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For some time I have been internally conflicted on the issue of congressional earmarking. Many people, including such diverse characters as President Obama and Congressman Chaffetz, have been vocal about calling for an end to earmarks. Others such as my own Congressman, Rob Bishop, reply that earmarks are not an addition to the total size of our federal expenditures – but simply a direction regarding the spending of money already appropriated. Believers in small government who make that argument say that our focus should be on reducing total expenditures rather than shutting down the earmarking process. Personally, I would like to see an end to earmarking and a significant reduction in total spending. (Earmarks alone are an insignificant portion of our spending.)
Almost 10 months ago I attended a town hall meeting for Rob Bishop in which the issue of earmarks was raised. Afterwards I wrote to Rep. Bishop asking these two questions:
- If we get rid of earmarks won’t that allow us to focus on the size of the pile of money?
- While I might prefer that Congress set the priorities for government appropriations rather than the administration, why should the priorities be set at the federal level at all? (except on truly federal priorities like defense spending) Wouldn’t it be better to just appropriate money and direct how much should go to various states and then let the states and municipalities decide which projects deserve the funding?
Apparently my questions were not even worthy of a form letter – I received no acknowledgment, let alone an answer.
In his State of the Union address last week President Obama (once again) called for greater transparency in the earmarking process. In response, Senator Jim DeMint rightly reminded us that:
We can see earmarks as plain as day now, but big spending politicians are unashamed. . . We should permanently end the earmark favor factory, but if the President won’t do that, he should at least impose a moratorium on this waste until we balance the budget.
Putting all that together I realize the truth that the primary problem small-government proponents want to address with earmarks is total spending and that while transparency is generally a good way to keep things running more appropriately even sunlight does little to deter earmarking – because it is considered an appropriate method to ensure you “get your fair share.”
Somehow after reading Sen. DeMint’s response the whole issue crystallized in my mind and I understand what’s really going on and what needs to be done.
Earmarks are not a large portion of the budget. Removing the amount of money spent on earmarks from the budget while allowing the earmarking process to continue would do virtually no good. Worse than that, it’s impossible because there is more to the earmarking process than the amount of money that gets earmarked out of the overall budget appropriation. Earmarks are a catalyst that changes the way our society looks at government spending.
The first and most repulsive change of thought is demonstrated by the lobbyists who are lobbying not for ideas, but for funding. These are the lobbyists who aim to get kickbacks from Congress for their clients. With earmarking in place it is possible to go directly to Congress and convince people far removed from the project to spend money from other taxpayers on a specific priority. This may be in contradiction of the desires of the local population but even if it is not it is never beneficial to the nation at large – even though the nation at large is footing the bill.
The second and more damaging (in the long term) change of thought that the earmarking process promotes is that it encourages the perception that the Federal government should be involved in local decision making – even when those local decisions have little or no impact on the nation at large. Suddenly the people in New York and California have almost as much influence as the people of Pleasant Grove, Utah when it comes to making decisions about what will be displayed in a city park in Pleasant Grove, a city that few of the residents of other states would even be able to find on a map – let alone ever visit. This change of perspective reduces states and cities to nothing more than administrative subdivisions of the federal government. This is a fundamental shift away from the federalism envisioned by the founders of our nation and, in my opinion, is a very dangerous shift to perpetuate.
While abolishing earmarks will not immediately reverse these two changes it would remove the catalyst for them and greatly improve the chances of countering their influence. Without earmarks there would be a massive reduction in the value of many lobbyists. Those who are promoting ideas would still be around, but none could come promising a financial return on investment in the form of appropriations from Congress. Without the constant influence of such lobbyists there would be a chance to reduce federal expenditures – especially in local projects. This in turn would make it possible for people to stop trying to inflate local interests into items of national consequence.
(I’m probably not the first to figure this out, but we need to articulate it better.)
27 replies on “Abolish Earmarks”
I’m with you on this one. We need to abolish earmarks for the reasons you suggest. I would like to see a return to revenue sharing along the lines we had back in the Nixon administration. The block grants that replaced revenue sharing during the Reagan years did little more than leave states with unfunded mandates and tie federal funds to bureaucratic interference with state and local projects.
