Memo to Kirchner: You Can’t Play “All Gain, No Pain” with Blackouts
I have always been against term limits. I’d rather change the way the system is currently rigged to favor incumbents and then let the voters decide on the merits whether their elected officials deserve another term. Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee isn’t writing about term limits when he chides Arnold Schwarzenegger for practicing “all gain, no pain” politics in yesterday’s paper. Still, Walters perhaps unintentionally ends up highlighting one of the problems with term limits: elected officials are infinitely more worried about the short-term political consequences of their actions than they are about the long-term policy implications:
There’s been a lot of talk in the Capitol about asking voters to raise taxes to pay for expanding health care. But this week, Schwarzenegger took a new tack by proposing to lease the state lottery to a private operator and devote lease payments to health care, thereby negating the need for taxes on doctors and softening the financial impact on employers.
Implicitly, Schwarzenegger is promising that nobody would be taxed that doesn’t want to be taxed while many billions of dollars in new health care benefits will flow to the uninsured poor and medical providers — all gain and no pain.
The fiscal flaw is self-evident: If the lottery can be leased and the state can realize a $2 billion revenue gain, shouldn’t that money be used to balance a deficit-ridden state budget before launching new spending schemes? Or does Schwarzenegger intend to dump the mess on the next governor while he morphs into a senator-elect and/or self-appointed guru of global warming — all gain for him without any political pain?
Schwarzenegger wouldn’t be dumping this mess on himself if he could stay in office as Governor of California, but he can’t. The people of California and Schwarzenegger’s successor are left to pick up the pieces.
In today’s New York Times, Alexei Barrionuevo reports on South American heads of state playing “all gain, no pain” politics of their own, especially when it comes to energy policy:
Néstor Kirchner, Argentina’s president, has steadfastly refused to raise his country’s gas and electricity prices, which are among the lowest in the world, ahead of the Oct. 28 election. Mr. Kirchner’s wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, is the leading candidate to succeed him.
Instead, his government placed winter energy-use restrictions on industries and cut off its neighbor to the west, Chile.
Mr. Kirchner’s strategy has satisfied voters and kept Argentina’s economy humming, for now. But the low gas and power prices have scared away needed foreign investment in energy development and raised fears of runaway inflation.
Argentina could be digging itself a bigger hole to crawl out of. While the government refuses to impose on residential consumers to cut back, Argentina’s energy demands are rising faster than supply.
Power plants have little or no spare capacity and are suffering from a lack of maintenance, increasing the chances of brownouts or blackouts, said Sylvie D’Apote, an analyst with Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
I think President Kirchner should make two phone calls. The first should be to Schwarzenegger’s predecessor, Gray Davis. As Davis learned when he was recalled from office, it’s one thing when your policy shortsightedness involves something arcane and distant like the state budget; it’s another entirely when it is something that has an immediate impact on voters, like blackouts. But instead of taking advantage of the lack of accountability built into term limits, Kirchner will be dumping his energy mess on his wife. That’s why I think his second call should be to a marriage counselor.
