The Curmudgeonly Professor Evaluates the Campaign Promise of Stopping Gridlock in Washington

Since only limited time exists for us all to make up our minds about whom we intend to vote for in November, the Curmudgeonly Professor is adding a second, bonus, lecture for today, titled "Can We Truly, Actually, Really, Definitely Believe the Promise that Someone Will Stop Washington Gridlock?"

This promise is perennially popular, since apparently most people believe Washington is all screwed up. The visual analogy is that of a freeway with bumper to bumper traffic waiting for cleanup crews to clean up toxic waste from a tanker truck that was going too fast on an onramp. I provide the following photo as another schematic diagram of Washington gridlock:

Actually, this photo is of the wires on my desktop which connect three external hard drives, three printers, a scanner, an electric pencil sharpener, a wireless DSL router, an electric fan, an old clunker PC computer which still has some stuff on it, and who knows what else. The wires just proliferate on their own, like bunny rabbits. For a time, I tried to keep the wires neatly bundled with color coordinated velcro strips, rubber bands, and other neatening devices. Then, gridlock set in.

Gridlock may be likened to a speech our current Commander in Chief made in which he said that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Or was it the other way around. Whatever. In any event, CIC (Commander in Chief) got his hands backwards, which is an easy thing to do in Washington gridlock.

Gridlock occurs for exactly the reason posited by the CIC. Too many people hardly know what they are supposed to be doing let alone what anyone else is supposed to be doing or actually is doing. Executive privilege is claimed every time some one really gets overly curious about what is happening so there is little point in asking anyone or trying to find out. Agency A or Department B can't proceed because regulations 2,018,985,986 and CBXA 10 zillion require five years of paper work, applications, forms, etc., to be filled out in quintuplet and submitted to Congress, the Supreme Court, and the City Attorney of Chugwater, Wyoming before any progress can be made. Meanwhile, everyone is going to lunch, attending hearings, preparing testimony, counting their sick leave and annual leave, counting their days until retirement, and writing memos in answer to nosy Congress people and Senators asking what is happening, when is it going to happen, will it ever happen, and why haven't we been told anything for five or ten years.

I was taught how to answer those kinds of nuisance letters during my brief happy stint as a Treasury economist. We were often assigned to write drafts of letters in reply to said Congress persons and Senators and other assorted dignitaries for the Treasury Secretary's signature. One day I was answering a troubling letter about forest taxation, a subject I knew absolutely nothing about, in reply to Senator Morse of Oregon, a powerhouse at the time. Where was his answer, he railed. The Secretary's office called the Assistant Secretary's Office, which called the Deputy Assistant Secretary's Office, who happened to be my public finance professor from Michigan, who called the flunky economist who was supposed to be answering the letter, me, who happened to be in the men's room at that illustrious moment in American history. After significant chastisement, the flunky economist vowed to have a short civil service career, finish his Ph.D. degree at Michigan, and go back to teaching eager economics students. But this is a good example of how government gridlock occurs, how stuff never gets done, and why one can never figure out what in the blankety-blank-blank is going on. You get the idea. Civil servants must not waste time going to the restrooms.

When you answer those pesky letters, you say something like "Thank you for your views on this important and significant bit of legislation. I can assure you that we here at Treasury have given your views every consideration in formulating our current tax policy. We will continue our study of the importance of your views, and will keep you informed of any further developments. Please continue to keep us informed of your views and suggestions on these matters of such significant importance to your nation." I was often tempted to add the words "God bless America," but wasn't yet ready to leave my Treasury staff job overnight. I learned how to write these kinds of letters after actually writing an answer with information in it explaining what was really going on, or what I thought was going on. I received a stern lecture on that point, and began mastering the art of writing in governmentese.

Anyway, class, you can see government gridlock is an urgent and continuing matter. As long as we have all these hundreds of big marble buildings up and down the streets of Washington, D. C. and scattered all over the U S of A, with countless employees populating the offices, hallways, water coolers, and lunch rooms of all of these buildings, all trying to do their duties, and many of them stymied in mountains of red tape, regulations, administrators who aren't exactly administrating, or whatever, we will have gridlock in Washington. Sarcasm aside, I found the vast majority of government employees I worked with and have known over the years to be extremely competent, walking encyclopedias of decades of government lore, and served as the foundation for what happened in government. Newly appointed political officials could not survive without this core of dedicated specialists. But that doesn't mean they have an easy job, or that gridlock doesn't exist. Though gridlock may some times be a product of incompetence, more likely gridlock is just a product of the overwhelming complexity of government. And no new President is likely to straighten things out, much. Every tax simplification act I ever had anything to do learn about merely added volumes to the Internal Revenue Code, to the legal books and court records, and provided new employment opportunities.

So wait another four years. Another new Presidential candidate can whip the voters up into a patriotic fervor by promising to straighten out the gridlock in Washington since, as we have been hammered on, "Washington is broken." I'll say. Every simplification project merely creates huge numbers of new jobs to figure out how to simplify stuff.