Part of the earmark idea is giving Congressmen the ability to “bring home the bacon” in the form of federal tax dollars, regardless of whether the expenditure is in the best interests of the nation or not. That should not be part of a Congressman’s job description in the first place. We elect people to Congress to represent us in federal decisions, not to raid the federal piggy bank for our local interests. If the federal government can afford to spend a small percentage of the budget on random local projects (which it most certainly cannot at this point), then let the states or local governments decide which projects to fund.
I wish I knew more about the revenue sharing. What I do know about it sounds promising, but I can’t seem to get enough information to convince myself that there are no lurking drawbacks that I am failing to see. If you have a source of information for me to look at I would love to do more research.
I absolutely agree that bringing home the bacon should not be part of the job description of a member of Congress. I can’t seem to get enough people to accept that – especially in a state and district where our federal senators and representative seem to think it is their primary task. (Okay, that’s not really fair – Orrin Hatch thinks that writing songs and palling around with Ted Kennedy before he died were at least as important as bringing home federal tax dollars.)
My question to you is, if the state and local governments decide to fund local tax cuts with their share of the money at some point – do you see a problem with that?
I’m sure there are drawbacks to revenue sharing lurking somewhere. I don’t have any research to offer on the subject.
Your question gets into a sticky area. Education is a prime example. The federal government mandates hundreds of educational programs and requirements but leaves it to the state and local governments to implement them and often fund them as well. If we switched totally to a revenue sharing system, should a state or locality be able to ignore the mandates? Let’s say the people of Utah decide that standardized test scores are a poor method for evaluating teachers and schools and they simply stop testing students. Or what if they decide that accommodating learning disabled students is just too expensive and they stop those programs? Should they then get the same revenue from the federal government? I don’t really have answers to these questions, by the way.
Perhaps those questions represent some of the drawbacks of revenue sharing. I agree that it’s a sticky area without easy answers.
The real point of my question (and I did not intend for this to be initially clear) was to suggest that there was no reason for the Federal Government to collect the money from the individual states only to turn around and give that money to the states. If the states need the money that is being collected from their citizens it should be the state collecting and spending the taxes rather than having the federal government collect it and then have the state come asking for handouts.
One way or another congress, or any legislative body anywhere that has the ability to pass budgets and spend money will find a away to direct the funds to things that are personally or politically beneficial to themselves. I really don’t think you can abolish this practice in any way that would actually be effective.
The problem goes well beyond just earmarks, the entire mechanism for the federal government to perform remittances back to the states needs reform. Their is a lot of different targeted “subsidies” that provide little benefit to the tax payers and provide disproportionate benefit to certain states/congressional districts. Corn/wool subsides passed in WW2 are still around, these subsides are part of what has turned most rural states into “donor” states that receive more dollars back from the federal government then they pay into the federal government.
Now I don’t think that its politically possible to end these subside programs or abolish earmarks etc, and any politician that says its possible is outright lying to us. I do think that the subsides can be replaced by a federal to state remittance program where the size in dollars of the remittance could be trended towards a more equitable distribution accounting population and poverty levels in the state over time and at the same time let the state choose how to distribute those dollars.
You come up with a value that each state should be receiving based on population/poverty level and then if their below that number increase their amount each year at 1.5X CPI and if their below that level decrease their amount each year by decreasing their increase to 1/2 CPI.
Now Medicaid, Medicare, SCHIP, economic growth programs, unemployment programs, EPA, some amount of discretionary dollars(what would have been earmarks), basically everything minus things like transportation(this runs on difference metrics entirely), and a few agricultural programs(soil conservation service for one) into this federal to state remittance program.
This would sidestep the whole electoral death from ending corn/wool subsides or other such programs because states could keep those programs as their “economic growth programs” dollars from the remittance, while states like California could use those dollars for expanded public health programs or other services. This would also end the donor state problem over time.
I absolutely agree that the donor state is a significant problem. You have obviously thought about it a lot and I appreciate the framework you have outlined here. The fact that you divide the funding between things that are population dependent and things that are geography dependent is well conceived. I would like to know what measure you would use to determine the relative poverty rates of the different states – that is another area where the system could be manipulated. I love the fact that your framework returns the bulk of power over decisions to the states and allows the virtues of federalism to work on the system.
I would also ask you the same question I asked Charles – what reason is there for the Federal Government to collect the money from the individual states only to turn around and give that money to the states?
