David Walker is the President of the Foundation that brought us I.O.U.S.A.

His assessment is unblinking as to where the responsibility lies, but stops short of saying where the true cause lies. Where he stops is where I start and as those of you who read me regularly know, I have been talking about this for a long time.

There is a relatively simple cause and effect, ankle bone connected to the shin bone, type of explanation for why we are where we are. We have a government that fails to execute its constitutitional responsibilities. Why? I will offer two prime reasons. First, we have allowed a political process to develop whereby obscene amounts of money are required to be elected. Since we everyday Americans (a) do not have the deep pockets needed to participate and (b) have been historically disinterested to the point we do not make the collective investment to candidates with small donations (that's changed this year) we have forced the politicians to go to what David Cay Johnston calls the "Political Donor Class". Political Donor Class money comes with significant strings attached and it goes to both sides. (Read Johnston's books, Perfectly Legal, and Free Lunch.)

Second, government is strangled by polarized politics. Why do we have polarized politics? Because we have forgotten the purpose, rules and definitions (if we ever knew them in the first place) of our political system. A significant portion of the population is operating outside the rules, forcing the rest of the electorate to band together in opposition for self preservation.

So, if you want to restore a functioning government, then you have to begin by overcoming polarized politics. If you want to overcome polarized politics, then we as a people must objectively reconsider the purpose, rules and definitions of our political processes. To assist in that goal, we need to make two significant changes to our electoral processes. I talk about those two changes in my White Paper.

Here's a link to Walker's article.

http://www.pgpf.org/newsroom/oped/ft/