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How We Rely on Government
Sometimes I envy the "government-is-the-problem" folks. They have a much easier time thinking up simple, clever slogans, like "it's your money and we're going to give it back to you." The surface-level appeal of that rightwing battle cry in the debate over federal tax cuts was hard to deny. It resonates, as they say.
A one-sentence mantra for our side is harder to craft. For example: you turn over a certain percentage of your income in taxes and if the government takes in more than it expected because the economy is booming (take a breath) then the burden is on government to come up with ways to use that money for the common good-which should be easy because there's so damned much that needs doing.
See what I mean? A sound bite it's not.
But something happened that illustrates the shallowness of the right's argument better than any sound bite: Hurricane Floyd.
When they vocally demanded help from government to recoup and rebuild, the flooded-out business owners in Bound Brook made the case quite well, whether they meant to our not, for why it's a good idea for government to have extra cash lying around. It's not about ideology on this level. It's about having the capacity to do what needs to be done.
Contrast that with this sentiment: "Our principal problems are not the product of great global shifts or other vast, unseen forces. They are the creation of government." So spoke Governor Whitman the day she took office in 1994. She proceeded to keep her campaign promise of a 30 percent state income tax cut. That's old news, why bring it up now? Because her response to the Bound Brook situation was to beat up on the federal government for not doing enough. Newspaper editorials properly criticized the Governor for using the particularly insensitive argument that we should give more to New Jerseyans in need and less to third world countries.
Even more egregious, though, was that she made the criticism at all. Politicians in the vanguard of stripping government of its capacity to help those in need should keep still at times like this. As the old joke said, people who live in glass houses should get dressed in the basement.
Forget Washington and just look at New Jersey. The Governor's tax cut denied state government almost $4 billion between 1994 and 1998. That's how much more tax revenue would have been collected if the rates had stayed where they were when she took office. That money could have done some good in Bound Brook, where the "problem" was quite clearly the creation of Mother Nature, not government. The money could have done a lot of things in a lot of places. But it wasn't there to do anything because the appeal of giving people back "their" money wins out in today's political climate over the notion that we are a community and government is a vehicle to allow us to help each other.
Of all the people in New Jersey who saw their income tax bill go down (and the richest got back the most, let's remember) some no doubt made donations to the Red Cross or other agencies that help flood victims. Others did whatever they wanted with it because, as Rep. Bill Archer, R-Texas, repeated during the tax-cut debate, "people know best how to spend their own money." Well, they do and they don't. They spend most of it in their own self-interest. And while no one has the right to tell them not to, we do have the right to demand of our leaders that they not "refund" money ostensibly collected to help society just because we took in more than we expected.
Things happen, and not just a hurricane now estimated to be, at $250 million in damages, New Jersey's worst natural disaster ever. AIDS reaches epidemic proportions. School buildings built decades ago crumble and need to be replaced. People lose jobs and health care benefits because of economic trends they have nothing to do with. It's hard enough to respond to the problems we know about, let alone the unforeseen future. And yet we have leaders who try to have it both ways, working to shrink government's capacity to do what needs to be done and then lashing out at how it uses its dwindling resources. How long are we going to stand for that?
A version of this NJPP commentary appeared in The Asbury Park Press.
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