Are We There Yet? Luv, We've Been There!

M2RB:  The B-52's

Fly the great big sky see the great big sea
Kick through continents bustin' boundaries
Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness
Around the world the trip begins with a kiss
Roam if you want to, roam around the world
Roam if you want to, without wings without wheels
Roam if you want to, roam around the world
Roam if you want to, without anything but the love we feel
Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness

By Mona Charen

Following the fiscal-cliff melodrama, Senator Richard Shelby appeared on television to declare that we are becoming European. “We’re always wanting to spend and promise and spend and borrow, but not cut. We’ve got to get real about this. We’re headed down the road that Europe’s already on.”

There’s no “heading” about it. We’re there. John J. DiIulio, writing in National Affairs, outlined the true size of American government. When state and local government expenditures are added to federal outlays, government spending as a share of GDP easily competes with European nations. In fact, per capita government spending in the U.S. is higher than in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and our debt to GDP ratio is higher than in most European states. 

The Obama administration has set records for deficit spending in peacetime, but there is no question that the growth of government at all levels has been a decades-long process. In 1960, total government spending (local, state, and federal) amounted to 27 percent of GDP. In 2010, it was about 42 percent. State spending has been almost as irrepressible as federal, leaving only nine states that can now boast AAA credit ratings. Many states are facing crises over unfunded pension liabilities that have the capacity to engender strikes and social unrest in the not-too-distant future.

Though President Obama and the Democrats are fond of citing the “two wars on a credit card” and the Bush tax cuts as drivers of our debt, the truth is that the first Obama term added $4.5 trillion to the national debt in just three years — more than the total debt amassed by the United States government in two centuries. DiIulio writes: “Add our annual debt per capita (about $49,000 in 2011) to total annual government spending per capita (about $20,000 in 2011), and we have a rough ‘big government index’ of nearly $70,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country.”

The difference between Americans and Europeans is that we aren’t honest about our appetite for big government. We hide it through a variety of proxies, private contractors, and public-private partnerships. Leaving aside the Department of Defense, which employs 3.2 million Americans, government employs more than 20 million civil servants. Only 2 million of those are full-time federal workers. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, employs 188,000 federal bureaucrats, but also 200,000 privately contracted employees. Medicaid doesn’t employ an army of civil servants but instead pays private employees of medical practices, hospitals, and nursing homes.

The EPA employs between 16,000 and 18,000 full-time personnel. It has been able to expand its regulatory reach, though, by cooperating with 50 state EPA equivalents and by hiring tens of thousands of private contractors.

Most non-profits receive few government subsidies. But the largest ones with the biggest budgets are heavily government-dependent. One-third of all non-profit dollars come from government. Catholic Charities USA, for example, a marquee “private-sector” charity, received two-thirds of its funding in 2009 from Uncle Sam.

Americans prefer small government to big government — in the abstract. But 60 million receive Medicaid benefits; 54 million collect Social Security; 48 million participate with Medicare; 45 million receive food stamps; 7 million are in prison, in jail, or on parole or probation; more than a million have de facto government jobs working for defense contractors; nearly a million children participate in Head Start; and about 40 percent of K–12 students receive free or reduced-price meals. There’s some overlap in those categories, but it still adds up.

Taking a government check goes down much more easily when you can persuade yourself that you’re only withdrawing money that you have faithfully paid in over the course of a lifetime. Indignant elderly callers to C-SPAN constantly invoke the “I paid for my Social Security” myth. They didn’t. The average beneficiary will receive far more in Medicare and Social Security benefits than he paid for in taxes.

We are, in short, a socialist-style society just like Europe. And Obamacare has yet to kick in.

The road to recovery begins with admitting you have a problem.

By Reihan Salam

Donald Marron and Eric Toder have done an excellent job of drawing attention to spending-like tax expenditures, and how they serve to obscure what we might call the true size of government. In a brilliant essay in the Spring issue of National Affairs (which is behind a paywall, but you’d do well to subscribe), John DiIulio Jr. takes a somewhat different approach that is no less illuminating:

 

One key reason why we are unwilling to seriously reduce the size of our government is that its scope and reach are even bigger than the daunting spending fi gures suggest. For many people, big government is personal: Millions of Americans either make their living from government or have family members or friends who do. In addition to the 3.2 million personnel who work for the U.S. Department of Defense (the world’s largest employer, followed the Chinese Army and Wal-Mart), American government now employs more than 20 million full-time or part-time civil servants, only about a tenth of whom are full-time federal bureaucrats (indeed, all of the real post-1960 growth in government employment has been at the state and local level).

