Of course maybe you got something out of the Cash for Clunkers program. And good for you if you did. At least, when you bought a new car, you didn’t pay GM or Chrysler twice; you paid Nissan once. (Meanwhile, will some liberal brainbox explain to me why it’s a good thing to junk a useful machine? How does destroying something that’s worth money make us worth more money?)
Paying double for everything didn’t start with the financial crisis or even with Democratic control of Congress. Paying double is an integral part of the modern welfare state.
Beginning with welfare. Your tax dollars pay for federal, state, and local welfare programs. Then you pay for your daughter to pursue a career in “holistic dance liberation.” You subsidize your son’s Internet start-up idea—Buttbook, a Web site you go on with all your enemies. Plus there’s your perennial bum of a brother-in-law, tweaking on meth in the doublewide and watching Cartoon Network on the high-definition television you paid for.
Same with schools. Your school taxes pay for Alger Hiss Public High School, conveniently right down the street, inconveniently full of heroin and 9mm handguns. So you also pay tuition at Friar Torquemata Parochial High.
At school, home, or work the most important function of government is to protect your person and property. That’s what the police department is for. And you get to pay the police and pay for burglar alarms, private security patrols, and guard dogs, such as our family’s guard dog, Pinky-Wink. (For the information of any prospective burglars, Pinky-Wink isn’t really a Boston terrier. He’s... um... a Rhodesian ridgeback, weighing 100... make that 150 pounds. Uh, the kids named him. Stop yapping, Pinky-Wink.)
The second most important function of government, in my opinion, is trash pickup. And people in government can start with themselves, as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, municipal garbage collectors pick up the trash from your house. But not until you’ve sorted it into the proper recycling bins, which you do by picking up the trash from your house. With government, what you don’t pay double for in money you pay double for in time and effort.
But usually it’s money. When you pay a hospital bill you’re really paying two hospital bills—one bill for you because you have a job and/or private insurance and can pay the hospital and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn’t have a job and/or private insurance and can’t pay the hospital. Your tennis elbow underwrites the Alger Hiss Public High School student’s 9mm handgun wound.
And never is paying double as doubly troubling as it is in the matter of retirement. You have to pay into Social Security and into your IRA and your Keogh plan and put some money in your savings account too. You have to pay Medicare tax and buy Medicare supplemental insurance and contribute to a medical savings account and make doctor bill copayments besides. And the funding for Social Security and Medicare is so underfinanced and actuarially shaky that you cannot be certain those programs will exist by the time you’re eligible for them. And you’re 64½.
Would you like to know what taxpayers are getting out of this deal? You and me both. How do we benefit from this twinning, this twoing, this duality? Damned if I can figure it out. Barkeep, make that a double.
10
Being Penny-Wise
One thing that can be said in favor of our political system is that it doesn’t change much or often, for better or for worse. The American government is a body of enormous mass, subject to considerable friction, but possessing tremendous momentum. This explains why we learned nothing in that high school civics class. If we wanted to understand government we should have paid more attention to the high school physics class we flunked.
Or gotten a job on the railroad. Government is a mile of boxcars filled with lard. The locomotive is, at best, the Little Engine That Could and more often something from Lionel. You and I are unlikely to get this train moving by pushing on the caboose even if we get all our friends to help. But once it’s in motion we’d better not stand in its way. Derailment is an option if we pry up the tracks. What a mess. And this metaphor is making less sense than a physics lesson, especially if we take it into the switch yard of government planning.
I’ll try one more time. Government isn’t the vehicle for lard, government is the lardass itself, waddling slowly down the path of least resistance, changing course only when it has to because of social forest fire, public opinion mud slide, or the earthquake of war. No matter how much we wanted the government to change course, and no matter how much we approve of the new direction government has taken, we were better off without the catastrophe that made the government turn left or right.
You may like the New Deal, but a worldwide depression with its various side effects such as Hitler was a high price to pay for WPA murals. I may like Ronald Reagan, but the earth would be a happier planet if he hadn’t been necessary. We applaud the outcome of the Civil War and the civil rights movement, but an alternative—less costly in blood and treasure—was to not treat black people like shit for five hundred years.
That our government can’t be easily budged or deflected is beneficial to some extent. Better this than the third world plan where government is changed more often than socks. But the monumental gravity of government causes bad programs and policies not only to endure but to become enshrined. And the immovable object/irresistible force conundrum of government makes it something—a high school physics quiz, a train wreck, a vastly overweight friend who begs to come on our kayak trip—that we want to avoid.
The least little manifestation of government will suffice as an example. How much would you think it would cost the U.S. mint to produce a penny? You’re half right. To manufacture this little item of pocket clutter is about twice as expensive as its nominal value. And its nominal value is nominal indeed. A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a pennywhistle or a piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you’re managing the U.S. mint, buy a penny.