Because states can’t regulate interstate commerce and can only limited regulate interstate immigration to wide a tax disparity between states would have a much greater impact that it would have between country’s like in the EU.
1. States can’t regulate interstate commerce, so large tax disparities would create a race to the bottom.
2. Many programs prevent states from externalizing costs to other states, Air quality rules, stream and river pollution prevention rules etc.
3. Are to expensive for the state to run but provide great out of state benefit. Their are several agricultural programs that fall into this category.
4. The programs benefits are to far in the future for the consequences of cuts to be politically costly. Education falls into this category.
5. General consensus of society for these government programs but not necessarily ever state agrees and if one state cuts the program all the other states will as well to stay competitive with the state that cut the program.
6. Many States want these programs but can’t effectively have the necessary tax system to support them.
I don’t have enough numbers on poverty rates or know enough about the problems with them to come up with any reasonable take on that subject.
Why should the Fed collect money to give to the states? It seems clear that the people’s representatives have decided that there are some programs so important to the nation as a whole that they cannot be left entirely to the states. Education, health and minimal living standards have been determined to be vital to the national interest but tradition has placed the delivery of these services in the hands of state and local governments. IMHO, we already have too much unproductive competition between the states such as the race to see how much money can be handed over to corporations to bribe them to build factories or offices in a state, we don’t need to have states cutting or eliminating public education to lower taxes as a further incentive.
One could make an argument that if a public good is of national importance then the federal government should not only fund it but operate it, but often that is impractical for other reasons. Education makes a good example. We need to educate our young people to some kind of reasonable national standard but we have a tradition of local control of school systems. That causes not only a gaggle of unfunded mandates, but it places responsibility in the hands of often ill-prepared, political and sometimes corrupt local school boards, causes each district to duplicate all the support services of every other district, and leaves much of the funding in regressive property taxes that differ widely from one district to the next. Is it politically feasible to nationalize primary and secondary education in the U.S.? Absolutely not. I doubt we could even agree on a curriculum. So if we are to give children in poorer and lower-tax states and localities a fighting chance, there must be some kind of federal mandate or standard. Not a great solution, but absent systemic change, we are stuck in the realm of the possible.
IMHO, we have outgrown our political structures. I live in a small city (sales tax, property tax) that is part of a larger town (property tax), in which there is a school district (property tax), that is in a county (property tax, sales tax), that is in NY state (income tax, sales tax and pretty much any other tax you can think of). There’s a lot of duplication there and a lot of taxation, and while we could make some claim for the benefits of local control, a quick look at the percentage of turnout for local elections puts the lie to that claim. A rational attempt at consolidation would put too many politicians out of work so change is not in the air. We need to re-think the whole plan. I’d really like to see a new state constitution, if I could disqualify all our current politicians from participating in the process.
Just so that there is no confusion for either of you, I did not intend to suggest that the federal government should collect no taxes, nor to suggest that there was never a reason to give any of their collected taxes to the states for spending on federal priorities. The kind of scenario I had in mind was more along the lines of if the Federal government takes 17% in taxes from the states and gives at least 2% of that 17% back to each and ever state is there some reason that they should not reduce their take to 15% and reduce what they give to each state by that same 2%. That is not to suggest that they should not be raising taxes and giving money to Texas to fund border enforcement while giving money to Hawaii for whatever it is that Hawaii needs in the way of federal priorities/responsibilities.
Ron,
1. I notice a theme in your “race to the bottom” argument. I still don’t believe that a race to the bottom is inevitable. Personally, I say we should let California or Massachusetts race to the bottom. I’ll work in Utah against us racing to the bottom, Charles can work in New York against them racing to the bottom, and you can work in your state (I don’t believe I know where you live but hopefully not CA or MA lest you be offended by my comment) against them racing to the bottom.
2. Issues that cannot be limited within a given state are easily the responsibility of the federal government – they are the ones with the authority to regulate interstate matters so we agree on the various pollutions.
3. These national priorities are again interstate – see 2.
4. This one just strikes me as false. People know the consequences of cuts to education whether those cuts are made at the state level or the federal level.
5. This seems to contradict itself. The general consensus of society is to support specific programs but if one state stops the rest will abandon their beliefs on the topic – not likely.
6. Besides deficit spending (which is such a useful tool – we should use it more . . .) what can the federal government do that states can’t as far as tax structure?
