Open season on the public sector is misguided

As if to honor last year’s centennial of Mark Twain’s death, American political debate is currently proving the truth of his maxim: “It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you do know that ain’t so.”

In Washington (and Madison) this week, politicians are hacking away at government budgets under the Tea Party theorem: Government spending equals bad, cuts in government spending equal good. It matters not what is sliced, only that the percentage be high enough.

This bit of wisdom brings to mind the old definition of a cynic: someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

And so, down with funds for Head Start for preschoolers; Pell grants for college kids; policeman on the streets, fireman at the ready; roads drivable, bridges safe, airports functioning, teachers in the classroom; regulators to help keep our air clean, our banks solvent and our drugs safe; and yes, soldiers on the front line.

What about lost jobs?
These are all shared — public — needs that we tax ourselves to provide. We ignore that tradeoff in this open season on the public sector. During last year’s election campaign, most of the talk was about the need for jobs. Unemployment is still around 9 percent, yet today the only apparent imperative is to reduce spending and government debt. How quickly we forget.

How cutting public budgets will create jobs is not clear. Nor is the analysis that tells us we’re suffering this recession because of government spending. Nor do we make much progress in reducing federal debt if we concentrate only on discretionary domestic spending — as the budget bill that passed in the House of Representatives does — while ignoring the big pots of money in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Department of Defense.

It’s as if Willy Sutton decided to rob corner grocery stores because those were easier targets, rather than banks, which had most of the money but were heavily guarded.

Ronald Reagan was a great American, but he helped perpetuate a myth when he proclaimed that “government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”

Neither statement is true. Government is, by itself, neither the solution nor the problem; it is, though, an essential part of the equation, even if the Tea Party faithful think otherwise.

Belief, but not truth
But then, Americans these days believe a number of things that are simply not true: That foreign aid is a big part of the budget (it’s a fraction of 1 percent). That civil servants get compensated better than their private sector counterparts (not so when you look at similar jobs — compare apples to apples — and allow for education and other job qualifications). That Barack Obama is a foreigner (or Muslim, a socialist, a Nazi, or perhaps all of the above).

Most fundamentally wrong of all is the notion that reducing government spending is the answer to a maiden’s prayer. Yes, we need to make government better and more efficient (including in its regulatory functions). But to make any noticeable dent in the debt we also need to fix Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and whittle down defense spending.

Deficit hawks like Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin say that elections have consequences, an argument you didn’t hear from Tea Party adherents after Democrats won control of Congress and the White House in 2008.

If there’s a consistent message from the elections of 2008 and 2010, and countless opinion polls, it’s that citizens are tired of the same old heated rhetoric, empty promises, slash-and-burn partisan politics. They are looking for solutions to problems, actual results that make their lives better. Too bad that’s not what we’re getting.

Dick Virden is a retired Foreign Service Officer who lives in Plymouth.