The problem is the cost of zinc, which is what a “copper” is actually made of. For the past twenty-five years a pennyweight of copper has been worth considerably more than a penny. And we wouldn’t want our money to have any actual monetary value, would we? That would violate all of the economic thinking that has been done since John Maynard Keynes. Therefore the United States began making pennies out of less expensive zinc with a thin plating of copper for the sake of tradition and to keep Lincoln from looking like he’d been stamped out of a galvanized feed trough. But then a rising commodities market drove up zinc prices. (Maybe China needs a lot of zinc for, oh, I don’t know, stabilizing the lead paint on Barbie dolls so that our girls don’t start beating their girls on math tests, or something.)
I learned about the penny’s cost overrun in one of those little five- or six-column-inch filler items that are now the mainstay of the once-mighty wire services. This particular squib ran a while ago in the Boston Globe, but I didn’t come across it until recently. I buy the Globe only for the comics, the Sudoku, and to train the puppy. I was arranging the sheets of newsprint on the kitchen floor, being careful to keep the editorial pages facedown. (I don’t want to give any encouragement to the Boston terrier’s natural inbred liberalism.) Anyway, there was the penny article.
I suppose, as a fiscal conservative and—at least until the cocktail hour—a responsible citizen, I should have been indignant. But, to tell the truth, I was hopping about with glee. (Something that, by the way, is not advisable in a kitchen’s puppy-training area.) You see, there are times when even we staunchest of libertarians lose our faith, or our faithlessness. That is to say, we lose our faith in our loss of faith in government. We catch ourselves thinking things like, “Whoa, what about the subprime mortgage market? That sub part was one moldy hoagie. Maybe there should be more government regulatory oversight.” Or, “Wait a minute, just because I’ve been to the emergency room for string trimmer injuries six times in the past two years is no reason for my health insurance to be canceled. Since when is stupidity a preexisting condition?”
/> Libertarians are only human. When we’re tired and stressed we’re occasionally vulnerable to the kind of easy self-gratification and delusional thinking that leads to government dependency. But then comes a story like the penny costing two pennies and it’s instant cold turkey.
In for a penny, in for $16 million of wasted tax dollars spent to put eight billion pennies into circulation each year. Take care of the pennies and the pounds (of flesh extracted by the IRS) will take care of themselves. A penny for your thoughts, and I’m not just picking your brain; I’m offering a 100 percent return on investment.
The good news is you have a lot more money than you thought you did. We all do. A quick survey of my home indicates that the average American household has something on the order of a million pennies stashed in coffee cans, cigar boxes, quart jars, kitchen junk drawers, children’s piggy banks, under car seats, between couch cushions, plus the two pennies in my old loafers from junior high in a box in the attic. So it’s new home theater–sized flat screen TVs all ‘round as soon as we get done building our backyard zinc smelters.
The bad news is that government is not just inert but corruptly inert. Various public interest groups with (excuse me) “common cents” have been trying to get rid of the penny for years. The Treasury Department itself does not like wasting $16 million a year on pennies when there are still so many banks, investment firms, and insurance companies in need of huge executive bonuses. The penny is a coin slot-jamming curse to the vending machine industry. It is a cash register pantload and change-making pain to retailers (not to mention a barrier to rounding all prices up a nickel). And the artificial demand for zinc created by the penny is anathema to the companies that have to pay more for zinc as a result. Everyone from the makers of buckets to the purveyors of cream to spread on cute lifeguard noses is mad at the penny.
But to no avail. According to the somewhat smelly and discolored Boston Globe, Jarden Zinc Products, the nation’s only supplier of the zinc “blanks” from which pennies are struck, has managed to block legislation banishing the penny. It has done so mainly by paying the political consulting firm Baker & Daniels LLP $180,000 to lobby against such legislation.
Then again, is this really bad news? It’s not great that we the public are paying double for something that isn’t worth a red cent. But it is rather wonderful that for a mere $180,000 you can get government to sit there like a lump. Consider how many times in history governments should have sat there like a lump. What if Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, Austria-Hungary’s commencement of the First World War, or Napoleonic France’s invasion of Russia could have been prevented for $180,000. Ah, the miracle of democracy—always letting us get our 2¢ in.
PART II
What Is to Be Done?
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others?
—Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address
1
The U.S.S. Thresher Bailout and the Washing-Machine-for-Her-Birthday Stimulus Plan
Did the 2008–2009 bailout of banks and financial institutions work? Well, here we are, a bit recessed but not suffering from a Great Depression. If John Steinbeck were alive and writing his Pulitzer Prize–winning proletarian novel, the Joads would be fleeing the rust belt rather than the dust bowl, and they’d still be headed toward a chimerical paradise of economic plenty, though, in this case, Washington. Instead of a Flivver, they’d be packed into a Nissan Murano, down payment courtesy of Cash for Clunkers. And the grapes in The Grapes of Wrath would be zinfandel.
As for the stimulus plan, the results seem to be PG-13 at best. Opinions differ on how stimulated we are. Whatever Harry Reid is feeling, Miranda Cosgrove on podcast does nothing for me.
Here, according to the Congressional Budget Office, are some of the spending programs authorized by the $787 billion “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.”
$9.3 billion to “Invest in rail transportation” (Last train to Clarksville!)
