Anyone who's looked at a newspaper in the last six months has most likely seen something about the political debates surrounding the issue of raising America's debt ceiling. The political consensus, whether one agrees with it or not, seems to be a combination of tax increases (referred to euphemistically as 'revenue enhancements') and spending cuts. Public opinion, however, seems to dramatically favor spending cuts over revenue enhancements in spite of the fact that the public doesn't really seem to want to cut anything specific.
But why do people want cuts to government spending? There are a number of reasons. Some people believe the government is simply inefficient. Some people have an ideological preference for less taxation and less spending. Some people have an ideological opposition to the idea of "government in one's life." Some people just don't want to pay taxes. There's a problem inherent in all but the third one of these reasons: the rationale is economic. And of course, a kind of reactionary and vague set of beliefs like those contained in the phrase "I don't want the government in my life," is virtually never good for anything.
It's good to have economic explanations for economic phenomena, but the rate of government spending is much much much more than an economic question. Government spending, and all spending for that matter, is first and foremost a social question. Money is a means of exchange. That means that its movement occurs only in the interaction between people and/or institutions. Money, then, is an inherently social good.
And when we think that the US government spends more money than any other institution on the planet every year, imagine the social consequence it has. Its influence is enormous! Government spending is the way in which the people, theoretically, express what is in the best interests of society as a whole.
But let's step back to the debate about the debt ceiling and balancing the budget. In a healthy democratic political system, the citizens would decide what they want to spend money on, and then they would figure out how to accumulate enough funds to pay for what they wanted to do. And it might not be unreasonable for that government to occasionally take out a loan and then pay it back. Of course our society is far too big for such a simple approach. When we're spending trillions of dollars, citizens cannot be expected to pick through tens of thousands of dollars in spending to see whether or not they agree that it's being spent well. And at times, it may be good for the government to spend money on things that are not what the public wants.
When the country is running well economically, people don't get too worked up over every way in which the government spends money. Some people might get upset about a particular item in the budget, but there won't be wholesale objections to government spending the way there are in the troubled times of today. But as the country has found itself in a precarious economic state, the political rhetoric has failed to adequately address the problem. Rather than address government spending in the rational way it should be addressed, politicians clamor for a balanced budget with all the ideological fervor of 17th Puritanical New England preacher.
There's nothing wrong with a balanced budget. In fact, it is something that must be achieved in the next couple of years or the country will risk complete financial ruin. The problem is that the only debate that has entered the public sphere is how to achieve a balanced budget. Tax increases, spending cuts, or some combination? It is as if the amount that we should spend is the first question to be answered, and the second question to be answered is how to spend that amount.
It's not as if this approach is always wrong. If you have a fixed salary, for example, you might limit yourself to spending a certain amount each week on groceries. Such an approach might be quite sensible if you're liable to spend extravagantly and don't want to do so. The great difference, of course, is that you don't control your income whereas the government does. The government can decide how much it's going to have to spend. But this doesn't mean that it should do so before deciding what it needs to spend money on.
The unfortunate truth is that the political rhetoric surrounding the budget has made any discussion of what money should be spent on nearly impossible. We have, essentially, sacrificed the social question for the strictly economic one. The result is that we will continue to fund programs that should be cut and stop funding programs that are important. It is a highly inefficient way to determine the destination of American tax-dollars.
No comments:
Post a Comment