Have you ever noticed that our country hasn't got a single written credible long-term plan for dealing with any of the biggest issues facing our nation today?
Today, there are no written long-term plans for reducing unemployment and growing our economy, stopping global warming, controlling health care costs, or fixing education. They are simply nowhere to be found. Not from Democrats. Not from Republicans.
In fact, there aren't even any committees of credible experts appointed by the President to create any of these plans.
Is this any way to run a country?
If the US were a business, no venture capitalist would fund us. We have no plan for growth, no credible plan for achieving profitability, and no credible plan for paying our debts.
If the US government walked into a bank asking for a loan, we'd be laughed out of the building. We are currently over $14 trillion dollars in debt and every day we spend $4 billion dollars more than we make. We don't even have a credible story for how we are going to change that. We don't have any story at all. Would you loan us money?
While I'm not suggesting that we should start running our country like a business, some basic principles like vision, long-term goals, strategic plans, and financial responsibility apply to both governments and business.
Wouldn't it be great if at the State of the Union speech, Obama announced that he would adopt the very successful planning methodology that President Kennedy and Johnson used for solving the nation's biggest problems? Not only did that planning methodology lead to the most successful legislative agenda in US history (a 96% passage rate), but the policies themselves also worked astonishingly well in achieving their objectives. Many are still being used today.
There is nothing keeping Obama from doing this. It isn't hard to do. No special interest can prevent it from being done. There are no excuses for not even attempting to create credible plans. All Obama has to do is make a decision to do it and then nothing can stop it from happening. But with the exception of Secretary Vilsack, nobody on Obama's team seems to have any interest in copying the successful long-term strategic planning strategies of previous Presidents. They seem quite content and happy doing the same old methods over and over and expecting a different result than they got in 2010.
For example, if Obama wanted to create a credible long-term comprehensive plan to solve global warming, he could pick up the phone, call Jim Hansen, and say, "Jim, global warming is a big issue and I know you are the leading world expert on this issue. I'd like you to select a committee of nine people you think would do the best job of coming up with a long term plan for dealing with this issue worldwide, and have them write a plan for me that is on my desk in 90 days? I'll then ask a dozen independent experts if the plan is credible, and if a bunch of of them tell me it is, I'll give it to another committee to strategize how to get it passed in Congress and implemented. It will be tough to do to get it passed with all the special interests that will be against it, but I'm going to give it everything I got. After all, that's what they elected me to do."
How hard is that? It's been done before by US Presidents. Successfully. That same approach created the most successful legislative agenda in US history.
What does a long-term plan look like? It is not a piece of legislation. It is not a policy or a set of policies. A long-term plan is a document that describes clear, measurable goals, and lays out the particular strategies that will be used to achieve those goals. The plan has major milestones, key strategic bets, a budget, a discussion of the risk factors, and how those risk factors will be mitigated. It describes what laws are required and what incentive policies need to be put in place so that everything works together to achieve the goals. There is a discussion of alternative paths and why the path chosen in the plan is preferred.
There are lots of excuses for inaction. Some people think you can't do this in a Democracy or that we have to change the political system to do it. Yet we know that isn't true since other US Presidents did it not that long ago.
A couple of people assured me that Obama must surely have such plans, but for strategic reasons he isn't telling anyone. That's wishful thinking. The reality is that some senior staff people inside the White House are as frustrated as I am about the lack of long-term strategic plans. People who have been in secret meetings with the Vice President also tell me there is no long-term strategy. Johnson's long-term strategic plans were all public. Not a single one needed to be secret. Finally, even if there were secret plans, you really can't keep any of them secret for very long if you plan on changing anything or win elections. They either have to be translated into an Executive Order or passed by Congress. If Obama expects to change anything during his term in office, if there were any plans, we'd have known by now.
