Bait and Switch
By Charles J. Sykes
Try
to imagine this:
You negotiate a price for a new car,
including its price, interest rates and various bells and whistles. The
deal is signed and sealed, you write out a big check, and the car is
delivered as promised . . . except, the dealer informs you, for a few last
minute changes.
Your new car will actually cost twice as
much as promised and you won’t be getting the GPS system, the CD player,
or the all-wheel-drive you ordered. And instead of a BMW, you’ll be
getting a Saturn. Painted yellow.
Enjoy.
This is, of course, a ridiculous fable,
because no car dealer would ever behave like state government.
In the private sectors a promise is sealed
with a contract, enforceable under law and there are rules about promising
one thing and doing another. It’s called bait and switch.
In politics, though, it has become so
common as to barely cause a ripple of outrage from voters who took the
bait. From the first President Bush’s “read my lips” tax pledge
(quickly broken) to Bill Clinton’s promise of a middle class tax cut
(even more quickly dropped); the public has grown understandably cynical
about pre-election love letters discarded the morning after.
Pols feast on that cynicism, which helps
explain the increasing brazenness with which officials are abandoning
promises before they are even cold or taken down from YouTube. Consider:
- Governor Jim Doyle,
his 2003 State of the State Address, said: “Going forward, my mind
will be open to every solution -- except one. We should not -- we must
not -- and I will not -- raise taxes.” Safely re-elected, he is
proposing not merely to raise taxes, but to jack them up by $1.74
billion. The property tax freeze? You must be joking.
- During his re-election
campaign, Doyle also signed a tough new law calling for GPS tracking
of dangerous sex offenders. Doyle was so proud of the law that during
his campaign he touted it in television commercials. Two months after
being safely re-elected to a four-year term, Doyle gutted the same
measure, by proposing to monitor a third fewer offenders than he had
promised voters just months earlier.
- In Milwaukee, city
officials told members of the Common Council and the public that
rebuilding and extending Canal Street would cost about $20 million. It
actually cost taxpayers $53 million – more than two-and-half times
the public estimate. A new audit found that officials knew the
original estimate for the project was bogus, but concealed the
project’s actual cost until it had been approved and work too far
advanced to do anything about it. In other words, the $53 million
price tag was not a cost overrun – it was simply the real cost that
officials covered up from the folks who would have to pay the bill.
- And last week, state
officials admitted that the cost of cleaning up the damage done by
printing taxpayers’ social security numbers on tax forms would be
more than double what officials had predicted just two months ago.
When the screw-up was on the front pages, officials with the
Department of Revenue low-balled the cost of providing credit
monitoring to affected residents by predicting that only 8 percent of
those affected would actually sign up for credit monitoring. By last
week, 15 percent had signed on, with more sure to line up before the
March 31 deadline.
In each case the story that was told when
the cameras were on and the decision was still pending was radically
changed when the cameras went dark and the deal was sealed.
That’s a lesson worth keeping in mind as costly and shiny new plans and proposals make their way through the Capitol this Spring: Don’t assume the politicians are as trustworthy as car salesmen.