Does Transparency Inhibit Political Compromise?

“Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial disease. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants. . . ” —Louis Brandeis, United States Supreme Court Justice, 1933, arguing for transparency

“Just as important as transparency is the ability of lawmakers to effectively work on behalf of those who sent us here.” —Mark Schoesler, Washington State Senate Minority Leader, 2018, arguing against transparency 

A 2019 research paper (link to the preprint), Does Transparency Inhibit Political Compromise?, focuses on this topic. As discussed here recently, lack of reasonable transparency in Supreme Court operations leaves the institution open to charges of unduly politicizing the rule of law at the expense of legal principle and the public interest. The criticism of politicizing laws at the expense of the public interest also applies to the process of legislation. The court claims it needs to operate in secrecy for "obvious reasons", but no significant reasons appear to exist. The judges just don't want what they actually do to be scrutinized. That's the reason.

Legislators claim that what they do needs to be shrouded in secrecy, including negotiation to reach compromise. Since congress and some or most state legislatures no longer operate on the basis of compromise, that defense of opacity falls to actual reality.

The preprint paper's abstract is blunt.[1] Based on their analysis, secrecy is not necessary for compromise:

Politicians and scholars contend that governmental transparency reforms constrain politicians’ capacity to negotiate and compromise in the pursuit of policy goals. However, existing research primarily emphasizes only that governments are strategic in adopting these reforms; whether lawmakers actually incur the alleged costs of transparency remains an open question. We investigate this issue in the context of American state legislatures, many of which have become exempt from “sunshine laws” in recent decades. Legislators justify these exemptions by claiming that transparency impedes deal-making and coalition-building, producing gridlock. We leverage variation in the timing of sunshine law adoptions and exemptions to identify their effect on legislative productivity, polarization, partisanship, policy change, and budget delay. Our analyses refute legislators’ argument for opacity; we report precisely-estimated negligible and contradictory effects of sunshine law exposure. We conclude that transparency does not inhibit political compromise. Legislative deliberation is equally or perhaps more effective under open governance requirements.

The argument that closed-door meetings are needed for dialogue and negotiation because that might not happen in public view. This sentiment is common among politicians throughout the world. The paper's authors point out that despite this standard defense of opacity, there is no research that directly measures whether that argument has any empirical support. Thus the question of whether transparency laws really do constrain politicians' capacity to negotiate and compromise is unanswered. The researchers looked at whether American public access to the legislative process limited indicators of political compromise, specifically productivity, polarization, partisanship, policy change, and budget delay. The researchers directly tested whether governmental transparency and efficiency are mutually exclusive.

Although common sense is an essentially contested concept, and people will bicker forever over it most of the time (~97% ?), it seems reasonable at ask, what does your common sense tell you about the reasons for needless opacity in government? At this point, what David Cay Johnston had to say in 2003 in his book Perfectly Legal about how things work bears repeating:

Sen. John Breaux (D-LA) said that "instead of drilling for oil and gas, Exxon was drilling the tax code, looking for ways to find more and more tax shelters." Senator Grassley said that "what hit me the most was the moral fiber of the people involved," who he said displayed "unbridled greed and blatant disregard for the law of fairness." 

Some politicians warn off the public by advising us fool taxpayers that politics is like making sausage. If you have a weak stomach, don't look at how we do our business. In other words, you don't ask and we won't tell.

My common sense tells me two things: First, some (most?) politicians want to operate in secrecy to hide their own immorality, hypocrisy, corruption, incompetence, ignorance, sheer stupidity, culpability[2] and/or betrayal of the public interest. They want to keep their bloody sausage fingerprints on the murder weapon from ever being found.

Second, forcing in as much transparency as reasonably possible would make the sausage making a lot less disgusting because the sausage makers would know they are being watched and their lies, corruption, culpability for failure and etc., are more likely to be found out and come back to bite them. Transparency should apply to both politicians and the lobbyists who often come with cash in hand demanding gifts from legislators. The public needs to see as much of this as possible. 

So, do you want to see more or less of the sausage making? 

