The "This Bill Will Reduce Unemployment Better Than The Other Side's Bill" Bill
A Story About Politics
It was in the third month of the year that unemployment ticked up over fifteen percent. Both parties in the Upper House of the Martian legislature, thick in the middle of campaign season, promised to voters that they would solve this crisis. In the Constitutionalist Party, the plan was to somehow reduce federal spending while simultaneously subsidizing cash crops and heavy industry. In the Egalitarian Party, the plan was to dramatically ramp up federal spending in order to juice the economy until jobs were being created by the truckloads.
When the Constitutionalist Party won the election handily, they immediately passed a bill entitled, “The Unemployment Reduction Act.” Rather than reducing spending, which would have required making hard choices about what to cut, they just passed out subsidies to various major players in agriculture and heavy industry. The bill also created a new government agency, the Unemployment Reduction Agency, which immediately created ten thousand jobs at the Unemployment Reduction Agency.
When the next month’s job numbers came out, the net job growth was still negative, with major losses in transportation and tourism offsetting the ten thousand new government jobs. Unemployment ticked up to sixteen percent.
In a snap election called the next month by the new prime minister – who claimed she needed a larger mandate from voters in order to do anything about federal spending – the Egalitarians beat out the Constitutionalists, which ushered in a new government with a new prime minister. The first order of business in the Upper House was passing the “This Bill Will Reduce Unemployment” Bill, which passed out cold, hard cash to every voter in the form of a stimulus check. It also increased the budget for the Unemployment Reduction Agency tenfold. Combined with other spending, this single bill added more than a trillion units to the deficit.
The next month, unemployment ticked up to seventeen percent. Samantha Sa-Nelson, majority whip in the Egalitarian Party, went on one of the Martian telechannels to explain that nefarious lies by the Constitutionalists were to blame for the uptick.
“Martians just don’t have confidence in their economy,” she said. “If we could boost consumer confidence, that would cure the animal spirits.”
“Excuse me,” interrupted the host, “but what exactly are you saying?”
“I’m saying that the problem is that the Constitutionalists have been lying about our law. They’ve told voters that by increasing spending it will hurt the economy and cause unemployment to go up. Our problem is that our side hasn’t been clear enough in articulating what this law actually does. If voters only understood, they would see that we’re doing the right thing. We need to do a better job telling voters what it will do.”
“To be clear,” said the host, “you are talking about the ‘This Bill Will Reduce Unemployment’ Act?”
“Yes,” said Sa-Nelson.
“And remind me again of the difference between that and the ‘Unemployment Reduction Act?’”
“The ‘Unemployment Reduction Act’ was the Constitutionalists’ law, not ours. Unemployment ticked up to sixteen percent after they passed that.”
“And today unemployment stands at…?”
“Seventeen percent.”
“Yes. Well, I also wanted to ask you…”
Days later, the legislature hauled Chip Ikiro, Chairman of the Unemployment Reduction Agency, in for a hearing to discuss the continued rise in the unemployment rate. Ikiro did not look excited to be addressing a panel of legislators, but he gamely held out through the questioning, until it came to Dennis Puoladinate, ostensibly a member of the Constitutionalist Party, but one fond of going his own way.
“Yes, Mr. Chairman, thank you, I suppose I’m still left with a question – and you may say it is a quite basic question, but I’m at a bit of a loss, forgive me – and that question is this: what exactly is it that you, you know, do all day?”
“What do I do?”
“Yes. You’ve tried to answer our questions about the agency, but thus far I am entirely at a loss as to any explanation of what you do all day. What is it that your ten thousand employees could possibly be working on? Since you’ve been installed, the unemployment rate has only made changes for the worse. You say that all your people are working hard to get that rate back down under ten percent, but how could any of that possibly employ ten thousand people?”
The Chairman looked perplexed. “First of all,” he said. “Ten percent seems to our agency to be overly optimistic. Our projections show us entering a new era, in which the low unemployment of prior decades is a thing of the past. If you ask us to get the unemployment rate below ten, we will likely fail. But ask us to get it to twelve, and that is a number more likely to hold common in the future.”
“Twelve percent?” asked Puoladinate. “You do realize that most people consider that to be a high unemployment.”
“Yes, in the past they thought that. We will have to work hard to adjust peoples’ expectations.”
“Mr. Ikiro, you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Which was?”
“What do you do? At work? During the hours when this planet is paying for your time. What do you…?”
“Oh, my days are very busy. I’m constantly signing forms and chairing meetings and I have to approve all of our hiring decisions and you know that ten thousand is a lot of…”
“Yes, well,” Puoladlinate interrupted him. “About that. What do they do all day? Those ten thousand. Why do you need that many?”
“Ask the Martian Central Bank,” huffed Ikiro. “What is it they do all day? They haven’t raised or lowered interest rates in centuries. Ask them why they need to be employing so many people.”
“Mr. Ikiro,” said the legislator, “the Martian Central Bank has less than fifty employees. And most of them perform economic research. Besides, we are quite happy with their performance. Even with unemployment as high as it is, the Martian unit hasn’t deflated. The matter at hand is your agency, not the Martian Central Bank…”
There was another snap election. Both sides took out all of the stops. The Constitutionalists, who represented rural Mars, took to castigating the major cities and thoroughfares of the planet.
“Have you seen the movies?” asked one politician. “They have men firing machine guns at helicopters in the middle of the evening commute. People think there’s going to be a war if unemployment gets any higher. The police’ll have to shoot people to keep them from looting the grocery stores.”
Meanwhile, the Egalitarians, who were committed to equality and who represented the wealthier, suburbanite portions of Mars, took to trashing Constitutionalist voters as backwards rubes, “whose knuckles are black from repetitive contact with the floor,” and whose “quaint folklore would be fun if these people could ever learn how to write it down.”
One Constitutionalist senator responded by saying that real Martians didn’t have fancy hovercars or live in skytowers. They worked with their hands out in the ice-fields at the poles or risked their lives mining for ore in the Asteroid Belt, only coming home every eight months to see their wives and families.