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Posted 11/3/11 by Matt Brown

Congress? The Mailman’s Ringing More Than Twice

We’ve blogged previously about the financial and bureaucratic troubles facing the United States Postal Service. On Wednesday, the Senate announced details of a bill that would provide it some relief—but still does not free the beleaguered American institution to operate as it sees fit. Without more fundamental change, the USPS is still on the brink.

On Monday, the New York Times reported on how several European postal services got out of a similar mess caused by: the steady switch from paper to electronic communication, stiff competition from private delivery services, and a massive and increasingly irrelevant infrastructure and real estate portfolio. Where the American system has remained locked in an organizational structure that predates the Nixon Administration, European systems have radically altered their business practices. In the past few decades, the German postal service shed all but 24 of its 29,000 properties (becoming primarily a tenant in other existing businesses) and 100,000 workers, began aggressively competing in new markets by selling everything from DVDs to umbrellas, acquired a private parcel delivery firm to ensure its continued competitiveness in the package delivery sector, and developed innovative services like online bill collection systems.

There’s no question why the German postal service is thriving while the American one continues its march towards default. It comes down to Congress’s regulatory stranglehold on the USPS. Unlike its German counterpart, which is admittedly privatized, the USPS is purposely prevented by its regulators from making rational business decisions in response to changing conditions, or from expanding into new markets. It surely cannot operate this way forever.

As we’ve said before, the solution is simple: free America’s postal service from its regulatory shackles. The changes currently being contemplated by Congress are a step in the right direction (they authorize some discretionary branch closings and staff buyouts). But to ensure the viability of the USPS well in to the 21st century, bolder action is required. Congress should replace the rigid rules that currently govern the USPS’s actions with a simple set of broad mandates: to deliver the mail promptly and accurately, to serve as many communities as frequently as is feasible, to adhere to labor practices that balance fairness and expediency, and to submit to a yearly audit. America’s postal services has plenty of smart people. It shouldn't always need Congress’s “stamp” of approval.

Posted 10/28/11 by Common Good

Today’s Read: David Crane’s Proposal for Pension Reform

Writing for the Washington Post, David Crane, president of Govern for California and a former adviser to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, argues that President Obama’s proposal to provide $35 billion to states to close budget shortfalls is “a fine idea”—but that it needs to be packaged with serious pension reform. He suggests an approach similar to the Administration’s “Race to the Top” initiative in education:

Congress and the president could establish a Race to Reform Public-Sector Pensions. States would compete for the $35 billion, and selection criteria would focus on three ingredients: 1) honest measurement of liabilities; 2) proper and contemporaneous funding that doesn’t kick costs to future generations; and 3) reforms that reduce liabilities.

Given the deleterious impact of deferred pension costs on innocent parties in the future, pension reform is a moral issue, as well as a financial one. Congress and Obama could take a big step toward addressing both problems by igniting a Race to Reform Pensions.

Start Over shares Crane’s concern about the cost of runaway entitlements—and agrees that the expenditure of public dollars requires consideration not only of today’s tradeoffs but also of how it will affect tomorrow’s generation. Read his piece in full and leave your thoughts about it here.

Posted 10/28/11 by Common Good

George Will Warns Against Warnings

"Whatever happened to the rule, ‘Do not speak unless you can improve the silence’?”

That’s the question the Washington Post’s George Will asks in a recent column about the “merciless river of words” that characterizes today’s airport experience. Warnings and disclaimers are everywhere—like the announcements that moving walkways will indeed end (“Pretty much everything does come to an end, doesn’t it?”). Do they really make us safer? Making arguments akin to Start Over’s on the effects of legal fear and the need to rein in lawsuits, Will writes:

Perhaps some silly warnings are ‘necessary’ to fend off the Fourth Branch of government, a.k.a. trial lawyers. But this merely underscores the fact that all this noise is symptomatic of modern derangements. Solemn warnings about nonexistent risks, and information intended to spare us the slightest responsibility for passing through life with a modicum of attention and intelligence — these express, among other things, an entitlement mentality that the nanny state foments: If something bad or even inconvenient or merely annoying happens to us, even if it results from our foolishness, daydreaming or brooding about the meaning of life, we are entitled to sue someone for restitution.

In January 2009, Will wrote about the work of Philip K. Howard and Common Good, stating: “Law is essential to, but can stifle, freedom…[Today,] what should be routine daily choices and interactions are fraught with legal risk.” Will went on to call Howard’s Life Without Lawyers “2009’s most needed book on public affairs.”

Read the whole column and add a comment here.

Posted 10/27/11 by Common Good

Philip K. Howard in the Daily News

In today’s New York Daily News, Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard comments on a recent lawsuit which is trying to force New York City to make its entire taxicab fleet wheelchair-accessible—which would add $935 million in operating cost every five years.

Wheelchair-bound people, Howard argues, deserve enhanced access to transportation. But at what cost? City transit already spends more than $500 million every year on accessibility. If this lawsuit succeeds, Howard calculates that the cost of each ride for a wheelchair-bound patron would come to at least $2,000—and possibly as much as $63,000! And what about all the other public good that money could fund?

Reducing pollution, funding pre-K education, repaying public debt, providing health care, you name it.