Charles,
The fact that there is low turnout in local elections does not mean that outsiders are controlling local politics. It does point to a dysfunctional community which can’t be fixed from the outside. Lack of functioning communities is one of the major challenges out society faces right now. Broken families and broken communities provide the massive holes in the fabric of society that make the fraud, abuse, waste, and criminal activity easier to commit and harder to combat.
I think you may have illustrated a difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals think we have outgrown our political structures while conservatives believe our political structures have outgrown us.
1. Utah is very rapidly racing to the bottom, we are cutting services in this state left and right, k12 and higher education have been on the chopping block for multiple years even as the number of students in the system increases(by 11,000 last year) and even during good times, Utah has also cut their environmental programs and only really has them for a show DEQ does not have the funds or political backing to enforce the rules seriously, Medicaid has been line itemed to death here only providing the absolute minimum legally possible even to the extent of using obscure rules to make it difficult for those that do qualify to get on.
If one state has to maintain a much higher tax rate over other states, then that state will see its business base shrink over time, this is not the case on the national level and is why taxation on the state level is political suicide.
Don’t discount the effect on the prohibition of regulating interstate commerce, its a good thing to have but it does take away the ability to manage their economy’s in the same way that we can manage the national economy.
2. and 3. they may be interstate “issues” but the programs are still ran by the states more then often enough.
4. I know several people who are being pushed out of their college education in this state because of cuts, thank heavens I am not one of them. cuts here have been leading to multi digit cost inflation in education, class sizes where growing before the recession so clearly this is a commonality for any year and not just down years.
5. programs require money to run, money comes from tax’s, tax’s on the state level are a race to the bottom
6. (do i sense sarcasm on the national debt comment? =p)national taxation won’t push business out of a state that’s why they work.
So I take it you are in Utah. in that case, we may not see eye to eye on the best solutions but we have the same interest in seeing our state improve.
1. I don’t think that education funding in Utah makes a good case study. Every year progressives argue that education is facing cuts, but the fact is that it’s a demographic problem – and nobody I know would dare suggest something like China’s one child policy. Education is the last thing that the Legislature cuts in lean years (at least as far as they have any say – there are always issues of mandatory spending that might force education cuts that they might not otherwise have to make). During the years where we were running surpluses they were throwing money at education as fast as they dared (people here still want tax cuts and funding for other priorities like roads).
As for managing the national economy – I don’t think we’ve done very well at that (and not just because we are in the middle of a 2 1/2 year recession).
4. I feel sorry for those being pushed out of their college education due to rising costs (except for the fact that a college education is not always worth the price). I was fortunate enough to finish my degrees before the price of tuition really began to shoot upwards. On the other hand, the problem is not simply one of state funding. I was appalled to watch university presidents getting double-digit raises at the same time as they were forcing faculty and staff to take pay cuts or forgo raises – that just an example of some of the other factors that increase the price of college education independent of what the legislature does for funding.
5. Still lacking solid evidence no matter how many times you repeat that.
6. National taxation is not without consequence. It may be universal across state lines, but it can force companies to move outside the country (or pretend to in some cases). It also increases the prices of the goods we produce making them less competitive in international markets and making us more dependent on our trade deficit while wreaking havoc on our manufacturing sector.
When it becomes more important to continue a political system or enforce an understanding of the legal framework of that system than it is to actually get results, then it’s time to ditch the system. If our government structure and our political system can’t meet the needs of the people then what exactly is the point?
If we followed the libertarian model of a small federal government and lots of independence for the states, we would have more illiterate unhealthy jobless people than we do now because corporate interests would run every state into the ground by cutting taxes and cutting spending until there was nothing left. They would get away with it because both of our political parties would help them achieve that destructive goal and no one in the media would bother explaining what was happening, assuming anyone was capable of understanding anyway.
People don’t vote because their community is dysfunctional, they don’t vote because they don’t believe it matters – because the government is not going to respond to their needs no matter what they do in the voting booth. We don’t have poor voter turnout because of broken families, we have poor turnout because of broken government. Now if we were to discuss how broken government contributes to broken families and communities, we might have a worthwhile discussion.
