Why the Mid-Term Election Matters
By Albert B. Kelly
The news on the political front ahead of these mid-term
elections has been intense and a little overwhelming. It comes at us from all
directions and at warp speed. News of bombs in the mail, high profile targets,
charges and counter charges; no one could be faulted for simply ignoring the
news and the election altogether.
As for the election itself, the conventional wisdom is that
the midterm elections are a referendum on this person or party and quite
frankly, the conventional wisdom misses what’s really at stake in the midterms.
Below the whoopla there is something more fundamental at stake and it has to do
with the value and availability of what the government provides. Our government
is more than laws and regulations and below the elected level, we get value.
If you read nothing else this year, I strongly suggest a quick
read entitled “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis, who is the guy who wrote such
popular books as “Money Ball”, “The Big Short”, Liar’s Poker”, and “Flash Boys”
to name a few. This roughly 200-page book takes the reader inside several federal
departments such as energy, agriculture, and commerce and shows us what we get
and what we’ll lose if we assume these departments are worthless and the people
dumb and lazy- which seems all the rage these days.
It is not a book about politics, but it does shed light on the
incredibly important role these agencies serve for the American people and it does
so in an easy way. It also highlights the dedication and commitment of the
people staffing these agencies. This is no small thing and whether through
ignorance, neglect, or corruption a lot of valuable services and knowledge,
paid for by taxpayers, could be lost.
For example, it was a guy no one ever heard of in the Energy
Department (Frazer Lockhart) who organized the first successful clean-up of a
nuclear weapons factory in Colorado thereby setting a template for all future
clean-ups that followed. A largely unknown researcher at the National
Institutes of Health (Steve Rosenberg) lead the way on immunotherapy for
cancers that no one knew how to treat. And it was an unknown woman at the
Federal Trade Commission (Eileen Harrington) who created the Do-Not-Call-Registry.
One main take-away from Lewis’s book is that the federal
government provides services that the private sector either couldn’t provide
because of size and cost or wouldn’t provide because there was little to no
profit to be made such as providing medical care for veterans, air traffic
control, a national highway system, food safety guidelines, or clean air and
water.
Our government handles a portfolio of risks that no private
company could manage alone whether terrorist attacks, AIDS, natural disasters;
a financial crisis as we had in 2008, or more currently the opioid epidemic that
is ravishing our nation. There are the visible and short term risks that we
recognize, but also abstract and long term risks such as cyber-attacks on the
electric grid and a changing climate.
In “The Fifth Risk”, there’s a great example of the
connection between a midterm election and potentially losing valuable
departments. Everyone’s heard of AccuWeather, which was one of the first
for-profit weather companies founded in 1962 by Joel Myers. While AccuWeather sees
itself in competition with the National Weather Service, the company actually gets
the raw data for its forecasts free from the National Weather Service paid for by
taxpayers for weather satellites, radar, and everything else needed to produce
forecasts.
Using free taxpayer-funded data AccuWeather, as a private
company, makes millions of dollars through selling repackaged private forecasts
and ads on its website. So be it, but the risk comes when Joel Myers lobbies
Congress and the White House to pass laws forbidding the National Weather
Service from issuing its forecasts, except when life was at stake, as nearly
happened in 2005 when then-Senator Rick Santorum introduced just such a bill at
Myer’s urging. Thankfully it was defeated.
More recently, Joel Myers was the White House pick in 2017
to run NOAA, which is in charge of the National Weather Service. He was one
vote away from being confirmed earlier this year. Had he gotten confirmed,
Americans would be paying twice for weather forecasts.
It’s the quality, diversity, and availability of what our
government provides that’s at stake in the midterms. Elect ill-informed,
corrupt, or shallow-minded individuals to Congress, and watch what happens next.