Pizza, Politics and Plain Speaking
September 27, 2011
BY DICK METHIA
Every so often a public personality gives straight talk a shot in the arm. In December 2009, Domino Pizza’s new CEO, Patrick Doyle, filmed a commercial bashing his own product. In the ad Doyle admitted that focus groups found Domino’s crust tasted like the cardboard box it comes in.
This year the award for straight talk goes to billionaire investor, Warren Buffett. In August in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, the Oracle of Omaha confessed that the U.S. tax system is so warped, his cleaning lady pays a higher percentage of tax than he does.
The shockwave rippling down Pennsylvania Avenue after Domino’s unprecedented ad and Warren Buffet’s candid admission reinforced what we already knew. Straight talk in Washington is as hard to come by as really good pizza.
Each day in Congress a handful of lawyer-politicians cobble together legislative monstrosities that will affect each of us for decades. Yet without a law degree, you can’t make any sense out of the thing.
Case in point: The Obama health care law, formally known as The Affordable Care Act, better known as The Wooly Wording Act.
After putting it off for all these months, last week I tried reading the bill online. The language is so obtuse and complicated I got a migraine, and nowhere in the 2,000 pages could I figure out whether the new health care law would pay for an aspirin.
It’s only going to get worse. Between now and the end of November a group of twelve lawmakers will wrangle behind closed doors to cut more than a trillion dollars from the federal budget. Can you imagine trying to read this behemoth of a bill? Persuading these twelve legislators to put a trillion dollar budget bill into plain language is like trying to sell snow shovels to San Diegans.
The sad thing is that presidents have been trying to clarify government language since President Nixon in the 1970s. “Tricky Dicky” required that the Federal Register be written in a way that average citizens could understand. Bill Clinton (“it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” surely one of the least straight talking official statements of all time) gave this task to Vice President Al Gore, the guy who claimed he invented the Internet.
Not to be left out of the list of straight-talking chief executives, last October President Obama signed into law The Plain Writing Act. This is its preface:
“The budgetary effects of this Act, for the purpose of complying with the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, shall be determined by reference to the latest statement titled ‘Budgetary Effects of PAYGO Legislation’ for this Act, submitted for printing in the Congressional Record by the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, provided that such statement has been submitted prior to the vote on passage.”
In 1776 we declared our independence on a single page of parchment. In 2011 it takes over 2,000 pages to explain who’s going to pay for your shin splints. In the 2012 elections, I’m voting for Warren Buffett!