One of the defining issues of Dingell’s career has been his close relationship with the auto industry. His district, though it was redrawn several times, consistently overlapped with the suburbs of Detroit, meaning that a fair number of his constituents were current or former auto workers. Normally, that’s not a problem for a Democrat, but when the industry and the push for new environmental regulations came into conflict, Dingell found himself at odds with his party.
In 1975, he helped draft the original automotive fuel-efficiency standards, known on Capitol Hill as CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy). Repeated efforts to raise the minimum number of miles-per-gallon cars and trucks were expected to be met with opposition from Dingell, who worried that increases would harm auto sales and, therefore, employment. In 2009, Mother Jones outlined the case against Dingell on CAFE—but when President Obama in 2012 reached a deal to increase fuel-efficiency standards with the automotive industry, Dingell supported the move.
In other regards, Dingell has been staunchly liberal, repeatedly introducing single-payer health-care proposals.
While congressional retirement announcements appear to have been coming fast and furious of late, a reminder: This crop of retirements is not unusual. The only thing unusual about the retirement of John Dingell is that one would be forgiven for thinking that it was never going to happen.
So, if most of America really believes we ought to limit terms served by the legislative and judicial branches just like we limit terms in the executive branch, why don’t we? Because we, the people, aren’t really the bosses anymore. Elected officials believe it’s about their ideas and not ours. Power was supposed to derive from the people and government was only to be by the consent of the governed.
DEVOLVED POWER TO THE STATES
The best government is the most local government, because it’s the closest to the people being governed. The toughest jobs in government are school board, city council, and county commissioner. People have your home phone number, and don’t mind coming up to you in the store or at church and asking about trash pickup, potholes, or PTA meetings. The higher up the food chain, the more insulated if not isolated one is from the “boss”—that is, the people you serve.
The original notion of the federal government was that it would be very limited in its scope. Its powers were narrowly defined in the Constitution and then, just to make sure the message about limiting the power of the federal government was as clear as a Lady Gaga gown, the Founders added ten amendments we know as the Bill of Rights. Every last one of them put an ironclad restriction on the government and gave it explicitly defined limits. It basically told the government that it couldn’t make us shut up, sit down, open our houses to them, let them “TSA us” without a warrant, tell us to stop praying or preaching, couldn’t take away our guns, make us tell the cops something that might send us to jail, and to finish it all off, they added one that said that if it wasn’t a power that was absolutely clear in the Constitution, then only the states had the power to deal with it.
Has anyone in D.C. actually read the Constitution?
If they have, they don’t seem to be concerned that they will be held accountable for ignoring it. And that indifference may be due to the fact that D.C. is driven by donors to the campaigns, not by the passions of the people.
One of the really colossal mistakes made by our government is one that few people today even understand: the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, which after decades of effort, passed in April 1913. Are you even aware of the Seventeenth Amendment and what it did? Well, prior to 1913, senators were appointed by their respective state legislatures and not directly elected by popular vote. At first glance, it might seem that having the voters directly elect the senators would be a great idea—they would enter office in the same way as members of the House. But the results have been anything but stellar.
The Founders intentionally separated the functions of the House and Senate as well as how the members got there. The House members, elected every two years, would bring the passions of the people with them, being directly accountable to the voters. The Senate was sometimes called the “saucer” of legislation, where the passions were cooled by thoughtful debate. Originally, the Senate’s focus was on how legislation affected the states, since senators were appointed by the states to make sure that the executive branch of D.C. wasn’t stepping beyond the Tenth Amendment and the rest of the Constitution and getting into areas it wasn’t allowed to enter. But once senators started getting elected by direct vote, they became wholly connected to D.C. and pretty much disconnected from the impact of their legislation on their state’s budget or borders.
During my ten and a half years as governor, I often wished that those in D.C. knew or cared about the impact of their actions on the states. But it was hard to get anyone that worked up about it, because the concern of senators and House members is the federal budget. Even some who had served as governor or in their state legislature would end up defining their main objective as to keep power in D.C. for themselves, and to heck with how it impacted their state budget back home or the rights of the citizens at the local level. This line of thinking has led to a major shift in power from where you live to where federal bureaucrats, lobbyists, and federal politicians live. Did it not occur to you how strange was the fact that during the entire economic meltdown of 2008–2009, the only place in America where property values kept going up instead of down, the only place unaffected in per capita income or spending by consumers, was Washington, D.C.? It’s because the people living and working there had the power and ability to take care of themselves, even if at the expense of everyone else in the country. Why do we put up with it?
