By CHRIS POWELL
President Trump may be the most grotesque politician trying to buy votes, what with his plan to have the federal government send $5,000 to every adult U.S. citizen if Republicans maintain their majorities in Congress after November’s election. But there’s plenty of vote buying in Connecticut as well.
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Governor Lamont and the Democrats promise more social programs and reimbursements to make up for the Trump administration’s cuts to federal welfare programs.
The Republican candidate for governor, state Sen. Ryan Fazio, and the Republican minority in the General Assembly propose hundreds of millions of dollars in state tax cuts.
It’s all silly.
The federal government is $40 trillion in debt, annual interest on which is greater than what the government spends on the military. As a practical matter the federal government is insolvent, with its debt so large that it can never be repaid in any practical sense, only inflated away with more devaluation of the dollar.
While Connecticut state government reports a budget surplus of $400 million, its unfunded pension liabilities still exceed $50 billion even though they have been reduced somewhat in recent years. In effect, whether with new social programs or tax cuts, state government will still be borrowing from its pension obligations, pushing those obligations deeper into the future where they will be paid by taxpayers yet unborn who never had the benefit of the pensioners’ services.
What is most telling is that there is so little effort to reduce government spending.
On the federal level, the modest reductions the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have imposed on welfare spending have been far exceeded by increases in spending in other areas, like the military.
On the state level, the Democrats would never think of cutting spending, since they are the party of government for its own sake, no matter how ineffective.
Last week Fazio and state Republican legislators did propose some spending cuts, but apart from eliminating state government medical coverage for illegal immigrants, an incentive to illegal immigration, the bigger cuts the Republicans propose are problematical, like reducing Medicaid payments for indigent citizens, whose coverage is already marginal.
At least it’s fair to assume that the Republicans would be inclined to spend less than the Democrats.
The biggest problem is that the country and the state are living far beyond their means. That’s what the unpayable federal debt is about — the country’s having induced or coerced other countries to buy this country’s bonds, which are not financing new productive capacity but only current consumption. A quarter or more of what government in the United States spends probably would never be spent if the country had to pay for it by itself.
That includes much of what state government spends, since so much of state spending comes from federal grants and reimbursements.
Realizing that the United States has no political will to control costs, other countries are tiring of paying for U.S. overconsumption and are reducing their financing.
The ability of the federal government and state government to transfer their expenses to foreigners and future Americans is terribly corrupting. Elected officials aren’t compelled to prioritize and choose in budgeting as much as they should and so increasingly give their constituents the impression that they needn’t prioritize and choose as much either — or at all.
So every day American government becomes more like what the French economist Frederic Bastiat called government almost two centuries ago — “the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else,” a great game of cost shifting.
Of course cost shifting is the purpose of welfare for the indigent. All progressive taxation is cost shifting as well, and a certain amount is sensible and fair. But it loses sense and fairness when it enables vast recklessness and plunder in government and the recklessness of individuals who are relieved by welfare of basic responsibility for themselves and so lose respect for society.
The waste of money is bad enough. The corruption and social disintegration are worse.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
