Time to Deal with Root Causes, Not Symptoms

Politicians kick the cans down the road

US Capitol Building

US politicians have perfected the art of dealing with symptoms of problems but not their root causes. This is because a politician has only two real jobs: to get reelected and to collect sufficient donations to enable reelection. All other considerations – including the principles, tenets, morals, and ideological foundations – are negotiable in completing those two endeavors. They are not problem-solvers, as it is better for them that certain problems persist because dealing with the symptoms of the underlying root causes is good politics for them and helps with the donations!

Here are some long-festering symptoms and their root causes that never seem to be discussed, let alone addressed.

Taiwan. On the international front, the current problems associated with defending Taiwan from communist Chinese aggression are a direct reflection of shifting and ambiguous US policy over the years – a series of symptoms of the real problem, which has been the casting of Taiwan adrift without alliances and a continuing means to defend itself as an independent nation. Dealing with the PLA’s ongoing intimidation of Taiwan in 2023 is a direct result of not addressing the root cause, which was the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué that negotiated US support for a “peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves” as the price the communists extracted for “joint opposition to the Soviet Union” during the Cold War. That led to the cockamamie “one China, two systems” head fake which masked the communists’ real intentions to absorb all near-abroad Chinese populations into communist China. The solution for Taiwan? Congress should press the Biden administration to fully recognize Taiwan as a separate country – which in fact it really is.

Federal debt. Many Republicans and other fiscal conservatives have been moaning about the national debt that has accumulated in recent decades – now $31.6 trillion and climbing – while not attacking the real root cause for the problem. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was passed over the veto of the Watergate-weakened President Nixon, and it opened the floodgates for deficit spending in the ensuing years. Consider the results, as the graph from the US Treasury here shows; federal debt has grown exponentially since the Act was passed as the Democrats figured out how to exploit the changes in the budgeting process that the new act permitted. If fiscal conservatives really want to address the federal debt crisis, then that Act needs to be repealed, and power restored to committee chairmen to fund and oversee specific federal departments and agencies. A return to regular order and regular budgets upon repeal of that act will remove some of the power of the speakership in delivering bloated budgets and “omnibus bills.”

Bank failures. Recent attention has been focused on the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, as well as the overall shakiness of banks in general. The quick fix of bailouts is the political solution that deals with the symptoms of the problem, of course. The root causes include going off the gold standard in 1971, which turned the dollar into a fiat currency, as well as the implementation of the Bank Secrecy Act, Sarbanes-Oxley, and Dodd-Frank Consumer Protection Act over the years, all of which essentially federalized the banking system and blurred boundaries among financial institutions. Turning the dollar into a fiat currency set the table for massive inflation, as described here. And traditional risk management and liquidity concerns were set aside in favor of politically correct investing – in the SVB case, the environmental, societal, and governance blarney of leftwing ideologues. So much for traditional risk and rate of return considerations. Those are the root causes of the current problems, and a repeal of some (or all) of these bills are in order. The fiat dollar needs to be backed by hard assets (gold), too.

Domestic surveillance. There have been many stories of domestic surveillance conducted by federal agencies (for example, here, here, and here), as well as the weaponizing of those agencies against political enemies of the Democrat Party. Republicans in the House of Representatives are beginning to expose some of the abuses, but nobody is talking about dealing with the root cause that enabled the spying on Americans: The Patriot Act of 2001. Few people know that “Patriot” is an acronym that stands for “Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.” And that euphemism means domestic surveillance! The events of 9/11 stampeded Congress to unanimously pass the Act, which refocused the vast intelligence collection apparatus built to track the actions of potential adversaries onto US citizens for the first time – all in the interests of “anti-terrorism.” The result was weakened bank secrecy laws, new types of warrants on the flimsiest of excuses, and information collection by signals intelligence and electronic surveillance systems focused on Americans on our home soil. Other increases in the government’s surveillance powers are discussed here. Since 2001, the domestic surveillance apparatus has been politically weaponized to go after Democrat-defined terrorists, including “white supremacists,” nationalists, and Trump supporters (refer to the continuing FBI investigations of J6 protestors). A big part of the solution is to repeal the key root cause that opened the door for politicization of federal surveillance capabilities against Americans. Time to repeal the Patriot Act.

Dark money in politics. The explosion of political action committees, laundering of foreign money through PACs to support/bribe/influence US politicians, and huge overall “investments” made by deep-pocketed donors aimed at influencing legislation has gotten the attention of many people in recent decades. The Right’s bugbears include George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg while the Left’s bugbears have been the Koch brothers and other conservative billionaires. Attacking them only targets symptoms of the problem. What has placed the dark money investments via PACs and foundations on steroids was the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (commonly known as “McCain-Feingold”). The Act stopped so-called “soft money” donations, which weakened the national political parties, and the low limits set on individual federal donations “disincentivized major donor programs and incentivized the money to come from elsewhere,” as noted here. And the “elsewhere” was the proliferation of “non-profit” PACs and super PACs that have plagued our politics ever since – and which have exacerbated the partisanship in America. To address the problem, the root cause (McCain-Feingold) needs to be repealed. That won’t completely fix everything, but an accompanying return to individual and no group bundling coupled with instantaneous public disclosures would be steps in the right direction.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Congress and presidents like to attack symptoms of problems because they campaign and collect donations while promising to deal with those symptoms. The above is a short list of topics, symptoms, and root causes. The latter are never addressed and, while the symptoms may be addressed and abated, new symptoms pop up that need to be tackled.

There are other root causes that the US political system refuses to address, too, such as the federalized healthcare system (thanks to Obamacare) and the repeal of the anti-propaganda ban in US government broadcast programming (the Smith-Mundt Act modifications of 2013).

Kicking the can down the road is much easier for the US political class.

The end.