You’ve probably heard that phrase before, but its meaning goes deeper than you might realize. Picture your congressperson. What do you think is their primary function, their purpose in Congress after you voted for and elected them? Is it to represent your interests to the nation or is it to do what is best for the entire country? The two are often in conflict. When a choice has to be made, which should your representative choose to prioritize?
The fundamental problem with American politics is expecting a locally elected person to look out for the national interest.
Most representatives go with the assumption, well founded in my opinion, that their constituents want them to focus on local priorities. Think about it step by step. Let’s say you’re the idealist of the idealist. You still need votes to be elected, and you need people to like you to get votes. If you aren’t elected you won’t be able to influence or initiate any legislation. Candidates will therefore do what it takes to get people to like them. But not just any people. Someone running for a seat in a district in Ohio wouldn’t care very much what a person in California might think of them. They need only to focus on the people who are actually eligible to vote for them.
To see why this creates a problem, imagine that you’re an employee of a big company with multiple departments. You’re hired by a person within one specific department and that person is also the only person with the authority to terminate you. Your job is to do what keeps the company strong. If you do what helps your department but hurts the company, you might very well be hurting your future self by weakening the company your section depends on to exist. What do you do if there comes a decision where the short term and long term interests of the department and the company don’t align? Is your first priority to keep the company healthy or to keep your boss happy?
This explains perfectly many of the confusing things we see. It explains how Congress can be so unpopular yet still have an enormously high incumbency rate of over 90%. You might think that it’s because of the inherent advantages of incumbency or gerrymandering but that wouldn’t explain the approval ratings of individual congresspeople when you ask their constituents. People generally approve of their congressperson.
People have a tendency to “other” those who act in ways they don’t like. That often means politicians and other voters. What many of us fail to see is that every other actor in our political system is just another person just like we know ourselves to be. We want to keep our job, so does everyone else, including politicians and other voters. Put to a vote people will elect to keep their job every time, even if it’s harmful in the long run.
This is most clearly seen in lobbying. Lobbying groups, especially for issues that involve financial interests, know what they’re doing. Look at the representatives lobbying groups target. In the top 10 recipients of coal lobby money in 2015 were Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania, Andy Barr from Kentucky, Rob Portman and John Boehner from Ohio, Evan Jenkins, Alex Mooney, and David McKinley from West Virginia, and John Shimkus from Illinois. These are just numbers so far for 2016. Look back at the year 2014 on OpenSecrets and you’ll find that candidates got many times these amounts. John Boehner pulled in over $330,000 that year from the Coal lobby.
Of the top 10 recipients, 8 were from coal country. During 2014, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Illinois were numbers two, three, four, and five in terms of coal production in the United States. Ohio was number eleven.
It is the same for other industries. Let’s look at steel production. The steel lobby targeted Rob Portman and Sherrod Brown from Ohio, Tim Walberg from Michigan, and Keith Rothfus from Pennsylvania. Ohio produces “between 14% and 17% of the United States’ raw steel.” Steel is omnipresent in Pennsylvania’s history. The Pittsburgh Steelers takes its name from one of the biggest industries the state ever had and U.S. Steel, the 15th largest steel producer in the world, is headquartered in Pennsylvania.
Let’s try one more, the sugar industry. In the top 10 recipients we find Collin Peterson and Tom Emmer from Minnesota, Carlos Curbelo from Florida, Kevin McCarthy from California, Michael Bennet from Colorado, and Ralph Abraham from Louisiana.
Florida and Louisiana are far and away the two biggest producers of sugarcane in the United States. There are only 11 sugar beet producing states and as you might have guessed, Colorado, Minnesota, and California are right there.
What this shows is that lobbyists know who to target and what buttons to push. The representatives from those states have a keen interest in supporting those industries. A quick way to lose re-election is to have a lot of unemployed people. Unemployed people are unhappy people and they will look for a representative who promises to bring them jobs. There’s always a candidate pledging to do that. Listen in on any presidential debate for just a few minutes to hear it. On the other hand, protect the livelihood of your voters and point to your efforts during the campaign and they’ll be more inclined to cast their ballot for you.
That’s local incentives overriding national priorities.
Congresspeople go to the national legislating body and find ways to support their local industries in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, tariffs on competing imports, and other methods. In 2013, fossil fuels received $3.2 billion in federal subsidies, coal is a part of that. Agriculture has received over $277 billion since 1995, sugar is a part of that.
Pointing to the negative long term effects these programs have on the nation is simple. Climate change is a fact and we are subsidizing the fossil fuels that worsen it when we should be incentivizing renewable fuels instead. Corn is the biggest recipient of those agricultural subsidies and results in hyper-cheap corn syrup which is then used as sugar substitutes in everything we eat from “healthy” cereal and even our bread. All that sugar is driving Americans straight into being one of the most obese nations on Earth. Meanwhile, obesity is an enormous contributor to death in the United States and contributes heavily towards our skyrocketing health care costs. Obese people develop more conditions and are more costly to treat than healthy weighted individuals. We’re paying hundreds of billions of dollars directly in taxes and indirectly in increased costs to our environment and our own health.
And it can be hard to take a stand. Just look at the kind of language used by Minnesota Senators when there was an attempt to phase out the sugar subsidies in 2012.
“The sugar beet industry supports good jobs in the Red River Valley and is one of the major foundations of Minnesota’s strong rural economy. That is why I voted to table the amendment to eliminate the sugar program.”
