House of Representatives candidate forum

[Joseph Cao]

Let me preface this by thanking YE for hosting this forum and to any of you reading this for reading this, and apologies in advance if any of my points have overlapped with those of the three before me.

One of the major problems that the game faces is the same as it ever was. We know perfectly well that activity is something to strive for, but we also know that activity levels ebb and flow through the year and that, for any one person, they are subject to a lot of external influences when RL or personal issues must take precedence. I mention this not as an excuse – it would be convenient to wave my own spotty record away with this if there weren’t other, more experienced players having the same problems, which seem to multiply at this time of year – but to note something else. MB has done an excellent job of keeping the House docket full, no doubt about it. Still, the rest of us who were elected have jobs to do and to actually argue for the principles that we stand for and it is fairly apparent that there is much left to be desired on that front. I’ll return to this in a moment.

On a broader scale it does seem like we have an activity paradox of sorts. We have a larger volume of legislation in the House than in previous sessions of Congress but less involved debate. As a whole, regional legislatures have been puttering along; Lincoln’s Council in particular has been positively buzzing with activity in recent weeks. And there is a glut of new candidates for elected office – Abdullah, JoeInator, SN, Nyssus technically, Sunrise formerly, several others, certainly more at once than in any election in recent memory – to join the regional luminaries like Lumine and Tmth and Siren who can provide the experience needed for good bills in their legislatures. I don’t quite know how to square that with the apparent drop in the number of people actually being active. It is possible that that number never actually dropped. All things considered, however, the current state of the game both elections- and government-wise strikes me as being a fallow period that will pass come the next presidential election or the growth in confidence of some of our newer players.

Addressing the House itself, and having now had the opportunity to scan the previous statements, I wholly understand MB’s frustration here. When I served as Speaker previously there would be representatives who would barely show up to vote, or indeed at all. Congress by design is supposed to be no less than the sum of its parts. In previous Congresses we have had people like Poirot, like OBD and Falterin, and earlier back people like Cinyc and Lumine and Thumb who were not all prolific billwriters; all of them introduced bills, and some were in fact especially prolific, but more importantly they were willing to debate and discuss even mundane bills like the one by RC which abolished the penny. We can track House members’ activity, as the Speaker is very commendably doing. We can PM people on Atlas and elsewhere. But productivity, actual productivity, needs engagement on multiple fronts: from the House leadership, the members, the other chamber, the administration, even the GM.

There are things we can do in the House and in the game more broadly to increase the chances of activity on the part of our members, but ultimately the choice to be active or inactive rests with the members themselves. Ditto for the population of the game at large. If people are incentivized to treat the game as a world unto itself, as an opportunity to engage in the better elements of politics, and as something worth engaging in, they can become active. If the users of the Talk Elections Forum are able to see that the game is worth playing, they will come in. I came in when I had just under 40 posts, in the midst of national complaints about an inactive vice-president and a dead Southern legislature, and who knows what other prospective Atlasians might be able to do the same?

[Joseph Cao]

Q2: Regions can and should adopt a larger role in the game. As others have pointed out, they are a reminder that the federal government isn't the sole arbiter of what goes on in government. They allow reforms and programs to be tested out at a lower level with PC input, some of which are successful and some… are not. It is clear that even setting aside things like the Philly Plan saga being emblematic of Lincoln politics, regional policymaking has the effect it needs to exert on the game at large and occupy the attentions of at least a majority of active players, either regional legislators and officeholders who set that policy or federal ones who need to take regional policy into account. I have generally tried to respect the contours of regional policy when discussing federal bills and I'm glad that most members of the federal government (of all parties) have done the same.


Q3: My view is that our goal should be a more efficient means of government, one that avoids spending too much on too many extraneous elements of those programs where possible while continuing to help our citizens with the problems they face. Part of that is naturally down to the extra measures that have sprung up due to the COVID situation; I am inclined to reexamine them as we wind down from the pandemic in the (hopefully) near future, as some of them were pretty explicitly temporary measures, based on the impact they had (which the GM can hopefully help with as well). That is part of my intent for the second stimulus extension that has just been brought to the House floor. Hopefully we will be able to continue that path of legislative oversight for other bills on a case-by-case basis.

I stand by the dumb regulations repeals that we enacted back then, however, and suspect the Federalists writ large feel generally the same, as those were genuinely dumb and often head-scratching regulations that in the larger sense were more of a hindrance than a help.


Q4: Building on from that, the regional tax rates are obviously very varied and I am going to refrain from commenting on the cluster we have in Lincoln as that has been a constant source of pain for the Council. This is only one of the many areas where I would argue for better coordination between the federal and regional levels in a way that helps both levels of government without balancing the budget on the backs of people who can't afford it. Certainly, however, the levels of revenue in Atlasia as we come out of COVID need to be monitored and handled as best we can at both levels of government. To the extent that we have a budget debate this year I hope to be in a position to bring that side of the debate to the table, reexamine our revenue and spending levels, and adjust taxes as necessary.