While reading Steven Teles’s long tome on kludgeocracy in National Affairs, I was reminded of what a Philadelphia congressman once told me in confidence. He told me that he favored the introduction of gambling in Pennsylvania because it is a painless way to raise revenue. The congressman told me this privately, and I was privately appalled. I was appalled because the gambling industry is about the furthest thing from painless for the people who are stripped of their income and savings at the gaming tables and slot machines. I was also appalled that this alleged liberal had lost all will to fight openly for social justice and a progressive tax code.
Mr. Teles coined the term “kludgeocracy” to denote a relatively recent development in public policy-making.
A “kludge” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of an existing system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principle, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes. Any user of Microsoft Windows will immediately grasp the concept.
As conservatives took over the Republican Party and Grover Norquist imposed his pledge on the caucus to never raise taxes, the left was driven into a defensive crouch where the temptation to raise revenues and distribute benefits more surreptitiously than through the income tax code became irresistible.
A byproduct of this is that the benevolent hand of government is hidden from citizens who don’t realize that they’re benefitting from disguised tax breaks, subsidized grants, or aid doled out by private third-party entities. Without direct and transparent options, liberals have settled for helping people afford an education, buy a house, or receive medical attention by the only means possible, and that often means that they get little to no credit for it from the beneficiaries. Instead, people confront complex and often infuriating bureaucracy.
The argument that liberals could benefit from a less complex government is compelling, but it wouldn’t work unless conservatives allowed it to work. Mr. Teles argues that conservatives are changing and perhaps coming to see the privatization of everything as a problem akin to the too-big-to-fail banks on Wall Street. After all, private companies that are completely dependent on government spending for their existence are really only more expensive and less accountable versions of the Federal Government. They also disguise the true size of government in many instances, undermining a core conservative criticism.
Maybe both parties have an interest in simplifying the way government operates, but it won’t happen so long as the Republicans are anti-tax absolutists and the American people still demand services.
For now, that Philadelphia congressman’s risk-avoidant approach to raising revenue will continue to prevail. And we will build more kludges.
And let me say, this is the kind situation when it degenerates into chaos, that induces people to accept a non-democratic strongman.
We’re not there yet, since city governments still usually work, but we’re getting closer every day.
But this is ALREADY what is happening in MI. They passed a law which allows an unelected, unvetted city manager to rule like a dictator, breaking contracts, ending public sector unions, etc. If this is not a dictatorship, what is it?
There’s also the fact that “Everyone Knows” if you simplify stuff that you pair it with reduction in rates. Are we ready to give those deductions which will be put back in?
It’s why I am perfectly willing to get rid of the employer tax deduction for health benefits, but not until ObamaCare has proven its worth. We need lots of liberal programs in place before we should ever agree to remove tax expenditures.
…. I was reminded of what a Philadelphia congressman once told me in confidence. He told me that he favored the introduction of gambling in Pennsylvania because it is a painless way to raise revenue.
Is this Congressman still serving in D.C.?
As conservatives took over the Republican Party and Grover Norquist imposed his pledge on the caucus to never raise taxes, the left was driven into a defensive crouch where the temptation to raise revenues and distribute benefits more surreptitiously than through the income tax code became irresistible.
One doesn’t beget the other unless the Democrats wanted it to be so. Basically, what I’m saying is that Democrats became scared of their own shadow. Why? Is it the legalized corruption of campaign cash? Are they really DINO’s? That’s for you to decide.
First of all, there is no “left” in the United States in any formal sense. Government (if you can call it that) is carried on through an increasingly far-right party with an activist wing that is capable of popular mobilization, and a center-right coalition party that shows neither capability nor interest in mobilizing any broad base of popular support.
Ignoring that for a moment, the phrase “the left was driven into a defensive crouch” exhibits the passive voice run amok. How about “Democratic Party policy makers chose to assume a defensive crouch, from other political options available to them.” At least that formulation leads one to consider why they made the choices they did, whose interests those choices served, and what the other available options were.
Perhaps you should peruse the election results from 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1994. Once you do, you’ll agree that the Democrats were driven into a defensive crouch.
Maybe crappy candidates had something to do with it. Ask yourself why some in the Democratic establishment want Chelsea Clinton’s mother-in-law to run in PA-13. She’s a winger in everything but women’s rights. And that’s just a recent example.
A byproduct of this is that the benevolent hand of government is hidden from citizens who don’t realize that they’re benefiting from disguised tax breaks, subsidized grants, or aid doled out by private third-party entities.
Yes, a thousand times and more, YES.
THIS is what has allowed the reich wing to make such inroads into the working class. Their greatest success was when the working class heard that “47% paid no federal income tax last year) and many of the people in that 47% had no idea that the figure included them.
The epitome of this was that moronic protest sign at an anti-Obamacare rally: “Keep your Government Hands off of my Medicare!” Probably because that person gets Medicare administered by a private party, as most seniors do.
It’s cute, but his new term doesn’t work for me. And thus I couldn’t read far, although I may return to the piece. Also I think Teles is somewhat misdirected with his concern about complex policies. Some policies that are meant to effect 300 million people living in complex societies and complex economies, are going to be complex. I think that the government structures, organizations and rules are such that we are not capable usually of taking on complex problems. The frequent need for creating a kludge to fix one small detail in a large complex system is just a symptom of our sick government institutions.
