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Sunday, September 28, 2003
What Does Government Do For Me?
Bill Clinton said it was over. But like a bad Hollywood sequel, Big Government is Back - and it's bigger than ever. But if it's so damn big, how come it doesn't do anything for me?
By David M. Fine
Prompted by a recent article by Paul Krugman called "Tax Cut Con," where Krugman comments on a cartoon in which a guy complains that he's paying about 50 percent of his income in taxes, I asked a conservative friend how much he pays in taxes. He replied that he thinks he pays about 40 percent in federal, state, and local taxes combined. "Isn't 40 percent enough?" he cried out in gut-wrenching agony, "What do I get for it?"
"You get Iraq," I replied.
We shared a laugh about this. But when you think about it, do we know what we are getting for the taxes we pay?
If you're middle-class, healthy, employed, law-abiding, and under 65, unless you're visiting our national parks, you might never come in contact with a federal government program. And given the narrow nature of political discourse in America, one could easily deduce that there are only three federal government programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Defense.
Mr. Krugman reinforces this idea in "Tax Cut Con". He attacks the conservative plot to deliberately put the federal government in a tight fiscal spot by running up big deficits. Eventually these "starve-the-beasters" will call for cuts in Social Security and Medicare to bring the budget back to balance. Krugman says these programs are the obvious targets because, outside of Defense spending, there's hardly anything else to cut: "you're left with spending equal to about 3 percent of Gross Domestic Product and most of that goes for courts, highways, education, and other useful things," he writes.
By calling it "3 percent" and blithely referring to the rest of the government as "useful things" Krugman perpetuates this idea of the government as nothing more than Social Security, Medicare, and Defense. Oh, and roads.
In fact, the non-defense portion of the budget Krugman is referring consists of about $300 billion in spending, in a total budget of around $2 trillion. A lesser percentage of the whole, surely, but a sizeable sum nonetheless.
So, what are some of these "useful things" your tax dollars are buying? Well, for one, America invested a whopping $23 billion in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and medical research last year.
What's more, funding for NIH has more than tripled over the past decade. Most of this money is transferred to universities and hospitals in the form of grants for research.
Of course, NIH is just one of many government programs. Below is a list of various programs and their 2002 budget authority.
Dig deeper and you will find many sub-programs that account for much of the spending. NIH, for one, is comprised of the National Cancer Institute, the National Heart, Lung, & Blood Institute, National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases, and some twenty other centers and institutes.
We are also paying for a lot of things we do not see: laws, regulations, and oversight, for the F.D.I.C. to keep our bank deposits secure, the Securities and Exchange Commission to insure fair investing practices, and for the Environmental Protection Agency to make sure companies don't pollute outside of the law.
We are paying for a multitude programs that help the poor and those with low incomes via Welfare (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), Food Stamps, Public Housing, heating assistance, Medicaid, and other programs - to obtain adequate medical care and to avoid going hungry or becoming homeless. The latest data indicate that about 34.6 million Americans live at or below the poverty level.
And, of course, there's our National Defense, probably the most visible of all national programs, and truly gargantuan, with a budget of $358 billion and 2.9 million employees.
It easy, looking at these numbers, to wonder if all of these programs really need to be as large as they are, or to ponder why America has such poverty amidst all these billions being spent on various programs coping with the symptoms of poverty.
Maybe it's time that America held a Budgetary Convention. Congress could appoint a task force composed of various specialists and interested parties, who are not elected officials or Washington insiders, to examine this vast forest of "useful things", how we are spending the money, and how it might be restructured to regulate more efficiently or better tackle many of the social ills the government programs aim to address. Though the General Accounting Office does this to some extent, we need a group of people who will look at the bigger picture. Such an analysis might serve as a useful period of public reflection on what our government does, doesn't do, and what it should be doing, for the citizens of this nation.
Just because there might not be much to cut in that "3 percent", we should nevertheless give it more than just a passing glance.
Resource: President's Budget 2004
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