Footnotes: 

1. The final published paper's abstract has been softened, presumably by peer review. It reads as follows:

Governments around the world face an apparent tension when considering whether to allow public access to the governing process. In principle, transparent institutions promote accountability and good governance. However, politicians and scholars contend that such reforms also constrain politicians' capacity to negotiate and compromise, producing inefficiency and gridlock. This argument—that transparency inhibits compromise—is widely accepted, but rarely empirically tested. We develop a theoretical framework around the claim and evaluate it in the context of American state legislatures. We leverage temporal variation in state “sunshine law” adoptions and legislative exemptions to identify the effects of transparency on several observable indicators of compromise: legislative productivity, polarization, partisanship, policy change, and budget delay. Our analyses generally do not support the argument; we mostly report precisely estimated negligible effects. Thus, transparency may not be the hindrance to policy making that conventional wisdom suggests. Effective governance appears possible in state legislatures even under public scrutiny.

 2. Regarding culpability, radical right Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) commented in 2018 about the gutless US Senate and why it produces such a poor quality product: 

“. . . . . the people don't have a way to fire the bureaucrats. What we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly decide to do is to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home and we pretend we make laws. No we don’t. We write giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined, and say to secretary of such and such that he shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs. That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch and the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work. [joking] And, the House is even worse.”

Secrecy allows Senators to avoid culpability for their own bad legislation.

"For political players, a lack of transparency results in a deep sense of 

security, freedom from accountability 

and a good path get what one wants" (Germaine)

The Tax Gap Gets Mentioned!!

Sen. John Breaux (D-LA) said that "instead of drilling for oil and gas, Exxon was drilling the tax code, looking for ways to find more and more tax shelters." Senator Grassley said that "what hit me the most was the moral fiber of the people involved," who he said displayed "unbridled greed and blatant disregard for the law of fairness." -- David Cay Johnston, Perfectly Legal, 2003

There is no law of fairness and moral fiber is irrelevant. Heck, morality is irrelevant and Grassley is a clueless dinosaur with way too much power. -- Germaine, 2021 

The net tax gap

Years ago I stumbled across the concept of a stealthy, quiet, never mentioned concept called the net tax gap. I remember it well. It was one of my milk curdling moments.  

But holy foschizzle! It was mentioned yesterday in passing on a business channel. Janet Yellen commented blandly that the current gap is running at $600 billion/year and she would take a look at it.

Translation: She will do nothing about it and could not care less.

Will miracles never cease? The tax gap is actually mentioned in public by someone with some real power. 

The net tax gap is a simple concept, but it is important. 

The magic math equation: The net tax gap = what is owed in taxes - what is paid in taxes. 

Translation into American: In non mathematical language, the gap is the difference between what is owed and what is paid.

So, if $1 trillion is owed to the US Treasury in taxes, but only $550 billion is paid, the net tax gap is $450 billion. That is $450 billion is what the US treasury is cheated out of and what us idiot honest taxpayers have to support in added federal debt financing. 

That's it. That's the whole shebang. My estimate (based on detailed IRS data and analysis for 2001 and 2006) put it at about $700 billion/year ± ~ $30 billion for 2021, while the last squeak the IRS made in public a few years ago was that it is only $400 billion/year at that time. I was more right than the IRS. The IRS was clearly lying about it due to threats from congress to really gut the agency if it didn't shut up and stopped bothering people about paying their taxes.

So there it is, tax cheats get to keep ~$400 billion/year (frightened IRS),  ~$600 billion/year (bland Yellin) or ~$700 billion/year (grumpy Germaine).

Fortunately for huge corporations, they buy and get lots of legal loopholes from sleazeballs in congress, so they don't have to cheat (as much). What a bunch of valiant patriots! HUZZAH!!

Yabut, waddabout the federal debt?

Glad you asked. Anyone in congress who complains about federal debt but blocks action on dealing with the tax gap, e.g., all most or republicans, is a liar. They do not care about the debt. They care about keeping politics corrupt and sleazy. They care far more about keeping tax cheats content and free to cheat than they do about stupid honest tax payers who do not cheat. 

