interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
Democratizing The Debates | Part Two
by Kathleen Hall Jamieson
March 18, 2019
This interview with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, the Walter and Leonore Director of the university’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Program Director of the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
This is part two of an ongoing conversation. You can read part one here.
I don't know many people familiar with the Presidential Debate Commission. They’re in control because they say they’re in control?
Yeah, that's right. There's no statutory authority.
I mean we've created social pressure on the candidates to debate. And the debate commission has offered a structure. But before the debate commission, The League of Women Voters handled the debates.
Right.
But the candidates want to put lots of constraints on what happens in debates. They want to dictate all sorts of things, and part of what we're trying to do with this report is say, "You know, some of those things you shouldn't get to dictate. Some of those things should actually stay more open." The League of Women’s Voters didn't want to do things that the candidates wanted, candidates basically said, "Well we're not going to come to you." Debate Commission constituted itself. Debate Commission was created by political partisans on behalf of political parties essentially. Without saying that. But look at who headed the Debate Commissions over time, it's basically operatives from the two parties.
And so could another model come up? I've expected the tech companies to put up their own debates. And basically say to the debate commission, "We've got an audience that's large enough that we're not going to work through you."
I wonder what would happen if they were seriously challenged.
Innovation is hard when somebody controls something. Because the purpose of the control is to drive out the innovation that might create a competing model. The place you're going to get the most innovation is going to be out of the digital sector because they're not thinking in the same terms as the traditional model, and I'd like to see the digital sector come to some kind of an agreement that they're going to put up their own debates.
It's refreshing to hear somebody so experienced, and who has spent so much time looking at this say, "Well no, actually, new debate is possible, and it would be really interesting."
Yeah, we said, "What is a debate supposed to do?"
It's helpful to see similarities, too. I mean it's really important to ask what do the candidates agree about? So if you agree Afghanistan is a good war, you never debate Afghanistan. Well it was really helpful in 2008 to just put on the record, "Senator McCain, Senator Obama, you both agree Afghanistan is a good war. There are people who disagree with the idea that Afghanistan is a good war. Would you defend your position?" Because if we're trying to do this to get debates and campaigning more broadly to forecast governance, you want the areas of agreement featured as well as disagreement. The reason for agreement is they predict governance more readily than the disagreements, because the party out of power is going to support it. If the candidates support it, the likelihood is you can get it through Congress.
The way I approach debates when I do debate commentary, the first thing I ask is, "What did we learn about what they have in common?" Because it's highly likely to predict governance. I was doing live commentary for CBS in '96 in the debate between Dole and Clinton.
Clinton moves to Dole's position on exempting up to $500,000 of capital gains on a primary residence if you've held the primary residence for three years. So Dan Rather says to me, we're live, "Kathleen, who won/lost the debates?" I said, "Nobody won or lost the debates. The American people won. In particular, if you're thinking of selling your house, take it off the market. The likelihood that next year there's going to be a capital gains exclusion which means you're not going to have the level of taxation you would under the current system extraordinarily high. What you had today was that they both agreed, they were going to exclude it. I will predict that within the next six months after the election, it's going to change."
I got a letter from a woman and she wrote me and said, "You saved me an enormous amount of money."
That's the sort of analysis that's helpful. I don’t know that most people think that way.
Well most people are saying, "What are the differences? What are the differences? And who made the gaffe?" Which is a stupid way to approach debates. Because most of the things we call gaffes actually weren't gaffes.
The moment where Quayle says he's passed more legislation than John Kennedy. That's no gaffe. It's a great gotcha moment for Benson to say, "You're no John Kennedy. I know John Kennedy." John Kennedy was a completely undistinguished member of the Senate. He accomplished virtually nothing. He set up a foreign exchange program that brought four foreign exchange students from Africa, and one of them was not Barack Obama's father. That's it. His name isn't on legislation. Quayle actually had his name on a major jobs bill. Quayle is literally telling the truth, and it's identified as a gaffe because the Democrats choreographed a Benson moment in which they basically said, "John Kennedy, this icon, is not what you are." Well that's not what Quayle was claiming. "I'm charismatic." He was claiming, "I've done more in the Senate." He was absolutely accurate.
