Bailing Out Politicians Now?
Even lifelong Democratic pol Steny Hoyer, majority leader of the U.S. House, is balking at Barack Obama's latest bailout proposal.
"I think there is spending fatigue," said Steny. "It's tough in both houses to get votes."
Hoyer was referring to Obama's weekend letter to Capitol Hill calling for a $50 billion bailout of state and city governments, to spare our elected politicians the pain of balancing their budgets with their own tax revenues.
Obama calls it an "emergency" measure to prevent "massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters." Yet, none of the 20 million state, county or municipal workers can lose their job unless an elected legislature and a chief executive agree that they should go.
Obama is calling for a taxpayer rescue of the political class to which he belongs, to spare it the painful duty tens of thousands of business executives have had to perform. Private employees—25 million of whom are out of work, underemployed or have given up looking for jobs—may be expendable, but government workers are not.
As America is running a second consecutive deficit of $1.4 trillion, however, the U.S. government has no tax revenue to send to the cities and states. We would have to borrow the $50 billion from China, Japan and the Persian Gulf nations.
Obama is thus asking Congress to deepen America's fiscal crisis and put the next generation on the hook for another $50 billion so today's mayors and governors can get an exemption from their political duty.
Where is the justice here?
Government workers enjoy far greater job security than private-sector workers. At the state and local level, their average pay and benefits, about $40 an hour, far exceed the $27 per hour in the private sector. The federal worker has it even better, receiving $30,000 a year more in pay and benefits than the average worker in the private sector.
Obama's proposal is thus about taking care of his own and the Democratic Party's political base.
Consider. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, the Transport Workers Union of America and other government unions in the AFL-CIO are all powerhouses of the Democratic Party.
Obama is proposing a $50 billion payoff for his own voters.
Democrats are the Party of Government. The more government programs and agencies there are, the more government bureaucrats and beneficiaries there are. As government grows—it now consumes close to 40 percent of the entire economy—the larger and more solid the base of the party becomes.
In Washington, D.C., the largest employers, far and away, are the U.S. and D.C. governments. They dominate the city, which is why city elections are so one-sided. The district has the only three electoral votes never to have gone for a GOP presidential nominee.
Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984, in their 49-state landslides, did not carry 20 percent of the district's popular vote. John McCain got 6.5 percent.
As Democrats are the party of government, Washington, D.C., is the capital of the Democratic Party as well as the nation. When the rest of America suffers a depression and recession, Washington knows prosperity. An economic crisis for the country means job opportunities here.
But there is a more critical reason Congress should reject Obama's "Save-Government-First!" policy.
The fiscal crises gripping Europe and America, which could portend a crisis of Western democracy, was caused by the unbridled growth of government. And it cannot be cured without a rollback of government programs and a downsizing of government workforces on both sides of the Atlantic.
As Greece is staring at unpayable debt because of government's conferring of jobs, benefits, salaries, pensions and health care the tax base could not sustain, California and New York are in the same boat and headed for the same reef.
Once the richest and most populous of states, both now face a steady exodus of business and taxpayers. But, of the people coming in to enjoy the cornucopia of benefits these states provide, many lack the skills, education or earning power of those departing.
And why should states like Virginia, that said no to many benefits, have to bail out the spenders in Sacramento and Albany who could not say no?
For the U.S. government to bail these states out again, as Obama did with his $800 billion stimulus, would only be to postpone the inevitable day of reckoning, to deepen the federal fiscal crisis and to raise the odds further that America herself will one day have to default.
In the recession of 1981, Ronald Reagan, with his across-the board tax cuts of 25 percent, bet the ranch on the private sector—and won his gamble.
Obama, with his $800 billion stimulus, bet it all on the public sector. It appears not to have worked. Now Obama wants to double-down.
Congress should give him no more chips.
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Is it not very relevant to Obama's plan that favoured minority groups are greatly over-represented among government "workers"?
The great Barry Goldwater once said in 1964:
"We have lost the genius of individual creativity. We are plodding along at a pace set by centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility, and regimentation without recourse. Rather than useful jobs in our country, our people have been offered bureaucratic legwork. Rather than moral leadership, they have been given bread and circuises."
The moral loss to a public sector worker society is a much greater problem than the unsustainable nature of it. It replaces long-term savings and plannings for the future, with short-term perks and benefits. It replaces entrepreneurialism with adoration for the easy and mundane. It replaces honesty with scheming for quick gains (because there is no more productivity that can exist for the long term).
