America is struggling with a sputtering economy and high unemployment ”” but times are booming for Washington’s governing class.
The massive expansion of government under President Barack Obama has basically guaranteed a robust job market for policy professionals, regulators and contractors for years to come. The housing market, boosted by the large number of high-income earners in the area, many working in politics and government, is easily outpacing the markets in most of the country. And there are few signs of economic distress in hotels, restaurants or stores in the D.C. metro area.
As a result, there is a yawning gap between the American people and D.C.’s powerful when it comes to their economic reality ”” and their economic perceptions.
In that regard the US is coming to resemble Uganda, Peru, or any number of Third World nations. Little wonder, then, that 62% of Americans now believe that the government in DC now longer has the “consent of the governed.” It is a situation that embodies a non-trivial level of danger.
D.C. has been this way since the huge expansions of government under FDR during the 1930s and then continuing during WWII. What we desperately need now is some type of constitutional amendment that has “term limits” for laws passed by Congress. Commonly called sunset legislation, such laws would have a definite expiration date, so the political class could not buy votes in perpetuity via handouts to whatever special interest they want. Add congressional term limits to this, a house cleaning of the top level career bureaucrats that frustrate any meaningful change, and possibly, just possibly, we could turn things around. Oh, and we need to do something to restore trust in the voting process, like requiring people to prove they have a right to vote before we let them vote.
3, don’t forget that the bulk of the “new” laws will be executive agency rules and regulations. Laws made by non-elected bureaucrats and, and many cases, so called “czars” appointed by the executive without Congressional oversight. Both parties are creating a non-elected government whose sole function is to rule over the rest of the country. It is way past time for a constitutional convention to end this madness.
As a young person in the 1960-70s I can remember clearly how adults i heard talking worried about the creation of Brasilia in Brazil, Canberra in Australia – they could also have included the invented Tanzanian capital; its name is escaping me just now. Each of these situations was the imposition of a brand-new cultural and pseudo-historical center as well as governmental seat on a society and geography that were considered dys-functional by, well, I guess by those multinational corporations and other powerful entities that were developing said nations.
I think what has happened to Washington is that without moving the capital anywhere else, its soul which began to languish in the Civil War is being replaced, and largely by the same forces that moved the capitals in other less developed nations. We don’t often hear Wash. DC spoken of this way but after learning about a large branch of my mother’s forebears who were in effect stuck in DC as part of the South throughout the Civil War, including a surgeon who I am sure at the time performed many amputations, it is clearer to me the extent to which cultural effects of the South held on until the mid-late 20th century there. Since the Bush years, for which a Northern family dynasty that had spent merely one generation in Texas held two presidencies, the creation of more bureaucracy and now, inevitably, the filling of those roles and ongoing creation of more by the heirs of the other party was fairly inevitable if they fought hard enough for the chance. Which they did, to the impoverishment of anyone else who didn’t get in while the getting was good.
What is terribly important is creation of a new class made up of those who are wealthy and very brainy and who are therefore quite wealthy.
This has not been a large class in the past. Now, because we begin to winnow the very bright out when they are in kindergarten (or earlier), they are destined to the kind of future above delineated. That this gathering of power, wealth and brains is in government, backed now by science, is the means by which the Triple A’s gpt their start in Brave New World. (And we need to remark that the spread of legal marijuana is ever so much like the spread and use of soma.) In short, we are beginning to sort the socio-economic world into Alpha’s and Beta’s as the poor get poorer and stupider, and the rich get brighter, more powerful and more concentrated in government.
Are we frightened yet? We should be. L:arry