I grew up in the segregated South and I know what utter, despicable racist bozos end up running state and local governments when there isn’t much federal interference. No matter how much you and Ronald and I try, if a race to the bottom is permitted, every state will run as fast as it can for the cliff and jump off. I want results. I want every American to have a quality education to the level he or she is capable and every American to have access to quality health care and every American to have a decent retirement and no American to go hungry or homeless. If we have a set of governments that can’t achieve those goals, we need to get rid of them. We aren’t going to make things better in this country by having an every man for himself struggle where some of the “men” are huge multinational corporations.
How can you say that our political system (meaning the Constitutionally limited version that I and other conservatives are pushing for) can’t meet the needs of the people when we have not given it a chance anytime in the last half century or more?
The “evil corporations” assumption falls apart when you realize that corporations need an educated workforce and thus they have a vested interest in maintaining education and quality of life. Corporations are not some inhuman sentient alien race – they are collections of people run by fallible humans with an interest in society. I would not argue that they are without fault – certainly they can be very short-sighted in their perspectives (I love quarterly earnings reports and the bonuses they drive) – but they are only very rarely malevolent.
One of the reasons that people don’t think that voting matters or that the government is responsive is because we keep pushing the reins of power to further and more distant government bodies – our votes do count for less and less the further we get from local governance. Also, people in a dysfunctional society are less likely to invest themselves in maintaining that community.
What I said about broken families was:
That is true and I did not mean to imply that broken families have a direct connection to low voter turnout. However, as broken families contribute to broken societies and frustrate existing efforts to clean up crime and corruption they do indirectly contribute to lower voter turnout because the ability to get results from local government goes down as those societal holes expand thus feeding the perception that “the government is not going to respond to their needs no matter what they do in the voting booth.”
I don’t know when you grew up in the south, but I trust that you do know “what utter, despicable racist bozos end up running state and local governments when there isn’t much federal interference {in a dysfunctional society}.”
As I said before, we can’t know whether Constitutionally limited government will work until we actually give it a try.
Any politician that proposes a tax increase in Utah to pay for education to make up for our “demographic problem” would be on the unemployment line the next election. The minute that such a thing was proposed, a number a corporate entity’s would start working to destroy the politician proposing it. Starting with the lobbying arms of Kennocott, Tavaputs followed by Qwests and Comcasts lobbying arms(The Utah Tax payers Association), Next would be the Utah association of Banks, Then the Utah Cars dealers association, and others all lining up and dumping so much money into the destroying the proposer of that legislation to increase tax’s that the only thing left is a strong air of fear for ever touching the subject ever again.
No Utah politician wants to talk about tax’s or for that matter anything that might cost business money, bring the subject up and they will redirect to a rant about the evils of the fed locking out utah lands(don’t get me wrong i have no problem with complaints about this. But I want to hear solutions to the now not whining over something the state can do nothing about). All the while ignoring other revenue sources (Italian waste storage) because its popular to be against and more importantly state business interests could not care one way or the other so its ok to be against that.
Utahs “Flat” tax is far from a fair tax, after paying all other state fee’s, property tax’s, sales tax’s, etc the poor/middle class end up spending a much greater percent of their income then do business’s and the rich in tax’s. State level taxation is a non functional institution with little chance of ever getting better.
Utah is the prime example of “race to the bottom”. Utah’s legislature is subservient business interests first, ideology second, and the people come in at a long off third.
We have sitting State senators that are heading up lobbying organizations for business, Utah tax payers association for example. And clearly the tax backed bond limitation laws they have passed clearly show how deep this sell out goes.
They are playing musical chairs with tax rates, returning sales tax’s on unprepared food, removing targeted restaurant tax’s and placing them on the overall sales tax. And they are not doing this to increase revenue, They plan on using the food sales tax to lower the income tax.
Utah is the prime example of “race to the bottom”. How far will the nonsense in this state have to go before something gets done about it.
I agree that proposing a tax increase for education is politically insane here. I also agree that our flat tax is not the same as a fair tax.
Now if Utah is a prime example of a race to the bottom then I would ask if living here in Utah is such a terrible thing. People are moving here in droves, our population is increasing faster than most places in the nation – which adds to some of our demographic challenges but which also illustrates that it’s a pretty fair place to live. Our state is the best manages state in the nation financially with the lowest per capita debt of any state and we have had one of the softest recessions of any state while the nation wades through what was at times described as approaching the great depression in seriousness.
