Huffman: Policy is Taking a Backseat to Politics

Oregon GOP senatorial candidate Jim Huffman spoke with FF, sharing his ideas on the economy, health care reform and the need for bipartisanship in Washington.

Friday morning David Frum interviewed the Republican Senatorial candidate in Oregon, Jim Huffman, about his thoughts on policies that would accelerate the economic recovery, health care reform, tort law, and Huffman’s vision for bipartisanship in the U.S. Senate.

Huffman started by asserting that regulatory uncertainty was a main driver for business timidity:

There are such high levels of uncertainty resulting from the regulatory regimes that have been put into place, or are being anticipated by a lot of businesses. And, I think the tax rates, particularly here in Oregon, where we’ve had a high increase in state taxes recently, I think all of that has combined to worsen the employment situation

The key, then, Huffman said, was to create a business environment that includes such things as “regulatory certainty, reasonable taxes, predictable taxes, and a climate in which people have some reasonable expectation that they’re going to get a return on their investment.”

Perhaps most important to Huffman was his focus on bringing down regulatory barriers. “I think we need to turn our focus significantly to regulatory reform – there’s only so much we can do through the tax system,” said Huffman, who pointed out that the health care bill’s regulatory burdens  would be especially disastrous.

Frum pointed out that regulatory changes tend to take a long time, and asked Huffman what policy he would offer to address the currently unemployed.

Huffman agreed with Frum, saying that payroll tax holidays were a viable option, but emphasized the need to listen to business owners. “If we can assess what it is that a small business needs to have – and I think that’s short term regulatory certainty, and short term tax relief – then I think we’ll get some response in terms of investment and job creation,” he said.

In terms of Obamacare, Huffman said that defunding the program “would be one positive step in the sense that it would make it impossible for some of this stuff to be put into place.” Huffman told Frum that the health care problem that most urgently requires attention is the high cost of care, rather than universal coverage.

Frum and Huffman also discussed the idea of selling insurance across state lines, and whether interstate competition would significantly decrease health care costs; as well, they talked about the increasing restrictions on BMOs.

When Frum brought up the idea that stronger insurance companies could hold down medical costs by imposing strict price discipline on health care providers, Huffman agreed:

I think that’s a big piece of it, yes. It seems to me that the argument for interstate insurance is only part of a much broader argument about getting more competition into the health care industry.

Drawing on his legal background – Huffman is a former dean at Lewis and Clark Law School – he said that one of his priorities as a U.S. Senator would be to refer constantly to the constitution:

One thing I would do as a member of the United States Senate is demand that we ask ourselves… ‘does the federal government have the authority to do this?’ – whether or not it is a good idea, whether a health care mandate to individuals to purchase health care is a good idea… is that something the federal government has the authority to do?

Asked what lessons he’s learned as an observer of politics over the last few decades, Huffman stressed the importance of bipartisanship:

Politics has a lot to do with the failure of government over the last couple of decades… and that’s the lack of any effort or success in working across party lines to solve problems. The last time we had real tax reform in this country was 1987, and that was a real bipartisan effort…

The driving force is party discipline, is party success, is reelection of members of the party – and we’re not getting into solutions to the problems that we face in this country... what we need is the kind of bipartisan legislation that we had going back to the civil rights era, the early environmental law era.

“The central thing that I would like to do is to bring more policy expertise [to the Senate]… I think when politics drives everything and policy analysis does not, we get what we deserve,” Huffman concluded.

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