Me and the Maytag Repairman

or, why I’m the loneliest guy in town.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a registered Democrat and some people have wondered why. The answer is easy. In Chicago there is no effective Republican Party. The choices are you’re either a Democrat or uninterested in politics. One of my neighbors (very active politically) once described me as an independent who want his trash to get picked up.

In Chicago the political action is in the infighting among factions of the Democratic Party. There’s a North Side faction and a South Side faction. There are racial factions: white ethnics vs. blacks vs. Hispanics. There are ideological and governance factions: what I’ve deemed “regular Democrats”, “reform Democrats”, and “independent Democrats”. The former Mayor Richard (“Richie”) Daley is a regular Democrat. The present incumbent governor is, essentially, a reform Democrat although you’d hardly know it from his tenure as governor. Cook County Clerk David Orr is another example of a reform Democrat, I think. I would characterize myself as being closest to the independent Democrats. As you might expect there aren’t a lot of them in office.

I’m more concerned about policy than politics, anyway. Let me use my views on healthcare, education, immigration, taxation, and trade as examples of my approach and views. As a rule I form my views based on what the legitimate needs are, how they can best and most practically be satisfied, and whose ox gets gored.

I think we need a major overhaul of our healthcare system. Incentives are completely messed up and, as long as healthcare providers are paid for performing procedures instead of helping people get healthier we’ll continue to see healthcare costs rise out of control. I think that policy should be more about increasing the total amount of healthcare, applying what’s available more efficiently and effectively, and paying a heckuva lot less for it than it is about divvying up the heatlhcare that exists more equitably.

Education, too, is in need of a major overhaul. The problem is similar to the one in healthcare: it’s not that we’re not spending enough but that the incentives are screwed up, we’re just writing off far too many of our young people, and the system just isn’t producing people with the skills our economy needs or even life skills. The system has so many core missions at cross-purposes and perverse incentives it’s a wonder that it produces anything at all.

I don’t think we have a generalized immigration problem. I think we have a Mexican immigration problem. I think we should accept just about anybody with a higher degree who wants to come, increase the number of work visas available to Mexicans dramatically, an order of magnitude or more, eliminate family re-unification as a core principle of our immigration policy, de-emphasize border enforcement, and do a lot more workplace enforcement accompanied by genuinely serious civil penalties on employers who employ those without legitimate work visas. I’m undecided on birthright citizenship. I don’t think we should accept dual citizenship.

I think the problem with our tax system has been poorly framed as one of the optimal marginal rate. I think that how you calculate income is a lot more important. My preference would be to eliminate corporate income taxes (which would induce a revolution in business formation) and start taxing compensation rather than income. The home mortgage interest deduction should be eliminated or capped at a fairly low level. The present deduction is welfare for people in the upper income brackets.

While I understand the benefits of free trade, I don’t think what we’re doing is accomplishing that. My preference: reciprocity. We should put quotas and duties on imports from other countries precisely equal to the quotas and duties they impose on goods coming from the U. S. I don’t any way to rationalize trade with China as long as they impose duties well into the double digits on our goods while we impose duties in the low single digits on theirs. They’re happy with the current system. They should be.

The problem with all of my preferences is that they gore a lot of very powerful oxen. I don’t think any serious candidate will ever run on my preferences let alone see that they come to pass.

So I’ll stay lonely.