Congress could learn from the road crews
There's no good to come from avoiding reality, because potholes don't fill themselves
Potholes are emerging. You know what comes next: Roadwork delays. (Photo by Andrew Ball on Unsplash)
It’s freeze-and-thaw season Upstate, which a rural economist might think of as nature’s job creation program: The weather tears up roads, so governments allocate tax dollars to patch those roads and build new ones, which yields paychecks for some 300,000 workers on highway crews.1
There’s a ripple effect in the economy, too, of course, but for most of us this roadwork provides an opportunity to complain about travel delays during construction season. Nobody has found a solution to that, since projects have to be done, of course, in the scant weeks before winter again imposes its deadline on outdoor jobs. Surely some members of Congress have issued press releases vowing aggressive action on summer roadwork delays, this problem so peeving the people, but the rhythms of nature are inexorable – and, indeed, can be useful: Maybe if the U.S. Capitol didn’t have central heat and air conditioning, Congress would get its work done seasonally, too.
That may be unfair to Congress, but only a bit. It’s not that nobody is doing anything on Capitol Hill; it’s just that what they’re doing often isn’t the work that needs to be done. Maybe they misunderstand the contract for services implied by voters’ support at the polls. There must be some guys on road crews like that, too, wearing orange vests and hard hats but never managing to do much digging. Think of them as the Marjory Taylor Greenes of highway construction.
This week, for example, a former special prosecutor was summoned to a House hearing, at which Republicans struggled in vain to elicit testimony that might help them find a rationale for impeaching President Biden. None emerged, to nobody’s surprise. Every American not yet deluded by the daily diet of dishonesty peddled by Fox News must be asking: Is this really the highest and best use of the resources of the U.S. Congress? It could be doing other work, if it didn’t have an apparent aversion to tackling tough issues.
Surely at the top of that list of must-dos, for example, would be saving western democracy – and for once, that topic doesn’t mean we’re talking about Donald Trump’s potential return to the White House. No, it’s this: The House’s Republican leadership, kowtowing to Trump’s campaign, has blocked action on aid that could help Ukraine stop Vladimir Putin’s assault on an independent, pro-NATO democracy.
Or we might imagine a Congress addressing immigration reform, which, likewise, is a part of its reality agenda that has been nixed by Trump. Nor can we expect action to lessen social inequities, support family farms or even to approve a federal budget – all of that stalled by a refusal of our elected representatives to recognize their responsibility to reality.
It’s as though the road crew foreman has declared that repaving is too hard, so the work won’t get done. “Never mind the contract, boys,” the well-coifed boss declares during the lunch break (having seen the research reporting that 89 percent of road crew workers last year were male). “Let’s just toss some hot asphalt patch mix into those pesky potholes.” Fox News will report, breathlessly, that they’re doing it to protect us from the socialist Democrats who want to take away Americans’ right to road surfaces of their own choosing.
To understand just how averse Congress is to taking on the nation’s tough issues, consider something that eventually will affect everybody: the financial uncertainty facing the nation’s big entitlement programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Social Security is the largest program in the federal budget, so you might consider its viability to be a fundamental task of Congress. And the need for action is clear: Multibillion-dollar deficits aren’t that far away, according to the Social Security system’s trustees. Just seven years from now, Medicare will only have enough cash to cover 89 percent of costs of inpatient hospital care and nursing home stays; two years after that, Social Security will be able to scrape up only 77 percent of the benefits it will owe retirees. I plan to be at the outset of my ninth decade on the planet then, and I imagine being damn eager to be reassured that those benefits are steady.2
The easiest solution to stabilizing the system might be to spread the available dollars to cover the growing number of people qualified for benefits, which would mean diminishing payments to everybody. But that’s wildly unpopular: A poll sponsored by the Associated Press last year found that 79 percent of Americans oppose benefit cuts. Or, of course, Congress could raise the age when Social Security benefits are paid – from 67 now to, say, 70 – but that money-saving solution is opposed by three-quarter of Americans. You think Congress would do something that unpopular? Not in my Social Security-supported lifetime, no.3
How about getting more money into the system? That would likely involve a payroll tax increase, so that more money is chipped in by today’s shrinking workforce to cover tomorrow’s growing number of retirees, along with their employers. But businesses and worker groups alike don’t cotton to that idea.
Or Congress could decide to bring more money into the system by raising the so-called “cap”: Right now, no payroll tax is collected on earnings above $160,000 a year, which means that no matter how much somebody earns beyond that – millions of bucks, even, in taxable wages – they won’t pay more than about $10,000 into the system. If raising the cap thus sounds reasonable, you haven’t been paying attention. Who do you suppose opposes that? If you said “wealthier folks,” and you still don’t understand why that’s a nonstarter, you are bigly uninformed about American political realities, as Donald Trump might say.
Speaking of Trump, he contributed to the conversation about entitlements this week, if unintentionally. A TV interviewer asked him about Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and Trump replied that “there is a lot you can do .. in terms of cutting.” Democrats loved that answer! It now gives them a chance to link all Republican running this fall to the idea of benefit cuts, the so-called third rail of American politics, which their Great Leader seemed to embrace. A spokesman later said Trump only wants to cut waste and fraud – and, gosh, I mean no undeserved disrespect, but I might have heard a politician or two say that before.4
But while Democrats are less likely to place the onus of shoring up entitlement programs on the backs of workers, they’re no more eager than Republicans, really, to take the hard steps needed to fix the problem. Social Security and related programs are simply too tough for the reality of today’s dysfunctional political ecosystem to handle. But here’s an idea: Maybe in refusing to face up to the reality of the situation, members of Congress are doing exactly what we’re asking of them – because their constituents are generally pretty adept, too, at avoiding reality.
