes of important policy debates. Money usually buys access to politicians, not actual decisions; those who hold otherwise are more cynical than realistic. Still, the system isn’t healthy, and it’s getting worse. It’s not a good thing when industries that contribute to political campaigns get to have their staff people essentially draft legislation pertaining to their own industry. And the campaign finance reform we’ve had in recent years, almost everyone agrees, has made things worse, not better.

There is actually an easy way to alleviate, if not solve, this problem—though it is, admittedly, politically difficult to achieve. It has two interconnected parts.

The first part is to have the Federal Communications Commission auction off rather than give away all broadcasting and bandwidth resources, not just some of them as is now the case. The companies that acquire broadcasting licenses are not exactly pauperized; they can well afford to pay for this relatively scarce resource—and that’s exactly what broadcasting bandwidth is. The money earned from these auctions and license renewals could then be used to subsidize political campaigns and help educate voters, just as happens in lots of other democratic countries.

The only way this works out fairly is if the time for active campaigning is constrained—this is the second part. Almost every other Western electoral democracy does this. There is nothing anti-democratic about it. It does limit free speech in some theoretical way, but the way things work now, with money dominating the process so completely, limits free speech for lots of candidates in a very real, not just theoretical, way. So the FCC should require all of its clients to allow a certain minimum of air-time during constrained official campaign seasons for all candidates who qualify to get on the ballot.

This is not a panacea. Candidates with lots of money could still buy more advertising during the campaign period, but those without a lot of money would be guaranteed a minimum of exposure to explain their proposals and views. We shouldn’t try to sterilize the advantages of money in politics, which is impossible anyway; but we shouldn’t want money to trump absolutely everything all the time, either.

So, sell the licenses to subvent free and fair political debate, and limit campaign seasons to curtail costs. This is a much simpler solution than those trying to limit and measure political contributions, whether of “soft money” or “hard money” and so on and so forth. Most such proposals, as with McCain-Feingold, are inherently too complex to be workable, because there are a zillion lawyers eager to make billions of dollars finding millions of ways around them. Proposals for a voluntary public funding system make a certain amount of sense, but the fact that they have to be voluntary to be constitutional limits their utility.

Besides, if the core problem is television—and it is—then the best solution is a direct one aimed at putting some boundaries around television’s functions in political campaigning. You can’t affect the position of a shadow by doing things to the shadow; likewise, we can’t do much about the shadow cast by television’s power. We have to get at the source.

And now the afterword, which connects my mention of David Korten the other day with David Brooks' column today with the fact the someone in Oregon just bought my old copy of Kirkpatrick Sales' book Human Scale, published back in 1980. And connected, too, to what I wrote on February 10 about cycles and bicycles. If I look just behind me I see a row of about 20 books I bought and read in the 1970s and early 1980s about ecology as a public policy paradigm. A lot of these books, including Human Scale, were a little flaky and impractical. Most of them, actually.  But, you know, looking back, they had the big idea right. It's taken more than 30 years for the reality of it to finally ooze through the the more mainstream among us. But I think it's actually happening. Maybe. And what is so sweet about it is that the recognition of what's gone wrong does not look any more conventionally liberal than it looks conventionally conservative. That old language, as I have said, is virtually obsolete. Maybe I'll re-read some of that old 1970s stuff--before it's all been sold away on Amazon!