“People often don’t realize that a political system is sometimes effective when it does not do certain things.” Pietro Nivola, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, argued in 2013. “You can’t just measure the things it does, the actions it takes; you also have to measure the actions it does not take.” Nivola’s study was impressed by how gridlock has the ability to stop the Republican House from cutting spending too abruptly for the economy.
And perhaps he’s right. Gridlock has caused an odd, but pervasive, stability in Washington. Spending has been static. No jarring reforms have passed. Maybe stopping reforms like cap-and-trade, which would have artificially spiked energy prices and undercut much of energy-driven growth we’re now experiencing, was more productive than not. The inadvertent, but reigning, policy over the past four years has been, do no harm.
On the strength of good economic news, POLITICO reports that Obama will use his State of the Union to roll out an agenda aimed at the stagnating wages and those Americans left behind to build on the growth. I’m going to take wild guess and say that it’s going to incorporate a lot of happy talk about “infrastructure” and a fairer reallocation of wealth. We need to grow from the middle out, if you will. No doubt, politically speaking, Democrats’ fortunes are bound to improve somewhat as economic anxieties ebb. The president will surely see better approval numbers.
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