Musings Of An Indie WriterScreeds
Sunday, September 26, 2004
$5 Billion Per Clue
February 5, 2003
It’s amazing the lengths a politician will go to avoid the recognition of a fundamental fact, if that fact would undermine his public posture.
Yesterday, Gifford Miller, the Speaker of the New York City Council, delivered himself of a rant about unfair federal and state treatment of New York City. Mr. Miller’s major complaint was that, by his numbers, the state and federal governments suck about $5 billion more in tax revenues out of the city than they return in locale-targeted spending.
Now, anyone who understands the first thing about coercive taxation and government spending would hope that the Archangel with the Clue Shotgun has Mr. Miller in his sights. Unfortunately, Mr. Miller, a Democrat, is incapable for political reasons of stating the moral of his own tale of woe.
Let’s be perfectly fair about this. Governor George Pataki dismissed Mr. Miller’s cri de coeur, implying that Mr. Miller might have a bit too much time on his hands. So neither a ranking city Democrat nor the state’s top Republican was willing to bare the heart of the matter publicly.
What we choose to buy for ourselves with our own money is seldom reckoned up in the vicious, grasping way that characterizes squabbles over government spending. (I said seldom. Your argument with your spouse over the new car you want is exceptional. Besides, one shouldn’t air one’s dirty laundry in public.) But when others are seizing our cash and making our purchasing decisions for us, things get rank pretty fast. The higher the numbers go, the more savage the exchanges of fire.
Could it be any other way? Taxation creates a pool of “public funds,” which are then spent under political direction. Someone’s going to get the money; why shouldn’t it be you? And someone’s going to get the benefits purchased with the money; why shouldn’t that be you as well?
In the United States, “you” is any of 300 million people, subject to 88,000 governmental bodies with taxing and spending authority, who buy from some four million above-ground businesses with products or services to sell. That’s enough special interests, great and small, to populate a very large, very ugly brawl. Because those 88,000 governments tax and spend so much money each year—over $4 trillion, in total—the incentives to participate in that brawl are enormous. Now and again they overwhelm the moral sense, and the fight gets dirty.
There is no averting this, once we decide to tax. The whole point of taxation is that government requires goods and services that private parties wouldn’t buy, whether for themselves or for others. Though this assumption is open to challenge, few people disbelieve it.
The very characteristics that make taxation appear inevitable for genuinely public purposes—the military, the police, the courts, and perhaps a few other items—make it the ultimate source of dissension as soon as it departs from those functions. If Mr. Miller hasn’t noticed that yet, he should.
The fruits of coercive taxation are always unevenly distributed, since it is in the nature of things that those with more will be mulcted for more, usually without receiving more in return from the State. New York City has one of the highest per capita incomes of all the municipal regions in the country. If Mr. Miller hasn’t noticed that yet, he should.
The Constitutional constraint of government to a few, well defined functions was supposed to mollify those who were taxed to pay for those things. The functions were self-evidently needful. The bounds on them “guaranteed” that their cost would not rise without limit. A combination of public spirit and benevolence was expected to keep taxpaying Americans from resenting their non-taxpaying brethren, or from struggling to turn the machinery of State to their own purposes—as long as the Constitutional limits were observed and the State’s bills were kept modest.
I won’t go into the devolutionary history of the thing. Regular Palace readers will already know most of it. But I will note that our elected officials, such as Mr. Miller, often talk as if they were unaware of its logic, and of the consequences of flouting it.
We tolerate this rather too often. If a man is smart enough to represent tens of thousands of us in a legislative body, he ought to have sense enough to know that the larger the boodle, the more viciously the thieves will fight over its division. Public spirit is always least evident among the feeders at the public trough.
But Mr. Miller, intelligent or not, is a Democrat—the Party of the Special Interests, whether those interests be regional, occupational, associational, or ideological. Now that Grover Cleveland is gone, the one thing a Democrat cannot be expected to do is condemn taking money from Peter to bestow it upon Paul. Democrats need Paul’s vote. (They hope to hornswoggle Peter into voting for them as well, but that’s covered in the advanced course.)
What the Gifford Millers of our political class can do is thunder about “unfairness” in the allocation of public funds, as if the system were intended to distribute its blessings in exact proportion to the contributions of the populace by region, occupation, affiliation, political allegiance, race, creed, sex, and national origin. But thirty seconds’ of hard thought makes it plain that the system is functioning exactly as its managers intend, and that Mr. Miller’s complaints are entirely about being on the dirty end of the stick.
Could we have those thirty seconds in a single, coordinated, nationwide burst, please? Say at Noon on Friday? $5 billion is a lot to pay for a clue.
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