Welcome to usgovernmentspending.com!

Here at the Road to the Middle Class we are frequently disturbed by the lack of comprehensive data on government spending.  We want to know important facts like:

• How much do we spend on education?
• How much do we spend on welfare?
• How much do we spend on government pensions, from Social Security to federal pensions to state and local pensions?

It is difficult to get information like this, because most of it is split up between federal and state-and-local programs. And our rulers like it that way.

But now we have usgovernmentspending.com.  Now you can find out what the great heads of government spending cost us all: federal, state, and local.

Want to know what the Big Three are?  No it’s not the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.  Right now, in 2007, here are the Big Three Government Programs:

1. Government Pensions: $873 billion
2. Government Health Care: $844 billion
3. Government Education: $745 billion

Go ahead, check out the details at usgovernmentspending.com. The thing is: all three big programs are a mess:

1. Governments have way overpromised on pensions.
2. Government health care doesn’t really give us much in the way of additional life expectancy. Some third-world nations have a life expectancy almost a long as the US.
3. Government education over the last 160 years hasn’t budged the literacy rate of 90 percent.  Maybe it’s even gone down.

Our liberal friends love to remind us of General Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex.

They would do well to think about the beam in their own eye—actually three beams: the government pension complex, the government health complex, and the government education complex.  Those guys make the Pentagon contractors look like pikers.

Britain's Labour Proposes Tax Cuts

In Britain this week they had a Nixon Goes to China Moment.  The Labour Party finance minister Gordon Brown proposed marginal tax rate cuts.

He cut two percent from corporation tax, from 30 percent to 28 percent, and he cut two percent from the “basic rate” of individual income tax, from 22 percent to 20 percent.

For conservative commentators like Simon Heffer it was the last straw.  For months they have been complaining that the Conservatives under  “Dave” Cameron have been making a bad mistake by holding back on proposing tax cuts and instead talk about responsible stewardship and balancing public and private needs by “sharing the proceeds of growth.” 

This strategy was in ruins, Heffer complained.

It crashed spectacularly, and at a velocity nearer the speed of light than of sound, at about 1.15pm yesterday, when Gordon Brown announced he was cutting tuppence off income tax.

 But did it?  Is it not a good thing when the left-wing party proposes tax rate cuts?

The problem that the British Tories have had for the last ten years is that whenever they proposed tax cuts the Labour Party (and the chattering class) immediately accused them of turning their backs on schools and the National Health Service.

But if Labour now thinks that tax rate cuts are a good idea, then tax rate cuts are on the table—for everyone.

Anyway, the British people don’t seem that impressed by the proposed cuts.  According to an overnight opinion poll:

Seven out of 10 people believe Gordon Brown’s give-and-take Budget has left them worse off or will make no difference to their family finances[.]

Place your bets.  How much am I bid for a tax cut?

Plain Old Patronage: A Theory of Government

In the excellent TCSDaily, Arnold Kling proposes a theory of government.  He calls his idea “The Arbiter With The Golden Scepter.” 

People get into disputes, he writes. 

In order to resolve these disputes peacefully, people must submit disputes to an Arbiter, who makes impartial decisions in light of common law.

But of course, it is one thing for an Arbiter to issue a decision. The problem is to enforce it.

In order to ensure that the Arbiter’s decision is final, and that the loser does not resort to violence, people have to give the Arbiter overwhelming power to quell violence. I call this overwhelming power the Golden Scepter.

This, of course, is the contract theory of government upon which our own constitution and government is based.  It assumes that the people forming “a more perfect union” get together from a state of nature without government to write a contract to govern their relations.

But anthropology teaches us something different.  People do not start out in a Hobbesian state of nature.  They start out in families.

And in families it is usual for the father to resolve disputes.  In the old days the father had the power of life and death over all members of the family.  That is what patriarchy means: rule of the fathers.

Of course, even in those days, fathers went to bed.  And in the interval between going to bed and getting up in the morning, they often found that they had made the wrong decision.  So they changed their minds.  Nobody knows how this happened, although Agatha Christie in her Autobiography hints at how it worked in the notoriously patriarchal Edwardian age.

The movement of the progressive peoples, wrote Sir Henry Maine in Ancient Law, is from status to contract.  So it is, but in the movement from family and clan to city, government grows from an outgrowth of fatherly justice to an organized entity with its own interests, interests separate and distinct from the interests of fathers.

And so we find, as Maine found in Roman society, that government slowly supplants the power of the father with the power of the government.

It takes over something else besides the power to resolve disputes.  It takes over the power of patronage. 

Yes.  You noticed.  Patronage and patriarchy both start with the Latin root patr-, as in pater, father.

Our modern welfare state is a living testimony to the fact that people still want to live under a father.  They want to enjoy his patronage, to receive his favors, to nestle within the circle of his power.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the people to rage most bitterly against the patriarchy are the ones who insist on the fatherly embrace of the welfare state.

So Arnold Kling’s Arbiter with the Golden Scepter is really just a father.

When do you think that the people of the welfare state will grow out of their adolescence and choose to live as free human beings, free from the protection and the power of the father?

Good Old-fashioned Democratic Politics

If you are a Republican the worst fear about Democrats taking over Congress was that they might have changed.  They might have given up their old ways of badgering businessmen and solving every problem with government spending.  What would Republicans do then?

But not to fear.  The Democrats running Capitol Hill are the Old Democrats of spending, subsidy, privilege, and micro-managing regulation.

Democrats are trying to add $24 billion in pork to President Bush’s $95 billion request for Iraq, reports Donald Lambro.

