#politics #unitedstates
I first encountered the President’s Management Agenda (PMA), as it was called then, for the Executive Branch in a Georgetown graduate public policy class where we had critically reviewed, discussed, and debated the post-9/11 PMA of George W. Bush in 2002, particularly the formation of the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS), just as the Pentagon was created in 1947 by Harry Truman after World War II, consolidating many other government departments under one agency.
American presidents have historically been elected on a partisan political platform, except for George Washington.
Transportation, until after the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System began getting constructed, was trekking across the land from coast to coast since Thomas Jefferson’s Lewis and Clark expedition from Illinois to the Oregon coast with the help of the Native American woman Sacagawea who had showed them the way, then in the 19th century largely by Cornelius Vanderbilt’s steamboats on American inland rivers waterways and the railroad.
Communication was slow and expensive, at snail’s pace well into the 1990s compared to now, just like the transportation until the early 1980s when the Interstate Highway system was finally completed coast to coast and air travel was deregulated to lower the cost, increasing passenger traffic, freeing up Americans to travel far and wide within the country and around the world.
United States of America was a vast land of natural beauty, still is, but in economic terms until after World War II, was for all practical purposes, a third world country.
For more than two centuries, there was barely a central bank like the #federalreserve which was not established until 1913 and no income tax, with U.S. Treasury supplying U.S. dollar, and hardly any reliable data until after the establishment of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), again post-Great Depression, to guide public policy.
Presidents and the Congress ran the country by the seat of their pants following pre-set ideological political and social agendas.
The inertia of this prejudicial ideological tradition of politics and governance, not throughly vetted by reason and hard data is still being followed by the U.S. government, including on the economy, despite the best and transparent economic and other data anywhere in the world, to the detriment of both the present and future of United States and the world.
Washington runs chaotically in Brownian motion to fulfill a president’s ideological agenda, even if it means bending reality with power, which almost always backfires.
Any future president and Congress should shift to the paradigm of data driven American and global political, economic, and social governance enabled by advanced information and communications technologies (ICTs), from people voting in elections to voting in U.S. Congress to making representative democratic governance more accessible, participatory and transparent for the citizenry.
Economist/Lawyer/Business Executive/Professor
2moWith all due respect, u are repeating yourself over and over. The members of the current government are cowards because taking under consideration his health he should have been removed a long time ago. This would be taking interest of the country over personal interests. But cowards are too scared to apply their own Constitution. Let's close the curtains at this show here, it is over...Just want to see who he will pardon from now on? This will show his priorities: country or personal. Let's wait with final judgements.