I think one needs to drill down and look at our sometimes ridiculous political institutions and their many dysfunctional elements. For a take on that I highly recommend this:
Its the Institutions, Stupid!, Why Comprehensive National Health Insurance Fails in America
by Sven Steinmo and Jon Watts
http://stripe.colorado.edu/~steinmo/stupid.htm
What makes it even more interesting is that it was written in the 90s after the failure of the Clinton health plan.
Who was it that said,”Those who love either the Law or sausage should not look too closely into how it is made.”?
John Godfrey Saxe, quoted in University Chronicle. University of Michigan (27 March 1869).
Another attibution is: according to Fred Shapiro, author of the Yale Book of Quotations, the quote is in the Daily Cleveland Herald in its issue of Mar. 29, 1869.
Thank You
It sure seems inspired by the recent spate of articles after the death of Ronald Coase, who introduced the idea of transaction costs within organizations.
This is certainly true:
The lack of public outrage over members of Congress who receive large farm subsidies but voting to end Food Stamps is an example of this sleight-of-hand.
This is an excellent point:
Jesse Helms, “Senator No”, was a master of using his obstruction for NC pork barrel expenditures. He even pulled the same trick to subvert the United Nations.
The other point in this section of Teles’s article is the complexity of the rules of the House and Senate that add to the number of veto points already in the Constitutional separation of powers. That complexity also advantages the longest-term incumbents–folks like the late Senator Robert Byrd.
State governors gelded the “War on Poverty” within two years by having all money for it funneled through the Office of the Governor. Nixon’s signature domestic program was “revenue sharing”. Reagan’s signature domestic program was “block grants”.
Interesting observation in light of what happened with Reagan’s tax cuts and tax simplification legislation that effectively (for a time) put the tax shelter industry out of business.
Not bad, for a political science professor who likely has never seen the day-to-day workings of a government bureau.
Here’s the issue. Kludges as a method of management are endemic in all institutions in the US (maybe in other countries too). It is the result of the push over the last generation for lean, mean, rapidly re-configurable, rapidly changing organizational forms for professional managers to manipulate for fun and personal profit (even government career managers). Virtually everywhere with an organization over 100 people you have highly matrixed organizations, lots of time spent in non-essential activities (various training exercises, coordination meetings, and so on) that give a veneer but not the reality of worker control of their work (and the corresponding exempt employee overtime status). And as a result, the first thing anyone has to do when they get a work task is to figure out who the people are with whom they must coordinate and which positions have different people in them than the last time that task had to be done. And in most cases, because it is coordination, a good number of those people will not be co-located in the office that they are in. And everyone has multiple assignments and during a day is multi-tasking, operating exclusively with asynchronous communication like voicemail and email. And the work results are shoved out the door when they are “good enough”.
There is enough complexity just out of that basic work culture to force continual kludges.
So what does simplification actually mean? Stuff like Medicare for All instead of Obamacare. Restoration of the single public school as the fundamental unit of public education, run by a principal teacher who teaches and with little administrative overhead. Direct funding of county school officials to run the schools in their county and account for the funds. That’s a couple of infrastructure examples.
Here’s an oldie. Bank regulations that set the savings and loan interest rates at a fixed value – the old S&L rates used to be 3% for savings and 6% for loans, no other fees.
The only requirement for a simple tax code is that a ordinary citizen can read the entire code and know how everybody’s taxes work. The complexity of the Eisenhower era tax code was never the rate structure, which had well over a dozen brackets. It was the accounting rules for deductions, especially corporate deductions, especially specialized industry deductions (oil depletion allowance, for example). There’s a lot of potential unemployment of accountants, tax consultants, tax lawyers, and even IRS agents, and so on that would result from that sort of simplicity. But the system would produce more reliable revenue streams.
Then, there is the byzantine national security, foreign affairs, homeland security, and intelligence institutions with their complexity, compartmentalization, oversight offices that don’t do oversight. If we are not in a war, we don’t need that complexity. If we are in a war, we can build the necessary complexity but the urgency will keep it from becoming a runaway situation.
Finally, Bill Clinton’s and Al Gore’s stratagem of using private contractors to maintain government functions hidden from counts of the number of government employees must end. The contracting and subcontracting adds complexity and cost and time delays. It also undercompensates the people who are actually doing the work and overcompensates the folks doing the negotiations.
You’re onto something BooMan in your recounting of the Philadelphia congressman’s risk avoidance. The major factor in having the political will to deal with this are the people involved and the incentives that distract them making government work better.
There are lot of folks so depressed by what they see happening that they are waiting for the whole system to just collapse under its own weight and stupidity so that folks will have to start rebuilding something simpler. We’ve seen before how that sort of transformation occurs; one example was called the European Dark Ages.
And also loses government control substituting private goals (profit) for public goals. This whole thing came about from popular myths that government workers are useless overpaid drones and private companies are always efficient. Actually private companies are always more efficient – in extracting wealth from their clients.
Re the Dark Ages: They came about when the public lost faith in institutions. The replacement was personal oaths of fealty. It’s the opposite of “respect the uniform not the man wearing it”.