The number being tossed about for post-Katrina reconstruction is $200 billion. That’s a lot of money, even for a cosmologist. If you spent a dollar per month throughout the entire existence of our observable universe, you’d only get up to about $164 billion.
How can we possibly pay for it? Mark Schmitt points to two ideas: a bad one and a good one. The bad one is a project being organized by Glenn Reynolds and N.Z. Bear to point the finger of shame at wasteful pork in the discretionary budget, in hopes that Congress will be moved to slice away this excess fat and free up funds for more important things. The germ of the idea is okay — wasteful pork is bad, why not trim it away — but the idea that they’ll reach $200 billion is fantasy-land. (At the moment they’ve reached about $14 billion, using an expansive definition of “pork” that includes, for example, all federal domestic-violence programs.) That’s because the part of the federal budget that they would even consider trimming is only about $500 billion. Schmitt quotes Stan Collender in the National Journal, who explains that “Social Security, interest on the debt, most other federal mandatory spending, the Pentagon, the costs of activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, homeland security and foreign aid” are off the table. The remaining $500 billion, by the way, includes all spending on science, education, and wasteful stuff like that. Rail against pork all you like, but it doesn’t make up 40% of the discretionary budget.
The good idea comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. They point out the obvious thing: the reason the government is having trouble paying its bills is because its revenues, as a fraction of GDP, are lower than they have been in decades. But even better, they home in on two tax cuts scheduled to kick in during 2006, which represent a particularly egregious example of benefiting the rich. One deals with personal exemptions, and the other sets the values of allowed itemized deductions, both applying to couples making over $218,950 or individuals making over $145,950.
Some interesting features of these tax cuts:
- President Bush didn’t even ask for them; they were inserted by Congress during the budget reconciliation process.
- 54% of the money from these cuts will go to households earning over one million dollars per year, the wealthiest 0.2% of households.
- 97% of the money from these cuts will go to households earning over $200,000 per year, the wealthiest 3.7% of households.
- The total cost of the cuts, including interest on accrued debt, is $197 billion over ten years.
Hmmm.
Dissident,
The interesting thing is that as a child who couldn’t afford anything at all, except courtesy of my parents and of the society around me, I received an education (and I didn’t have a choice in the matter either 🙂 ), and the benefits of that education, if any, would be mostly received well beyond the lifetimes of those who funded it. So while I do not have any children of my own, I do not mind paying for children’s education in my taxes and by other means. I hope the benefits extend beyond my lifetime, though it can’t possibly benefit me in any way. I do look for wise use of the money. I’m not imposing my values on anyone, the objective good of education is measurable, I’m sorry you didn’t understand that. Do examine the societies I mentioned, if you had to choose (and you had a choice) you’d find yourself choosing the one where the government paid more than lip service to education.
And I wasn’t educated to be called a thief or predator by you. I suppose it hurts when your pet philosophy or scientific theory for that matter, is a failure. The fact is that libertarianism doesn’t work, it does not square with human nature. As I said before, it can’t take man beyond hunter-gatherer. Societies are engineered, not theorized into existence, and engineering has to take into account the highly non-ideal nature of its material. The American Constitution, btw, is a great feat of engineering, and it is not libertarian. Humans are not naturally libertarian; it requires a great feat of government to get the illusion of a working libertarianism. We see not libertarians emerging from Somalia, or Afghanistan or Yugoslavia or Iraq, we see war-lords. We see drug-lords and pirates and armed gangs of all kinds. For libertarians to even get their voices heard, the first thing needed is strong government. Otherwise, they just get shot by the gangs.
Anyway, enough of this. I won’t visit your asylum any more.
-Arun
[Aside: the conservative/libertarian argument after Katrina was – see, government can’t work, it is the problem. But I think, I hope, after Rita, we’ll see just how well the government can work. There is nothing inherent in the nature of government that it will work poorly any more than there is something in the nature of the free market that it will work well; the failures in either case are a failure of accountability.]
If human life is a value, then vitamin C is a value, a necessity, there is no question of “imposing” this on anyone, it is part of the nature of things, at least, until we learn how to fix the broken human gene.
Education is like Vitamin C, one leads a scurvy existence without it.
If something is a value which does not need to be imposed, then why does it need to be imposed? That’s what a tax is: imposed spending.
