Six months ago a magnitude 7 earthquake struck Haiti. It killed 220,000 people and destroyed the capital of Port-au-Prince.
Six weeks later a magnitude 8.8 earthquake hit Chile. It was one of the three worst mega-quakes in recorded history. This quake caused a tsunami that devastated several coastal towns in south-central Chile and damaged the port at Talcahuano. The quake moved the entire city of Concepción 10 ft to the west, and cut the power to 93% of the people in the country. Despite the fact that this quake was 500 times stronger than the one in Haiti there were only 700 casualties.
There were many reasons for the large discrepancy in the damage done to the two countries. The Chile quake was deeper and off the coast about 7 miles while the Haiti quake was centered pretty close to the capital city.
One of the main reasons however was that Chile had suffered one of the strongest quakes ever, a magnitude 9.5 quake, back in 1960, and they had learned from that experience.
Chile has a strong central government and required all of their buildings to meet strict earthquake standards. They taught their people how to respond to a quake. Chile had emergency personal who were trained and they had the infrastructure to respond quickly and to rebuild the extensive damage quickly. Over 10% of the country's physical plant was affected – the equivalent of $1.4 trillion worth of damage if it had happened in the United States, but they were able to restore power in a matter of days, and they have completed construction of 40,000 temporary houses within 4 months.
Haiti on the other hand has little if any government. The country is rated as the most corrupt government in the world. There were little if any building codes enforced and contractors were able to bribe whatever inspectors or planners they did have to deal with, and build unsafe buildings with little rebar or seismic resistance. Whatever hospitals and emergency response crews were available, were rendered useless as their buildings collapsed on them and their equipment.
Six months after the Haiti disaster little has been done. The city is still in ruins, the streets have not been cleared, there is still little water, sewage, or power, and the majority of the city is still huddled in tents and dreading the approaching hurricane season.
The major difference between the two nations is that one has a strong central government like the United States, and the other has the small limited government the right wing would have America become if the Republicans and the Tea Party has their way.
Some will argue that they simply want to eliminate most Federal government programs (except the military) and allow local and State governments to have more power. Look at the world's second most corrupt government Afghanistan to see how that would work. There are many things, like universal laws, rules, regulations, and standards, that are necessary to guarantee people and businesses can move from one state to another. There are also world problems that cannot be dealt with by individual states, and disasters like Katrina, the gulf oil disaster, and global warming that can only be handled with a strong central government.
Americans like their government to be unobtrusive. But when a national disaster strikes, they don't complain about the size of government, they complain that the government is not doing enough. After eight years of an anti government anti regulatory administration, the government is often unable to prevent disasters and unable to react when disaster strikes.
The worldwide Economic collapse, Katrina, the Massey Coal Mine Disaster, and the Gulf Oil Disaster has demonstrated the consequences of the small government anti regulatory political philosophy in this country.
Regulatory agencies were underpaid and understaffed and the regulations lacked teeth. There were only 62 MMS inspectors that were responsible for keeping 4,000 oil wells safe and honest. To be more efficient sometimes government has to be bigger not smaller. If the IRS had more people and resources they could recover up to $300 billion dollars in unpaid taxes without changing the rules at all.
Americans want the government to be there for them when they need it. When they get sick they want good medical care. When they get hurt they like their workman's Comp Insurance. When they loose their jobs they like their unemployment insurance. When they get old they rely on their Social Security Insurance, and the Medicare system they paid into.
So how is Obama making these systems more efficient? Today he signed a bill to crack down on waste. He said that this bill could save $50 billion a year in waste. Last month he ordered a "Do Not Pay" database to prevent payments to dead people. In the last three years $182 million dollars were sent to dead people.
Obama has proposed a three-year freeze in spending not tied to national security. He has instituted changes in how government contracts are awarded to save billions in such costs, and he has directed agencies to sell excess or underused real estate.
In May Obama signed the Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act, which will increase government oversight, save taxpayer dollars and spend defense funding more efficiently. Obama has also asked each arm of the military to come up with billions of dollars in savings.
These are all praiseworthy efforts but the government needs to go much further in its efforts to pare down the bureaucracy, increase the efficiency, and yes make government smaller. Here are a few ideas that would make our broken government work better.
1. Efficiency. The Health care law has provisions where experiments in Health Care can demonstrate which programs are the most efficient and cost effective. These successful ideas can then be incorporated into National programs. Something like this should be standard in all government programs to make them more efficient and cost effective. The government has programs where employees that come up with ideas for cost savings can get a portion of those savings. These programs should be expanded to include better service and efficiency.
2. Ending obsolete Programs. All government programs should have a 6 year sundown clause where they have to be evaluated and reauthorized. If the programs are ineffective or not cost effective they need to be eliminated or changed. We still have laws on the books for rural electrification from the 20's.
3. Simplify. The recent financial regulatory bill had over 23,000 pages of thick legalese. Two thousand lobbyists spent hundreds of millions of dollars and justified this expense by stating that only they could explain what this complex bill meant. Certainly lawmakers could not read it before they voted on it. In 1914 the law creating the Federal Trade Commission was only 8 pages long. In 1935 the entire Social Security act was only 28 pages long. Congress should pass a law that would require any bill to use plain spoken, easily understood language, with a 10 page maximum for simple bills and a 100 page maximum for major bills. This would eliminate the need for lobbyists and allow lawmakers to read and understand what they were voting on. It would also eliminate most of the loopholes, and exceptions and simplify the bills.
4. Consolidation: The Washington Post recently said that there were about 3,000 separate intelligence communities that generated 50,000 reports a day. These should be consolidated to 3 or 4 agencies which share information and cooperate to publish a handful of reports.
5. Transparency: There should be no more closed door deals. Every meeting should be videotaped and available for public viewing. All bills should be passed with a simple majority as required in the Constitution. The filibuster was meant to be rarely used and requiring a supermajority results in deal making, gives holdouts inordinate power, and results in special privileges and pork.
6. Cooperation: Having just two parties with contradictory goals and bills often result in partisan gridlock with only the extremes of each side insisting they are right. Each legislative effort should include at least three bills, one from the left, one from the right and one from the center. (Republican, Democrat, and Independent). Then preferential voting or instant runoff voting would determine the bill that the vast majority could support.
7. Limit the Military Industrial Complex. The military budget is about 65% of discretionary spending. We can no longer be the cops of the world and we no longer have another super power to challenge us. We can no longer afford to spend more than the rest of the world combined. We should withdraw from our two wars, shut down hundreds of unnecessary overseas bases and eliminate our privatized mercenary forces. We now have more mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan than regular troops and they get paid up to 5 times as much for the same work as our troops.
We currently are suffering from partisan gridlock where one side is trying to solve problems and the other side is trying to block any progress. One side has decided government is evil and should be stopped or destroyed, the other side knows the system is broken but thinks that it can be fixed. Government should not be adversarial, our lawmakers should cooperate to solve the many problems we have.