Legislation is famously reactive instead of proactive. Existing problems get more attention than consequential future problems, reinforced by the incentive of lawmakers to think short run, namely to their next election.
All 435 US Congress members are up for election every two years. U.S. senators enjoy six-year terms, with one third of them up for election every two-year election cycle. Even those newly elected for a six-year term spend a disproportionate amount of time raising money to use for their next election, and/or to influence colleagues.
The old saw that “money is the mother’s milk of politics” is discouraging. Unfortunately, that’s reality.
The problem with short run political thinking is that many of our serious problems are long run, requiring long run political thought and long attention spans. Those long run future benefits almost always come at short run economic and political costs.
It’s human nature to discount future benefits and avoid upfront costs. This natural phenomenon is exacerbated by the temptation of demagogic politicians to use those immediate short run costs as a weapon to beat up on those who have the wisdom and courage to think long run.
Even when existing problems are starkly evident, politicians often use short run costs to hammer those who have the will to address a tough problem.
A revealing example of this is American health care, long a serious issue for many Amaericans. Thanks to LBJ, Medicare went far toward making health care available to older Americans. Many other Americans, including politicians and media stars, had healthcare insurance through their employers, making it too easy for politicians and the media to neglect low paid Americans lacking access to affordable health care. Any politician who would take the morally and ethically right path to address this politically difficult issue would pay a stiff price. Barack Obama and the Democrats paid that price as they passed the Affordable Care Act.
Republicans, with the aid of the media, including NPR, amplified Republican fear-mongering objections, including “Death panels,” “government takeover of health care,” and “harm to Medicare.” Senator McConnell vowed to use this then-unpopular program to make Obama a one-term president. Although McConnell failed to make Obama a one-term president, he nevertheless won the political war, with Republicans taking control of congress and hindering further progress of Obama and the Democrats on getting out of the Great Recession.
The ACA was so unpopular that Donald Trump used it as a major campaign issue in 2016; he promised to end it. However, by then, many millions had benefited from it. Even Senators McCain and Collins, who had vigorously opposed it, were influential in keeping the ACA in place — thanks to the pleading of their constituents who benefitted from it.
The long run American acceptance of the ACA had come at a stiff political short run price paid by Obama and the Democrats, demonstrating another old saw that “no good deed goes unpunished.”
A current example of this phenomenon is playing out over ending the 20-year imbroglio regarding Afghanistan. Few Americans other than combat veterans and their families paid a price for that war. Nevertheless, having dragged on for two decades it became unpopular. But ending a war that came to have an impossible objective — making Afghanistan into a democracy — would be construed as “losing it.” Its end would draw more political and media outrage than the many thousands of American and Afghan casualties — felt by neither most Americans nor the media — of the past 20 years. But that’s the way politics and the media work.
This brings us to another long run issue that is becoming more evident every day — climate change. Seriously addressing the issue will require short run costs, both financial, and changing our way of doing things, including moving toward renewable energy sources and less reliance on non-recyclable plastics. This will surely result in some economic winners and losers, at least in the short run. It is irresistible for politicians to deny the problem, to assert that solutions are impractical and too costly, and to label advocates of solution as “Socialists.”
Possible ways to deal with climate change have legitimate pros and cons, and deserve serious debate. But it is politically easier to deny the problem, and politically advantageous to hammer opponents. Again, political and economic costs of action today are taking precedence over long run benefits of meaningful action.
We see it again over the infrastructure bills. The roads and bridges bill involves concrete and steel, and obvious transportation efficiency benefits. And McConnell desperately wants that bridge connecting Cincinnati to its suburbs across the Ohio River in Kentucky. But the other bill that includes longer run benefits, such as making child day-care affordable so that women can get back into the paid work force, is seen as unimportant, disparaged as merely part of a “Democratic wish list.”
Very often, demagogic politicians realize short run political benefits with their short run thinking. But sometimes short run thinking backfires.
Donald Trump paid the ultimate price for short run thinking. Unlike most politicians who think to the next election, he failed to even think that far ahead; he could only think till the next news cycle.
Trump clearly realized early on the gravity of the Covid-19 virus. And he surely was, or should have been, astute enough to anticipate its devastating effect on the economy — the very economy that he, with the aid of an accommodating media, claimed to be his strong suit.
But taking firm, unpopular, measures to get on top of the virus would have been a tough short run call for which Trump surely would have taken some political heat. Better for the next news cycle to deny the virus than to acknowledge it and take heat for imposing measures to address it.
Had Trump taken that political heat up front to get on top of the virus, thereby saving the economy, he very possibly would have been reelected.
Oh, the perils of short term thinking. It can come back to bite you.
— John Waelti of Monroe, a retired professor of economics, can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net. His column appears Saturdays in the Monroe Times.
