Gun Violence Research Remains Neutralized

Spitting hot lead in defense of America, mom, 

apple pie, the flag, automatic weapons, ammo, etc.

The use of illicit drugs and a history of physical fights in the home are important risk factors for homicide in the home. Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance. .... Our data indicate that keeping a gun in the home is independently associated with an increase in the risk of homicide in the home. The use of illicit drugs and a history of physical fights in the home are also important risk factors. -- Arthur L. Kellermann, et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 329:1084-1091, Oct. 7, 1993

“The Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.” – conservative Chief Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger

In an average year, gun violence in America kills nearly 40,000 people, injures more than twice as many, and costs our nation $280 billion. .... examining the serious economic consequences of gun violence is paramount to understanding just how extensive and expensive this crisis is. .... On an average day:

• American taxpayers pay a daily average of $34.8 million for medical care, first responders, ambulances, police, and criminal justice services related to gun violence.
• Employers every day lose $1.4 million in productivity, revenue, and costs required to recruit and train replacements for victims of gun violence.

CONTEXT

In 1996, congress effectively banned federal funding for gun violence research. The ban was a response by people who opposed gun regulation and the NRA to a 1993 research paper (quoted above) that shows that gun ownership was a risk factor for domestic homicide. That unsurprising result sent the gun people into a crazed frenzy of fear and rage. As usual, the inconvenient research paper was smeared by partisan propaganda. It was falsely characterized as a political attempt to take away everyone's guns. Once again, inconvenient science and truth was politicized and lied about for ideological and special interest reasons, mostly gun industry profit. That came at the expense of the public interest, in particular, public safety.

The ban came in the form of a law that barred the CDC from spending money to “advocate or promote gun control.” Over the years, the NRA and others justified keeping the ban in place in the face of attempts to get it removed. The justifications included lies such as (i) the CDC does not have the expertise to get involved in gun violence research, and (ii) the research is being done in other federal agencies. When ideology and/or big money is at stake, inconvenient facts and truths are shamelessly obliterated by lies and slanders for political partisan reasons in congress and for special interest profit.

The situation in 2021

An article in the New York Times, Can New Gun Violence Research Find a Path Around the Political Stalemate?, curiously suggests that the research funding ban is still in effect while actually saying it isn't. Maybe this is the NYT's attempt to help get the funding ban removed. Who knows? The NYT writes:

And Andrew R. Morral, a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, a research group, is using sophisticated modeling tools to estimate rates of gun ownership in every state, with detailed demographic information. The purpose, he said, is to search for patterns in firearm homicides and suicides — a first, basic step in research that could lead to reducing them.

The recent mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder, Colo., have once again left Democrats and Republicans in a stalemate over background checks for gun buyers and assault weapons bans. But public health experts say a new round of research could pave the way for gun policies that avoid partisan gridlock — and ultimately save thousands of lives.

The studies by Dr. Naik-Mathuria and the others are being paid for by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is once again funding research into gun violence after a nearly 25-year hiatus imposed by Congress. And while they might not reduce the number of massacres, mass shootings account for an extremely small percentage of the roughly 40,000 Americans who die each year from gun violence.

“It’s not either, ‘Keep your guns or prevent gun violence,’ ” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who helped establish the C.D.C.’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control but said he was fired in the late 1990s under pressure from Republicans who opposed the center’s gun research. “There’s a strategy that science can help us define where you can do both — you can protect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and at the very same time reduce the toll of gun violence.” 

Federal money for gun research all but disappeared after Congress in 1996 enacted the so-called Dickey Amendment, which barred the C.D.C. from spending money to “advocate or promote gun control.” It was named for Jay Dickey, a former Republican House member from Arkansas, who proudly proclaimed himself the National Rifle Association’s “point man” in Washington.

In 2019, Dr. Rosenberg and Mr. Dickey’s former wife, Betty, a retired former prosecutor and chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, helped persuade Congress to restore the funding; lawmakers appropriated $25 million, split between the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health, for firearm injury prevention research.

The agencies are now financing nearly two dozen studies, though backers of the research say the money is a pittance compared with the breadth of the problem. (emphasis added)

Inflicting righteous discipline on the miscreants,

you know, democrats, atheists, the LGBQNT folks, 

undocumented immigrants, 

people shopping for groceries, etc.

There's nothing like a good NRA point man in Washington to make sure that greedy, corrupt special interests get what their campaign contributions paid for. Before he died in 2017, Dickey expressed surprise and regret about banning the research money. He defended himself as saying something along the lines of: 'Gosh 'n golly, shucks, gee wiz, holey moly! I never intended to stop all the research. I just wanted to stop all the political stuff.' Maybe Dickey actually drank the cool-aid the NRA bought for him and was sincere, or maybe he was just another cynical lying politician.