That's two-party politics and business as usual. This sleaze and corruption has been going on for decades. The US Treasury has been cheated out of trillions, maybe about $10 trillion since 2000. That's almost a lot of money. Almost, but not enough to get congress jazzed about anything about it -- too many re-elections are at stake.

Hooray! I don't feel a thing.

Ouch

Sidney Powell's legal defense: 'Reasonable people' wouldn't believe her election fraud claims

 THIS IS JUST TOO RICH!

Lawyers for the Trump ally claim she was just sharing an opinion when she said the election was stolen using machines built to rig races for Hugo Chavez.

“No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” Powell's attorneys said in a court filing defending her against a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, the manufacturer of the election equipment she claimed was involved in the conspiracy to steal the election.

“Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as 'wild accusations' and 'outlandish claims,'" her lawyers wrote. "They are repeatedly labeled 'inherently improbable' and even 'impossible.' Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support defendant’s position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process."

While arguing that Powell's public statements and filings were clearly opinion, the filing also claims that she still believes them to be true.

Her lawyers argued that journalists are able to use the First Amendment to rely on sources they deem credible and that attorneys should be able to do the same. Powell credited sworn testimony when she tied Chávez, who died in 2013, to voting systems used in the 2020 election.

"Lawyers involved in fast-moving litigation concerning matters of transcendent public importance, who rely on sworn declarations, are entitled to no less protection," the filing said, arguing that journalists are only penalized if they know they are publishing false information.

"She believed the allegations then and she believes them now," the filing says.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/sidney-powell-s-legal-defense-reasonable-people-wouldn-t-believe-n1261809

Are Some Rural Areas in Unavoidable Economic Decline?

In 2103, the New York Times published an article, The Russia Left Behind: A journey through a heartland on the slow road to ruin. The article noted that there were hundreds of towns shrinking into villages and villages decaying into forest. That was intentional Soviet Union policy. The Soviets cut off support during efficiency drives in the 1960s and ’70s. Towns and villages were categorized as “promising” or “unpromising.” The unpromising ones were cut off from support and left to shrink or revert to primeval forests with roving packs of wolves.

In 2017, the New York Times published a related article, Russia’s Villages, and Their Way of Life, Are ‘Melting Away’, indicating that Russia's rural population is declining. Many small towns and villages are simply going extinct in terms of people living there. After restrictions on movement relaxed after the fall of the Soviet Union, many young people fled resource-starved parts of the countryside for big cities. Researchers estimated that out of 8,300 villages in 1910, 2,000 no longer have permanent residents.

The National Review published an article by Kevin Williamson that ferociously attacked the allegedly self-inflicted misery, immorality and self-deceit about life in rural areas slowly dying from lack of economic activity. Williamson's article pointed to the immorality of belief in T****'s 2016 campaign promises because they masked reality:

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves. 

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. 

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. 

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. 

If you want to live, get out of Garbutt.

In 2018, the New York Times published an article, The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy, that asked if economic rural decline is inevitable. The NYT wrote: "There are 60 million people, almost one in five Americans, living on farms, in hamlets and in small towns across the landscape. For the last quarter century the story of these places has been one of relentless economic decline. ... the United States has grown by 75 million people since 1990, but this has mostly occurred in cities and suburbs. Rural areas have lost some 3 million people. Since the 1990s, problems such as crime and opioid abuse, once associated with urban areas, are increasingly rural phenomena."

It may be that unfavorable economic trends make it impossible to sustain many rural populations in the US and elsewhere. Rural decline is underway in Canada. Agriculture continues to automate, so that is probably not a major source of rural job growth.

The political ramifications aren't clear. Rural population loss suggests there could be a decline in republican party affiliation as urban areas tend to be more democratic and independent than rural areas. How to deal with economic decline is not clear either. 

Some evidence shows that urban areas tend to subsidize rural areas, although most conservatives vigorously dispute that. Regardless, rural economic decline seems to be real and it's a major source of social and political antagonism. This problem just might not be fixable by anyone. Economic trends have a way of going where economic forces make them go, politics and ideology be damned.

