We can't tell difference between $100 outrages and $1 annoyances

Originally published in the Columbus Dispatch, this is a slightly expanded version that goes into more detail. I truly appreciate the Dispatch for their willingness to include contrarian voices and headlines that help to sell newspapers.

Because you read the newspaper and columns like this, my editors and I are grateful. As a news and opinion consumer, you likely find yourself occasionally — if not often — outraged by what you read. Me too.

But what if the scale of our reaction isn’t commensurate with the actual magnitude of the problem?

What if our inability to regulate our hundred dollar outrage toward things that are merely one dollar annoyances prevents us from having the bandwidth to tackle the bigger problems.

Our indignation budget only goes so far.

The recent muttering, sputtering, and blubbering end of the longest-lasting federal government shutdown reminds us that we’ve collectively lost the point of self-governance.

I have an artifact from my father on my desk. It’s a tool he used — a calculator — that can perform in seconds everything from basic arithmetic to calculus but uses no batteries or external power other than regular human intellect and finger dexterity.

High schoolers used them in their math classes, as did the engineers who built the rockets that put men on the moon 60 years ago.

It’s a slide rule.

We already had electronic calculators when I was in school, but my father introduced me to the slide rule because I kept making a common error. Mindlessly punching numbers into a calculator risks losing perspective of the scale of the problem. Slide rules require users to keep the location of the decimal point in their minds while working through a calculation.

Each digit the decimal point moves represents an order-of-magnitude — 10x — change in the result. Tiny errors quickly become massive ones.

I think about this tool every so often; not just because it reminds me of my father but because it reminds me to think about the scale of a problem and make sure any potential solution passes a simple plausibility test.

Which brings us back to the outrage about the government shutdown.

Our nation is being subsumed into a quicksand of $38 trillion of national debt. It’s outrageous that politicians shut down the government because almost half of them demanded we add hundreds of billions more to a health insurance — not health care — program that’s already cost more than $1 trillion. The Affordable Care Act made health care less affordable for worse care.

A competent press corps would clarify the facts — rather than merely parroting partisan talking points — and the resulting well-informed electorate would demand that politicians stop the bleeding first.

Tens of millions of young Americans are stuck in their own quagmire of nearly $2 trillion of student debt encouraged and backed by the same politicians who can’t manage the government’s balance sheet. The crushing burden of massive debt for young adults can last well into middle age. It delays marriage, reduces family formation and homeownership, and stifles entrepreneurship — all historical paths to middle-class success and community stability.

The debt bomb is entirely the fault of politicians who decided college was right for everyone. It’s not. We need plumbers and electricians more than Starbucks baristas with sociology degrees and $100,000 debt. The former start working and earning years before the latter and do so with little to no debt, job security, and a bright future building and fixing real things for real people. And, unlike customer service, middle management, and factory work, trade jobs are far less likely to be threatened by AI or robots for the foreseeable future.

The debt and labor market distortions from these policies are bad enough but the damage goes much further. The easy money and zero accountability for productive results directly led to the explosion of college tuition costs. The same pols who claim to believe in “equity” voted for the very policies that made college so expensive that it benefits wealthy Americans far more than proverbial middle class.

I addressed “moral hazard” in my last column. Our elected officials are the personification of it.

Congressional Democrats want to forgive that debt — political doublespeak for transferring it to taxpayers. Republicans treat it as the borrower’s moral failure rather than recognizing the government’s role in enabling the addiction and accepting some responsibility for it. Both have lost sight of the magnitude of the problem they caused.

Such blindness is hardly limited to federal officials. Ohio’s urban public school districts consistently fail to teach foundational literacy skills —causing life-long harm — while a review of their curricula, school board meeting agendas, and spending demonstrates little evidence of a sufficient focus to solve it.

An electorate educated in slide-rule logic would recognize the magnitude of the problems rather than complaining about whether their favored program gets cut.

And, while our public institutions were — and still are — whistling past the graveyard of their own demise, they focused instead on infinitesimally small problems of micro-aggressions, cultural appropriation, long-past colonialism, unconstitutional racial preferences, and a panoply of other pet projects. To the extent that these are individual concerns, they simply don’t rise to the scale necessary to warrant a lien on the public treasury or our even more limited attention span.

The hundreds of millions of dollars committed to these programs are only small change in the scale of multi-trillion dollar annual government spending and tens of trillions in outstanding debt.

But the distraction and navel-gazing is the modern example of Emperor Nero “fiddling while Rome burns.”

The inability to keep the decimal point in the right place isn’t a partisan failing. Republicans have held the power of the presidency, Congress, governorships, and many state legislatures while all these outrageous threats developed and allowed the problems to become multiple orders of magnitude worse.

The Trump administration has accomplished some important policy successes but nearly every one of them is compromised by pettiness and ham-handed implementation that gives opponents easy opportunities to focus attention away from the larger — and truly outrageous — problems.

When the crew of Apollo 13 made their famous radio call that “Houston, we’ve had a problem” the slide-rule toting engineers never lost sight of the point and brought those three men home. We need that same focus today.