Others say that there are no "truly independent experts to validate the plan." But the point of the experts is just to validate that the plans are credible. Universal agreement among experts is not required (and rare to achieve on anything). Agreement on which experts should be used to validate the plans isn't required either. There just needs to be credible validation by a reasonable number of credible experts. This sort of thing is done all the time in the scientific community where is known as "peer review." The point is that if you have a plan and ask 100 experts what they think and 99 experts say it is credible, and 1 does not, that is simply more likely to be a better plan than one in which 99 out of 100 experts say it is unworkable. We don't need the best possible plans. We just need solid plans that can work.
One person told me that you can't make any plans at all because the media and the opposition pounce on any idea for change and pick it apart. So for example, suppose Obama had a plan to reduce health care costs or a plan to make us energy independent so we don't have to send billions of dollars overseas buying foreign oil. I'm having a tough time imaging how people would be protesting against such plans. I'm sure some will. Nobody said it would be easy. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get it done or that it is impossible to do.
Some people think that Obama can't create these plans because they think he is "controlled" or "in bed" with the special interests or corporations. As far as I know, very few, if any, special interests benefit from a lousy US economy. No large US corporation I know makes more money when the US economy tanks. I've never heard of any US CEO wish for lower US sales next quarter. When the US economy tanked in 2008, the earnings of the S&P 500 went negative in Q4; the first time this has ever happened. Every company I know of wants lower health care costs. So the "special interests" are not aligned to prevent our moving forward on creating plans that help our economy. They should all welcome such plans and push their lobbyists to get them passed in Congress.
To me, the lack of any independently validated written long-term plans for dealing with our top issues is the single biggest issue facing America today.
If the President and Democrats don't want to have long term plans for solving our biggest problems, what is keeping the Republicans from creating them? Republicans don't have any plans either that can be validated by independent third party subject matter experts. Their plans are equally lame. For example, the Republican health care plan is to repeal Obama's plan entirely. That's not a plan. That's stupid. As far as I know, there aren't any credible independent health care experts who say that the most important thing we can do right now to improve health care in the US is to completely repeal every single provision in the health care reform we just passed.
Most voters I've talked to see the problem clearly. Secretary Vilsack sees it clearly (not surprising since he was also outstanding for demanding solid goals and business plans for each department when he was governor of Iowa). But most other politicians I know don't see the problem at all.
My brother is a staunch Republican. I asked him recently, "If Obama had credible long term plans for dealing with our top issues that were validated by independent experts, would you vote for him in 2012?" His response was instant and emphatic, "Absolutely!"
Some people say that Obama has written plans for our top issues posted on his website.
I disagree. Here's what that site says about climate change: "We will invest in energy efficiency and conservatiÂon, two sure-fire ways to decrease deadly pollution and drive down demand. And we will hold special interests accountablÂe as we finally work to address climate change and its potentiallÂy catastrophÂic effects." That's it.
That is not a plan for how we stay under 350ppm to avoid a climate disaster. Those are at best a few tactics that only work domestically and will have marginal impact even at that.
A real plan for climate change would say what the maximum allowable ppm goal is, set specific prices on carbon over the next 10 years (at least), and tell us specifically what the rebate to consumers is (will it be 100%? 0%? 50%?). It would talk about specific dollars we'd invest in each major carbon free power technology and when we'd make those investments. It would set goals for how many nuclear plants would be built in the US the next 10 years (10? 100? 1000?). It would lay out specific incentives for that to happen. It would have a credible strategy for getting the rest of the world to reduce their carbon emissions. For example, if we make massive investments in lowering the cost of nuclear to make it cheaper than coal and then help finance conversionÂs of coal plants to carbon free nuclear plants worldwide, that is probably better than praying that other countries will implement carbon taxes or fee-and-dividend or cap-and-trade. It would talk about investing in fast nuclear and pyroprocesÂsing and set specific aggressive target dates for operation and feasibilitÂy demonstratÂions for those technologies. It would talk about how we use fast reactors to completely get rid of all of the long term nuclear waste. You may not agree with me about nuclear, and you may not like my plan (and that certainly wasn't a complete plan which would be too large to fit here), but that isn't the point. That was just an example of some of the things a real plan might contain. Any credible long-term strategic plan would have things like I just mentioned in it: a comprehensive set of specific goals, key strategic bets, milestones, overall strategies, specific incentives, investment dollars, etc. which all work together and have a reasonable chance of hitting the overall goal and a way to measure whether you've achieved the goal. That would be a plan. Hoping that all of these things happen on their own or that global warming suddenly "goes away" is foolhardy. Hoping that some magic new technology is invented that saves the day is risky and irresponsible. We have the technology to address this problem now. We know what public policy to use (fee and rebate). The public policy is even politically popular in other countries. What we lack is political leadership to get it done here.
