1) Explain “kludgeocracy” (with examples) Kludgeocracy comes from words kludge and cracy. Kludge is an ill-assorted assembly of portions gathered to meet a particular purpose and is clumsy but non-permanent effective solution to a particular fault or a challenge. Cracy in simple terms means rule or “government by.” Kludgeocracy is, therefore, a government by way of establishing a system in a clumsily and also temporary manner to sort out a particular challenge on quick fixes. The word is insulting and is also a politically loaded term. Steven Teles is a Johns Hopkins political scientist defines kludgeocracy as policy or a program that meets the qualifications of a kludge if its underlying policy mechanism is a substantial complication …show more content…
According to Steven Teles, the case of the tax code has so many reasons as to why it is so messy. This is due to some reasons like; the way it is easier to add things to it than subtracting, resources transfer through the tax code seem to be a big government than direct spending regardless of similar effects, conservative immune system of the big government in the tax code is lower than to the big government through expenditure, and finally, people attempting to attain special deals get easier doing it through the tax code than directing spending since there is minimal visibility, and the hurdle of the distributive policy they get is less- creating a spending program with distributive effect of the mortgage interest …show more content…
The government carried on to be intertwined where several expansions have been occurring from health care to education to the environment. In actual sense, the state and its locality govern all these programs while the federal government is participating in regulation, funding, and evaluation and also setting standards. The effects of these are the sophisticated marble-cake-federalism structure that to some extent it almost characterizes every domestic policy in the U.S. that points out responsibility as a difficult thing to establish. In some national disasters, for instance, the Katrina and also the spilling of the BP oil demonstrated difficult in establishing responsibility.
4) use concrete examples from the readings to build an argument as to whether or not developing a kludgeocracy was inevitable/is potentially valuable. (Given the Founders’ concerns and the constitutional structure that we inherited, would you argue that our government could be anything other than “clumsy” today? Is that clumsiness valuable? Why or why