In Policy, Vagueness is No Virtue  

Up until the DNC anointed Kamala Harris as their standard bearer, they were pushing their devotion to saving democracy. Then Democrats became all about joy at their convention, in large part by ignoring the massive costs of what they so joyously promised. Afterward, the Harris campaign first posted Biden policy positions as their own. But then those were deleted, so Harris could pretend to be a “change” candidate despite being Biden’s VP for almost four years. Harris then said almost nothing informative about her new policies, but proxies offered often anonymous claims to different beliefs than she had previously espoused, whose details were far too skimpy for credibility, much less evaluation, even though that undermines effective democracy they so recently claimed to be ardent defenders of. And Matt Vespa has reported, the source code for Harris’ “new” just-in-time for the debate policy section showed it was “a copy-and-paste job from the Biden 2024 website.”

Such slippery vagueness makes an informed electorate, able to evaluate specific policy positions, beyond reach. And voting dominated by uninformed participants adds nothing to our wisdom, yet can dramatically change the outcome, because absent detailed information, no one can adequately judge how a proposal would fare or falter in the real world.  

Why is there such a gap between private market behavior and such political competition? After all, like private sector salespeople, politicians strive to present their wares as attractively as possible. But unlike private sector salespeople, much of a politician’s product line consists of self-proclaimed responsibility or “co-traveler” status for everything good, but sufficient distance or innocence in everything bad, and claimed consequences of proposals not yet enacted. And seldom are the benefits “all they are cracked up to be” but the supposed costs a low-ball fantasy. Further, politicians are unconstrained by truth-in-advertising laws, which would require that claims be more than misleading half-truths; they have fewer competitors (and journalists, judging from the recent debate) keeping them honest; and they face “customers” far more ignorant about the merchandise involved than those spending their own money.

These differences from the private sector explain why politicians’ “sales pitches” for their proposals are so much vaguer. The downside is that if vague or vaporous proposals are the best politicians can put forward, their wares are certain to be logically or empirically inadequate. 

If campaign rhetoric is unmatched by specific program details, where the devil lurks, there is no reason to believe such proposals will be effective, much less efficient, uses of funds, because no reliable way exists to determine whether a policy will actually accomplish what is promised so easily on the campaign trail. The details will determine the incentives facing decision-makers, and goals, however laudable, that are inconsistent with the incentives created will go unmet.  

Sometimes, politicians know too little of their “solutions” to provide specifics of a workable plan. That is, the vagueness is in their minds.  If so, they know too little to deliver on fine-sounding campaign commitments. Achieving intended goals then primarily depends on trust that some future bureaucrats or legislators will somehow both know precisely what to do and do it right — a prospect that inspires few beyond the “public servants” in question.

Politicians may in other cases know the details of intended programs, but fail to provide them. That is, the vagueness is in what they tell the public. Unfortunately, if it is necessary to conceal the details of a proposal to put the best possible public face on a proposal, those details must be adverse. When those details make a more-persuasive sales pitch, politicians would not withhold them. Concealing rather than revealing pays off politically only when better informed voters would be more inclined to reject a proposal.   

Examples of government policies that fall far short due to vaguely articulated or poorly designed campaign promises are not hard to find. Those who seriously study government can provide many such. Here are just a couple of my “favorite” failures.

As Mark J.  Perry described in 1991, a 10-percent luxury yacht tax leading democrats “crowed publicly about how the rich would finally be paying their fair share and privately about convincing President George H.W. Bush to renounce his ‘no new taxes’ pledge.” But “they’d badly missed their mark.” It never even raised enough money to cover the cost of running the program, but managed to kill 25,000 boating industry jobs for far-from-rich workers and wipe out millions of dollars of tax revenue in the process. But at least the government learned a lesson and killed that program. But we keep creating more such promises that will be unkept. More recently, President Biden’s infrastructure plan (mainly throwing money at ill-conceived projects) was going to produce half a million new EV charging stations by 2030, but only managed to build seven stations in the first two years. 

Sometimes the vagueness has enabled massive frauds, including over $1 trillion in the Obamacare program. Jonathan Gruber, its architect, admitted that “The bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes” (even though it was found constitutional only because Chief Justice Roberts held that the insurance mandate was a penalty rather than a tax). That made those costs disappear from the scoring. In addition, since the CBO only projected 10 years into the future, they slow-rolled implementation the first four years, to make it look far cheaper than it would actually be ($848 billion) when it was evaluated. But when the CBO later looked at the costs of 10 full years of the program, it found the tab to actually be over $2 trillion.

Claiming adherence to more elevated principles, but stalling in presenting detailed proposals also has strategic advantages. It defuses critics by allowing criticism to be parried by saying “that was not in my proposal” or “I have no plans to do that” or “I said something different since then” (but don’t expect a clear, defensible reason for why, or ask whether I can be trusted to not go back to my earlier positions),” or other rhetorical dodges. It forces opponents to “go first” with specific proposals, which puts the political heat on opponents and provides their camp something to criticize, without allowing similar return fire. It also allows a candidate to incorporate alternatives proposed by others as part of their “evolving” reforms, while claiming to maintain their same principles.

Regardless of the strategic political advantages of such vagueness in misleading or misdirecting voters, adequate analyses of public policies cannot be built upon such proposals and pronouncements. That requires the nuts-and-bolts policy details that have been so glaringly absent in 2024. And when a candidate combines so much “guess what I will actually do because I have given you no real idea” with desires to increase by trillions of dollars what they will transfer from citizens’ hands to their own, that is a valid reason for not being a cheerleader on their behalf.  

In the private sector, few Americans would spend their own money based on such vague promises of an unseen product. They would be foolhardy to act any differently when a political salesperson is marketing their wares, because such vagueness virtually ensures bad policies, if advancing Americans’ well-being —rather than party power — is the criterion.