On top of that, despite our low finding for public education our educational results are consistently well ahead of the national average. That proves one of three things (take your pick):
Money is not the end all in determining quality of education.
The state is doing very well for education despite the demographic challenges to our funding.
Or, There are societal factors that have more bearing on educational success than what the state government does.
Obviously there are things that can be improved, but I say that if Utah is a prime example of a race to the bottom – bring on the race.
Well David, perhaps the true political system hasn’t been given a chance recently, but since there is no possibility that either of our visions of a proper role for government has a chance of being realized, my point stands.
Publicly owned corporations (something of a misnomer) have only one purpose, as determined by law: to increase shareholder value. Regardless of the interest individuals within a corporate structure may have, the corporation cannot violate its fiduciary duty to its shareholders (or to be precise the speculators currently in possession of the stock certificates) in order to achieve some eleemosynary goal. They will continue to use their political power (no unchecked) to pursue policies that are optimally profitable – low or no taxes, little or no regulation, and as much government largesse as they can muster.
We’ve had this discussion about broken communities already in another context. I think the indirect contribution to lower voter turnout is quite a logical stretch. If we look at the pressures on families and communities that contribute to breakdown, we find underneath many policy decisions made by government or government abdication of its role in protecting them. For example, financial stress is a leading cause of family breakdown and that is the result of policies that don’t put an emphasis on jobs, don’t protect worker rights, don’t provide a safety net, and place families one illness away from financial ruin. Those policies are great for corporations, because they foster cheap labor. You are correct that the “reins of power” move further up the government food chain but often that’s because the lower level government units failed miserably to do their jobs. Giving them back the responsibility will only lead to repeated failure.
Did we ever in our national history have “Constitutionally limited government”? What years were those? What were the conditions of average Americans during those periods? If we have never had it, then I submit it is a moot point, being merely a theoretical construct and not practical.
I say there is a chance for Costitutionally limited government (albeit a very slim chance).
They are not publicly owned corporations – they are publicly traded corporations, meaning that the public has a chance to buy and trade ownership interests in those corporations. In other words, any individual has the opportunity to be a shareholder to whom the corporation is duty bound to provide a financial benefit.
Policies that are optimal to profits go beyond low taxes and include access to an educated and productive workforce and a market that can purchase whatever the corporation produces.
The indirect connection to lower voter turnout may be a stretch, but my original assertion, that broken families contribute to the societal holes that encourage fraud and other criminal activities still stands.
Did we ever have Constitutionally limited government – perhaps never perfectly, but much closer to the ideal than we have now. We did in large measure from 1790 to 1910 (with something of an exception to limited government from 1860 to 1865). What was the condition of the people during those periods? Well, that is not simply a matter of their material condition because as you progressives like to argue “you did not accumulate your goods in a vacuum,” so lets look at trajectory of the society during those periods. We expanded as a nation from the Eastern seaboard to the west coast. The material condition was almost always improving from decade to decade. Our stature among the nations of the world was rising. Our population was exploding as people from all over the world flocked to be part of this great nation. Compare that trajectory to what has happened since WWII. We have become economically dominant, but our place is slipping. We are garnering less and less respect from the world (especially once the glow of the cold was was behind us) and our society becomes more and more dysfunctional. Notice that the great expansion in federal powers preceded that shift and continues through our downward spiral.
Utah has a population growth rate of around 2.1% that means the population doubles every 33 years. Currently their are around 2.7 Million people in Utah. Most of the population growth is in the low and middle class segments meaning that population growth does not grow the states budget size to handle that population growth.
Education numbers are better in Utah even given the smaller budget, and its funny some of the things that improve test scores. Providing free breakfast at title 1 schools increases test scores more then any other program, Of course this costs money and is soon to be on the chopping block. We have been decreasing the number of teachers even with the increase in student population, 40 children per teacher class sizes will destroy the quality of education and we can’t let it get their.
Reduced funding to DEQ(department of environmental quality) is resulting in fewer site inspections and less oversight leading to illegal dumping of hazardous materials, create huge costs of clean up down the road, polluting the water supply further increasing the cost of filtering drinking water. These are future costs that are much greater then solving the problem now but people can’t see them so their are few or no political ramifications for cutting them.
Utah’s government is a decaying mess, It just isn’t clearly obvious to everyone yet.