So, here we are today, about 25 years later and still ignorant about gun violence and politically gridlocked. We are still ignorant about possible ways to reduce it without unduly burdening a fraudulent right to bear arms. And we are still suffering mass shootings by freaks, mostly enraged males, exercising their fraudulent right to bear weapons of mass slaughter.

Come and take it?? That's feisty!

Careful, don't grab the wrong pussy!

How Democracy Slowly Melted Away in 1930s Germany

Modern American fascists

The recent fall of democracy in Georgia is prompting some folks to raise the alarm over the fate of democracy. Thom Hartmann, host of the show Democracy Now! (left bias, high fact accuracy) on Free Speech TV, writes about this bit of history and the parallels with Nazi Germany and the fall of democracy there. Hartmann writes:

In light of what Georgia’s legislature and Governor Brian Kemp just did to crush democracy in that state, you will want to read what a brilliant reporter wrote in the 1950s about how the Nazis took over Germany. It illustrates what the GOP is doing with vivid detail.

The Nazis corrupted the political system and took it over, bit by bit, gradually drawing the people along with them, and packing the courts with partisans in a way that was shockingly banal and totally resonant with today.

And then, in a relative instant, they changed the laws so it was all irreversible.

This was Chicago reporter Milton Mayer's great fear and great fascination, after he got to know real Germans who’d lived through the years of the Nazis.

An American Jew of German ancestry, and a brilliant writer, Mayer went to Germany 7 years after Hitler's fall and befriended 10 “average Germans,” asking each how the Nazis rose to power in an otherwise civilized nation.

His book, They Thought They Were Free, is his story of that experience. Intertwined through it — first published in 1955 — are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans: to us, today.

Georgia legislature the power to decide who won elections in that state, regardless of how the vote turned out.

It was introduced into the House, passed the House; introduced into the Senate, passed the Senate; sent to the Governor and signed by Governor Brian Kemp… all in less than one day.

Mayer quotes one of his German friends as describing a similar process:

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security...." 

The German survivor continues, as if he’d been living in Georgia or Iowa or Wisconsin for the past decade: 

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ..." 

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. 

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these “little measures” that no “patriotic German” could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. 

One day it is over his head."

A week ago, we all thought we had a fine constitutional republic that had just been battered a little bit by a crazy billionaire con man.

Today, we’re discovering that throughout the past five years — and really since 2001 with Bush’s PATRIOT Act/torture/war/wiretap response to 9/11 — we’ve been incrementally changing our country with every Republican administration, particularly at the state level, and most Americans didn’t even realize it.

We are farther along in the process than most Americans understand. America has now sunk so low in the rankings of democratic nations because of the way Republicans have rigged state governments and use the filibuster in the US Senate that we are as dysfunctional as Argentina or Hungary.

This, Mayer’s German informant suggests, is how fascism will always take over a nation.

"You see, one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty."

Thus came the final opportunity for genuine fascists like Kemp to move and move quickly.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You're an alarmist.’"

Meanwhile, Florida is trying to pass SB90, which would require everybody in the state to re-register to vote for every election.

Are the parallels between 1930s Germany and America in 2021 fairly close, or are there major differences that render this analogy false?

Does American Democracy Have a Good Chance to Succeed?

Democracy under direct attack

The FGOP is now busy propagandizing the 1/6 coup attempt as honest, 

decent, law-abiding citizens just peacefully exercising their 1st Amendment 

rights, but being ruthlessly oppressed by evil, rampaging police

(Standard FGOP anti-democratic mendacity)

A New York Times article focuses on this issue. The NYT writes:

At the end of a winding answer on Thursday about competing with China and about his relationship with Xi Jinping, a man he said does not have a democratic “bone in his body,” President Biden offered up a revealing assessment of one of America’s most pressing challenges.

“This is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” he told reporters at his first news conference as president. “We’ve got to prove democracy works.”

China’s president, Mr. Xi, Mr. Biden said bluntly, was “a smart, smart guy” who shared with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a belief that “autocracy is the wave of the future and democracy can’t function” in the complexities of the modern world.

“We talked about China and the competition they’re engaging in in the Belt and Road Initiative,” Mr. Biden said. “And I suggested we should have, essentially, a similar initiative coming from the democratic states, helping those communities around the world.”

There is a striking similarity between Mr. Biden’s list and Mr. Xi’s “Made in China 2025” initiative — which was first announced six years ago as an effort to make China largely independent of Western suppliers for critical technology.

At the core of Mr. Biden’s infrastructure and supply-chain initiatives is an effort — parts of which began in the Trump years — to ensure the West is not dependent on Chinese technology. It is a battle that blossomed over Huawei, the maker of next-generation communications networks, but has now spread to fears that Chinese apps like TikTok could be a pathway for attacks on American infrastructure.

“China is outinvesting us by a long shot,” Mr. Biden said, previewing his argument, “because their plan is to own that future.”

