The Ice Cream Party and the Spinach Party

If anything, the days when I stay home are more productive than the days I go in: There aren’t so many distracting phone calls or chats with coworkers, and of course there is no commute.

With all that extra time and energy on my hands, I found myself thinking about subjects I usually stay away from: domestic subjects. And eleven years after Republicans first took over Congress, I’m amazed at how few appealing proposals are on the table.

At any one time in American politics, we have a Spinach party and an Ice Cream party. The Spinach party wants you to do a lot of unpleasant things that will do you good. The Ice Cream party wants you to be happy now. Back in the Jimmy Carter administration, the Democrats were the Spinach party: Pay higher taxes. Obey more government regulations. Turn down your thermostats. Give the canal back to Panama.

These days, however, the Republicans are sounding more and more spinachy. Finish the war. Retire later and get less when you do. Be nice, boys and girls, and stay quiet while all the good jobs go to China. You will thank us later when all our policies make you better off in the long run.

The Spinach party often has a lot of worthy policy ideas, but there is a problem: Nobody comes running when the spinach truck drives by, jingling its bells.

I’m a Democrat myself and a foreign policy buff at that, but the absence of attractive domestic policy initiatives from the party that controls the White House and both branches of Congress is both alarming and depressing at a time when most Democrats seem incapable of addressing national security issues with any coherence. So during the transit strike I used the time I saved from commuting to put together some proposals that met three criteria: Each had to be popular, practical, and consistent with conservative principles. Some are new, some are old, but all are ideas that, it seems to me, would benefit both the American people and the political party that proposed them.

THE FIRST IDEA, not surprisingly given my personal circumstances the other month, has to do with telecommuting. For New Yorkers, transit strikes aren’t the only hazard. Since 9/11 we have lived in a city that knows what catastrophe is. Last summer’s terror attacks on the London transit system reminded us that even attacks on a much smaller scale can paralyze a major metropolitan area.

The point is that promoting telecommuting is good civil defense. Whether a disaster is manmade like a terror attack or natural like a bird flu pandemic, it’s important to insulate the American economy as far as possible from the ensuing disruption.

Something like 44 million Americans now telecommute at least part time. Working with state and local governments and with business leaders, the federal government should encourage public and private enterprises to develop emergency plans that would allow as many workers as possible to work from their homes or from nearby satellite work sites during an emergency–and develop plans to protect the country’s telecommunications infrastructure as well. More than half the American workforce now has jobs that can be done from home at least in part; if public and private employers put emergency plans in place, we can significantly degrade the ability of terrorists to disrupt our lives.

Hardening the telecom infrastructure and requiring enterprises to develop emergency telecommuting plans and the computer and software capacity to make them work wherever feasible would cost money, but it is something the federal government should support, and by the standards of the Homeland Security budget, the investments would be modest.

Once employers develop this emergency capacity, and once we have protected the telecommunications network, this extraordinarily powerful and flexible capacity can be used for other emergencies–like hurricanes, blizzards, oil boycotts, and transit strikes. Like the interstate highway system, originally planned to ensure the rapid movement of goods and troops in wartime, or like the Internet, originally created by DARPA for defense purposes, the telecommunications network and emergency plans would have many other uses. We could encourage the use of the emergency infrastructure in normal times, for instance, to conserve energy and meet clean air standards. Companies that met certain standards for increased telecommuting would benefit from tax reductions, and the government would look with more favor on home-office deductions for workers who telecommute.

Listen to the ice cream truck. Encouraging more employers to offer more employees more opportunities to telecommute accomplishes several popular things.

The average American worker spends about one hour per day commuting to and from work–the equivalent of six full work-weeks a year. Someone who telecommutes one day a week saves the equivalent of one work week a year. Telecommuting workers would have more time with their families and more flexible schedules. Parents with sick children–or children with elderly parents–could stay home more often and meet family responsibilities without losing the ability to work. Promoting telecommuting is a pro-family policy, since any measure that enhances the ability of caregivers to combine careers with home responsibilities is good for fathers, mothers, and children. With more adults working from home more days, America’s children and young people would have more adult supervision.

Beyond that, people who spend less time commuting have more time to do what they want–more freedom. That, presumably, is what government ought to provide.

Telecommuting isn’t just worker friendly. It enhances productivity. Many workers will stay home with a cold or the flu to avoid the commute and to avoid spreading disease at the office. Often, these workers–to say nothing of physically challenged workers–could work from home and put in a full day. Ninety million work days per year are missed because of colds and flu. If sufferers from colds wanted to work, and parents could work while they cared for sick kids, workers would be more productive, and we would all be better off.