I find it amazing that both parties expect people to go to the polls and be energized about voting for people who have no credible plans for fixing the most important problems facing our nation today. The only reason the Tea Party got any traction in 2010 is because of a complete lack of a legislative agenda from either party that people could believe in and get excited about that had a realistic chance of solving our top problems.
Obama has very little time left to change that. He has my permission to start now.
UPDATE: 1/21/11 Obama appointed Jeff Immelt to head a his new President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. That's a good start.
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Cheers and Happy 2011
The process I described is not naive at all. It was the same process that produced the most successful legislative agenda in US history. How is that naive?
Government agencies are the agents of public policy. Â National public policy is our 'strategic plan' of record and it is forged via public debate and the existing legislative process using elected representatives, including our Chief Executive / CEO. Â Elected representatives are tasked with making the best decision possible to serve the common good of their constituencies, using the best possible information and intelligence.
The President has access to more experts, more information sources, more decision scenario simulations than any human on earth could process for any given issue. Â Of course detailed written 'plans' exist at the Presidential level ... however some details may be classified or otherwise not suitable for general public consumption. Â Think insider trading or worse. Â But the public policy aka 'strategic plan' is in fact publicly available ... either as proposed platforms, bills or the various de facto operating plans and appropriations of the governmental agencies tasked with the fulfillment of the 'strategic plan'. Â It's not available in its entirety to the general public as an investor summary slide deck or 'investor book' business plan financials because it can't be, without potentially causing harm or unfair advantage. (continued ...)
And the last time I checked, the good ole U.S.A. had plenty of 'investors' ... not VCs but International Bankers who've invested hugely in our debt. Â For better or worse. Â And you can be certain this also influences the 'strategic plan' aka public policy by closely observing how the US fairs in the various international economic summits like G8, G20, etc.
Please give our CEO, the President, and his team a break. Â The world situation is far more complicated than could ever be imagined during the 'Great Society' era, nostalgia notwithstanding. Having a detailed, comprehensive interrelated and coordinated strategic plan and being able to share same with voters is not the same thing.
Please understand that our government does not operate as (mis)portrayed by the media, both mainstream and fringe. Â Public disclosures and private details must be handled with great care to avoid 'Wikileaks' types of problems. And just because you can't get access to a detailed written plan with expert recommendations, that doesn't mean it does not already exist in some form. Â To assume otherwise would be naive. :-) Fin
Following the Nebraska model (unicameral and nonpartisan) seems like a very interesting idea.
Is there compelling evidence that Nebraska has fared better than other states due to their being unicameral and nonpartisan?
It certainly should brighten your day, as it did mine.
I think Obama is just acting like most people who get elected.... everything is a short term focus, and any vision, long term planning, and really listening to good ideas from regular people goes out the window once you get elected.
There are a few notable exceptions to this. Congressman John Garamendi comes to the top of my list.