Now the part they should have featured was, the question that leads to that exchange, which was, "What is the first thing you'd do if you became President?" And he can't find an answer! So the inference that he was unprepared was right, but the evidence they were using was wrong. The evidence that he couldn't find the answer is what they should have featured. But it didn't digest as well. So the claim that he's John Kennedy, like John Kennedy, better than John Kennedy, that's not the issue distinction. He's better than John Kennedy. It's true, it's demonstrably true. He can't figure out what he'd do if he became President unexpectedly. That's a big deal.
And if you say, "Well John Kennedy would have figured it out." Maybe.
Maybe. But then you wonder is it the person who's best at debate that looks like the winner, and maybe not the person who's delivering the most honest or accurate information?
There's a problem with winner as a construct. You can't win at debate. I mean I'm a former debater. I can win an academic debate. In an academic debate, you have a single proposition which you argue over a one hour period in blocks of 15 minutes with a pro/con structure, affirmative and a negative structure. Then you reprise the structure. I can win or lose that, because I can assess on that argument, who argued most effectively, who used evidence most effectively. Was there a decisive argument that disabled the other side?
And then they come down to, "Was there a gaffe?" Well, what about the X number of minutes? And most of the things called gaffes are not gaffes.
Then they use military metaphors or they use sports metaphors in ways that make no sense. The moment someone does something that is supposedly disabling the other person's candidacy is a knockout punch. There's no such thing as a knockout punch. That's boxing, where the person is literally on the floor.
The person's down for the count. It just doesn't exist. So these crazed metaphors come in. Out of the ballpark home run. I've also never actually seen one of those. Because discourse is complex. You don't get that kind of really clear destruction or validation. Our whole vocabulary for looking at debates makes no sense.
The question we should ask is, "What did you learn that is of value to you in distinguishing the candidates about the ways in which they will govern?" And that can be about their issues or about their character and their temperamental dispositions. And as a result, a debate might be very valuable to you on issue or two, or one exchange or two. To me, one or two are completely different areas. I don't want to say that yours is less valuable than mine. The question is was the information accurate and did it forecast governance? If it did, it made you a better voter, probably didn't change your mind about how to vote. Very few minds are changed by debates. That is not their purpose. Their purpose is to increase the tie between campaigning and governance so that voters can cast informed votes in which the relationship is clearer to them and then you actually forecast governance. And by that standard, by the way, the debates in 2016 were good debates.
The public did know the positions of Clinton and Trump by the time they voted. They were uncivil. There's a whole lot of stuff that suggested temperament problems, particularly for one of the candidates, but people knew he was going to build a wall. Donald Trump has pretty much done exactly what we anticipated. Which means from that standpoint, it was a good election. I'm not at all surprised by the Trump presidency. At all.
Yeah.
I'm less surprised by the Trump presidency than by George W. Bush. Because George W. Bush said he wouldn't engage in nation-building. If you took that literally, you'd say, "Okay that's a bad forecast."
Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do. No surprise.
And his theme, I mean this is the band theme, promises made, promises kept. You can almost hear him checking those things off. In an odd sense, people look back at the election and say oh my God it was a terrible election. No, it wasn't. It accurately forecast the differences between the two candidates. And in the candidate who was elected, which is the only way you can assess the tide of governance, because you don't know what Hillary Clinton would have done because she wasn't elected. I presume she would have acted on her promises, but I don't know. I know with Trump. Okay at that level, it's a good campaign. You can't say people were misled. They also heard all of his uncivil discourse. Well he carried that into the presidency too. They voted knowing that. So there aren't really any surprises. The surprise is the public didn't know the extent of the Russian involvement. And I wrote a book about that.
The other criticism I hear often is that it doesn't make room for a third party to participate.
Well it does, because we've had Anderson debate Reagan, but Carter wouldn't debate.
But the threshold seems too high to some people.
Well you've got to have some threshold test. We addressed it. Basically, we would lower the threshold test. Because we think it's good to give the people the chance to have another party get the access. I mean right now you've got third parties trying to percolate up in our system. And widespread perception that it's two existing parties aren't coherent anymore. I mean there's a left in the Democratic party and there's a right in the Republican party. The right in the Republican party is being represented by Trump right now.
