Showing up the Shirkers

This article from the online "Anchorage Daily News" puts the spotlight on the "brave, new, and incredibly broke" Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. They make an argument about how polarized partisan lines have been major contributors to the deficit (approaching $15 trillion at the time). This seems to coincide with Kalt and Zupan's assertion that Senators shirk because of voters' rational ignorance. Those of us who love to see the world in black-and-white (or in this case red-and-blue) will vote along our party lines and root for our senators as they vote against the "cold-hearted Republicans" or the "socialist bleeding hearts" without examining the causes of the deficit and creating some sort of bi-partisan hybrid.

It's reassuring that the article refers to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction as "a cyclical signal" that the government needs to be repaired. Although the government is made of thousands of legislators and millions of voters, maybe we need to take messages like the one sent by this faux committee and implement measures, like the ones we discussed in class, to minimize shirking. We could even tip the balance slightly away from rational ignorance so that the voters take responsibility for monitoring some of their representatives'/Senators' actions.

Another thing that Kalt, Zupan, and this article agree upon is that shirking could be reduced with more clear-cut performance expectations (for this article, as per the founding fathers and the Constitution). I'll close with a quote from the article, "The creators of our political system apparently never considered the effects of long-term inbreeding or tertiary stupidity, avarice and megalomania on such an enterprise."

I guess the creators were bound by a system devoid of slack.