Getting What We Pay For
By Jan Larson (03/20/06)
In a vote last week, Congress authorized government borrowing of an additional $871 billion dollars, thereby increasing the “debt ceiling” to nearly $9 trillion.
The action was necessary to maintain the “full faith and credit” of the United States. In other words, without borrowing more, the government would not have been able to repay amounts that it had previously borrowed.
What does this all mean? It means that to keep satisfying you, Mr. and Mrs. Voter and Taxpayer, the government has established a Ponzi scheme whereby you continue to get all of the government “services” that you are “entitled” to and, assuming you die soon enough, you won’t have to pay for them. The bad news is that the people you leave behind will have to pick up the tab, and the tab is going to be massive.
Annual federal spending is now approximately $22,000 per household. The $9 trillion in debt equates to roughly $30,000 per person, or for a family of four, $120,000.
To be sure, a significant amount of the debt is owed to foreigners, but to be fair, a large amount is also owed to American citizens. In other words, if you own U. S. Savings Bonds or other treasury securities, part of the $30,000 in debt that you owe is owed to yourself.
If you told most Americans that you were going to add $120,000 to their family’s mortgage, I don’t expect very many would be happy, but that is, in effect, exactly what Congress has been doing year after year after year.
What do we get for our money?
Constitutionally and practically, only the federal government can operate and maintain the military. The U. S. military is currently the best in the world, although it is very expensive. Remember the $10,000 toilet seat?
There is a role for the federal government in regulating foreign and interstate commerce. Again this is a power designated for the federal government in the Constitution. Personally, I don’t have any problem with federal regulations regarding product labeling, for example, or federal requirements regarding the importation of foreign products.
Patent and trademark protection is another proper function of the federal government as is the printing of currency and minting of coins. It would be chaotic to turn these functions over to state or local governments.
With respect to the Constitution, the federal government oversteps its bounds when it comes to providing for the “general welfare.” This is where the government gets far too involved in things that are either best left to state and local governments or, better yet, eliminated entirely.
Louisianans and others along the Gulf Coast looked to the federal government for disaster relief following hurricane Katrina. Not only did the federal government fail to meet the (often unreasonable) expectations at the time of the disaster but it is now also becoming clear that the post-hurricane relief efforts have been fraught with waste and inefficiency. I’m not surprised.
The federal government established the Social Security program decades ago, but it is now doomed to fail unless major changes are implemented. The current (and past) members of Congress are (and always have been) more than willing to push that problem into the future, but that problem will become real one day soon.
The federal tax system is a total disaster. Not only does the system virtually incomprehensible and impose onerous compliance burdens on businesses and individual taxpayers, but also fails to collect hundreds of millions of dollars taxes that are legally owed.
The federal government pays (though wasteful pork-barrel spending) for thousands of projects that contribute nothing to the “general welfare” but rather to the welfare of very narrow constituencies of individual members of Congress. We all pay for those pork projects, but few of us receive any benefits from them.
The federal government collects gasoline taxes, skims off a sizeable chunk to pay for the bureaucracy, and then returns the rest to the states. This is nothing but a federal bureaucratic employment program, but we all pay for it.
Is there anything that would prompt you to say, “Let’s let the government do this, they would do it better?” The vast majority of the federal bureaucracy could be dismantled with those functions turned over to state and local governments or eliminated entirely with almost no negative effects on the day-to-day lives of most Americans.
All government programs and agencies have their constituencies, but there comes a time and that time is now, where “must have” must be separated from “nice to have.”
Until we wake up to that fact and elect people that will take a hard-line stand on reducing government spending, the bills that will one day have to be paid, will do nothing but continue to grow.
Copyright ©2006 Jan A. Larson All rights reserved.
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