Goldmark: When will Congress do its duty?

A friend of mine tells me Europe is carrying four burdens that doom it to long-term decline. He ticks them off: a population that isn't replacing itself, a bureaucratic overlay that stifles initiative and clogs up the private sector, heavy dependence on foreign energy imports, and over-indebtedness.

The United States, he tells me, is in somewhat better shape, because we now labor under only three of these four loads. Our demographics combine strong immigration patterns with an adequate fertility rate to keep our human capital increasing qualitatively and quantitatively.

But what about that statement that we, like Europe, are smothered by a layer of bureaucracy and regulation that constrains initiative of all kinds? I thought of examples from my own life.

Taxes -- those affect everyone. Filling out the forms has gotten much more complicated than when I began working several decades ago. And I sense less confidence in the basic fairness and necessity of the tax system by the public than I used to notice. Are there more loopholes and arcane gimmicks? Yes. Is it less transparent and fair? Again, yes.

I enrolled in Medicare a few years ago. Do I find the amount of paperwork and forms enough to choke a horse? No. I find a lot of the explanations for partial reimbursement hard to fathom -- especially when the party informing me of those decisions is a private sector contractor trying to minimize costs and tell me as little as possible. But on the whole I find the system better than my private secondary insurer.

What about Social Security? I find Social Security to be one of the best run large organizations, private or public, I have ever dealt with -- and I've dealt with a lot of them.

But when I look elsewhere, I worry. Drive through the older parts of our major eastern cities -- New York, Newark, Philadelphia and others. You see empty factories with broken windows and abandoned buildings scrawled with graffiti. You wonder: If there were a local public agency with the authority to swiftly condemn and clear this land -- just take everything down, clean up the site and put it up for sale for development -- wouldn't that generate opportunity and investment for those areas? Today those sites are choked by weeds, waste, and a soggy blanket of complex regulatory regimes and overlapping public mandates.

What about the financial sector? We got into trouble in 2007-08 in part because we deregulated that industry. People were trading in derivatives and credit default swaps that sometimes neither buyer nor seller understood. And we all read about the famous "no-doc" mortgages, where all you had to do was sign and someone threw a couple of hundred thousand dollars at you -- with a lot of fine print that strangled you later.

Our deregulation of the financial industry was reckless and incomprehensible. We Americans not only recognize, but actually celebrate, the fact that everyone is out there to make a buck and to be as aggressive -- yes, even cutting a few corners -- as the law will allow. So what did we do? We eased up on the regs that required these financial wheeler-dealers to be reasonably transparent and honest. In this case, we needed rules that were clearer and more forceful, not less regulation.

Then I look around and ask: Why haven't we moved on the big issues that threaten us? Why have we done virtually nothing to create jobs, to get us off imported oil, to clean up the tax code, to address global warming, to reform our health programs? It has to be because of Congress. Our situation is dire, but our condition is befuddled and paralyzed -- and the only surplus we're running is one of ideological cant.

And when a legislature is befuddled and paralyzed, it's usually a reflection -- one way or another -- of those of us who elect them. It's called democracy. The buck stops here. hN