The Poison of Partisanship

How Political Incentives Prevent Us from Cooperating on Our Biggest Challenges

Big problems require collaborative solutions.  When politicians with diverse perspectives work together, they can find more durable and complete answers to challenging questions.  The current win-at-all-costs political culture in Washington, DC and Salem discourages working together in the common interest because those solutions often require compromises from the partisans at the extremes of both parties who disproportionately influence our primary elections.  We see this influence in the failure to address immigration, social security, and housing problems in our federal and state governments. 

Immigration.  Comprehensive immigration reform has three pillars – a bigger “front door” of legal immigration, a process for regularizing the status of the 11 million undocumented people currently living in the US, and enforcement.  For the far right, a misperception of immigrants as young criminals prevents any compromise on the undocumented, even though immigrants are more law-abiding than native-born citizens and more of them are over age 45 than under age 25.  For the far left, immigration enforcement represents the cruel return of people to situations where their lives are endangered, even though only a small percentage of immigrants even claim asylum.  Moderate Republicans generally favor increased immigration as supporting business interests, while moderate Democrats tend to accept that a system that protects refugees and asylees can also reasonably exclude people with significant criminal histories. 

However, working together across the aisle often means a quick exit from public office for a politician.  In primaries that are often closed to independent voters, winning the voters with the most extreme views is the surest path to victory, as these are the voters most likely to participate in partisan primaries.  Further, gerrymandering has decreased the number of competitive districts, meaning that the winner of the primary becomes the winner of the general election by default.  Indeed, in 40 percent of state legislative races nationwide, no one from the minority party even filed to run.

Social Security.  As with any benefit program, Social Security’s inputs must pay for its outputs.  To achieve fiscal sustainability, the program will have to cut benefits at the higher end of the income spectrum and increase taxes to support benefits for lower income recipients.  However, cutting at the high end is toxic to both parties and tax increases are anathema to anti-tax zealots.  Doing nothing will result in a cut of about 23% in benefits in about 10 years, an outcome opposed by 79% of Americans.  Unfortunately, the influence of the most polarized voters in party primaries blocks progress on the moderate, comprehensive solution the country needs.

Housing.  Oregon lacks adequate housing stocks for all except the wealthiest residents.  A comprehensive solution requires rent stabilization that allows a reasonable profit, sustainable rental assistance funded from upper end rental units, and construction incentives.  At the time of writing, only a rent-stabilization bill appears to have any promise of passing the Oregon Legislature, further disincentivizing the construction of new rental housing.  From the far-left perspective, housing is a human right, landlords should subsidize rental housing, and housing developers are not part of the solution.  From the far right, rental housing should be a free market, rental assistance should not receive public funding, and developers should face no restrictions on their ability to build wherever they like. 

Housing experts generally agree on four points: some loosening of restrictions on construction is necessary if we want to see more housing; low-income housing always requires a public subsidy; short-term rental assistance keeps people in their housing; and the public sector alone will not build adequate housing stocks.  Put another way, a nuanced solution requires both the public intervention favored by the left and private incentives favored by the right, but there is little incentive for collaboration.

All Is Not Lost.  Despite the strong disincentives to cooperation, people of good will can make progress.  The US House Modernization Committee adopted some simple changes that resulted in positive collaboration.  In the Oregon House, Rep. Lily Morgan and I were able collaborate across the aisle on bipartisan policies to increase enforcement against illegal marijuana grows in Southern Oregon.  In the current bitter partisan climate, we make progress most often by working on smaller issues.  While this won’t solve our biggest problems, it does give us some hope that goodwill does still exist in politics. 

Legislative efforts to prevent the cultivation of marijuana under hemp licenses resulted in significantly greater compliance in 2022 than in 2021.

Enabling Our Better Angels.  While it is tempting to blame legislative successes on good character and failures on bad, a truer answer is that legislators respond to incentives built into the system.  Gerrymandering and closed primaries incentivize politicians not to collaborate in the public interest because they magnifying the electoral importance of extremists over those of moderates.  In Oregon, a proposal to implement Ranked Choice Voting is still alive in the House and an active petition campaign seeks to reverse the state’s gerrymandering.  While character in public officials may be necessary for them to support the public interest over partisan ones, it won’t sufficient to tackle the big problems without these sorts of structural incentives. 

OTHER NEWS

The Strategic Corporal Problem

In the military headquarters I worked in, we often discussed the “Strategic Corporal Problem” - the reality that our efforts were often defined by the actions of some of the most junior members of our command. As we saw last week, one Airman First Class with access to classified information who wants to show off to his friends can seriously damage our national security. While we will undoubtedly learn more in the weeks to come, two lessons jump out to me. First, we should rethink the personnel model that recruits young, immature people into roles better suited to more responsible employees with experience in the field better able to appreciate the consequences of their actions. Personally, I only started working in a headquarters after 4 years of experience in the field as an infantryman. That experience helped me appreciate the consequences of my work. Second, we should hold the government accountable when we find out that its internal deliberations differ so significantly from its public pronouncements. Certainly the methods and means of intelligence collection should remain classified, but the government should be more forthright with the strategic conclusions drawn from them.

Rest in Peace, Bill

Former Secretary of State Bill Bradbury passed last week. He was a dedicated public servant whose infectious enthusiasm drew people to his causes. I’ll miss him.

Children’s Health

Oregon isn’t doing enough to support children’s health. In a sense, we are victims of our own success in covering more children with public health insurance. The Children’s Health Insurance Plan and continuing all Medicaid eligible people on the Oregon Health Plan during the pandemic ensured that almost all children have health insurance…but mostly on public health insurance that pays pediatric providers 80% or less of the cost of delivering healthcare services. During the pandemic, hospitals also converted children’s hospital beds to meet the needs of adults. Many of these adults were on Medicare, which purports to pay 100% of the cost of delivery. As such, many beds were not converted back as inpatient hospitalization rates from COVID-19 decreased. Put another way, most kids have coverage, but providers find it increasingly difficult to keep their doors open, particularly in the mental health space. For all that I’m an advocate for a single-payer healthcare system, any such system has to pay providers enough to keep them open. Underpaying on Medicaid/OHP disproportionately hurts children and drives up the cost of private care and insurance as providers seek to recover deficits from care provided to people on public insurance. We need a plan to address the problem.