In addition to FGOP (fascist GOP) efforts to obliterate free elections as much as they can wherever they can, the party literally hates government. The party leadership rabidly but blindly believes that deregulated markets solve nearly all problems better than government power ever could. In this regard, the FGOP is a powerful anti-democratic autocratic political force that Biden has to fight tooth and claw against.  

It is clear that the FGOP's vision of deregulating markets causes power to flow from government to wealthy people and businesses. Republican brand deregulation removes restraints on the ability of special interests and wealthy people to make more money, e.g., they can ignore burdens like pollution, honest advertising, etc. The republican vision of commerce and government is not one where power flows to individuals. It is one where power flows up to special interests and wealth, not down to average people.[1] That is inherently autocratic, and if recent history is a reliable indicator, inherently corrupt, incompetent and lawless.

Obviously, most republicans and some or many independents do not agree with this vision of reality. But if one does at least understand the argument, the problem that Biden and democrats face in defending democracy is clear. How can democracy be defended when at least 35% of US citizens want a demagogic dictator in power? That is the case whether the authoritarians agree or not, or whether they know it or not. That authoritarian mindset doesn't seem to much mind the mendacity, crackpottery, corruption, incompetence and contempt for the rule of law that accompanies the FGOP's demagogic tyranny.

Does American Democracy Have a Good Chance to Succeed? Is the FGOP an anti-democratic political force working against democracy to build some form of a demagogic tyranny-Christian theocracy?

Footnote: 

1. Of the several deregulations I have looked at that were implemented under the previous FGOP administration, all deregulated special interests and power flowed from government to the affected special interests. In no case did power flow to average people. Power flowed up and concentrated with wealthy people and businesses. 

A moment in history the FGOP has clearly forgotten

The Tax Gap Gets a Second Mention!

The Washington Post reports this morning in an opinion piece:

But there’s some lower-hanging, revenue-raising fruit that has not featured prominently in leaks from the White House or Capitol Hill: giving the Internal Revenue Service more money.

Increasing spending to help pay for spending may seem counterintuitive. It makes more sense when you consider that every additional dollar invested in the IRS generates a $6 return, according to Treasury estimates, by enabling the agency to detect and collect tax bills already owed.

Thanks to years of budget cuts, the overall IRS budget is about 20 percent below its level a decade ago in inflation-adjusted terms. Meanwhile, the agency has been given more and more responsibilities. These include implementing the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, combating identity theft and tax-refund fraud, dispensing multiple rounds of pandemic stimulus payments, and, possibly very soon, issuing monthly cash payments to families with children.

With fewer resources available to handle all these duties, something had to give. That something turned out to be enforcement. Tax cheats can now get away with murder — or at least the ability to substantially shortchange Uncle Sam.

The number of IRS revenue agents — the auditors qualified to examine complex returns — has plummeted 43 percent over the past decade, according to a report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Audit rates of those filing these complex returns have also sharply declined.

For example, the number of millionaires who were audited in fiscal 2020 was about a quarter of the number from fiscal 2012. Accordingly, these IRS audits turned up unreported tax bills of $1.2 billion last year, about a quarter of the $4.8 billion found in fiscal 2012.

These numbers are presumably not declining because wealthy people and corporations have suddenly become more scrupulous about paying exactly what they owe. They know the IRS is outgunned; if anything, cutbacks in IRS audits and declining referrals for criminal prosecution have emboldened tax cheats — or at least encouraged well-heeled filers and the armies of tax experts they employ to attempt increasingly aggressive interpretations of the law.

The more conspicuous this lack of enforcement gets, the more additional people are likely to duck their tax duties. This has happened in other countries, such as Greece and Italy, where perceptions that everyone else is shirking have led to cascading tax evasion. No one wants to be the only chump left following the law.

Estimates for the size of the U.S. “tax gap” — the difference between what’s owed and what’s collected — vary. By one estimate, from economists Natasha Sarin (who was recently appointed to a post at Biden’s Treasury Department) and Lawrence H. Summers (the former treasury secretary who is also a Post contributing columnist), the IRS will fail to collect nearly $7.5 trillion of legally owed taxes over the next decade. Even that may understate the amount of evasion. A new paper co-authored by IRS employees suggests the ultrawealthy may be hiding more money abroad than had been previously estimated.

If about $7.5 trillion is going to be left uncollected in the next 10 years as the opinion asserts, then the tax gap averages about $750 billion/year. As noted here a few days ago, estimates of the tax gap varied. Tax cheats get to keep ~$400 billion/year (frightened IRS), ~$600 billion/year for 2021 (Janet Yellin) or ~$700 billion/year ± ~ $30 billion for 2021 (my estimate).

Looks like my estimate is closer to the mark than the IRS estimate. And, maybe it is closer than Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin estimates. 