In this kind of situation, you'd expect a kind of Libertarian emergence on the right and you'd expect what is actually emerging on the left, which is a Green/Progressive left. And maybe then the moderates on both parties become the third party. They're just kind of the moderate.
I mean they're kind of the traditionalists. They believe in free trade. They believe in progressive taxation, but not too much, etc etc.
Perot for awhile was ahead on the polls, so he's really a different case. I mean at one point, he was leading Clinton when he was running in '92.
What was he running as?
He was running Reformed candidate. Reformed Party. But he introduced the deficit as an issue. The other two didn't want to talk about it.
So the idea that the third party functions introduce new ideas into the system, even if it never legitimizes and becomes a mainstream party, but you'd like it to have that capacity. Means that you should find a way to give it more access than we give it right now. And if we had a viable third party, Bloomberg would be running right now. Bloomberg can't figure out how to get through the Democratic primaries. I mean he could figure out how to win the general election. He just can't get through the Democratic primaries. And we don't have structures set up to let an Independent get the standing it takes to win. The way we've currently got it structured, it'll always draw down the support for one candidate. And Bloomberg's calculation is he'd draw down the support from the Democrat, and as a result, he'd cost the Democrat the White House, but he wouldn't win himself.
So there's no real sense in him running.
Not unless you want to have a re-election of Trump. I mean I assume that's his calculation.
There's ideological space there. And there are candidates who genuinely don't belong inside the parties. I mean Ron Paul didn't belong inside the Republican Party. You watch those primary debates and you said, "Okay, these people are Republicans and he's not." Bernie Sanders should not have run as a Democrat. Bernie Sanders derailed the Clinton presidency by running what was essentially a third party candidacy inside the Democratic debate.
And he's about to do it again.
Yeah, probably not with the same effect. I mean there are now other progressive candidates. And it's not that there isn't a progressive impulse inside the party. It's gravitated toward those positions.
Right.
So it's not that it was not productive that he did it, it's that it really damaged Hillary Clinton. And fights inside the party usually do hurt the nominee, not always. They sometimes can strengthen, Humphrey strengthened Kennedy in '60. That was essentially the challenge to the left to Kennedy. Kennedy was running as centrist. Kennedy was a kind of Bill Clinton. And the Republicans love to say the Kennedy tax cuts.
What do you propose for the actual structure of debate?
We've got multiple recommendations in the debate commission report. One is the chess clock model. Which is, everybody gets a block of time and you get to control the microphone by hitting the button. But if you talk at great length, then somebody's going to be able to rebut you uninterrupted because you've lost the capacity to come back. So we're trying to get equal division of time. We're also trying to get more exchange in that model.
Another is that you create 15 minute blocks in which the candidate gets to tee up her preferred issue. The other candidate gets to tee up her preferred issue. And also each side gets to tee up the issue they'd most like to attack the other side on. And then the moderator gets to put in the remaining blocks. Because sometimes you get debates in which one candidate has a really important block of ideas and the electorate needs to understand this person will try to advance them in the presidency and they never get asked about it in the debate.
But you have to have some time for the moderator because there are times in which neither candidate wants some issues teed up and the moderator's job should be teeing them up. Now we haven't been very successful about that. '88 never teed up the S&L crisis or the demise of the Soviet Union. So it's not that moderators have shown that they're particularly good about this.
2000 never teed up the terrorist threat on the Cole. The first terrorist attack. We had our first terrorist attack during that election and it wasn't teed up. Well that's a moderator failure. So that second model says, "You actually have a right to advance your strongest case at some point and let it be attacked. And to advance your strongest case against the other side. And let that exchange be heard." And if both have that, and the moderator then picks up the things that contra cast and null. We think we've got a better debate.
And it's not, "What's the most newsworthy?" What we're trying to do with that structure is get governance forecast. So the biggest indictment? Well they might be a bad President if that's correct.