- Amy Klobuchar
“The U.S. sugar program supports thousands of Minnesota jobs and brings millions of dollars into communities all over the state. I’m very pleased that we were able to save the sugar program with today’s vote.”
-Al Franken
“We don’t need the tanks. Our tank fleet is two and a half years old on average now. We’re in good shape and these are additional tanks that we don’t need.”
-General Ray Odierno, Army Chief of Staff, in testimony to Congress
“[We] recognize the necessity of the Abrams tank to our national security and authorizes an additional $120 million for Abrams tank upgrades. This provision keeps the production lines open in Lima, Ohio, and ensures that our skilled, technical workers are protected.”
-Representative Mike Turner
Take a guess as to which state Representative Mike Turner hails from.
These are people’s jobs. You might look at these politicians and shake your head disapprovingly. They’re being so short-sighted you think to yourself. True enough but the politicians don’t care what you think if you’re not in their district or state. They answer just to their own constituents and voters. They don’t answer to you!
Besides, if a candidate says they’re going to take the high road and not do this it will likely cost them the election. There’s always someone else out there who will promise to deliver if you won’t. The easy calculation there is to just promise it and try to balance the national and local interests as best you can. Politicians know this as well. Most of the time this results in everyone looking the other way as long as each representative gets to have something to take back to his constituents as proof of how hard he’s working for them.
To emphasize the primary focus of this piece, it’s again local incentives overriding national priorities. And with bad results. Most importantly this doesn’t happen because of some conspiracy or because politicians are corrupt. It happens because those are the incentives we provide to those we elect.
We made one graph comparing the share of the vote the incumbent party got with the change in the deficit that it had presided over. It looked as if we’d spilled a bag of dots onto a piece of paper. The next graph plotted vote share against change in real disposable income. The line showing a correlation fit perfectly — more perfectly, in fact, than I’d anticipated.
The incentive is clear. If you want to win the election find a way to get federal dollars spent in your district and state. Despite whatever the voters say or claim the statistics show that the thing that actually drives them is the economic bottom line. As you probably know, what people say and what people actually do are often two entirely different things. We already think that about politicians but unsurprisingly it applies to the voters as well.
If you think those people should suck it up and deal with the fact that their industry can’t stand on its own, you should think about the repercussions to your own livelihood. You’d be surprised at how much government help your job receives even if it isn’t clearly obvious. The existence of the car industry keeps steel and car part manufacturers alive. The existence of cheap corn syrup in a very real way subsidizes huge parts of the food industry including sodas. Our economy is so interwoven that taking down big parts of one industry reverberates widely. Look at what the collapse of the housing bubble did to our economy as a whole in 2007–2008. Are you eager to potentially sacrifice your own economic security? Even if it’s the right thing to do it’s hard to follow through.
Say it one more time, local incentives are overriding national priorities.
A word of caution
You might be tempted to say the actual problem is lobbying. You might think that politicians are being bribed or bought by lobbyists to do things that go against the national interest. But the numbers tell a different story. It shows lobbyists donating to candidates who are already sympathetic to their position. Of course a representative from coal country is likely to favor the coal lobby. Of course representatives from districts with a heavy sugar economy will look kindly on the sugar lobby. Lobbyists donate to candidates who already have their backs to make sure that candidate wins and can go on to represent them in Congress.
The Religious Right is a special interest but so too is the LGBT community. The fossil fuels lobby is a special interest but so too is the Sierra Club. The alcohol lobby and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The list goes on and on. For every interest there are multiple groups for and against it and they’re all trying to make their case to Congress. There is no lobby made of robots. Every lobby is made up of real people like you and me trying to take care of themselves. Go to Kentucky or Ohio and tell the coal miner or steel worker that he’s a special interest and he’s hurting the country with his selfishness. Whatever job you have, whether it be at a big company or a small business, you assuredly have a lobby working for you in Washington. Even if you don’t know or realize it. We are all lobbyists for something.
Neither is the problem government spending, though those are the examples given here. It’s merely a side effect. The true harm is the pollution and obesity we are inflicting on ourselves because we are prioritizing local interests over the national good. And there are other kinds of harm that can manifest themselves in ways that aren’t necessarily as financial. The Religious Right has more influence in the South and Midwest. It’s not surprising therefore that Democrats who get elected in those areas, sometimes called Blue Dog Democrats, tend to be more socially conservative than other members of their party from the coasts. So when you’re wondering why a Southern Democrat is against gay marriage, or wants to restrict birth control and abortion, or is against tighter gun regulation… well, just take a look at their voters.
It’s all of us. We the people are the problem.
The good news is if the problem is us, then we are also the solution. If the problem were a corrupt system it would be nigh impossible to fix. We’d have to blow up the system and rebuild it. But as voters we can just make sure we care more about the national good than our own selfish motives. If we make politicians aware that we expect them to do what’s best for the country, and we vote punish them when they don’t, things will change.
Here’s the bad news, and it is quite bad. The likelihood of millions of Americans putting aside their short-term interests for the long-term national good is slim to none. Moreover, even if a lot of Americans actually do it, they’ll soon see that other Americans aren’t doing it. The Americans making the sacrifice will feel taken advantage of. It’s a bit like the climate change agreements countries make. When countries agree to make cutbacks on emissions they want to know they’re not the only ones making that pledge. If everyone else continues to pollute, you’re not really helping the environment by promising to cut back but you are definitely hurting your economy. At some point you’re going to say the sacrifice isn’t worth it. It’s a race to the bottom.
In reality it might take a crisis to solve these issues.
