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A Mile Wide...

Working for the U.S. House of Representatives for much of my adult life, I liked to say that being a congressional staffer made me great at cocktail parties: thanks to the nature of the job, I have a knowledge base that’s a mile wide but only an inch deep.  This blog is my opportunity to write about those areas of focus where I have been able to dive deeper.  It is, theoretically, a chance to spend less time terrorizing friends on Facebook in disposable policy debates that get lost among Dexter discussions and kid photos (I’m a fan of both) and to spend more time putting my thoughts into one nice, coherent, semi-permanent place.  But I suspect it's probably more about the latter than the former: I envision a repository that grows with me as I learn and think about new things, or think about old things in new ways--one that allows me to keep all of those thoughts together so that I'm not reinventing the wheel every time I write a new memo or want to track down a helpful data set.

For those subjects where I claim a modest degree of expertise, I’ve often ended up with my own framework for thinking about them and with my own analogies for explaining them to a broader public audience.  (One of the more fun challenges of working in public policy is to write the ‘talking points’ that make complex policy questions relatable.  I stay up nights trying to think of the perfect analogy to explain the healthcare law’s individual mandate or the difference between mandatory and discretionary spending.)  To the extent that those frameworks and analogies might be interesting or helpful to others, they’re here, publicly available instead of locked away on my hard drive.  And to the extent that making them public provides people with an opportunity to tell me why I’m wrong, that’s helpful too.  I respect any opinion that can be backed up.  (Less so the opinions that end with ‘You might have all the facts, but I still think…’)

Of course, in keeping with the name of the blog, I’m not sure I’ll be able to limit myself to just those areas where I claim to know what I’m talking about.  I stayed on the Hill for a long time because it’s the only job where one is paid to have an opinion about everything.  And I do.  Have an opinion. About everything. Some of that is bound to spill over here.  

And lastly, of course, I know a number of interesting people and I’d like to hear more from them.  Starting this blog and keeping it as wide as possible gives me access to insights I haven’t heard before.  

 I've been delaying starting this for a long while because I've let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I've decided to proceed now even though I know I'll want to come back and refine, refine, refine until I get to some kind of 'definitive truth' about the federal budget or tax policy or healthcare or gun control or abortion or poverty or economic mobility or the social contract... That's where people (civilly) telling me I'm wrong is helpful. If someone gives me new facts or insights, I want to be able to assimilate them, Borg-like, into my worldview until I'm moving closer and closer to truth.

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