RALEIGH – Coming off of three tough, spirited, but mostly substantive debates in the past week – George W. Bush v. John Kerry, Dick Cheney v. John Edwards, and Patrick Ballantine vs. Mike Easley – the notion that there is such a thing as bipartisan cooperation might be viewed as little more than a flight of fancy. How can politicians with such divergent world views ever find room for agreement?
Well, it isn’t a hard as you think. Nor is bipartisanship inherently a good thing. Plenty of horrible, wrongheaded ideas have been enacted with broad, bipartisan support. For much of the 20th century, Democrats and Republicans in Washington were in fundamental agreement that the federal government needed to get bigger, to supplant local and private initiative in favor of uniformity and coercion. The two parties only disagreed about how fast government should grow.
I don’t mean to be excessively doleful, though. There are cases in which ideas attract a broad consensus because they make sense. Different politicians may have different reasons for supporting a policy change, but that doesn’t mean the change won’t be an improvement.
An example I’d throw out is reform of unemployment insurance. The UI program was created in 1935 as part of the Social Security Act (talk about a widely supported bill with unforeseen and unfortunate consequences). Originally designed to alleviate financial problems facing state-run UI funds – and to impose a uniform system across states that varied widely in how and whether they forced employers and employees to participate in job-loss insurance – the system has long had significant defects. During the 1970s and 1980s, these defects became appreciated across the political spectrum, and included the tendency for spells of unemployment to be longer when UI benefits were more generous, the inability to tailor remedies to the specific needs of displaced workers, and the cross-subsidy the program essentially mandated from low-turnover industries with few UI claims to high-turnover industries with many claims.
By the 1990s, even the Clinton administration was talking about making some changes in the system. Demonstration projects by the Bush ’41 and Clinton Labor departments showed the promise of offering some workers cash up front, rather than stringing them out with small weekly benefit checks over 13 or 26 weeks. The idea was to induce some workers to go back to work immediately – no longer facing the incentive to maximize benefits by staying out of the workplace – while giving other workers the immediate funds they needed to address their own personal needs for reemployment, whether those be a private-sector training program, a return to college, or resources to help start a small business of their own. Shortening spells of unemployment would also save tax money.
The present Bush administration is a strong believer in the concept, adding in the notion (discussed at some length in John Locke Foundation papers and my 2001 book Investor Politics) that workers should be able to open their own Personal Reemployment Accounts in which to save UI dollars for future use. Obviously policymakers have yet to transform the current top-down, inflexible UI system into one of personal accounts. But it is not inconceivable to imagine either a reelected President Bush or a new President Kerry pursuing policies along these lines. Most workers and employers would benefit, personal ownership and freedom would grow a bit, and spells of unemployment would likely be shorter and less costly to taxpayers and the economy.
Many calls for bipartisanship are fake, little more than demands that one side capitulate to the other, or are downright dangerous. But don’t get cynical – sometimes they reflect common sense crowding out the political game.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.