Political Extremism: Minds Stuck in a Rut

“All movements, however different in doctrine and aspiration, draw their early adherents from the same types of humanity; they all appeal to the same types of mind.” -- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951

A 2019 research paper, The Partisan Mind: Is Extreme Political Partisanship Related to Cognitive Inflexibility?, tries to dissect the basis for apparent cognitive differences between extremists or ideologues and others. Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain be rigid adherence to a political ideology. The ideological extremity hypothesis, posits that extreme liberals and conservatives are more cognitively rigid than moderates. According to this hypothesis, partisan political extremism arises from inflexible belief systems that capture the world in black-and-white terms that create the (usually false) appearance of certainty and simplicity. Consonant with this hypothesis, there is indirect evidence that left and right extremists are more dogmatically intolerant and more likely to feel superior about their beliefs.

The rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis, posits that conservatives perceive the world in a more inflexible and categorical way than liberals. Consonant empirical evidence reveals a relationship between political conservatism and psychological preferences for traditionalism, familiarity, and certainty. By contrast, that research indicates that liberalism is more tolerant and accepting of uncertainty and ambiguity.

The data this paper generated was interpreted to be generally in accord with the ideological extremity hypothesis. The data indicates that ideological extremism, not just extreme conservatism, correlates with extreme political partisanship, dogmatism and animosity. 

 

What is cognitive flexibility?

Cognitive flexibility is defined as the ability to adapt to novel or changing environments and a capacity to switch between modes of thinking. One group defined it as “the ability to flexibly switch perspectives, focus of attention, or response mappings”. Cognitive inflexibility is believed to be a state of mental stasis or a tendency of an individual to not change. That includes sometimes not changing bad behaviors despite bad consequences. That is sometimes observed in certain patients with compulsive disorder, drug addiction or frontal lobe damage. To investigate the relationship between inflexibility and political ideology, the research protocols here relied on three different, validated measures of cognitive flexibility.

The paper concludes with this summary of the results: "The present investigation sought to address the question: Does mental rigidity reflect one’s partisan intensity or political orientation? The results reveal that strong partisan intensity predicts reduced cognitive flexibility, regardless of the political party’s orientation and doctrine. .... To the best of our knowledge, these findings constitute the first direct objective testing of the ideological extremity hypothesis using behavioral assessments of cognitive flexibility rather than self-report questionnaires. The data here support the essential claim of the ideological extremity hypothesis: political extremists were more cognitively rigid than political moderates, across multiple tests of cognitive flexibility. These results suggest that the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis may be incomplete, as it does not account for the presence of the 'rigidity-of-the-left.'"

In other words, extreme liberals could be in a similar or the same cognitive boat as extreme conservatives.

As usual, the authors caution that additional "studies should seek to replicate and expand these results, as well as explore ways in which the two hypotheses can be combined and empirically negotiated."

Political Thrillers

 My partner in crime Geri and I have started to watch old classics of late, especially as now with Covid not a lot of new material coming out.

On my Forum I talked about Alfred Hitchcock films, on here I want to talk about political thrillers.

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO POLITICAL THRILLERS ANYWAYS?

Nowadays the films that pass for political thrillers seem dull compared to some of the classics (at least in my humble opinion).

Examples of what I am talking about:

 Seven Days in May (1964)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058576/

Though the movie is about a General ready to overtake the US government parts are eerily similar to what happened recently via Trump.

Another gem:

All the King's Men (1949)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041113/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4

But one of my favorite all time, and still is, is:

Fail Safe (1964)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058083/

Now, what constitutes a political thriller does vary from person to person, I found a sight that listed "Dr. Strangelove" as a political thriller (say what?) as well as listing "Lincoln" which is really a historical piece more than a thriller.

BUT COME PLAY ALONG ANYWAYS:

GOT any favorites among the genre? Any political thrillers you care to list for Geri and I to watch?

Maybe you know of a gem I have missed.

and Happy Monday to boot!