1. Enact Fair Elections Now Act
2. FCC mandate that all political advertising is a public service and therefore free
3. Permanently ban anyone who has served in federal office from becoming a lobbyist
4. Break up the big banks
5. End ALL wars and lower the bloated defense budget
6. Enact The Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplification Act of 2010 – (Eliminate $1 trillion in tax givaways. Change the top tax bracket to 70% to help pay down deficit)
7. Reduce health care costs by adding the public option. Allow Medicare to purchase drugs. Allow drug re-importation.
8. Climate Change Legislation – put a heavy price on carbon to encourage alternative energy investments
9. National Infrastructure Bank – Run by engineers, not politicians. Find $2 trillion over 10 years to create jobs now and increase productivity later. Put millions back to work. Fund with a millionaire's tax
10. Federal government make massive investments in R & D to create quality jobs long term in areas like biotechnology, alternative energy, IT, materials, science, alternative-fuel automobiles, and clean technology. Fund with a bank tax
11. Enact entitlement reform by seriously means testing Social Security, Medicare and adjusting retirement age.
12. Raise educational standards through a national core curriculum. Advocate the firing of the the bottom 10% of teachers nationwide and replace them with good teachers. Make higher education free to families that can't afford it to encourage upward mobility in
Credible plans have specific measurable goals, and sets of specific strategies and tactics that work together and are likely to achieve the goal.
But those aren't a plan. They are great ideas.
The next step is to send in the engineers as Paul Volker has suggested where profit and taxes are secondary, they represent "How we achieve the goal", not the goal itself. The goal is to use checks and balances to actually ensure or just to repair, an economic engine that achieves the goals of our Vision document.
But I'd be happy if we just set a few goals to address our top problems.
We don't need a vision document to know we should reduce unemployment, reduce health care costs that are spiraling out of control, address climate change, etc.
Some vision is however is required to set those goals. For example, for climate change, we could have a vision of a zero carbon future by 2050. How would we get there? Or we could be less visionary and say "we have to stay under 350 ppm; how do we do that."
While a vision document would be great and could be done in parallel, it should be used as an excuse for inaction.
The cost issues for health care was passed as part of the Stimulus package using health care IT automation and "Best Medical Practices".
Reducing our dependency on foreign oil is part of Biden's Workforce
http://pacenow.org/documents/Recovery_Through_Retrofit_Final_Report.pdf,
that outlines an excellent business model for achieving carbon reductions though energy savings. Although "Cap and Rebate" would even help more.
The President's refusing to raise taxes on the lower and middle classes and the Consumer Protection Agency are his belief that small\local businesses need paying customers.
The President's declared intention to increase exports.
The biggest problem not addressed is the 45 and over crowd's unemployment:
As the maker of Framemaker you know exactly the problems with moving to the "paperless office" and trying to treat a document as a database or form. But by doing it now we could improve productivity in the future, get over a geographical hump and provide the training needed to take advantage of SaaS, cloud and web services allowing small businesses to compete with their larger kin.
So the biggest problem I see is how to sell anything to the American people.
Free market businesses are fundamentally different than sovereign nations. This is especially true for populous nations and extra especially true for populous nations with representative forms of government and aspirations towards the notion of democracy. Like US.
Governments are, or at least should be, responsive to and at some basic level responsible for, all individuals residing within their boarders. Businesses are largely, if not entirely, free to pick their customer niche, to upsize, downsize, to dis-incorporate, to reincorporate, to relocate across boarders. Nations require armed invasions to achieve comparable agility. Think about it. The US government utterly defeated the Japanese government in 1945. Today the Japanese auto industry has successfully invaded the US mainland and effectively conquered Detroit. Parts of Detroit resemble Hiroshima circa 1945. Our military bases in Japan sell no cars to the vanquished.
Centralized economic plans bring to mind Mao, Stalin and Hitler. Ironic. At one time we were told by our business system was the better path.
The main problem with panels of experts is that they don't agree with each other and nobody really knows who they are in the first place. You could do a lot worse by just choosing a big random sample from the census data. All experts can do is game scenarios. All governments do this anyway, there is no need to make a big deal about it.
In spite of reservations, I liked the post.
Your point about the problem with a panel of experts is the reason why Obama should pick one expert and let that person pick his team. Then you (are likely to) get a compatible set of experts who cover the field. If you want diversity of plans, set up multiple independent teams by appointing multiple team leaders. You can even go the complete hand picked route. Johnson did that.
Despite your reservations, President Johnson proved that the process worked. The plans were made, they got passed in Congress, and they pretty much worked as intended.