To quote my favourite President.
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any controlling private power. — FDR
“Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” — FDR
Call me short-sighted but I think I’ll stick with the government that is considered well managed over the one that is considered out of control even if you say the well managed one is a decaying mess. If you can find one that is working now and not a decaying mess then I would be happy to consider that.
I have spent a bit of time in Utah but am certainly no expert. It appears to me that Utah benefits greatly from the fact that a large percentage of its residents share a similar family-focused and community-oriented religious belief. That is unique and probably has a great deal to do with the quality of life there. As for your observation on corporations, yes they do want an educated and productive workforce although they are as likely to find it in China or India as in the US, and they need a market but that also doesn’t have to be in the US. Many of our corporations are larger than lots of foreign nations and they have little loyalty to the US if any.
You are right that the US is losing respect and stature since the end of the cold war, but that really is not because we have expanded federal power on the domestic front, but rather because we are spending $2 Billion a day to assert domination over the rest of the world and making a real mess of it. We grew through the period prior to WWII primarily because of strong protectionist tariffs and other government “interference” in the marketplace. Bad Samaritans – Secret History of Capitalism by economist Ha-Joon Chang describes this in some detail. As for the post WWII period, I’d recommend any of the recent books by Chalmers Johnson. I fail to see any connection between our attempts to use government to help our own people and the decline of respect in the world. If anything, our failure to address our own issues of poverty, health and education make a mockery of our attempts to provide aid to the rest of the world.
I think there is a connection between the expanded federal power on the domestic front and the $2 Billion a day being spent to assert domination in other parts of the world – they are both part of the same mindset of expanding power – one focuses that new power internally and one focuses it externally, but it’s the same force.
Possibly, but the most fervent supports of the military-industrial complex are also the ones that oppose expansion of domestic programs. The most fervent supports of expanded domestic programs are among the few that dare to oppose the military-industrial complex. I will admit that Ron Paul is the exception here, as he is in almost every other case, but the exception that proves the rule. From my point of view, it appears that the leaders of both political parties are promoting a governmental model that provides an open checkbook for anything related to the military or the security of the “homeland” and intends to pay for it by cutting back on programs that were designed to help people. Neither party has the guts to increase taxes so that’s off the table. Perhaps they will allow some of the Bush tax cuts to expire, but I’m not counting on it.
I agree that different groups push for the expansion of our military and surveilance powers than push for the expansion of our social safety net, infrastructure, and external aid programs. It’s still the same impulse to concentrate power in a central authority. The two impulses are wrong for different reasons. The military and surveilance power properly belongs to the federal government in most cases (meaning that the states can properly conduct police powers including investigations and undercover work) but that power should always be kept at or near the minimum level necessary to preserve our security as a nation. The power to provide aid and material sustenance should properly be expansive, but the power for it should be concentrated in individuals and non-governmental entities.
Neither party has the guts to increase taxes nor to cut programs that should be cut (whether that is cut back or cut out). That lack of will to do the hard things is why we are in such trouble as a nation economically and diplomatically. Instaed we have a Congress that is perpetually satisfied with knee-jerk reactions and flavor-of-the-week giveaways.
“Call me short-sighted but I think I’ll stick with the government that is considered well managed over the one that is considered out of control even if you say the well managed one is a decaying mess. If you can find one that is working now and not a decaying mess then I would be happy to consider that.”
We have the 5 worst air quality city’s in the country, double digit education inflation, underfunded regulatory agency’s that will lead to the illegal disposal of industrial waste(more super fund sites yay, and high water utility costs to cover new filtration systems to handle new containments), gross political corruption in the legislature where city’s right to self determination is quickly being eroded to satisfy a few large corporations.
The only thing Utah has managed well, is the budget and maintaining a low tax rate. The cost of that low tax rate however will truly be expensive.
So I suppose our definitions of “well managed” are a bit different.
David, I think what you mean to say is that you distinguish between those who want to expand military and surveillance powers from those who want to expand the social safety net because you consider the former to be a proper role for government but not the latter. As you know, we differ here and I don’t think I need to restate my views again.
What I meant to say was that those who seek to expand military powers are generally a separate group from those who seek to expand the social safety net. obviously there is some overlap between the groups, but I was noting the different priorities of major groups. I think that we both understand each others views on this topic.