MAD MONEY OF POLITICS
Every time Congress or the courts try to “fix” the unholy influence of special-interest money to politics, the worse they make it. I say that as a practitioner of politics and not just a spectator. Here’s what we basically have today, thanks to the irrational hodgepodge of campaign finance laws and rulings: If you are an actual candidate for office, you are very tightly restricted in where your money comes from, how much you can take, and what you can do with it, and every bit of that money has to be reported in minute detail so your critics and opponents can pick over every line and misconstrue it and try to make you look like a crook or at least fairly corrupt. If you don’t have the guts to actually run for office and put yourself and your family through the sausage grinder of elective politics, then you can create an organization through which you can pour unlimited amounts of money, beat the living daylights out of the people who were willing to do what you were too cowardly to do, and in many cases, never even have to tell anyone that you were behind the savage attacks on the candidate.
Here’s my simple solution: Prohibit nothing. Disclose everything. For everyone. If you give money to express your views, then stand up and be counted for it. Give as much as you can or want. Just tell us who you are. If you want to give $10 million to a candidate, do it. The rest of us may wonder aloud if a candidate is a wholly owned subsidiary of his donor, but at least we’ll know where the money comes from and can figure out if your actions in office give special attention and benefits to your benefactor. Another reason not to limit direct contributions to the candidate is because the current system favors the wealthy who decide to run for office and self-finance their campaign.
If a person who has the ability to spend $50 million of his own money and not miss it runs against a person who has no personal money to invest and in fact has to give up all income in order to run for office, then why shouldn’t the candidate without means be able to receive any amount one wishes to give? Should a wealthy candidate be allowed to give $50 million to his own campaign, but the less affluent candidate be limited to soliciting donations of $2,600 or less—the maximum permitted for individual donations?
And we should add another provision in election law. If you currently hold office and wish to run for any office other than the one you currently hol
d, you must resign from that office in order to file for a different office. On this, I speak from experience!
When I ran for President, I looked around on the stage and saw that I was running against some people who could give themselves unlimited amounts of money to make themselves instantly “credible,” because their campaign reports showed sizable amounts in the kitty. I saw others who were sitting members of Congress or the Senate, who would still receive the paycheck plus all their benefits that I helped pay for, and yet never had to show up for work to get the check! Nice work if you can get it. Those candidates enjoyed federally paid staff who, while they couldn’t do direct political work, could be engaged in development of policy and the coordination of scheduling, and if an “official” reason for travel could be conjured up, you and I would be helping to pay for that as well.
I know that as a contributor for Fox News, if I failed to show up for my duties for months on end while at the same time I was standing over at CNN begging them for a job, I’d find out pretty quickly that I was really going to need that CNN job because I’d get tossed from the one I had at Fox. Can you not show up for work and spend your time applying for another job and still get paid? Then why should your congressman or your senator?
EMPOWERING PEOPLE INSTEAD OF ENSLAVING AND IMPOVERISHING THEM
One of the most surreal moments in my life came when then–Virginia Governor Mark Warner (now senator) and I appeared before the Senate Finance Committee on behalf of the National Governors Association, presenting a proposal for reforming Medicaid that had come from forty-nine of the fifty governors. (Only Rod Blagojevich of Illinois refused to sign on and we know how things ended up for him.) We were actually proposing that the governors of the states—Democrats and Republicans—be willing to take less money from the federal government in exchange for greater flexibility as to how we spent it. If you think that seemed like a slam dunk, then you wouldn’t understand Washington, D.C. After I had outlined our proposal, I was subject to lectures from Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Jay Rockefeller about people in poverty. I had heard about all I could take and finally said, “Gentlemen, as someone who grew up one generation away from dirt floors and houses without plumbing or electricity, and as one who is the first in his long impoverished family to even graduate from high school, I never thought I would be getting a lecture on what it’s like to be poor from a Kennedy, a Kerry, and a Rockefeller!”
Such is the arrogance of many making policy that supposedly is designed to help people out of the trap of poverty. They don’t have a clue. Not one clue. The ignorance of those who tailor anti-poverty programs was one of the primary motivators that pushed me into politics. Not only had I grown up closer to the bottom than to the middle, much less the top, but in my role in church work and serving as a volunteer in community organizations to help people in poverty, I understood that these guys knew about as much about being poor as I knew which fork to use when eating caviar.
The fact is, since America’s “War on Poverty” was launched a little over fifty years ago, the poverty rate in America is exactly where it was then. The main difference is that today, even poverty isn’t as dire for most people as it was fifty years ago. Michael Tennant, writing in The New American, said: “Fifteen trillion dollars: That’s how much American taxpayers have forked over in the name of helping the poor since 1964. And what do we have to show for it? A poverty rate that has barely budged, an entrenched bureaucracy, and a population—like that of Greece and Portugal, two welfare-state basket cases—increasingly dependent on government handouts.”
Michael Tanner is the director of health and welfare studies for the libertarian Cato Institute, and has researched and written extensively about the well-intentioned but miserably failed efforts of the government to end poverty.
Tanner points out that when LBJ launched the War on Poverty “the poverty rate in America was around 19 percent and falling rapidly.” Tanner reports that “Government spends $20,610 for every poor person in America, or $61,830 per poor family of three. Given that the poverty line for that family is just $18,530, we should have theoretically wiped out poverty in America many times over.”
