Kevin McCabe (R – Big Lake)
It is telling that none of the House or Senate finance committee co-chairs are part of the group. The next meeting is this Wednesday at 2 pm at the Anchorage LIO. Don’t hold your breath for a comprehensive plan. There has been several of these groups over the decades. Zero has changed. There are three levers: Permanent Fund, spending, revenues. That’s it. A comprehensive plan will require pulling a bit on all three, which is unlikely. And even if they manage to do the impossible, whatever results from the group will still need to go through the legislative process. Which means a bill that goes to at the very least the finance committees and then the floor. The next special session is set to start in just over three weeks. But according to many at the meeting, it won’t begin until the group is finished. As I said last week, most legislators do not want to go back to Juneau in August. My bet is it gets pushed back to September. In addition to the fi
Today’s episode is all about solutions. We talk with Executive Director of the Institute of Political Innovation (IPI), Solomon Lieberman, about what cross-partisan “politics industry theory” reform is, and how it can help us move into a better era of American politics.
“Politics industry theory” was first formulated by Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter while they were attempting to pinpoint objective, unbiased reasons why American government was failing. What they found was that our political duopoly (the Republicans and Democrats together) has slowly removed legitimate competition from their industry. The Institute for Political Innovation was then formed in order to help organize and empower reformers from both sides of the political isle to return competency and accountability to government through true competition.