Because Government Isn’t Big Enough?

Does Ezra Klein live on the same planet as the rest of us?

As the old adage goes, when the gods want to punish you, they give you what you want. Conservatives talk a lot about government failure, but over the last few years, it’s really we who have failed government, depriving it of the revenue, the conscientious management and the attention needed for it to succeed.

Deprived the government of revenue, have we? Klein says the Bush tax cuts (cue crashing minor chord and thunderclap) have cost the government $200 billion. On the other hand, the Treasury Department says that the government has collected 11.4 percent more tax revenue than it took in at this point last year. Thus far this fiscal year, the federal government has raked in $1.5 trillion.

The 200 million dollars that Klein is lamenting (assuming, for a moment, that it’s only lacking from this year’s tax income) comes to 13 percent. We nearly offset that 13 percent in seven months just because the economy, boosted in large part by those tax cuts that Klein wants to eliminate, has been booming. That’s hardly “depriving”.

It’s hard for him to sustain his premise if one of the main pillars of his argument makes me laugh right out loud. It doesn’t get better.

He brings up a couple scary boogeymen – schools and police departments – to scare us into believing that what the government really needs is more money. Lots more. here’s the thing. Police departments and schools aren’t n dire financial straits because government itself is underfunded and lacking oversight but because those particular parts of government are lacking. Police departments are always underfunded. I know this because I’ve worked for police departments for the past 18 years. I’ve seen how much scrambling has to go in in May just to make overtime budgets stretch until July 1. I’ve seen how officers have to go on patrol by themselves knowing their nearest backup is an hour or more away. I’ve seen them have to dip into their own money to fix their agency-issued equipment.

There’s plenty of money in our state governments to fund police departments. We just don’t care to make sure the money goes to them.

There’s plenty of money for our woefully failing school systems too. We don’t care nearly enough to make sure the money that does to go our schools is spent the right way.
Why should we? Government has told us that they know best and they’re going to handle it so we should just sit down and hush up. Anytime we try to get our hands into the schools and fix the problems we see, we’re smacked down quickly. Folks like Klein are all on board with that, his bemoaning of insufficient oversight notwithstanding. Our schools waste money hand over fist thanks largely to a stratified system maintained ruthlessly by teachers’ unions that could really care less whether you kid learns to read or not. Don’t believe me? Go out there and try to get an incompetent teacher fired. Heck, try to give on a bad evaluation. Come back in a couple months and tell me the unions give a rip about what sort of job that teacher does. Of course the teachers’ unions are big Democratic contributors and running afoul of them means that you don’t get all those juicy campaign contributions every couple of years. You need that union money to keep your party in power, so your kids suffer. Does that sound like a failure because the government is too large or could it be that the government is already too large for us to control the way we were meant to control it?

Klein’s entire premise is ridiculous on its face. The nanny-state “security net” government that Klein wants (and which is entirely anathema to every principle on which this nation was founded) had been failing miserably since the day it was born and called The Great Society. You can’t put enough whitewash on it to say it hasn’t been. Klein says that we ought to give bigger government a chance. I say he’s had his chance and he’s blown it.

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Category: The Economy and Your Money