$6 billion to “Clean up sites formerly used by the Defense Department” (Find someplace to bury “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”)
$4.6 billion to “Provide additional money to the Army Corps of Engineers” (A basement dehumidifier for the French Quarter.)
$4 billion to “Provide additional financing for state and local law enforcement” (Taser guns for school crossing guards.)
$4 billion to “Repair and modernize public housing units” (Where would you like this crate of bioengineered cockroaches, Mrs. Gilhooey?”)
$3.2 billion to “Provide tax break to General Motors” (We broke Oldsmobile, we broke Pontiac...)
$2.8 billion to “Provide additional money to the Department of Homeland Security” (“Secretary Napolitano, we just received this fax from Nigeria, from highly placed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. We could make a fortune!”)
$2.5 billion to “Provide additional financing to improve communications in rural areas” (“I’m away down here in the holler, Clem! Ain’t heard a word yer sayin’! Why doncha use that there new megaphone you got from the government man?”)
$2 billion to “Provide additional child care” (Give an extra saw-buck to the babysitter and let her buy her own six-pack.)
$2 billion to “Support battery manufacture” (Every toy imported from China will be required by law to be “batteries not included.”)
$2 billion to “Finance renovations and technology upgrade at community health centers” (New rectal thermometers for all.)
$1.3 billion to “Invest in air transportation” (The bad news: they’re charging you $50 for each piece of carry-on baggage. The good news: you get to lie down in the overhead bin.)
$1.2 billion to “Construct and repair veterans’ hospitals and cemeteries” (“Found a place to bury ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’!”)
$1 billion to “Provide water to rural areas and Western areas impacted by draught” (“Here’s a bottle of Pellegrino for you, and a bottle of Pellegrino for you, and...)
$1 billion to “Provide money for 2010 census” (“Counted eleventy more Martha Coakley voters hiding in the Big Dig!”)
$830 million to “Provide additional financing for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration” (Sun’s out! Surf’s up!)
$650 million to “Provide coupon to convert to digital television” (“Hey, Lulu May, come on up outa the holler! HeeHaw reruns is on TVLand!”)
$555 million to “Help defense employees sell homes” (Paint walls a neutral color. Keep lawn trimmed. Flowers in a jar on the kitchen counter add a homey touch for prospective buyers.)
$510 million to “Repair and modernize 4,200 Native American housing units” (Hold on 17, double down on face cards and tens.)
$500 million to “Help states and local school districts track student data and improve teacher quality” (Everybody’s grades have been posted on Facebook. Bow and muzzle-loader season on teachers opens November 1.)
$500 million to “Help states find jobs for unemployed workers” (Get your brother-in-law a job making lists of strange things the federal government is spending stimulus money on in your state.)
$400 million to “Provide grants to states for energy-efficient vehicles and infrastructure” (Mr. Mayor, here’s your bike.)
$300 million to “Provide incentives for hiring disadvantaged workers” (Unless their disadvantage is that they’re here illegally from Guatemala and are willing to work doing anything.)
$300 million to “Replace older vehicles owned by the federal government with hybrid and electric cars” (“Mr. President, it’s Segway 1.”)
$231 million to “Expand national service program” (“My name is Ben Bernanke, I’ll be your server tonight. The specials are incredibly expensive...”)
$192 million to “Equalize mass transit and parking benefits” (New York City will park its subway cars in your carport, but you can park your SUV on the subway tracks.)
$70 million to “H
elp states provide services to homeless children” (“Kids, if you’d care to be seated on this piece of cardboard on the sidewalk, Ben will take your drink orders.”)
And so on with ninety-four other interesting ways to spend your tax dollars.
Assuming the American economy needed a stimulus, there was an alternate way to provide it. For only a couple of hundred billion more than the cost of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act (and who’s even counting anymore?), all federal personal income taxes could have been eliminated for a year. (Personal income tax receipts were estimated at $953 billion in 2009.30) This was the suggestion of my ex-congressman in the Second District of New Hampshire, Charlie Bass. With his display of common sense, you can see why Charlie is my ex-congressman.
A yearlong tax holiday would be quite the stimulus around my house. Muffin, age twelve, could get a webcam to put on her own iCarly-type show except with more giggling. Poppet, age ten, has been begging for a herd of miniature Nubian goats and a chance for a slot on the national goat rodeo circuit. We would be able to pay for her fancy, spangled goat-roping outfits, no problem. Buster, age six, wants a child-sized Enola Gay with nerf A-bomb. My wife would like to drive her Kia Rondo over a cliff. And I have my eye on a new muzzle-loader so I can bag Mr. Mannsburden, my high school civics teacher, if he’s still alive.
The advantage of a tax abatement over a stimulus plan is that, instead of idiots in Washington spending your and my money, us idiots get to spend our own. Our spending will be foolish, but not as foolish as government spending for the simple reason of Committee Brain—individuals aren’t as stupid as a group. It’s the difference between Harvard and the Harvard football team, which any eleven kids from the Pop Warner League back where I come from in Ohio could whip by a dozen TDs without resort to the forward pass.