An Unproductive Congress?

A headline in the Huffington Post caught my eye today. It proclaimed that the latest Congress could be set to be the "most unproductive" since the 1940s. I'll confess that I consider most legislative assemblies to be totally "unproductive" so my reaction when I read the headline was - "so what's new?"

It may actually do the US (and I suspect if the UK could achieve a similar situation) a lot of good to have a legislature that can't agree on anything and so doesn't pass any new legislation for its term of office. Certainly in the UK, we have suffered from far too much new legislation over the last 20-odd years. Almost 80% of the current Statute Book has passed in the last 16 years, and most of that has not "improved" our lives at all, rather the contrary. The problem is, of course, that the parasites  MPs/Congressmen/Representatives that infest sit in most legislatures have to justify their existence somehow and, since they actually generate no income, create no jobs, and live off everyone else's earnings (like the civil servants who actually run the country) the only way they can make their mark is to "pass another little law."

No, even after reading the Huff Post article, which does actually highlight the problem of the Congress refusing to "raise the debt ceiling" and increase taxes. This will impact on the Federal Government's ability to pay teachers, civil servants, medics and the military. It will cripple the Obama Care package and it will impact on jobs across the board, but it will, on the plus side, prevent the passage of a lot of nuisance legislation which would probably impact almost as heavily on the economy.

I always find it interesting that our legislators - in every country - never seem to make the connection between the latest "little law" and the run of unintended consequences it has for everyone else.

Maybe an "unproductive Congress" will prove to be a good thing in the long run ...