The Brooking Institution used to put out a grandiose document called Setting National Priorities. It was sort of a “shadow” budget document. I looked for a recent version, but I did not find one.
Anyway, I am in the midst of noodling over various possible projects. One idea is to try to produce a version of SNP that would be designed with a Republican Administration in mind.
I like the idea of a pyramid model. That is, there should be a few high-level objectives, and then below that would be initiatives that feed into those objectives, and below that would be components of those initiatives, and so on. There should be between three and five high-level objectives.
For example, a high-level objective could be to revive the economy by unleashing entrepreneurship in nonfinancial business, including education and health care.
Another high-level objective could be to put fiscal policy on a sustainable path.
Another high-level objective could be to align regulatory missions and policies to 21st-century technological reality in energy and telecommunication.
One can imagine this being presented in WIKI format. Comments on the pros and cons of that for this project are welcome.
I realize that I need to do a lot more to flesh out this idea. Assuming it has some appeal (to others, but most of all to me), I will post more about it as it evolves.
Scott Adams recently linked to a politician that is basically putting his campaign platform on GitHub.
Your idea of crowdsourcing national priorities would probably be a good fit for this model as well.
http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/guy_changes_civilization/
I am not interested in crowd sourcing this project.
In what ways, then, would its presentation be Wiki-like?
(I was going to discourage that as a format that requires too much editorial oversight of changes, and suggest something like Reddit or Slashdot where particular ideas get up- or down-votes from participants, but I now suspect I misunderstand the goal of using a Wiki-like format for this.)
I too understand “wiki” as systematically making it easy for readers to contribute, and judging from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki this is probably not a rare misunderstanding of Kling’s intent, whatever that is.
Arnold,
Entrepreneurship in both health care and education are vitally important for future growth, but don’t forget that crowd sourcing in some capacities would have to be a part of the picture in order for it to happen. Otherwise, without everyone’s input, it is impossible to generate more open frameworks which broader marketplace interpretations can rely on. Without a more open framework, nothing about either is going to really change.
My worry with these things is always that the specifics they outline aren’t specific enough. For example, unless you get specific about what reforms you want, “reform the regulatory environment” just means “provide new and exciting round of opportunities for regulatory capture.” “Create a carbon tax set at this level and amend the clean air act to specifically not cover carbon” provides less wiggle room. Actually writing a draft bill provides even less. I’m a big believer that people who want to change government actually have draft legislation in hand, at least as a starting point. I think that’s especially important for libertarian minded people who can’t trust the government to just work out the details.
That caveat aside, it seems like a fun and interesting idea.
Does this imply that we should determine the functions of government by fiscal policy, rather than determine fiscal policy by the functions of government (which were once presumably constitutionally delineated)?
An interesting idea. However, I would rather see a document structured around “first principles for a 21st Century democracy” (for lack of a better label). Such a document would describe the need to create a much more transparent government, and a federal government that devolved many of its current programs to state and local governments and to individuals. Such a government would also return to its enumerated powers. In sum, before we talk about national priorities, we need to discuss the appropriate scope and scale of government in today’s world.
I rather like the idea, but I’ve some caveats.
The zero order point: This looks doable. Documents are out there, from OMB and GAO and CRS and CBO, which provide figures and analysis which can be cut and pasted to provide boilerplate. Think tank reports can be excerpted to provide analysis and budget alternatives. There are probably enough people with an interest to make the work loads credible. You might consider farming out the labor to some graduate level students — Perhaps a GMU seminar in environmental economics could write a chapter as a class project, for instance.
First though, Brookings always had sort of a unified inistitutional focus (AKA “slant”) to their documents. They liked food stamps, for example, and didn’t like manned space programs, and those showed up in their recommendations year after year. Which was tiresome in some ways, but at least you had an idea of what you were getting each year when you opened the latest version of SNP. If you go to a Wiki format, you risk losing that ideological consistency. Different people with different axes to grind are going to push different objectives, and that’s going to affect the “shape” of the document. You’ll have 39 page-views on the utility of carbon taxes, and a single paragraph dealing with farm subsidies.
Secondly, it strikes there are long term issues which ought to be addressed in such a document, since they are long term issues which the government is going to confront, in ways which shape the budget. Demands for programs to cope with global warming aren’t going to shrivel up and die, for instance. The Defense industrial base is headed for shrinkage (we’re building ONE fighter aircraft this decade, the F-35, unlike say the 1960’s when we built — or at least worked on — several dozen, Will we build any more in the 2020’s. or is the nation officially done with manned military airplanes?) Energy policy will be an issue — is fracking going to get us through the next decade, and if there are environmental costs is the Federal government going to be tagged with the bill? Financing health care will be a bigger and bigger issue — the fraction of GNP devoted to medical costs is going to rise for decades to come, even if some future Republican administration decides to zero out Obamacare and half a dozen other programs conservatives dislike. There’s a huge coming issue about the basic “fairness” of American life — lack of adequate jobs for large numbers of citizens, the rise of “the 1%”, stagnant income growith, etc.
TL;DR: There will still be noisy Democrats even when Republicans rule, and not all their issues can be ignored indefinitely. That shapes your budget plans, like it or not.
Still: I’d like to see your version of Setting National Priorities. This year, and the next, and the next, and …
At first I thought you were getting interested in single nucleotide polymorphisms.
I’d like to see an answer to R Richard Schweitzer’s question in the comments …
… although I don’t think I’ll like the answer overmuch.