"The biggest thing I want to do." Well you're going to try to do it. Let's find out if it's any good. Both get to do that. And then these are really important things that will face the country. You both are going to tell us what you're going to do about it. That's essentially the model under the block concept.
I would love to see a chess clock model in practice.
It's happened in France.
On the same scale?
Yeah, and it worked really well. So we've got one example, but most people can't speak French, so they don't know how to watch it. There was a chess clock model in France. We've been trying to get the consultants to pioneer some of our models at the state level when they're running gubernatorial, when they're running senatorial. In part because some of the stuff is always good to pilot before you move it to a Presidential election, although we think the status quo is so bad that we don't think this could be any worse.
We know what problems we're trying to solve. On the chess clock model, you're trying to solve the gaming that comes with you get a question, I get a rebuttal, you get a surrebuttal, because you are then going to take the end of your surrebuttal to engage in a gratuitous attack that I will have to respond to when I get my next question and it makes learning hard. So the game playing is what we're trying to get rid of. We're trying to get rid of the fact that the candidates will just railroad through and take extra time, which isn't fair either and moderators have failed to shut that down. And you can't really shut off the microphone although I think it would be a good idea at some point. It's hard because what if a person is right in the middle of an idea? You're going to look like you're politically biased against them.
Right.
So then they're going to coach candidates to look like they're victims. I mean the idea behind the chess clock, that does shut your mic off –
But it does it on its own.
Yeah, right.
It's not somebody's hand.
Yeah. I mean we've got to prevent people from thinking that the process is unfair even as we make sure it isn't fair. So sometimes it can look unfair when no, that's just structural. You just built the crazy in. So I'd like to see these things tried at some level other than the Presidency.
The problems we're trying to solve in Presidential debates are real. They are real.
And I'm the academic. My job is to say, "But wait a minute. The public can't learn what it needs to learn if you play that game." But they have to play that game because that disadvantages their opponent. So you want to change the structure so they can't play the game, and so that their opponent can't play it against them.
Why do you do it to your opponent? Because your opponent can do it to you. You don't want only one side to be able to do it. So some of these things you look at from a learning standpoint and say, "That makes it harder to learn. Okay how are we going to fix it?"
I'm really pleased with the structural moves in this debate commission report because they start out by saying, "That doesn't work." Now what would work that we could get the candidates to buy into because if they don't buy into it, they're not going to debate. And we actually thought that most of these reforms benefited the candidates substantially enough that if the model were put up, they would accept the model. And this was in the view of the people who were from the debate process. They coached on both sides for all these years.
Every time somebody put up an idea, we would say, "Would the candidates accept that?" And somebody, "Oh, the candidate's disadvantaged if the candidate doesn't. Because here's how my candidate gets hurt when that bad thing happens. And here's how I hurt the other candidate." So we asked everybody to come to this thinking from the perspective of the electorate. And we got the commission to formulate most of the recommendations before they started signing on to candidates because sometimes you can say, "Well my candidate, that person would be advantaged by this." And, "My candidate would not." As opposed to let's just forget that. Let's just say, "How do we get maximum time between campaigning and governance." That was the objective.
And they would do better with this better model.
Yeah. But because they're traps for the candidates regardless of side in the current system. And they're gamed as a result. And trying to get beyond that. I mean the second big goal is you want more people to get more access to more content.
The challenge in our system is the system rewards short-term thinking. It doesn't reward the person who says, "We're going to do this now because the cost of not doing it now is greater if we delay. Or the cost of doing it later means that we're going to deal with a far more difficult problem or we won't be able to deal with it as well and we're going to have these downsides to dealing with it."
There aren't many people that don't have any successors. So there has to be a way in this process to get that kind of engagement. It doesn't come in the short-term in the debates, because they will all say, "Free lunch." They do. Every time Jim Lehrer asked the question, "How are you going to pay for it? Where is the trade-off?" They basically answered, my translation, "Free lunch."
In this next set of exchanges, if you conventionalized it, offered a kind of post-debate debate, you'd be able to push those issues. And just simply say, "Name the three things that you're gonna trade-off." And then if somebody doesn't, you just say, "Now look, this is really important to this person." Now they've promised here and here and here. The trade-offs are there.
