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Writer's pictureTom Cochran

Oh, For the Good Old ACIR Days?

Updated: Sep 16, 2020


Our system of fiscal federalism directly fuels our public sector economy and heavily influences everything in our private economy from residential, commercial and industrial locational decisions, and access to decent quality public education and healthcare, to the the execution of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.


That highly complex system is suddenly under the most severe stress since the Great Depression, throwing its many shortcomings and inequitable outcomes into high relief. This crisis may be the best opportunity the nation will have in the foreseeable future to start a top-to-bottom review and perhaps re-design of elements of our entire structure of fiscal federalism. Some entity made up of experts in the field should take this on. Many of us have found ourselves wishing that a previous century's trusted, unbiased source of information, analysis and ideas concerning the intergovernmental fiscal system - the dear departed Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) - could be suddenly resurrected for this purpose.


The LBJ School's Dr. Donald Kettl has just published an excellent think piece in Governing.com regarding the ACIR and the reasons for its demise at the hands of Speaker Newt Gingrich. Dr. Kettl does a good job reviewing the probable causes of this vital entity's loss of support for its work by Governors, Mayors, County Executives, et al and pointing out that those reasons are still present have been reinforced by other developments in the last twenty years (e.g. the increasing availability of relevant data to anybody with access to the Internet) to make it unlikely that ACIR will be rising from the ashes. Dr. Kettl concludes with the wish for some kind of forum "...in which to debate these questions — and a common language, fueled by a pool of rich data, with which to have the conversation."


I heartily agree with the idea and wonder if a private version of ACIR could be self-created by a group of think-tank-based intergovernmental fiscal policy experts and funded by philanthropic donors.


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