Who knew until now that there exists such a thing as a scientifically-compiled list of the world’s leading problems? But it’s there, thanks to the Brussels-based Union of International Associations, a research center that publishes The Encyclopedia of World Problems & Human Potential. And on the Encyclopedia’s list of 56,000 known problems in the world, right there somewhere between “Absolutism” and “Xenophobia,” you find this: “Avoidance of reality.” The 56,000 problems aren’t ranked, but there it is, confirmation that reality is known by scientists to be something we humans are eager to dodge, skirt, skip, eschew.
“People no longer prefer to confront reality directly,” the organization declares, “having learned and accepted that reality has for all practical purposes become unmanageable. People tend increasingly to devote their energies to the proliferation and production of trivia and unreality to soothe tired and fractured egos.”5
The Encyclopedia of World Problems helpfully lists some narrower problems posed by avoidance of reality, like self-deception, escapist family lifestyles and meaningless recreation — though what qualifies for the latter was not delineated. (Tik Tok scrolling? Golf? Beerpong?) What caught my eye, though, was that the Encyclopedia of World Problems lists a broader category of problem from which avoidance of reality problem supposedly derives: irresponsibility.
Irresponsibility is something we can grasp, because we know that we often behave irresponsibly. If we didn’t, we would have long ago made greater strides to limit the destruction of climate change, for one thing, or to make a greater share of the wealthy world’s resources available to the 85 percent of humankind living on less than $30 a day, for another. That is, we would get around to doing what we know we should be doing.6
But give us a break: 56,000 problems seems an insurmountable list, doesn’t it? Maybe, more realistically, we need a tighter focus than what the Encyclopedia of World Problems poses. Perhaps we ought to consider the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015. The SDGs address global needs, and they are articulated as a pathway toward ending poverty, hunger, AIDS and discrimination against women and girls – in the words of the UN Development Program, to “ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.”7
For so noble a vision, the goals needed to reach that are simple and direct: No poverty. Zero hunger. Good health and well-being. Quality education. Certainly none of them can be achieved easily, as the UN concedes: “The creativity, knowhow, technology and financial resources from all of society is necessary to achieve the SDGs in every context.”
But this can be discouraging. Today, more than halfway between the declaration of the goals and the UN’s target of achieving them, we seem further from the accomplishment than ever. The attack of Oct. 7 tragically pushed most of the world further from the hope encapsulated in even declaring such goals. The prospect of a potential return of Donald Trump to the White House, and the continuing viability of like-minded right-wing leaders globally, makes optimism a challenging habit to hold.
Perhaps truly confronting reality, then, is futile; maybe the beerpong hobbyists have it right, and we shouldn’t scold Congress for avoiding the agenda of American reality. Then again, there’s some hope in the sheer number of tasks facing us. That is, precisely because of the many discrete challenges that loom – those 56,000 key problems, and the 17 overarching goals – there’s surely an important task awaiting the work of millions of us. We’re not looking to just a few experts for big solutions; we all have a shot at making a difference in what we do every day.
Take those choppy Upstate roads, for instance. While potholes aren’t included in the Encyclopedia of World Problems, there are six listings involving roads among the 56,000 key issues confronting the globe – from dysfunctional roads in advanced societies to environmental degradation caused by unsurfaced country roads. Each of the problems has people addressing them around the world – just as there are folks working on the many other real problems of the day that the Encyclopedia of World Problems lists, from loss of soil bacteria globally to limited home nursing care, from sweatshop labor to the unavailability of literacy classes. My neighbor is a volunteer English teacher for new immigrants; my niece is a farmer and activist for healthy organic food; my friend is a poet whose words inspire others. They are pursuing an agenda based on reality, not ducking out into performative behavior, the raging virus of Capitol Hill.
That is, there are countless good people going about the hard daily work of resolving what sometimes seem to be insurmountable problems. We might hope that our representatives in Congress take note, and then act – before Social Security loses its financial stability, for example, before Ukraine falls to Russia, before climate change imposes much worse consequences than a tough season on road repair Upstate. We need to expect more from those who seems to be part of the Beerpong Caucus. We need to remind them that while they can avoid reality, the consequences of reality aren’t, in fact, avoidable. That’s true in every season, and there’s work for them to do right now, which we ought to insist they do.
https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/employment/road-highway-construction-united-states/#:~:text=There%20are%20307%2C595%20people%20employed,the%20US%20as%20of%202023.
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2022/11/social-security-reform-options-to-raise-revenues
https://apnews.com/article/social-security-medicare-cuts-ap-poll-biden-9e7395e8efeab68063d741beac6ef24b
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/11/politics/trump-entitlements-social-security-medicare/index.html
http://encyclopedia.uia.org/en/problem/133223
https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-poverty-facts
https://www.undp.org/sustainable-development-goals?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwhtWvBhD9ARIsAOP0Goj5x4rpmOXU4lc207ds43Cgbvem8cWBOJdhjJHAauD_Oidmaz1m5m4aApo0EALw_wcB
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