American Government:: Welcome to the Moderate Party

By Charles Bingman

The American government system is incredibly huge and complex, sophisticated, complicated, muddled and notoriously fragmented yet interrelated, since it consists of hundreds of governments, program by program and place by place.

The people themselves have favored moderation; exhibited a fund of common sense, and have displayed the ind of courage that their political leaders have often lacked. The Moderate Party would see itself as a political force to produce national collaboration instead of the present tendency toward centrist stalemate. What people really want is a life of security, stability, and fairness. What this demands of governments is moderation, common sense and courage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532081903

Charles Bingman

Charles F. Bingman was a federal government executive, then a professor as John Hopkins University. He has done consulting assignments in a dozen countries, and is the author of eights books and more than 60 articles about governments around the world.

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Copyright © 2019 Charles Bingman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-8189-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-8190-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019913151

iUniverse rev. date: 09/06/2019

CONTENTS

Introduction

Agenda 1     Governance As The Art Of Being Human

Agenda 2     The Nature Of American Government

Agenda 3     The Threat Of Special Interest Politics

Agenda 4     When Is Government Good? When Is It Bad?

Agenda 5     Development Of The National Economy

Agenda 6     Vital Social Services

Agenda 7     National Health Care

Agenda 8     Education: Primary, University And Beyond

Agenda 9     Successful Retirement

Agenda 10   Transportation And Infrastructure

Agenda 11   Immigration And Refugees

Agenda 12   Fair And Adquate Taxation

Agenda 13   Moderating The Urge To Regulate

Agenda 14   Concern For The Environment

Agenda 15   Effective Government Operations

Agenda 16   The Art Of Bad Budgeting

Agenda 17   The National Security Establishment

Agenda 18   The American Intergovernmental System

Agenda 19   Balanced International Relationships

Summary

Sources

About The Author

INTRODUCTION

The world is changing – but of course, it has always been changing. Gone are the horse and carriage, and in have come the horseless carriages by the hundreds of millions. Gone are the canals, and in are super highways. Education no longer peaks at the 6th grade or the 12th grade but at the post-doctoral level. The wood stove has become the home heating/cooling system. The ice box is out, and the refrigerator is in, and full up.

Governance is a far broader concept than just the governments themselves since it encompasses the involvement of individuals and orgnizations in some form in the affairs of governments. Governance includes the roles of corporations, interest groups and non-government institutions as well. The whole thing starts with a great debate: what is it the government is really supposed to do?

In the past, the answer has ranged from nothing to everything; from letting the peasants starve, to government from the cradle to the grave. By UN definition, there are 196 countries in the world. Perhaps 40-50 of them are very small, or remote islands, important for those living there, but not weighty in world affairs. There are thus about 150 substantial governments, and all of them without exception are run from the top down by centrist elites, and about 105 of them are in deep trouble. Deep trouble is defined as involving wars, insurrections, serious internal conflict, deliberate skewing of wealth, lack of social justice, and lack of social services and public infrastructure. Most of these governments suffer from poor management, bumbling incompetence and rampant corruption. Most of them suffer from problems created and extended by the governments themselves out of motives of greed, viciousness and an insatiable lust for power.

In its totality, the American national governance system is unbelievably huge and complex, sophisticated, complicated, muddled and notoriously fragmented and yet interrelated. It is probably unwise to think of it as the government since it is literally hundreds of governments, program by program and place by place. In short, it has never been a coherent entity designed to be managed as that term is understood in other contexts. The best way to evaluate government is first from the top down, and second from the middle down. From the top down, governments are created and designed not for management effectiveness but for political interpretations, and the political view of the world is often markedly different from the professional management view. Thus, public managers are faced with conditions far different and far more complicated than those face by the executives and managers in the private sector.

The President is, by order of the Constitution, the Chief Executive of the government, and yet not even the President can really manage the totality the way chief executives of corporations can manage. Much of the operational power and authority for specific government programs is vested by law not in the President but in the head of the government agency that delivers the program. Cabinet secretaries and agency heads may work for the President and be appointed by him, but each also works for the Congress which defines his or her programs, dictates agency structure, defines many of its processes, and ultimately controls its finances. The President cannot order his leaders to violate the law, and should be careful not to try.

The U. S. became an economic powerhouse through the world’s finest manufacturing capacity. But manufacturing has gradually been overtaken by its own success because it financed the surge of the consumer economy that dominates the economic horizon today. More and more of the total economy is commercial, including banking and insurance, higher education, government, and millions of jobs in offices, retail establishments and brain occupations. The picks and shovels have largely been replaced by the telephone and the computer.

