Planning Decisions, Inc.

THE BOTTOM LINE FROM CHUCK LAWTON

Policy Simulation Game: The Long-term Short-term Paradox in Augusta

Published Sunday April 13, 2008

An’ here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice.
~Bob Dylan

It is more than slightly ironic that all of the budget decisions in Augusta are made in the short term and all of the reasons supporting them can be known only in the long term.

Question: Why not cut more from Medicaid today?
Answer: Because if we do, we’ll spend more in the emergency room tomorrow.

Question: Why not put off some of the road and bridge repair today?
Answer: Because if we do, they’ll fall apart, paralyzing our economy and leading to even tighter budgets tomorrow.

Question: Why not raise taxes today?
Answer: Because if we do, businesses won’t invest, employment and income growth will slow even more, and we’ll have to make even more severe service cuts tomorrow.

All of these reasons for sparing one program or another from cuts today are undoubtedly valid, at least to some degree. But exactly (or even roughly) how true they might be will never be known. More importantly, how these long-term projections might interact with one another will never be put to the test. Why? Because no one ever looks—really looks—at the reasonably likely long-term consequences of budgetary actions when making the short-term decisions.

This year, last year, five years ago, ten years ago, and, in all likelihood, ten years from now, the hard decisions in Augusta have been and will be made not on the basis of long-term evidence, but on the basis of short-term political power. Reasonable people of good will bring their personal biases—however shaped—to the political pressure cooker of the Appropriations Committee, and some “win” while others “lose.” However unappetizing the process may be, the sausages are made, and we all dine on the outcome.

The central problem of this paradox of long-term reasons for short-term decisions is that we never get to test the biases—our own or anyone else’s. There is no feedback loop. No one ever gets to say, “Oh yeah, look how real per capita emergency room expenditures fell five years after we invested that million dollars in pre-natal health education!” No one gets to say, “Oh yeah, look how employment and income started to accelerate five years after we cut the income tax and committed to annual R&D bonding!”

Augusta needs to take a lesson from the arcade and the video gamers. What we need in Augusta is a big padded game room that reverses the current process. What we have today is a pressure cooker where all attention is focused on the short-term exercise of power—marshalling the forces to win, reasons be damned. What we need—not as a replacement for the current system, but as a supplementary practice field—is an “artificial” pressure cooker where all the attention is focused on the interplay among the long-term reasons for various program decisions, while who wins or loses is ignored.

In short, we need a vehicle for giving the current decision makers—legislators, program directors and lobbyists—the chance to play out the results of their game over six, eight, ten year periods, to see and learn from likely results and then to do it again…and again…and again. Just like kids do with their Game Boys.

OK, you say. Intriguing idea, but who will be the Wizard of Oz who creates the “game,” who builds the software? Who is to say what will be the long-term results of improved health education or lower taxes or more college graduates or a less oil dependent transportation system? Alan Greenspan? Ben Bernanke? Charlie Colgan? After all, won’t the power play just switch from “fixing” the votes to “fixing” the model, to proving your reasons superior?

Yes! Exactly! That’s the point—switch the debate from who gets the money in the short-run to whose long-term reasoning is most compelling. And let the players design the game. Maine’s power brokers need to conduct a visioning session. They need, like the power brokers and citizens in one of our nearly 500 towns. to gather in a gym some Friday night and Saturday morning and ask themselves what sort of state they want to live in ten years from now; what they like and don’t like about what we have now; what they want to preserve and what they want to change. Then they need to lay out how to get there, including how to set priorities among their various strategies.

This may be an outlandishly optimistic assignment, but it’s a necessary one. Because, if there is anything that can be known with certainty about the future, it is that—whatever vision of it you may have—it’s clear that the only conclusion to be reached by continuing our current course is, “You can’t get there from here.”

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