From Our Brains to Yours
I’m going to spend $100
I’m headed out the door in a few minutes and while I’m out I’m going to spend $100. My neighbor is headed out, too, and she’s going to spend $150, but I’m just going to spend $100. Am I being smarter, getting the better deal? Will the thing I buy work?
You’re no doubt wondering what I plan to spend $100 on, and you can’t really say whether I’m getting the better deal or whether “it will work” until you know what I’m buying, what my neighbor is buying, and what I want “it” to do.
Obviously, If I’m buying a paperclip for $100 and my neighbor is buying a house for $150, she’s getting a better deal even though she’s spending more money. And as for whether my paperclip will work, that depends entirely on whether I’m hoping something will hold a stack of papers together.
I feel like this is roughly the conversation we’re having about the Senate, House, and conference stimulus bills. We’re hearing a lot about what they’ll cost, a little about what we hope they might do, and not a lot in terms of how those two factors relate. This morning on NPR I heard Senator Collins suggest that she was pleased as punch that the final bill to come out of conference was less then either the House or Senate versions. Full stop. She had no further comments explaining why that fact is a good thing for the economy, what was cut to reach that lower total number, or why those cuts were the right ones. She – and her colleagues being interviewed – had even less to say about what, precisely, they believe the stimulus package will do.
This irks me for a variety of reasons, including:
- My grandchildren will be reaping what the stimulus package and the TARP spending sow. When I meet them someday (hopefully a long, long time from now – my son is nine-years-old), I want to be able to look them in the eye and tell them what we thought we were doing, and that we honestly thought it was the right thing to do. I can’t look anyone in the eye and honestly say I think the House, Senate, or conference bills are well-thought pieces of public policy. The process has been such a hodgepodge, we’ve gone about it without real consideration of “first principles“, and the resulting compromise seems to be more about a final number (mustn’t go above $800 billion!) than any sense of what we’re hoping that money will buy, and for what purpose.
- As a communications professional I’m constantly railing against evaluating the wrong things. For example, if your communications goal is changing attitudes, why do you only measure the number of media hits? So, focusing on the secondary question – what does it cost? – at the expense of the primary question – what are we buying and what do we hope it will do? – offends me as a strategist.
Before I head out to spend $100 (groceries, for those of you dying to know), I’m going to spend a bit of time on ShovelWatch – http://www.shovelwatch.org -wishing that our national conversation on the stimulus might be as in-depth, and especially that our elected officials from both sides of the aisle respected us enough to have that conversation.