Perhaps financial reform is a good example that is also less contentious than health care and immigration might be.
Two comments…
Why weren’t all the good things (whatever they are) in there done a long time ago ?
Surely there are some bad things tucked away in there that would never come about if part of a smaller bill.
How might the legislative process be altered to encourage good timely things and discourage bad things that are tucked away in “comprehensive” reforms?
Those are questions that could be asked of any legislation. Why the good things weren’t done a long time ago is a question you could ask whether it’s a long comprehensive bill or just a bill that changes a single law. If a law is passed saying nothing more then say, “All widgets for sale have to include a warning label warning that improper use can cause cancer”, you could ask why it took so long to tell everyone that. Maybe they didn’t know widgets caused cancer, maybe nobody thought that someone would misuse widgets, maybe previous congresses were in the pocket of Big Widget.
As for any bad things, obviously the authors of the bill don’t think that anything in it is bad, or else they wouldn’t include it in the bill. It’s sometime a tactic, though, when you have legislation that’s controversial or might not have enough votes by itself, to include it in the larger legislation, in the hopes that the whole thing will get passed.
This can, of course, backfire, as we saw this last week. There was a bill in the Senate that would allow the government to continue paying unemployment benefits to people who have been out of work for over 26 weeks. This, in itself, is reasonably uncontroversial, but it never got to a vote in the Senate, in part, because the bill also included some tax provisions that the Republicans didn’t like (extending the first time homebuyers tax credit, and changing a provision that says that the income of private equity fund managers is to be taxed at a lower rate than other income (the “Warren Buffett loophole”).
So now, all sorts of people will lose their unemployment (disclaimer: including myself), because the bill didn’t get passed, because Republicans didn’t want to close the loophole.
Our government drinks deep from the cup of inertia. So when an opportunity comes for reform (however you define that) the smart move is to grab as much as you can. You aren’t likely to get another chance. One way to change that would be to simplify the governmental structures and reduce the influence of moneyed interests. Of course, you’d have to overcome a lot of inertia to do so.
The silence is deafening… surprised?!
Not me…the progressives love “comprehensive” as a means to shove legislation thru that would never pass if it stood alone.
(Republicans do it too some times…beat you to it).
Obama is alleged to have said that he won’t enforce border security because he’d never get any form of amnesty thru. His people deny it. No intellectually honest person would disagree with the truth of that though.
Um, this progressive responded.
Should I make something of the lack of response from conservatives?
Well if Big Widget was able to get some scientists to say that widgets didn’t cause cancer (or cause global warming), you don’t even need to pay anyone, you just need a party that is innately willing to take everything Big Widget 9or big anything for that matter) at face value.
Its the carried interest provision and it doesn’t apply to Warren Buffett. The Warren Buffett tax distortion is that he gets most of his income in teh form of capital gains which is taxed at 15% while his secretary is taxed at ordinary income tax rates. The carried interest provisions allows hedge fund managers to convert their compensation (which is always ordinary income) into capital gains. We don’t allow waittresses to say that their tips are “gifts” and therefore not subject to incoem tax and we shouldn’t allow hedge fund managers to say that their carried interest income is anything other than compensation either.
The provision comes from special oil industry povisions that applied to oil exploration partnerships.
Well if they weren’t so lazy, they’d have jobs by now
There are some reforms that are stup1d to do in peicemeal fashion. immigration is one of them. We have built over 90% of that “fence” along the border that everyone said would be the answer, the one that everyone said must come before any other type of reform, now we hear the fence has to be bigger and there are a few other things taht must be done before we can engage in comprehensive immigration reofmr. What they REALLY mean is that they will keep coming up with other things that must be tried before we haev comprehensive immigration reform.