P.J. O’Rourke said it succinctly: “Giving money and power to the
government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage
boys.”
We all know the examples — road construction at $100 million
per mile, money tossed down a courthouse rathole so portly
teenagers can take a shot at blaming McDonald’s for their
super-sized posteriors, the free Cadillacs and $145,000 salaries
for the lucky duckies on the new Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board,
plus 20.25 cents per mile.
All told, annual spending by state and local government in
Pennsylvania is now up to $8,213 per capita, according to the
latest numbers from Matthew Brouillette, president of the
Harrisburg-based Commonwealth Foundation — or $32,852, on average,
for a family of four, and that’s not counting federal spending.
Some of the money for that local and state spending comes from
borrowing — money that will have to be paid down the road, either
by us or our kids. Still, the bulk of this local and state spending
is funded by local wage taxes, the state income tax, property
taxes, or by the taxes we pay every time we stop at the pump or go
out to eat. Additional funds come from the taxes and fees collected
from businesses, a form of taxation that simply inflates the prices
of everything we buy.
Add federal taxes to these state and local levies and the Tax
Foundation reports that Americans, on average, will spend 107 days
this year working for taxes — 70 days to pay their federal taxes
and 37 more days to pay state and local taxes. By comparison, we’re
saving, on average, only the equivalent of two days of work per
year.
Add further the price of mushrooming regulations and lawsuits,
plus the price of slower income growth due to the disincentives to
investment and work caused by a puffed up and overly intrusive
government, and we’re easily at the point where we’re
half-socialized, and more than halfway to where the American Dream
has been turned into a nightmarish scenario of centrally planned
idiocy, confiscatory taxation, bureaucracy run amok, and a blizzard
of paperwork, zany lawsuits and red tape.
Already, we’re at the place where the state of Louisiana
requires Shamille Peters, a black woman in New Orleans, to have a
license to arrange and sell flowers. “The test to get the license
is judged by existing florists, and they routinely fail two-thirds
of the applicants,” explains Peters.
“Today,” writes Brian Doherty, a senior editor at
Reason magazine, “Social Security and Medicare and
Medicaid seem on track to lead Americans to working more than half
their lives merely to feed a government machine dedicated to
kicking back some of their own money to them, accompanied by lots
of nannying, bullying, commands, and a large skim off the top.”
Adam Smith got it right more than two centuries ago, in The
Wealth of Nations. He wrote, “There is no art which one
government sooner learns of another than that of draining money
from the pockets of the people.”
Still, bad as it is to have the sticky fingers of a bungling
government rummaging around in our wallets, what’s worse is a
federal government with a bloated $2.57 trillion budget that can’t
deliver on its most basic of responsibilities — the safety and
security of the American people.
Altogether, that $2.57 trillion is equal to $8,700 in federal
spending for every man, woman and child in the nation, on top of
what’s being spent at the state and local level, and we still don’t
have a system in place to effectively inspect the shipping
containers that are arriving at our ports every day from overseas,
or a system to adequately scrutinize the tons of toxic chemicals
that are going through our cities in trucks and rail cars.
We are, in fact, well over three years past the attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, and there’s still no biosecurity program in place that
can stop pathogens from walking out of U.S. laboratories, the turf
war continues between the FBI and CIA over who’ll pocket the
largest slice of the anti-terrorism budget, a full 97 percent of
the nuclear material stockpile in the former Soviet Union remains
outside the range of any U.S. monitoring, the commercial cargo
being shipped on passenger planes is still being ineffectually
inspected, and we’re still protecting our nuclear reactors against
a suicide plane attack with local cops and pea shooters.
As Thomas Jefferson put it: “…I own that I am not a friend to
a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.” In our time,
oppressive enough to grab 107 days of work and still not get the
job done.