Think about that—instead of spending all that money for government programs to end poverty, if we’d just handed out checks without the programs, the people wouldn’t be in poverty at all and we’d be saving a lot on bureaucracy!
But as Tennant points out, there are now 126 separate anti-poverty programs administered by seven different cabinet agencies and six independent agencies. Then there are the hordes of social workers and government employees who administer the various programs. All of these people have a vested interest in the programs’ continuation and expansion.
Here’s the dirty little secret about poverty programs: They aren’t about ending poverty—they are about perpetuating government programs and private sector enterprises that make up what I call the “industry of poverty.” Yes, poverty is a condition for poor people, but it’s a career for those who administer the programs and who would be put out of business if they were actually successful in eradicating poverty, so rest assured, they will never eradicate it. Trust me on this—the biggest fights I ever had as governor were trying to take money from a “provider” that should have gone to someone who was actually poor and needed it.
Federal welfare spending has risen 375 percent (in constant 2011 dollars) since 1965 and total welfare spending has climbed almost as much, writes Tennant. If money solved the problem, we wouldn’t have a problem.
THE FORCE OF THE FAMILY
The real secret to eliminating poverty is not a secret at all. It’s amazingly simple, but it makes the people living in their tony little bubbles seethe with rage. Ready for this?
Marriage.
Sounds too simple to be true, but here’s a fact—the Beverly LaHaye Institute researched data in 2012 to discover that if a family has two married parents, the poverty rate is about 7.5 percent. If a family is headed by a single mother, the poverty rate is almost 34 percent.
While Hollywood celebrities make it seem quite normal to have a baby now, and think about a husband later (if at all or ever), most young, single women having babies aren’t Hollywood starlets with millions of dollars to afford full-time live-in nannies, private jets, and private schools. And the War on Poverty we discussed earlier was launched fifty years ago when most children were raised by two married parents.
The Heritage Foundation has done extensive and admirable research on the economics of the family and found that the poverty rate for white, married couples in 2009 was 3.2 percent. If it was a white nonmarried family, the poverty rate jumped to 22 percent. For black couples who were married, 7 percent were in poverty; if a nonmarried black family, that number soared to almost 36 percent!
There are mountains of evidence to support the fact that a child growing up with both a mother and father who are married to each other and stay married, and have at least a high school education and are employed, will most likely live beyond poverty for their entire lives and be less likely to use drugs, drop out of school, or go to prison.
Television, movies, novels, and the lifestyles of those who create them would make us believe that the glamorous life doesn’t include a father around. Reality says fathers do matter. Not just biological sperm donors, but Dads who join with the mother in not only creating the child, but responsibly raising the child.
Robert Maranto and Michael Crouch of the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform penned an insightful look into this reality for The Wall Street Journal in April 2014. According to Maranto and Crouch:
Abuse, behavioral problems and psychological issues of all kinds, such as developmental behavior problems or concentration issues, are less common for children of married couples than for cohabitating or single parents, according to a 2003 Centers for Disease Control study of children’s health. The causal pathways are about as clear as those from smoking to cancer.
PREVENTION INSTEAD OF INTERVENTION
I’ve long maintained that our health-care system is messed up not because we don’t spend enough money on it—we spend more of our GDP on health care than virtually any nation on earth. Our problem is that we spend most of our health-care resources—between 75 and 80 percent—to treat chronic diseases that are mostly the result of eating too much, exercising too little, and continuing bad habits like smoking. Lifestyle issues and genetics are driving the costs, but we spend mostly to treat illnesses after they become catastrophic. It would make far more sense to focus on preventing diseases first, curing them if we don’t prevent them, and treating them if we have to. My friend Jim Pinkerton has done the best research on what he calls a “Cure Strategy” and reveals that if we focused just on Alzheimer’s disease alone, the financial benefits would be staggering. We already spend $200 billion a year on this dreadful curse, and by 2050, that figure will jump to $1 trillion a year! That doesn’t even begin to account for the painful toll the disease takes on the caregivers and the loss of social capital a family suffers from the intense care necessary for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.
If we said with determination that we would focus on finding a cause and cure for Alzheimer’s, cancer, and heart disease (the three big cost factors of health care) in the same way we focused on eradicating polio when I was a child, we would not only change lives, but we would genuinely change our economy.
It’s been incredibly shortsighted for us to pull back from focused and fact-driven scientific research. We’ve made the disastrous mistake of gutting the space budget. As one who grew up seeing the many side effects of the dollars we spent developing the exploration of space, I am appalled that instead of ramping up our efforts to find the cutting-edge of technology, we have reduced ourselves to hitchhiking to the space station on a Russian spacecraft. John F. Kennedy would be ashamed of our dismantling not only his dream, but my dream and the dream of every “space age” kid who has lived better thanks to the innovations that came from our NASA programs.
God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy Page 24