You just don’t get it, do you? If you perceive a value in something, by all means pursue it. Pay all you want for it. It’s your right. But the moment you try to force others to pay for what *you* consider worthwile, you are nothing but a predator and an oppressor, and deserve to be called by your right name, and to be fought back by all necessary means.
Because you see, fighting oppressors, defending the right to live as we choose, not as others choose for us, is at the very core of human nature, no matter what you say. It is your stance that is literally inhuman.
Your argument is, then, based on the argument that the self is pretty much all. So far as I can see, most people don’t believe that and favour democratic governments with a measure of spending power (and that money to be spent is raised from individuals, in the end), so this point of view loses bigtime in the court of public opinion. Which is, I guess, why the LP would be better off focussing on being a pressure group (like the ACLU, or CATO, or what have you) and abandon their ridiculous political ambitions. Sure, they can try to play that as trying to shift the debate amongst the big players, but they’re getting less votes than before (at least at the national level) even as the debate moves away from them. There’s one Libertarian in Congress and he was basically elected as a Republican. Alan Greenspan, yes, is a former disciple of Ayn Rand but overall, the revolution just never happened. I think that the best approach now is to call for restraint and, most of all, a balanced budget. Indeed, a balanced budget first because that’s the most important thing (balanced over an economic cycle, at least) and then we can argue about how much restraint is required.
“Your argument is, then, based on the argument that the self is pretty much all.”
Sorry, it’s not clear to me what you mean by that. My argument is simply that each individual has the right to live his or her life as he or she sees fit, doing whatever he or she wants, as long as he or she does not violate the same right of others. This does obviously include spending the result of one’s productive endeavours as one sees fit. It does not in any way preclude collaboration and all kinds of societal involvement. In fact, if 10 (or 10 million, or five billion) people decide that they want to organize themselves in a Stalinist dictatorship, I raise no objection as long as it is their *choice*. I may well shake my head in sorrow (or laugh my ass off in glee, depending on the mood of the moment) but as long as it’s what they want, fine with me.
The moment they try to force somebody else into it against his or her will, that’s when you’ll hear me unsafe my revolver.
Please note the fundamental asymmetry between me and Arun. He wants to impose his will on others. I simply want everybody to be allowed to choose for themselves. The divide between us is therefore a moral one which, contrary to what you say in comment #23 (all in an attempt to keep the peace, I’m sure) can never be reduced to just “a different cost function to you”.
You’d best be firing your revolver around you, then. It’s not a Stalinist dictatorship, but the US (and every other Western country) has thriven on the imposition of the will of some fraction of the population on the rest of it (this is pretty clear, of course, in the collection of taxes, but it’s there right through the structure of the law). Your apparent ideal doesn’t exist; sure, you can try to bring it about (I don’t think that it’ll work) but there’s not much point claiming that you’re going to start shooting if The Man, backed by The People, starts to infringe on your right to do what you want, because that is the situation you already live in, assuming you live in a Western nation (or most other nations, for that matter).
And the question of economic policy has to be driven by some sort of cost analysis. You can emote it up to whatever you want, freedom, tyranny, whatever, but in the end, underlying it, has to be logic. The creation of the cost function itself, almost certainly, is driven by moral imperatives.
Your pessimism is depressing. Read and cheer up:
http://www.freestateproject.org/community/nh_info.php
🙂
While people who want (as) libertarian (as is possible) government move to New Hampshire, those who want a Christian government are moving to South Carolina. Perhaps that was the original purpose of the states in the Union, but I suppose the insistence on slavery put an end to that.
Meanwhile, it turns out our current President has presided over the greatest increase of discretionary non-military spending in recent years.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/23/175346/446
talks about it, while the sorry state of the republic is discussed here
http://prudentbear.com/internationalperspective.asp
Kind of goes to show that the label attached to a politician or any other person for that matter, means nothing, it is what one does that counts. Who you are is determined by what you do, not by what you believe in.
There is a nice graphic in the NYT (unfortunately hidden behind subscription) about how corporations embellish their earnings. The corporations can’t say – the government made us do this.
We learn for instance, that Cisco’s 70 cents earning per share should really be 53 cents, because of dilution by stock options. We learn that Exxon Mobil has $26 billion in pension obligations but only $18 billion in pension fund assets. All in all, it adds up to big money. The problem that obfuscation pays off. It pays off big for the executives because their bonuses are tied to earnings. (Don’t try blaming executive compensation on the government.) If the problem is with ignorant or stupid investors and not with the free market as such, the same can be said about any other human system, including government.