Urban Institute points out a low water mark.

From the Urban Institute comes a study that illuminates the way government has made policy for the past couple of years. The name of the study: Beyond Ideology, Politics, and Guesswork: The Case for Evidence-Based Policy. That's where we are, a public policy organization feels the need to point out the fact that hey, maybe we should start basing programs, laws, and policies around evidence and observable fact.

U.S. public policy has increasingly been conceived, debated, and evaluated through the lenses of politics and ideology. The fundamental question—Will the policy work?—too often gets short shrift or even ignored. A remedy is evidence-based policy—a rigourous approach that draws on careful data collection, experimentation, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine what the problem is, which ways it can be addressed, and the probable impacts of each of these ways. Examples of how evidence informs good policy and lack of evidence can invite bad include health insurance coverage, education, sentencing policy, and redress for housing discrimination.

It's crazy, but I think it might work. It might even gain traction within our esteemed collection of teetotalers, horse fondlers, stagecoach tippers, money fuckers, spineless turtles, flag eaters, and country molesters known as the US Congress. That is if the Urban Institute will spend the necessary lobbying millions and fly a few of our more crooked lawmakers out for a symposium in whatever country it is where you can bang an ungulate, drink moonshine, and watch monkey boxing you can also gamble on. Then maybe it'll happen. Until then it's bridges to nowhere, wars in Iraq, offshore drilling, and corn ethanol.

So remember: evidence and fact make better policy. Hopefully they can pass this out to lawmakers and hit them on the head with it.