One might be willing to forgive some of the statements of candidates running for the GOP nomination for president, passing them off as just part of the silly season that now lasts for a full two years before a national election. Rick Perry's charge that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and Michele Bachmann's claim that God was sending us a message through the East Coast earthquake and Hurricane Irene would seem to fit in this category. Perry knows (one hopes) that the Social Security Trust Fund is solvent for at least another quarter century, even if we do nothing to strengthen it. Bachmann knows, unless she wishes to claim that God talks personally to her (and one hopes she does not), that natural disasters are explained by science.
Yet running for president is serious business -- or at least ought to be. As voters, we have a right to expect our candidates to take it seriously, and to utter statements that reflect careful thought. If it is permissible for a candidate to say anything, just to stoke emotions and get votes, then how is that candidate any different than, say, Ponzi Master Bernie Madoff, who said whatever he wished to hoodwink investors?
So here is a three-part test to apply to every statement from every candidate, Republican or Democratic: (1) What are the implications of what you are saying? (2) Can you prove those implications? and (3) Would you be willing to stand behind those implications?
For example, Bachmann said that we should abolish the "job-killing" EPA in order to increase the domestic supply of oil and natural gas. The clear implication is that without EPA, we would have more oil and natural gas coming out of the ground. Yet she offered no evidence to prove this, except the undocumented notion that regulation prevents (rather than, well, regulates) oil and natural gas extraction. The second implication is that EPA costs jobs, again without any quantification that the number of jobs gained by axing EPA would exceed the number of jobs that would be lost if everyone in EPA (and its many contractors) were fired. The third implication is that EPA doesn't do anything else worth keeping, other than stop the extraction of oil and natural gas (the Energy Department and a host of laws fit in here somewhere, so maybe we would have to abolish them too). Of course EPA was created to help clean up our polluted waters and air and prevent industrial pollutants from making us sick, so another implication is that we can do without those roles of EPA too. Would she stand behind that?
Oh, but she has a solution for all this: "We do have EPAs in each of the 50 States and I think it's up to the states ... to develop their own environmental protections and regulations," she added. What are the implications of that? One is that 50 sets of state regulations would be less damaging to the economy and jobs than one set created by EPA. The second is that business and industry would find it more efficient and cheaper to deal with 50 sets of regulations than one, national set. The third is that each state would be oh-so-kind as to consider the impacts of its own industrial operations and pollution on other states and regulate so as to avoid them from crossing state lines, a procedure manifestly disproved by the problem of acid rain. A fourth is that, should a business or industrial operation recklessly endanger the environment, someone will stop them (EPA not being around). Would she stand behind all of this?
The point is not that we should never consider abolishing EPA (or any other government agency). The point is that the implications of that -- and other public policy statements -- need to be pursued and tested. Candidates that do not do this are signaling that they don't care what they say, have not thought through what they say, or are unable to think past their first utterances.
When someone runs for president, we have a right to expect that he or she can think deeply and systemically, realizing the implications of what they propose, the downstream impacts as it were. To use a metaphor, they should be able to play 3-D chess, seeing the world in more complexity that just the next move they make. If they cannot, vote for them at our peril.