Former governor John Carlin urged young people to get deeply involved in politics in a speech he made in Iola Tuesday night, which is reported at greater length starting on page one.
“They need to have broad agendas,” he said. “My generation has a very short agenda: ‘Don’t mess with my retirement,’” he said — and then launched into an issue-packed agenda for all and sundry to tackle.
— Money in politics, particularly at the state level:
Item: When a senator or representative must start raising money for the next election from the first day his or her term begins, and must raise tens of thousands of dollars every day to have enough to run a credible campaign, that uses up so much time there is little left to spend on the affairs of the nation.
Item: The quickest, easiest way to raise campaign money is to take it from the special interests. It is very difficult for a member of Congress to take money from lobbyists day after day and then vote against the corporations and organizations that those lobbyists represent.
Solution: Public financing of congressional campaigns. The states of Maine and Arizona have adopted systems which use state funds to see that all candidates, regardless of their personal wealth, have about the same amounts of money to spend on campaigning. The purpose is to take the corrupting influence of money out of the political picture. (News note: the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Arizona law unconstitutional Tuesday without explanation.)
— Anti-government rhetoric hinders problem-solving, particularly in states such as Kansas.
Item: Kansas doesn’t have enough wealth to tax to meet its needs. Kansas always gets more from the federal government than it pays in federal taxes. Examples: all of the reservoirs on Kansas rivers that provide flood control, such as the John Redmond Dam at Burlington, were built with federal money and could not have been built with state funds; the interstate highway system was built with federal money and all of the state’s highways were built and are maintained with a combination of state and federal funds; almost every farm family in Kansas is the beneficiary of federal subsidies; Kansas has an older population which depends on Social Security and Medicare, both federal programs. Those who say that we can do without the federal government aren’t looking at the facts.
Rather than consider government the enemy, we should work with and through government to solve probems and ex-pand opportunities.
— Politics in Kansas and in the nation have become polarized, with extremists on the right and the left dominating the scene and making it difficult to get things done.
“When everything is seen as either black or white, right or wrong, compromise becomes impossible and progress stalls,” he said.
When he was governor, Carlin related, Bob Talkington of Iola was President of the Senate. The two worked together to increase the sales tax by a penny, from three cents to four cents. The bill had bipartisan support. While there was always debate between Republicans and Democrats, he recalled, “at the end of the day, we got together and did what was good for the state of Kansas,” he said.
Excessive partisanship makes good government difficult to achieve.
— More money must be spent on basic research at universities in Kansas and throughout the nation. Because of bud-get constraints, federal grants for basic research have dropped significantly and more and more research is being funded by private enterprise.
Private enterprise has a different timeline. It must have results in the short term in order to justify the investment. Basic research, in contrast, may not pay off for decades or not at all in terms of money. But it is basic research that lays the foundation for future growth and prosperity.
CARLIN is a visiting professor at Kansas State University where he teaches classes in politics and in being an effective executive.
He spoke at the annual meeting of Iola Industries, Inc., at the Allen County Country Club, and responded to questions from an audience of about 90 following his remarks.