No one is asking the question. In the 1990s, under the same laws and guided by the same logic, advocates for the disabled killed a plan to install public toilets in New York because it was not practical to make the toilets wheelchair accessible. What matters to them is equality, not practicality. Give me my rights!

Society and government have the moral responsibility to use public money for the common good. As Howard writes: “Every public dollar involves a moral choice, a tradeoff with other needs.” Responsible spending means deciding when the tradeoff is justified—and when a $2,000 cab ride is just too much.

Posted 10/26/11 by Common Good

Philip K. Howard and Phillip Blond discuss government reform

Philip K. Howard, Common Good’s Founder and Chair, and Phillip Blond, the British philosopher known as “guru” to David Cameron’s Big Society, met on October 14 for a provocative discussion of government reform in the United States and the United Kingdom. Phillip Blond is the author of Red Tory, a book that sought to redefine centrist politics in the United Kingdom, and the founder of ResPublica, a think tank whose core principal is the Common Good-like idea that “human relationships should once more be the center and meaning of an associative society.” The discussion was moderated by Sir Harold Evans, editor-at-large of the Reuters news agency and former editor of The Sunday Times of London. Watch the clip:

Posted 10/24/11 by Common Good

Today’s Read: Food Follies

Sunday's Washington Post editorial page made the point we all, by now, are far too aware of: Federal farm subsidies are little more than a politically motivated waste of taxpayer dollars. The subsidies are obsolete, written for a vastly different time, and they only continue to exist because of powerful lobbying campaigns:

By any reasonable measure, the current system of federal support for agricultural is a scandalous misuse of taxpayer dollars. In fiscal 2010, the federal government spent about $5.1 billion on payments to commodity producers — regardless of need — and another $13 billion on “counter-cyclical” aid, heavily subsidized crop insurance and “disaster” programs. Most recipients were far from poor. The payments distort markets and antagonize our trading partners while encouraging wasteful farming.

Government has proven that it doesn't know when to quit. Outdated laws are hardly ever repealed, because some small group is usually benefiting from them--and willing to fight to protect them. Don't we need a better way to clean the books of outdated legislation?

Read the whole editorial here.

Posted 10/18/11 by Common Good

Phillip Blond Speaks with Philip K. Howard

Phillip Blond, architect of David Cameron's "Big Society" program, recently appeared in New York to discuss structural problems that plague both the United Kingdom and the United States. He joined Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard on Friday morning to explore common ideas with the Start Over movement. The Christian Century reports that according to Blond:

The breakdown of both social norms and the family unit—and the growth of government to address those ills—as well as the dominance of corporations and the rich in the current economy...[is] a result of an 'oscillation between extreme collectivism and extreme individualism' .... Both are manifestations of the same impulse: a concentration of power first in the state and then in the markets. And both those liberal and conservative 'orthodoxies' have led to the same society-destroying outcome.

Common Good certainly agrees with Blond that political orthodoxy will not lead to a successful American future—and that it's time to Start Over.

Video of the event with Blond and Howard will be posted here when available.

Posted 10/17/11 by Common Good

The Oklahoman Endorses Start Over Solutions

A recent editorial in The Oklahoman supports the Start Over mission to restore authority and accountability to government. After Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard spoke in Oklahoma City, the paper wrote that "sensible rules and regulations, including reasonable fees, should be the norm all the time, not just a temporary response to crises." It continues:

Restoring common sense to society is a bipartisan issue....'Neither party,' Howard's group says, 'will acknowledge the core flaw in our government structure: Americans with responsibility no longer feel free to make sensible choices.'

Read the full editorial here and leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Posted 10/15/11 by Common Good

Philip K. Howard Argues for Health Courts

Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard recently spoke at the Union League Club in Chicago on the topic of healthcare, defensive medicine, and health courts. Modern Physician reported that according to Howard:

[P]eople [are] feeling powerless to oppose nonsensical legal or bureaucratic rules imposed on them by well-meaning politicians—many of them now dead—who sought through the rules to keep anything bad from ever happening. And now legislators lack the will to amend rules to fit current circumstances, he said. Howard urged the students to question and make fun of the rules and "write about this with clear eyes."

Howard made the common sense point that legal fear should not define how doctors practice medicine. Instead of traditional tort reform, which has proven to have limited effecitveness, Howard advocated health courts, a Common Good solution that "would not have juries but would be led by full-time health judges with a budget to hire neutral experts to testify on the merits of a malpractice case."

Read the full report from Modern Physician here.

Posted 10/3/11 by Common Good

Today’s Read: Go Big or Go Bigger

Erskine Bowles and Common Good Advisory Board member Alan Simpson, co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that the deficit reduction "supercommittee" should take the bold action our country needs, instead of getting bogged down in details:

Commission members were willing to take on their sacred cows and fight special interests — but only if they saw others doing the same and if what they were voting for solved the country’s problems. This spirit of shared sacrifice gained us broad bipartisan support, spanning from Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin to Republican Sen. Tom Coburn. We would not have garnered that type of support had we not taken on defense, domestic programs, the solvency of Social Security, health care, and spending in the tax code all at once.

Common Good agrees that our country's challenges require decisive action, not half-measures. Read the whole thing here.