Telecommuting would help address America’s looming retirement and Social Security crisis. Older workers often want to keep working, but decreasing mobility makes the commute a physical challenge. Many people in their sixties retire because they are no longer comfortable facing rush hour traffic, especially at night. Others have ailments like arthritis that make physical travel more challenging but in no way impair mental acuity, ambition, or the desire to contribute to society. Older workers can work longer if they can work from home some or all of the time, paying more in taxes and earning more income and giving them more years to save for final retirement. The handicapped will have more access to more economic opportunity as physical barriers become less of a factor.

As a foreign policy buff, I can’t help but note that telecommuting would take some of the international heat off the United States over global warming. For every 10 percent of the nation’s workforce that telecommutes one day per week, 1.2 million gallons less fuel would be used each week, and air pollutants would decrease by 12,963 tons per week. These figures reflect only the savings from workers who stayed home. Real figures would be higher; with cars off the roads at peak hours, all drivers would get a less-congested, more hassle-free drive to work. That would reduce the energy used by all drivers, not just the lucky telecommuters at home in their bathrobes. All this would lessen our dependence on imported oil–and, since we would have emergency plans for events like oil boycotts and other serious interruptions in supply, it would make the American economy less vulnerable to foreign oil blackmail.

A serious shift to more telecommuting would put the United States ahead of European nations in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And we would get there the American way: not by taxing and regulating things people like (energy and cars), but by making it easier for people to do what they want.

The government has taken a few baby steps in this direction; the private sector has been moving more quickly. However, tax incentives and direct federal spending will be necessary to move to a fully functional civil defense program. Fortunately for budget hawks, there are offsetting savings. Highways are expensive; what drives construction is often peak demand at rush hour. Telecommuting at levels that cut rush hour traffic would reduce the need for new construction and lengthen the useful life of infrastructure already in place. We have a lot of capable accountants with sophisticated computer programs; why not produce some estimates of construction and maintenance savings that would reduce future deficits enough to make room for the tax incentives?

Reduce vulnerability to terror, natural disaster, and political oil blackmail. Enhance quality of life with pro-family legislation. Reduce pollution and cut energy costs. Cut taxes without throwing the budget out of whack.

This doesn’t sound like the spinach truck to me, and I don’t think it would sound that way to voters.

HERE’S ANOTHER ICE CREAM IDEA. Maybe not on the same scale, but it’s something the government could do, and something most people would like quite a lot.

Let’s cut the transaction hassles and costs on residential real estate. For the large majority of American families, their homes are their largest investment. Building a national market in which people can freely and easily buy and sell homes has not only helped generations of Americans acquire property and learn about finance; it’s also contributed to the flexibility of the American economy by enabling people to move around the country in search of opportunity and jobs.

Yet as anybody who has tried it knows, there’s a lot of red tape and cost when it comes to buying or selling a house. Closing costs are mysterious, arcane, and to a large degree the consequence of an inefficient system that is often deliberately designed to provide comfortable niche livings for various otherwise useless professionals. The free market is taking care of some of these costs as banks keep losing loans to cheaper Internet lenders and as the competition among realtors leads to fee cutting. But there are plenty of costs that can only be cut with government pressure–to, for example, put title information into computer-searchable databases so that title searches and title insurance would cost pennies rather than hundreds of dollars.

This doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. Congress could direct Fannie Mae to require gradual reductions in the fees and paperwork associated with conforming loans. States that adopted new and more efficient methods of title registry and deed conveyance could get some help from the federal government to modernize their systems.

Some people will say that this is a two-bit, Clintonian idea. But people elect politicians to help them relieve annoyances they can’t fix on their own. Significantly reducing transaction costs on the most important investment most people make is exactly the kind of thing people want their representatives to do. Why shouldn’t a commitment to address this issue be part of the 2006 Republican program?

HERE’S A BIGGER IDEA. Paying for college education is one of the biggest financial worries facing middle class and working families. Fancy liberal arts schools that let your kids live in essentially unsupervised coed dorms while majoring in such helpful subjects as deconstructionist literary theory and Why America Sucks now cost north of $40,000 per year, and even less-prestigious schools that teach more useful subjects can cost as much per year as a round-the-world cruise. Some kids come out burdened with insane levels of debt; others are frozen out of the market.

The liberal answer is that the government should pick up the ever-escalating cost of supporting Ward Churchill and his fellow astronauts of theory in the lifestyle to which they aspire. But maybe there’s an alternative.

There is no reason the government should try to prevent American families who value the traditional college experience from paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, but perhaps it could offer an alternative: a federally recognized national baccalaureate (or ‘national bac’) degree that students could earn by demonstrating competence and knowledge.