Democracy has Fallen in Georgia

The authoritarianism of the republican party crossed into some form of Christian fascism in the wake of the 1/6 coup attempt by the ex-president and a mob of traitors. Most or all of the fascist GOP (FGOP) leadership fell in line with the big lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Although a few voters left the party after the 1/6 coup attempt, most rank and file republican voters were in accord with the big lie and falsely believed the lie was reality and reality was a lie.

After the election, the ex-president make voter suppression his main target for FGOP policy. In turn, the FGOP has responded enthusiastically to the demagogue's desire to rig future state elections so that their candidates always win, even when they clearly lose the vote. Georgia is the first state to give state FGOP officials the power to legally void a vote and award the win to the republican. The FGOP in Georgia has given the tyrant demagogue exactly what he wanted. Georgia is well on the way to true fascism. Other FGOP-controlled states can reasonably be expected to follow suit in the coming months.

Some people saw this coming and tried to warn us

Some people with experience in the fall of democracy to a tyrant demagogue saw the danger the ex-president presented to American democracy. Years earlier, reporter Masha Gessen had witnessed the fall of Russian democracy to the tyrant Putin. She wrote this in 2016 a day after the election and Clinton had conceded. This was what Gessen wished Clinton had said in her concession speech, but did not say. Gessen was prescient:

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

 
That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday [in her concession speech to the ex-president].

Like most Americans, Clinton did not see the looming fascist danger in the ex-president or the republican party. Some, maybe most, Americans today still do not see it. Polling in Georgia indicates that about 75% of people there oppose various provisions that the FGOP has put into law. That suggests that even some republican voters are uneasy with the transition from democracy to tyranny. Disregard for public opinion, along with contempt for elections and voter's wishes, are clear signs of the new American fascism. They have been signs of fascism ever since it was invented.

The Georgia situation

The New York Times comments on the situation in Georgia:

Georgia Republicans on Thursday passed a sweeping law to restrict voting access in the state, introducing more rigid voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, limiting drop boxes and expanding the Legislature’s power over elections. The new measures make Georgia the first major battleground to overhaul its election system since the turmoil of last year’s presidential contest.

The legislation, which followed Democratic victories that flipped the state at the presidential and Senate levels, comes amid a national movement among Republican-controlled state legislatures to mount the most extensive contraction of voting access in generations. Seeking to appease a conservative base that remains incensed about the results of the 2020 election, Republicans have already passed a similar law in Iowa, and are moving forward with efforts to restrict voting in states including Arizona, Florida and Texas.

Mr. Biden joined Georgia Democrats on Thursday in denouncing efforts to limit voting, calling Republicans’ push around the country “the most pernicious thing.”

“This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” he said at his first formal news conference since taking office.

Though the law is less stringent than the initial iterations of the bill, it introduces a raft of new restrictions for voting and elections in the state, including limiting drop boxes, stripping the secretary of state of some of his authority, imposing new oversight of county election boards, restricting who can vote with provisional ballots, and making it a crime to offer food or water to voters waiting in lines. The law also requires runoff elections to be held four weeks after the original vote, instead of the current nine weeks. (emphasis added)

Think of that a moment. It was an intentional distraction from the fact that republicans can now overturn election votes they don't like, i.e., when a democrat wins, but the FGOP actually had the astounding arrogance and hate in it to make it a crime to provide food or water to voters. Those are people standing for hours in lines the FGOP intentionally created to keep people from voting. If that isn't some form of fascism, what is it? It isn't democracy, that's for sure.

American democracy is clearly under a major, sustained direct attack by a radical extremist FGOP. The coming fights over protecting voter rights in the Senate will be bitter and brimming with hate and lust for vengeance, regardless of the outcome. At present, it looks like the GOP will be able to block any meaningful defense of democracy, which will be free to fall in the states the ex-president needs to be elected in 2024. All the demagogue tyrant needs is three or four more states to fall and that will be the end of American democracy and the American experiment for the foreseeable future, maybe forever. 

Those fights could come down to one or two radical conservative democratic Senators, Joe Manchin (WV) and possibly Krysten Sinema (AZ) who oppose moving forward with voter protection without significant GOP Senate support. There is no reason to think that even a few, if any, FGOP senators have any interest in protecting voter rights when their party leadership and its cult leader (the ex-president) is hell-bent on rigging elections as Georgia has now done.

It is deeply sad to see how easily democracy can fall under pressure from a corrupt, mendacious tyrant demagogue flying on the back of the dark free speech dragon. Gessen could see just how fragile democracy was. And, she could clearly see the danger of a demagogue tyrant for what it was and still is. 

Has America learned its lesson? Are we really going to let our country slide into a full-blown fascist demagogic tyranny? Is fascism inevitable because democracy is so fragile? Or, is this just a kerfuffle in a teapot or whatever kerfuffles happen in?

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)