Of the 200 comments so far, nobody has pointed out when in our history there was a more effective success model for getting legislation passed that worked more effectively to address our top problems.
While Kennedy and Johnson may have gotten 96% of their legislative agendas passed (I'll accept that without checking), some of the policies did not work astonishingly well in achieving their objectives. The Great Society was a colossal failure. The percent of poor has been relatively stable from his admin through the 90s. Also, it took years to undo the welfare mentality.
Also, he says, "As far as I know, there aren't any credible independent health care experts who say that the most important thing we can do right now to improve health care in the US is to completely repeal every single provision in the health care reform we just passed." That may be true, but it was also true when the bill was passed. There was no consensus (other than on the left) that it would solve all health care problems. It represented a amalgam of a bunch of special interest amendments and reps didn't even read it because it was too long and complicated (remember Pelosi saying we need to see it passed before we know what it does?). People want small portions of the law to be enacted, but are generally against the bill as a whole.
While planning is a good thing, the government ought not spend its time building grandiose plans to solve huge problems, but focus on practical, achievable steps instead.
Did it enact things like Medicare and Medicaid that are still used today? Yes! Are voters clamoring to repeal Medicare and Medicaid as bad ideas? Nope. Repealing those programs isn't on the agenda of the Republicans or Democrats. Should they be restructured today almost 50 years later? absolutely, some changes are in order.
The list goes on.
Bottom line: the programs pretty much met the goals they set out to achieve.
Medicare and Medicaid are like taking drugs (no pun intended). It is hard to get off them once you are dependent, but you know they cost you a lot. Many Americans are just afraid of change in this regard and will punish anyone at the polls if their fix is taken away.
It is clear that Medicare and Medicaid cost too much, bureaucracies are too big, and should be restructured, without question.
If the goal was to build bloated programs that made people dependent and provide mediocre services from overstaffed bureaucracies, then it was a success.
Nonetheless, the author is correct. We don't need another "bipartisan" deficit commission. We need a clear statement of mission, vision and values coming from the White House. In simple terms our mission is to make the world a better place for EVERYONE via peace-making, environmental management, resource management, etc. Our vision should be that we non-violently lead the world in the right direction, away from the rape of the environment towards responsible stewardship of the planet. Our values (supposedly) are bedrock American principles: freedom, justice, equality of opportunity, stewardship, diversity.
From this one can assemble a plan and prioritize. We need a stronger economic foundation at home and can do so if we attend to our neglected infrastructure and stimulate strategies for energy independence. We no longer need to be the world's cop. We should support international agencies to do the ugly work of maintaining law and order. Addressing the incineration of fossil fuels and its threat to our climate should be our top priority. No planet; no future.
Why we do not have this kind of thing already in place astonishes me.
Without measurable performance, how can we determine if the politicians are working for us or working for special interests?
A business without a performance plan will cease to exist. Politicians without a performance plan, vote themselves raises and gifts (extended tax cuts). Something is wrong when conflict of interest is not a consideration.
Of course getting anyone in Congress to agree to a performance plan would be as difficult as getting full disclosure of campaign contributions.
A broken system does not want to be exposed and fixed, lest they loose power and influence.
Outdated Legislature Rules.
President Obama DOES have a plan. In my opinion, the problem with implementing ANY plan is with the Senate "system" (60-vote majority, etc). It may have worked back when it was created, it needs to be revamped. It's simply NOT realistic, and many-a-plan has fallen through these very cracks.
Just my $.02 (again, very simplistically put).
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http://www.barackobama.com/issues/
Again, IMO, the real problem is with implementation vis a vis legislative structure.
Ironically, Republicans too agree that there are problems with the current "structure".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/04/AR2011010402032.html
Not proud to be on the same page as they are, that notwithstanding, reform is needed.
.
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1. Erase the government, so
2. Big business can operate completely unfettered, and
3. The Invisible Hand will see that all are fed, housed, and clothed sufficiently, provided
4. We are not so lazy to be unwilling to work 14 hours a day in a dirt floor factory.