Most of the added money stuffed into the emergency supplemental bill, expected to come up for a vote today, is for the kind of costly, pork barrel, special interest, vote-buying handouts Democrats promised they would end if they won control of Congress.

Since the Democrats haven’t changed their spots the political space traditionally occupied by Republicans and conservatives is still available. Even though the Republican Congress sadly betrayed the trust of their supporters in recent years and created an opening for a new, moderate Democratic Party, the Democrats have decided they like their old ways best. 

So let’s get back to the important work of formulating ideas and policies to reform the corrupt welfare state and its steadily deteriorating performance in pensions, in education, and in health care.

The American people are counting on us. 

Globalizing Health Care

Here at the Road to the Middle Class we are not so sure about the 15 percent of GDP spent on health care.  When it comes to improving life expectancy, expensive bio-medicine isn’t exactly outperforming sanitation and baisc OB-GYN care  to keep infant mortality down.

And then there’s the regulation and the licensure and the special interests, not to mention the herioc end-of-life care that doesn’t relieve suffering and doesn’t extend life.

So it’s good to see the chaps at Democracy Project doing a bit of thinking. They don’t like

the status quo or various extensions of the status quo such as proposals for a single payer system, mandating employee coverage, mandating employer coverage, health spending accounts[.]

Everyone, Democrat and Republican, wants to give the present system a few tweaks.  But nobody is thinking big ball.

The problem with our health care system is over-regulation. Yet, all the Republican solutions and Democratic solutions involve extending or reshaping the regulation.

Why not sidestep regulation altogether?

This can be accomplished through overseas medical treatment.

 What, medical tourism, risking life and limb in third-world countries?  Well, not so fast.

Back in the 1950s, many Americans believed that goods "made in Japan" were of low quality. As it turned out, by the 1970s "made in Japan" meant better quality than U.S.-manufactured goods. There is no reason why health care can’t be provided in the third world.

What makes you think that medical care in say, India, won’t be competitive with the US in 10 years or so? 

The beauty of it is that it would force the US health care industry to start cutting costs and improving quality.  Just like the US auto industry had to do.

We’ll find out, along the way, just how privileged and subsidized our vast health industry has become.  And we can expect our doctors and nurses and adminstrators to go screaming to Congress for relief from medical “dumping.”

But we won’t pay a blind bit of attention to their screeching.

Forget Racial Profiling, Now It's Political Profiling!

Who was not outraged by the shocking practice of law enforcement officials racially profiling minorities.  Why, they were picking up blacks all over the place, way disproportionate to their actual representation in the community.

(Of course, blacks have tended to commit crimes at up to ten times the rate of other races, but that doesn’t count.)

But now a new front has been opened in the fight against profiling.  In a breathless article in E Pluribus Media Donald C. Shields and John F. Cragan announce that the Bush Justsice Department has targeted Democratic elected officials for investigation far more than Republicans. 

Our ongoing study of the Bush Justice Department (to be published in 2009) investigates the implications of the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzales Justice Department’s blended religious -fundamentalist and neo-conservative rhetorical vision.

It was un-biased economist Paul Krugman who first publicized this scholarship.  And instapundit picked it up.

We will leave it to others to remind the two scholars that “religious-fundamentalist” and “neo-conservative” are not strictly scholarly terms but political perjoratives which change their meanings according to the present needs of Democratic politicians and activists.

And of course the findings of the study don’t really justify the scare headlines.

If you actually look at the numbers they cite you see that at the national level the “profiling” is not that great.  In their Appendix B Shields and Cragan show that the Bush Justice Department is currently investigating the following state-wide and federal elected officials: 36 Democrats and 30 Republicans.

But it is at the local level in Appendix C where the disparity rears its ugly head.  Here the Justice Department is investigating 262 Democrats and 37 Republicans.

How could this be, other than the bigotry of religious fundamentalism and neo-conservatism?

Well, if you look at the names on the list it is amazing how many of them come from notorious cellpools of corruption: New Jersey (30 under investigation), Baltimore (20 in a “wide-ranging investigation”), and so on.

And it is a shocking fact that Republican elected officials are grossly underrepresented in the corrupt inner cities of America.  (Why is this?  More research is needed.)

It couldn’t be, could it, that the Bush Administration is just doing its job, trying to root out corruption where it is most likely to be found, in Democratic controlled big cities?

President Bush Draws a Line

Republicans are fit to be tied about pusillanimous Republicans that won’t fight back against Democratic attacks.

As David Limbaugh sees it:

From the war on Iraq, to Gitmo, to the NSA surveillance program, to the Wilson-Plame fiasco, to global warming, to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, deceitful Democrats engage in relentless warfare against Republicans, and Republicans -- way too often -- roll over without even returning fire.

Actually, whenever Republicans do fight back they get skewered as mean-spirited and Puritan.  So, they figure, what’s the point?

There’s another problem.  Republicans don’t believe in fighting other Americans.  We believe in fighting foreign terrorists, not foolish mouthy Democrats.  We are professionals, business owners, and investors.  We believe in voluntary cooperation, following the rules, and serving our fellow men.  That’s what successful people do under democratic capitalism.

But Democrats do believe in fighting other Americans.  They believe that justice can only be achieved by political fight, by fighting for the people against the powerful, in the immortal words of Al Gore.  And they believe that it is not enough to write laws to work towards justice, or commutative justice.  They believe in distributive justice, taking stuff from some people and giving it to others.  They only sorta believe in democratic capitalism.  What they really believe in is politics.

Today, it seemed that President Bush has his limits when it comes to truckling to the Democrats.  In a statement to reporters about the US Attorney firings he said:

I will oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials.

It’s not exactly a ringing counterattack to the Democrats’ charges but it’s a start.