More and more, the future has become the cities. In 1930, 60% of the U. S. population lived on farms and in rural communities and small towns. Today, that number is down to about 15%. The world is awakening to the fact that the future will be increasingly urban, and neither central governments nor cities themselves seem fully ready to cope. Many of the world’s largest cities are already overwhelmed. All over the world, massive shifts of population are occurring from rural and village life to urban life. This movement has been largely stabilized in the most developed countries, but in the less developed countries, a serious decline of primary level jobs (i.e. agriculture, mining, forestry, and fishing) is taking place because of the low economic value derived from these occupations, and this decline is forcing millions to move to cities in the hope of finding a better livelihood. This movement is spontaneous and irreversible. This creates two kinds of problems: first, the overburden and potential collapse of urban economies and infrastructure; and second, the decline of rural society, despite efforts of many countries to subsidize and prop up rural economies and enhance rural development.

The huge surge of people to cities has meant that especially the largest and most densely populated cities has dramatically increased the need for high quality public infrastructure which has risen in importance. As cities fall behind the power curve, it has become harder and harder to catch up again. When nations fail and collapse, the process of disintegration mutilates institutions and destroys the underlying understandings between the government and the governed. This is precisely why state rebuilding must be sustained, and requires time, massive capacity building, large sums from the outside, debt relief, and appropriate forms of tutoring. But note: not even the U. N. or the U. S. can be held responsible for rebuilding other governments around the world. Many humanitarian voices advocate exactly that, but the only way to resurrect more than a hundred failed or floundering states is for each to remain responsible for its own fate.

The whole world including the United States is experiencing a huge surge in population. Almost every sector of economy is becoming more sophisticated and more productive, and despite the most ominous of predictions, the world has almost never run out of critical resources. There have been major improvements, worldwide, in technology, education, the body of usable knowledge, in managerial skills, and in the value-added nature of economic sectors. There is less reliance on primary economic sectors (farming, fishing, mining, forestry) and a movement upscale to more value added secondary and tertiary levels of economic activity. Here are some of the most important ways in which the world has become better:

1. Transportation: air travel has grown beyond belief; hundreds of millions of people now have their own automobiles; thousands of miles of highways and urban streets have been provided; the number of air line passengers is simply staggering; and in all modes, the cost per unit mile of travel is, remarkably, down.

2. Despite repeated ominous predictions of world wide starvation, food is far more widely available. New techniques, better farming equipment, new fertilizers and insecticides have allowed far greater production on far frewer acres under cultivation. Food is available in remarkable variation at far more affordable cost.

3. The expected life span of humans in 1900 was 41. In 1930, it was 59. In 2000, it was 77, and it is close to 80 now.

4. Millions of women have entered the workforce. In 2015, 74% of working age women were in the labor force, compared to about 35% in 1946. In addition, the value of jobs held by women is uniformly higher and more productive.

5. Almost all forms of medicine are unbelievably advanced. Most of the horrible diseases of the past – plagues, small pox, measles, polio, influenza have largely been eliminated. New problems such as obesity, drug addition and AIDS are being dealt with as individual problems.

6. Humans are more willing and able to move to improve their lives. Immigration and emmigration, while difficult in the short run, prove to be invaluable in the longer term. The tragedy is the fact that mobiliity is now so often the fate of refugees and displaced persons, but there is a substantial record of humane efforts to deal with these problems.

7. Machines that replace human labor have multiplied, and greatly reduced the cost of producing most things. Machines have enabled the greater expansion of economies, creating more wealth and new forms of work.

8. Communications have experienced a remarkable revolution, especially in the form of computers and cell phones, and the world of the average person will never be the same – but usually better.

9. Home ownership is much more likely, and homes are totally better and more convenient: heating and air conditioning, sanitation, labor saving appliances, furniture, clothing – at greatly reduced costs.

10. The base of formal education and further access to knowledge has been greatly expanded. An exceptional number of young people are now able to go to college.

11. The openness of society has been increasing. The roles of women and minorities have become more equal, more permissive and more productive.

12. As a result of these changes, real incomes have doubled between 1900 and today. In 1900, the middle class was just about 1% of the population. Now it is over 23%. Poverty as a human affliction is remarkably down all over the world. In a study of 10 countries, eight showed a reduction of people living in poverty from 1.1 billion to just 782 million, and real gains have been experienced to a remarkable degree in China and India, and in unlikely countries such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia and Congo

13. There is a very special reality that, through the 1980s and ’90s, the U. S. accepted more than a million legal immigrants per year – more legal immigrants than all other nations of the world combined. In addition, there has been a huge flow of illegal immigrants. 11% of the U. S. population is foreign born – about 40 million people. And it has been ever more clear that the performance of immigrants and refugees has been overwhelmingly positive.

