GARBAGE CAN ISSUES—FURTHER APPLICATIONS

GARBAGE CAN ISSUES—FURTHER APPLICATIONS. The garbage can concept can help you sit through that painful committee meeting. Think how wonderful it is that there is this garbage can issue to keep these folks busy. Then the only hard part is getting through the discussion of the garbage can issue. The lesson is that if it weren’t for the garbage can issue, the people making those heated inconsequential arguments would be arguing anyway. but about issues of substance. I sometimes wonder about whether this kind of thinking is being used by professional politicians with certain public debates. Take, for example, confirmation hearings (to use a historical example, the lengthy debate when Eisenhower appointed Admiral Lewis Strauss to be Secretary of Commerce). The thinking of a President might include the thought that there are going to be adverse hearings on some subject; why not have the attention focus on this issue? I have to confess that there have been some public policy issues in the past where I have thought that the issue was not important, but that it served to keep a lot of people I tended to disagree with busy and out of trouble. You probably already think the same way from time to time, without calling it a garbage can issue.