I'd like to see, if we were a really mature system, a candidate who stood up and said, "Look, I'm going to increase taxes. I'm going to make cuts here and entitlement to those of you who are okay and and and, because my priority is I'm going to build the infrastructure so the water is clean and safe. The roads are clean and safe. The bridges are not going to fall down. We are reducing the amount of carbon and we're putting these abatements in because because because." That candidate could get elected.
I think you're starting to see some of that with young Congress members, right? Like an AOC?
She's not telling us how to pay for it. She wins my debate, and then she's got to go into the accountability structure.
I can tell you what the trade-offs can be. It's can you be reelected if you say, people like me who do not need Social Security are going to be phased out of it. People have been counting on this process, you say, "Look if you make over this amount, we are going to ask you to not take your Social Security. In fact, we're going to take it away from you. You plan for it for the next two, three years and then we're going to take it away because you've got enough money to make it."
And that money is going to go over here because these kids have to get college debt for. I work in a university. We don't need to have the salary levels where we're at in universities. If we dropped upper administration salary levels, yeah maybe some people would go to business, but probably you have a whole lot of qualified people left. We've got to start cutting the cost of college. And the solution is not going to be government comes in and subsidizes that structure if that structure doesn't dramatically rein in its costs. We've increased above the rate of inflation for way too long. It's unacceptable. It's irresponsible for my sector of the economy to work that way because it's killing off the people who are the future of the country and we can't do that. Somebody's just got to throttle these things back in the name of protecting the next generations.
And when AOC starts telling me how we're going to do that, I will be much more impressed by her. Right now, I love her aspirations, but somebody's got to pay for them. And I think the climate is a crisis. I mean we could say, "What are the things we have to worry about right now?" We have to. But also have to worry about college debt. We have to worry about increasing the likelihood that everybody has access to higher quality healthcare-
Yeah.
The idea that we do not have the same infant mortality rates is something that we oughta wake up in the morning and just be profoundly ashamed of. We've now got declining rates of longevity. You're saying my kids won't live as long as I did? What's wrong with this picture? So all of that is going to cost. And money's going to come from some place, or we're going to squeeze out other things. And somebody needs to sit down and say, "Here's how." Clinton should have gotten Simpson-Bowles through in '98. Instead, the Lewinsky scandal basically derailed the last two years of a presidency that could have taken on the entitlement problem at which point, I would not be getting Social Security.
Right.
And Medicare. You know, I'd be paying that on my own because I can afford to. But you know the kids coming out this year in college wouldn't be carrying the kind of burden they're carrying either. And we have more people covered with insurance than they did before. So I'm waiting for somebody to have the courage to just smack the public into awareness. And that means a whole lot of taxation for people in my income bracket. And people in my income bracket have to say, "Fine."
Yeah. It's going to be the group of people saying, "Okay." I mean it's the Warren Buffets. And when Warren Buffet says that, people say, "Good, so you pay the extra money that I'm not willing to."
Yeah.
And the other piece that we have to get right, we've now got a threat around the world that we haven't had before. Because you've got nuclear capacities in the hands of people who are not stable. So your generation, the generation coming behind you is going to start living the '50s again. When kids actually believed they could be blown up at night because it's plausible now.
That's awful.
Which means some of the expenditures that we could think that we could cut back on, some of the forms of military expenditures, that may not be the place the cuts are going to be able to happen. If what you're trying to do is to stand down some of these other activities. Because the counter capacities that are needed to make sure that the missile doesn't reach the United States are going to be expensive. It's time for somebody with real courage to stand up and our structures need to accommodate a discourse of what's gonna happen. So the debate commission report's a little piece. It's not the whole piece.
And demand it to happen more, right? Not only provide space that allows this to work, but to say, "This is what we expect of our leaders. And this is what we expect of our citizens."
And basically, force the people who have the income to take a reduced standard of living because they're already fine. In order to pay back into the system. But that's a hard message.
Absolutely.
And older people vote at a disproportionate level. And everybody's functionally selfish. This is true.
Right. Thank you.
I admire what you're trying to do, good luck.
Thanks very much.