There has been a lot said and written in the last couple of days
about a new poll showing that only 20% or so of Americans “trust
the government.” The news is being gravely received and treated
as further and redundant proof that the country is in a bad way.
To me, though, it sounds like pretty good news. We need
more distrust of government for the very good reason that
government is pretty much an untrustworthy enterprise. If more
Americans had been inclined to distrust the government five, ten,
twenty, or more years ago, we might not be in the fix we are in
today and our distrust might not be so bilious.
Wouldn’t it, for instance, have been a good thing
if we had distrusted the entire Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac
contraption which was the foundation of the housing bubble that,
when it burst, led to the economic distress that has so many of
us feeling distrustful and worse? If we had been a little
skeptical of the government’s claim that Fanny and Freddy were
not backed by the full faith and etc. of the government and would
not be bailed out if they got into trouble, then they might not
have grown so fat on preposterous mortgages that they had to be
bailed out using the full faith and etc. And we might all have
jobs and more money today. But the people who ran those
Government Sponsored Enterprises — and got hog-rich doing it —
assured us that all was well. And we trusted them.
We can’t claim innocence. This wasn’t a “fool me once,
shame on you,” thing. By the time of the housing crash, we all
had plenty of reason to know better. Still, we go on trusting, so
shame on us.
We would, I think, be a lot better off today if we’d been a
lot less trusting back in what we are all supposed to think of as
a better, less dishonest times. Wouldn’t the nation be better off
its citizens hadn’t accepted with docility the assertion, made in
1967, that Medicare would cost a mere $12 billion in 1990? Turns
out that the actual number was a little closer to $110 billion.
But how could any good citizen actually distrust a government
that gets it wrong by a mere factor of almost 10? And how
absolutely nihilistic of him to doubt that the Health Care Reform
legislation so recently passed will both expand coverage and
reduce the deficit.
Where’s the trust?
Back when he was campaigning for the job, President Obama
said he would do something about this trust deficit, declaring
that, “…when it comes to what’s wrong with this country, the
American people are not the problem. The American people are the
answer. The American people want to trust in our government again
— we just need a government that will trust in us. And making
government accountable to the people isn’t just a cause of this
campaign — it’s been a cause of my life for two decades.”
Well, on the matter of a different deficit, the one that
has people worried about the world they will be leaving to their
children and grandchildren, President Obama has resorted to an
old Washington scam that we have seen before and should, by now,
distrust instinctively. He has appointed a commission to study
the matter and get back to us with recommendations.
Commissions like this one are established to do what
everyone in Washington wants done (increase taxes, close useless
military bases) but lacks the courage to do.
This commission will be chaired by Erskin Bowles who once
worked in the government, for Bill Clinton, and Alan Simpson who
used to work in the U.S. Senate where what they do, year after
year, is vote for things they can’t raise money to pay for. Among
the other members of this commission will be Senator Richard
Durbin of Illinois where the people in government ran the state
into an economic ditch before some of them, but not nearly
enough, went off to jail.
That anyone who is now, or ever has been, a member of the
United States Senate is serving on the commission charged with
reducing the deficit is prima face cause to distrust the whole
enterprise. But, of course, we know what the commission is going
to recommend before they even start running up bills to decorate
their office space.
Get ready for the Erskine & Alan VAT. That would be a
Value Added Tax.
When asked about the VAT, Robert Gibbs, this
administration’s Secretary of Distrust said, “This is not
something the president has proposed, nor is it under
consideration.”
Which pretty much seals the deal.
Once we get the VAT, maybe we’ll look back at that 20%
figure and wonder how it could ever have been that high.
