Which half of government do you want to cut?

I used to think that Richmond area Tea Partiers were all Michigan transplants. Their homemade signs tended toward yellow lettering on a blue background. (At least I assume they're Tea Party signs. Nothing says cranky populism like a homemade anti-government rant posted in a highway right-of-way, and Tea Partiers seem to want to be the voice of the heretofore silent, cranky, populist "majority.")

But lately they've branched out. One I see every day is a red hammer and sickle inside a prohibited symbol. Yes, now that the Democrats have passed Mitt Romney's health care reform, can the gulags be far off? "They came first for the insurance companies, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't an insurance company..."

One in particular deserves rebutting: "Cut government by half." Why half? Why not one-third? Or two-thirds? Did you pull that fraction out of your you-know-what? Or maybe, since I'm a liberal and want all the government, and they want no government, they decided to meet us halfway. In that case, I accept their magnanimous proposal, and invite them to start cutting, with the help of this handy-dandy pie chart:

As you can tell, you cannot get to 50% by eliminating foreign aid, welfare and grants for obscene art. Not even close.

If you want to make it easy, you could just get rid of half the programs where the pie pieces naturally add up to 50% more or less. That means you could fund the military, welfare (including unemployment benefits) and Medicare, but you'd have to kill Social Security, auction off the national parks, shutter every foreign embassy in the world, pull the plug on NASA, default on the national debt, and adopt an open borders policy because there'd be no money for border patrol agents.

Or flip it. Keep all the little stuff, plus Social Security, and close the Pentagon and Medicare. Costa Rica doesn't have an army; if they can get along without one, why can't we?

I vote for option two because I was endeared to Yellowstone by the summer I spent working there. And I'm a lover, not a fighter.

The point is, Yes, the government is big and expensive, but that's because it does some very big and important and expensive stuff! Like run a pension system and medical insurance for the elderly. Tea Partiers might like to imagine a Brave, New Philanthropic World would blossom if only we weren't taxed so much. Why churches and charities could care for the aged, and they'd have the means to do so! But in fact, we tried that once, and it didn't work. Before Social Security and Medicare were enacted, the elderly were the population demographic most likely to be poor. Now they're the least. Which is as it should be.

But I don't think there's that much hard, libertarian thinking going on in the Tea Party movement. I think it's a lot of throwing a hissy fit over the bank bailouts, the stimulus bill, and the takeover of GM. All this stuff cost a bunch of money, and it was distasteful, especially the bank bailouts. Heck, I'm cranky about it, and I'm a big gubmunt librul!

But it saved the economy from going off a cliff. We're in the worst recession since 1982, but we aren't in a depression, and that's because the government stepped in prop up the banks, save jobs and create jobs when the private sector was unable to do so.

Sooner or later we will have to deal with the mounting debt, and we'll have to deal with it by raising taxes and cutting benefits. There's ample room to do both. We could raise taxes back to where they were under the Clinton administration, and as I recall, those Clinton-era tax rates were accompanied by strong economic growth. And as life expectancy increases, the retirement age should go up.

But not now and not even next year. The economy is still very weak. When FDR pulled back on the New Deal in 1937, the economy descended yet again.

Tea Partiers have a right to be cranky, but crankiness isn't a governing philosophy. They need to put down their paint brushes, come out of their basements and educate themselves on how economies actually work, and what their tax dollars actually pay for.

Comments

[Pastor Mack]

Which segment of the population is the most likely to be poor now? I'm guessing whatever segment that is, there is probably heavy government spending in that demographic, and it has not led these people out of poverty. But I could be wrong.

Of course the populist tea partiers are over-simplifying their case by asking for a reduction "by half." But then, if you wanted a serious discussion about taxes and government, you wouldn't choose an interlocutor that is such an obvious straw man.

You, rather cutely, assume that the government will both raise taxes and cut benefits. Unfortunately, we are creating a people who is so dependent on the system that they will not allow this (and this is almost all of us, not just a few segments). Look what happens in France anytime a change to benefits is proposed. Look at Greece recently. If a government raises revenues, be sure they will find a way to spend it. And this European model is clearly the direction that the Obama administration wants to go.

Here in North Carolina, we finally have the glorious lottery! Has our education system improved? Not a lick. But the folks in Raleigh have more money to dole out, and they makes them happier than a drunk in a liquor store.

I am, however, open to the notion that big government is the punishment that Christians deserve for not doing their jobs in the social realm.

[Marvin]

Pastor Mack,

A few comments. First, children are the demographic group most likely to be poor today, and they lack the guaranteed income that the elderly enjoy through Social Security:

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/poverty08/pov08fig04.pdf

As you can tell from the graph, poverty declined in the 60s and 70s, and began to increase after 1980, when the big push was to "wean people off government dependence." The Great Society wasn't perfect, but it was largely successful in its effort to reduce poverty in the U.S.

Second, it is no wishful thinking to assume that the government will raise taxes and cut benefits in the future. We did it in 1982, when the retirement age was raised and FICA taxes were raised. We can do it again.

Third, if you want to see what it would like were the Church and not the state the primary deliverer of poverty relief, you need only look at life in the U.S. before the New Deal. The nation was far less secularized then, and suffered from far more material deprivation.

The welfare state is no punishment. As I have earlier argued, it represents a successful and centuries-long effort to Christianize the social order, at least with respect to the 2nd table of the law:

http://marvinlindsay.typepad.com/avdat/2010/01/working-ourselves-out-of-a-job.html

Lastly, the views on the sign are no straw man. GOP primary candidates are pandering to these sorts of views. Sadly, they're relevant to the current political process, and need to be knocked down.