Earmarks eliminated but waste remains
Fund the US or fund us?
| Expecting politicians to spend public money responsibly is like expecting Paris Hilton to shop at Goodwill. Never happen. And can you blame them? If you got a boatload of mullah, more coming in everyday, and if you have to use it or lose it, well, it’s not rational to expect anybody to be thrifty then -- no matter what they promise. |
by Jeffery J. Smith
July, 2007
On a cut-spending platform, Republicans won Congress in the mid-1990s. Once in power, they engaged in a feeding frenzy at the public trough. In the House, the number of earmarks -- home-district projects whose funding is inserted into spending bills -- went from 3,000 in 1996 to 15,000 in 2005.
Making similar promises, Democrats wrested Congress back last year, then funded their pet projects sneakily. They did strip bills of all earmarks, but asked federal agencies to fund the projects anyway from their individual budgets. Under which shell is the pea?
Reformers suggest ways to cut the fat. Like, grant the president the power of a line-item veto. But the chief could leave in pork for his party and cut out worthy projects wanted by a different party. Or, require public disclosure of Congressional earmark sponsors. Some pork-artists might, might become too embarrassed to openly insert more wasteful spending. (LA Times, 12 July 2007)
A more basic and thorough solution is to shift discretionary spending from politicians to citizens. Here are a few ways how:
- One, every time Congress proposes spending on some project, that bill must explain where the money’s coming from, and get the beneficiaries of the project to pay for it. Want to build a bridge to nowhere up in Alaska for a quarter billion dollars? Then get the drivers who’ll use it and the landowners at either end of the bridge to pay for it.
Two, put the budget on the ballot, as do some cities in Brazil. Citizens wouldn’t vote for every line item but would allot proportions to major spending categories, such as the military, transportation, public health, schooling, parks and the environment, even corporate welfare. Then average out the votes to figure out the percentages.
Three, replace subsidized services with a dividend to citizens. What’s so efficient about us paying politicians to pay bureaucrats to pay providers to serve us? We could just share public revenue equitably and use our dividend checks to choose our own teachers and doctors.
Not only do politicians spend too much and spend that wastefully, they also spend the wrong money. They tax and spend the value of goods that individuals produce -- buildings, businesses, income -- instead of recovering and sharing the values that society generates.
What values do we together engender? When people spend money for something nobody created, that thing’s value cannot be from an individual, it can only come from society. Where is land, which nobody made, most expensive? Where population is most dense. If somebody can claim credit for population density, please stand up. Oil grows expensive not because each year Exxon makes it more powerful but because more people want to burn it and no one can create it. Socially generated values are what we pay for nature and for privilege.
To recover our own values, government would charge for the little pieces of paper it grants its clientele. Want a title to land, a lease to a resource, a license to bandwidth in the spectrum, a permit to emit pollutants? Pay society full market value for diminishing the opportunity of everyone else to use that part of the natural world.
If we ran government like a business and charged as much as the market would bear for exclusive titles, how big a dividend could government pay us, we the stakeholders? By getting the going rate for every privilege from deed to corporate charter, government would raise many trillions every year. Your share, as an American voter, could be anywhere from $8000 to $12000 each year.
Enjoying that dividend, we could get by with so much less government that we could shrink it. Being smaller and less expensive, it could forgo much taxation. So citizens would pay less tax, yet collect a multi-thousand dividend.
Spending their own money, citizens would be less likely to fund a bridge to nowhere and more likely buy just what best meets their individual needs. We might still need politicians -- for the jokes if nothing else -- but not to spend our own money for us.
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Jeffery J. Smith runs the Forum on Geonomics.
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Also see: Bush's State of the Union -- Vague and Sketchy
Cost Overruns Appear Certain But Govt Doesn't Care
Cut Government-Funded Pollution |
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