Canada and Sweden regularly downsize their governments by 10%, perhaps knowing this little fact down in their hearts. Looking at Greece, even if their government eliminates most jobs in government and privatizes their society, they will still be left with a wasteful, short-termist society that will only carry these burdensome values with it.
Mr. Buchanan is correct as a whole in this article. Then there is this doozy. "Democrats are the Party of Government." They are not the only party of government as the Bush years reminded us.
To be sure, the "unbridled growth in government" needs to be checked, but this should not be a license to allow "unbridled growth in corporations," which in classic mafia-esque fashion will become "shadow states" as tyrannical as any government. I'm not suggesting an "agrarian distributist" way of thinking, but what we need is a smaller government nevertheless capable of stopping its people from suiciding themselves in the long term as well as the short.
That is the great tragedy of socioeconomic politics these days: the corporate world has gripped the Right and perverted "smaller government" into "licence to rape"; meanwhile, the Left has embraced "check the corporations" and mutated it into "inflate government"--without, of course, checking the corporations, as Barak Hussein Obama knows well.
the corporate world has gripped the Right and perverted “smaller government” into “licence to rape”
Without, of course, downsizing government, AT ALL. For all his "deregulation," Reagan was just another crass Keynesian after all.
As for Goldwater, I am not qualified to tell whether all of his policies would have had the salutary effects he'd hoped for, but Mr. Sanjay's quote is salient in more ways than one: Goldwater himself was definitely the last original thinker to run for President in the United States.
Finally, as for civic employees: in France, when a company "winds up," the first creditors to be payed are salaried or wage-earning employees. I do not know if it is the same in the United States, but it should be. And the government should have to abide by these rules, as well: if there is truly a crisis looming that threatens the position of federal civic workers, then the Obama administration, as their employer, is under moral obligation to withdraw American troops IMMEDIATELY from the futile engagements all the way across the globe and to terminate IMMEDIATELY all subsidies to unstable foreign governments--third world or otherwise--in order to pay, for as long as possible, the salaries of those who depend on it.
@3: I don't agree. The Republican Party is for big government, sure, but it's not their thing: unlike Democrats, Republicans are just exceedingly bad at big government. And at corruption: that's another lesson of the Bush years (and the Nixon presidency). The Democrats can cover up and get away with corruption for years; the Republicans are just so incompetent that it goes into broad daylight right away. It's not for nothing that Alan Simpson called his the "Stupid Party."
Isn't wonderful I now live in Greece without ever having to pack a suit case and board a plane.
Dr. Wilson @1
In the mid 1990's the U.S. Postal system of Chicago was considered the most inefficient of American major cities. I'm sure there is no correlation, but only 10 percent of the Chicago postal workers were people of no color. I'm sure their effieceny hasn't improved, but salaries and benefits have increased under Obama.
NGPM, any corporation that is too big ends up failing for that very reason.
Back in 1991, the head of General Motors said, "If you kicked our company in the butt today, it would be two years before the other end said ouch." It is nearly impossible to manage a very large corporation, and be able to understand or control problems within it, because you never know from where they would stealthily come to hurt it. It is a notorious problem of large corporations that they suffer from diseconomies of scale, and often those diseconomies exist because of government protection and subsidization.
Big corporations fail regularly, and failure is an important, necessary, and inevitable part of business. Too big to fail is an oxymoron. Governments never fail no matter how large they get, because they can always tax, print, and deficit their way into being however large they wish to be, at the expense of the productive activities of the civil populace.
And that's what Buchanan rightly points out. Far less is always at stake for the public sector worker than the private sector worker, since the former can burden the latter to do whatever she wants.
I don't think Goldwater was very original in his thinking. He was a pro-abort Planned Parenthood Republican. He and his wife like the Bush family were big supporters of Planned Parenthood. 'Conscience Of A Conservative' was ghostwritten by L. Brent Bozell Sr. I think he was a typical countryclub Republican, who wasn't a very nice person. He helped and supported his daughter with an abortion and in his old age spoke up for homosexula rights. He was the first Presidential candidate to call for legalized abortion. I knew it and worked for him, shame on me.
If the Era of Bought Politicians is over, then so much the better. I'm sick of a senate filled with intellectual lightweights who merely purchased their seats, and then pretend to represent us while doling out favors to their well-heeled sponsors.