With input from employers, the Department of Education could develop standards in fields like English, the sciences, information technology, mathematics, and so on. Students would get certificates when they passed an exam in a given subject. These certificates could be used, like the Advanced Placement tests of the College Board, to reduce the number of courses students would need to graduate from a traditional college. And colleges that accepted federal funds could be required to award credits for them.

But the certificates would be good for something else as well. With enough certificates in the right subjects, students could get a national bac without going to college. Government agencies would accept the bac as the equivalent of a conventional bachelor’s degree; graduate schools and any organization receiving federal funds would also be required to accept it.

Subject exams calibrated to a national standard would give employers something they do not now have: assurance that a student has achieved a certain level of knowledge and skill. It is the easiest thing in the world today to find English majors with BA degrees from accredited colleges who cannot write a standard business letter. If national bac holders could in fact perform this and other specific tasks that employers want their new hires to perform, it is likely that increasing numbers of employers would demand the bac in addition to a college degree. Students who attended traditional colleges would increasingly need to pass these exams to obtain the full benefits of their degree.

For students from modest or low-income homes, as well as for part-time students trying to earn degrees while they work full time jobs or raise families, the standards would offer a cheaper, more efficient way to focus their education. Students could take prep courses that focused on the skills they actually needed to do the jobs they sought. Parents could teach their kids at home. Schools and institutes could offer focused programs. Public records could show how well students performed on the exams, offering students and parents far more accountability and information than they now get.

Such programs would be both cheaper and more flexible than conventional college degree programs. The contemporary American college is solidly grounded in the tradition of the medieval guilds. These guilds deliberately limited competition to keep fees high. In the best of cases, guild regulation also protected consumers by imposing quality and fairness standards on guild members. Few observers of American education today would argue with straight faces that the quality of undergraduate education is a major concern of contemporary guilds like the American Association of University Professors. Colleges today provide no real accounting to students, parents, or anybody else about the quality of the education they provide. No other market forces consumers to make choices on so little information.

One consequence of this poorly functioning market is to grossly exaggerate the value of “prestige” degrees. Especially these days, a lot of kids work very hard in Ivy League colleges, but others still major in booze and other diversions. Meanwhile, there are plenty of kids studying at, say, Regular State University, where they work very hard at demanding courses under tough professors. A national bac exam would allow these kids to compete on a level playing field against the Harvard and Yale grads; employers could look at the scores and see for themselves which kids knew more.

Less unearned privilege for Harvard, more opportunity for Regular State. That, once again, is what the ice cream truck brings.

As a Yalie myself and a part-time college professor to boot, I find these ideas a bit unsettling. But to voters worried about paying for education, resenting the advantages that prestige diplomas confer on a handful of mostly privileged young people from well-to-do families, and conflicted about the lack of practical focus, educational coherence, and moral guidance found at so many colleges today, an alternative route to a college degree might seem like a helpful idea.

And, by the way, to hardworking immigrants slogging through night school, to working single mothers trying to improve their lives and their kids’ prospects, and to many other Americans who don’t have the time or money for frills but urgently need a serious college degree, these reforms would open the door to a better life.

By setting open standards for the national bac, and by allowing anybody to offer the service of preparing students to take the exams, Congress could break the guilds’ monopoly on education. A century ago higher education was still a luxury, and it scarcely mattered that it was offered only by arcane guilds in a system that took shape in the Middle Ages. But today many people of very modest means need a BA-equivalent degree to succeed in the workplace.

The power of the guilds in the goods-producing industries had to be broken before the factory system could provide the cheaper goods of the industrial revolution. The service and information revolutions require the breakup of the knowledge guilds: The professoriat is a good place to start.

THE SECRET OF POLITICS in a democratic society is figuring out how to give the people what they want. The Democrats were masters of this in the New Deal era: Large government bureaucracies provided social programs and services that voters could not get for themselves, and a regulated national economy was seen as the ticket to mass voter prosperity. In the new economy, that formula no longer works very well, and since Reagan’s first term, Republicans have made political progress primarily by dismantling pieces of the New Deal and Great Society programs that voters no longer value. At the same time, the Republican ideological preference for free markets turned from a liability into an asset: Voters came to believe that freer markets would deliver more and better goods–and jobs–than the New Deal could.

But now Republicans in turn have a problem. Demolition is no longer enough. Whether the subject is health care, education, retirement, or job security, voters want more–and what little the Republicans offer looks suspiciously like spinach. Democrats, divided on national security and still nostalgically locked into the social imagination of the New Deal era, are unable to provide a compelling alternative vision–for now. But the failure of the Republican party to develop a compelling and attractive domestic agenda, the failure to stock up the ice cream wagon and get it out on the streets, will eventually produce a major crisis for the GOP.

As for me, I’m working diligently to implement my New Year’s Resolution: more days at home in the bathrobe, sipping tea.

Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.