14. Factoring out immigration, the rise of American inequality greatly disappears; for 89% of the American population, that is native born, income inequality has been declining since the 1960’s. For African-Americans, family median incomes are finally currently rising twice as fast as the population as a whole.

15. 80% of the U. S. population has graduated from high school, and 25% have a college degree. The U. S. averages 12.3 years of education – the highest in the world. The current drop-out rate is about 10%; but prior to 1940, most children dropped out – because they had to go to work.

16. In 1900, 42% of workers were in primary sectors of the economy; 38% were in industry; and 20% were in white collar occupations. 47% of women’s employment was as domestics. 58% of men and 52% of women are now in service sector. In 1850, the average work week was 66 hours; in 1900, it was 53 hours; in 2000, it was 42 hours. House keeping chores took 4 hours a day for 90% of housholds in 1900; in 2000, it is about 14%.

In sum, despite the negativism and hand-wringing, and the problems that still need to be solved, Americans have developed a great and rewarding country. The people themselves have favored moderation, have exhibited a fund of common sense, and have displayed the kind of courage their leaders have often lacked.

AGENDA ONE

GOVERNANCE AS THE ART OF BEING HUMAN

What we deal with in the world of American politics is simply the implacable conflicts inherent in human kind. The world is never risk free; there cannot be created a risk-free world. What can be done is for the people themselves, despite the eternal conflict between conformity and dissent, to demand that their leaders be more positive and supportive, and do not exacerbate these conflicts for shoddy political advantage. We must somehow stop the government’s preoccupation with can’t, or with us vs. them. Human choice is the natural opponent of control and regulation. The Moderate Party should see itself not as the party of centrist power or of Blockade or Stalemate, but as the party of intergovernmental collaboration. Collaboration is a whole different concept. It means that governments can and should deliberately combine to produce results even where each may have its own policy imperatives. In other words, government plans and programs must not be forced into conflict, and can instead be manipulated into collaboration and shifted to laws, policies and regulations that are simpler, shorter and based more on principles of guidance and away from the urge to create restrictions and prohibitions. If this were to happen, it would produce a desirable reduction of challenges and law suits over the enforcement of government’s vast layer of control. People yearn to believe that the rule of law will define all that is good and proper, but the rule of law is not enough, since the laws themselves can be perverted or ignored. What people really want in life is security, stability and fairness. What this demands of governments is moderation, common sense and courage.

All governance has escalated in power and complexity. In many world countries government authority is not shared but centrally dictated and controlled. In the United States, the basic government philosophy has always been the use of multiple levels of government, each with its own defined roles and scope and degrees of influence. What has emerged then is a great and compelling range of vital public programs that are shared in, and led by many complex relationships between governments. Consider the following list of reasons why government sharing and collaboration are vital:

1. Sharing power promotes democracy because it is easier for citizens and organizations to reach and influence local governments. Especially with social services programs, most national governments are seen as remote and preoccupied with broader issues. Decentralization also enhances the total number and competence of public leadership.

2. Local governments offer the potential of achieving higher public service effectiveness and responsiveness, and of creating a better and more capable public service. In general, local administration of public programs is seen as more practical and less theoretical or doctrinaire. Program success is more likely to be evaluated in terms of how well the public is served.

3. Devolution will take power out of the hands of centrist elites, reduce elitist collusion and the power of centrist government organizations, and reduce the range of public activities that are vulnerable to corrupt control. It also importantly shifts the attention of special interest lobbying groups from a single target to a variety of governments, more attuned to the general public interest.

4. As more power and authority is decentralized, it makes the relationship between the central government and local governments more balanced since these relationships will be more often negotiated rather than dictated. Regional governments have roles to play which are genuinely regional in nature – for example, regional road nets, the allocation of land uses, the provision of public utilities or the priorities between conflicting demands on government. But to achieve these advances, regional and municipal governments must be independent and not just administrative units of the central government.

Political Doctrine

Every government is a political state, and each has constructed a doctrinal framework articulating some broad and generalized form of governance. The most prominent political frameworks in use today are communism, state socialism, representative democracy and centrist authoritarianism. None of these frameworks are absolute, and they often overlap or are in conflict in some very confusing ways. But in each country the prevailing political framework is seen as a vital way