Tom Mast, Solve American Gridlock
Rachel Larimore wrote in The Dispatch Weekly on August 27 her article Very Expensive Week. It focused mainly on the student loan debt issue that is in the news these days.
Early in the article, she mentioned that the cost of the debt forgiveness could approach $1 trillion and said that “…is that it’s just one more sign that our political process is so broken that we are unable, or unwilling, to solve problems anymore.” I agree. Let’s find out why it is broken and how it can be fixed!
Congress with some help from the executive branch created the student loans programs and related avenues that encouraged students to take risks involving heavy debt and degree selections that meant they could not repay. These programs also created strong demand for higher education that stimulated the rate of growth of tuition at 8% to be about double that of inflation, pricing many people completely out of a college education.
Congress has to have been aware of these issues it nurtured, but did not correct them. Now, the President has threatened to forgive some student debt by executive order, and the speaker of the house has retorted that only Congress can take such an action. Of course, the question remains whether Congress could agree on what to do and take some action. Almost all the time, there are only two points of view in our Congress, and with the common tight balance between the powers of our only two strong parties, gridlock ensues.
Rachel Larimore finished with “Just as there are no easy solutions to the big issues I’ve mentioned there is no easy fix for our politics. We need to elect officials who are knowledgeable and qualified and serious about problem solving. But too many voters are drawn to candidates who, at best, have unserious ideas and, at worst, are just there to posture and “own” the other side. We can blame our elected officials for what they do or don’t do, but we’re the ones who put them there.” #congress
I submit that we voters can fix this problem, which is having a dysfunctional Congress. Our electoral methods are providing us with only two warring parties. Members of Congress don’t have a variety of viewpoints from which to choose.
Sadly, a great many important nations have learned this lesson and have an average of 3.9 effective parties, meaning that these parties are strong enough to influence policy. See the graph below.
So, the root cause of our student loan debt problem and many, many others is our electoral methods. The ones we use are not proportional and are designed to foster having only two real parties, parties whose primary goal is not problem solving, but domination over the other party. Electoral methods that will lead quickly to more than two effective parties are Multi-Member Districts and Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). These produce much more proportional voting meaning that the winners of elections closely represent the viewpoints and desires of the voters.
P.S.If you are really fond of Gerrymandering and the single-member districts that were mandated by Congress in 1967, you may want to ignore everything above. #gerrymandering
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