The various public-employee workforce reduction plans launched by state and local governments since the recession started have so far resulted in only tiny actual cuts. The proposal made by House Republicans in 2011 to eliminate 200,000 federal civil service jobs, meanwhile, exempts “critical” and “security” personnel. As several analysts have noted, even if it were approved, it would only end up cutting about 70,000 federal jobs over a period of many years. 

Beyond those employed directly by the state are the workers of businesses and non-profi t organizations paid or subsidized by one or more levels of government to help administer programs in defense, homeland security, health care, consumer-product safety, environmental protection, and so on. Indeed, big government in America involves far more than government: It involves Big Inter-Government (BIG) plus BIG’s Private Administrative Proxies (PAP) and their non-government but taxpaid employees. Let’s call it BIG PAP for short.

DiIulio goes on to describe the scale of BIG PAP, ranging from the military industrial complex (the Lockheed Martin Corporation has had as much as $35 billion worth of military contracts in a single year), homeland security (DHS has 200,000 private contract employees and 188,000 federal workers), Medicaid is directly responsible for the employment of millions of people working for ostensibly private for-profit and non-profit medical providers, etc. DiIulio’s discussion of the non-profit sector is particularly interesting, and it sheds light on a number of recent controversies:

 

In 2009, the non-profit organizations recognized as “public charities” by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service reported about $1.4 trillion in spending while holding $4 trillion in total assets (for comparison, the total assets of state and local governments were about $4.6 trillion). In total, the nonprofit sector employed about 13.5 million people (roughly a tenth of the American workforce) and accounted for about 5.5% of GDP.

About three-quarters of non-profit organizations, including most faith-based ones, spend under a half a million dollars a year and receive little or no government grant or contract money. But the quarter of the sector’s organizations that boast its biggest annual budgets are highly dependent on direct government funding, meaning that one-third of all non-profit dollars are from government, paid through grants or contracts. For instance, in 2009, Catholic Charities USA alone spent $4.2 billion — and about two-thirds of that money came from government grants and contracts. 

Over the past quarter-century, government grants to non-profit organizations have nearly tripled (in inflation-adjusted dollars). And just as businesses lobby to keep government contracts flowing, non-profit organizations lobby to preserve government grants and to block measures to limit itemized deductions in the federal tax code. [Emphasis added]

That Catholic Charities USA has become part of the political fray is hardly surprising given the source of much of its funding. Many of our intermediate institutions have grown so dependent on the state as to become duly deputized extensions of its power. And of course this happened because many of these institutions initially welcomed the assistance, thinking that it would strengthen their independent efforts. But that’s not quite how it turned out. It’s interesting to read DiIulio’s essay alongside a book like Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community.

But DiIulio hasn’t written an anti-BIG PAP polemic. Rather, he offers a sobering reminder that the project of reversing the expansion of central state authority is far more difficult than is commonly understood. BIG PAP is here to stay. At this point, we are obligated to make its workings more transparent and accountable. One area where I part company with most of my fellow conservatives is that I place a much heavier emphasis on containing the scope of government than containing its supposed size, as our measurements of its size are highly misleading and efforts to limit its explicit size often lead to an expansion of its scope, e.g., expansion of the use of regulation and private administrative proxies. This is one reason why I consider regulation a more pressing issue than taxes.  



Roam - The B-52's

I hear a wind
Whistling air
Whispering in my ear

Boy mercury shooting through every degree
Oh girl dancing down those dirty and dusty trails
Take it hip to hip rocking through the wilderness
Around the world the trip begins with a kiss

Roam if you want to, roam around the world
Roam if you want to, without wings without wheels
Roam if you want to, roam around the world
Roam if you want to, without anything but the love we feel

Skip the air-strip to the sunset
Yeah ride the arrow to the target
Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness
Around the world the trip begins with a kiss

Roam if you want to, roam around the world
Roam if you want to, without wings without wheels
Roam if you want to, roam around the world
Roam if you want to, without anything but the love we feel

Fly the great big sky see the great big sea
Kick through continents bustin' boundaries
Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness
Around the world the trip begins with a kiss

Roam if you want to, roam around the world
Roam if you want to, without wings without wheels
Roam if you want to, roam around the world
Roam if you want to, without anything but the love we feel

Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness
Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness
Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness
Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness
Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness
Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness
Take it hip to hip rock it through the wilderness