By Mona Charen
Friday, January 04, 2013
Following the fiscal cliff melodrama, Senator Richard
Shelby appeared on television to declare that we are becoming European.
"We're always wanting to spend and promise and spend and borrow but not
cut. We've got to get real about this. We're headed down the road that Europe's
already on."
There's no "heading" about it. We're there.
Prof. John J. DiIulio, writing in "National Affairs", outlined the
true size of American government. When state and local government expenditures
are added to federal outlays, government spending as a share of GDP easily
competes with European nations. In fact, per-capita government spending in the
U.S. is higher than in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and our debt to
GDP ratio is higher than most European states.
The Obama administration has set records for deficit
spending in peacetime, but there is no question that the growth of government
at all levels has been a decades-long process. In 1960, total government
spending (local, state and federal) amounted to 27 percent of GDP. In 2010, it
was about 42 percent. State spending has been almost as irrepressible as
federal, leaving only nine states that can now boast AAA credit ratings. Many
states are facing crises over unfunded pension liabilities that have the
capacity to engender strikes and social unrest in the not too distant future.
Though President Obama and the Democrats are fond of
citing the "two wars on a credit card" and the Bush tax cuts as
drivers of our debt, the truth is that the first Obama term added $4.5 trillion
to the national debt in just three years -- more than the total debt amassed by
the United States government in two centuries. DiIulio writes: "Add our
annual debt per capita (about $49,000 in 2011) to total annual government
spending per capita (about $20,000 in 2011), and we have a rough 'big
government index' of nearly $70,000 for every man, woman, and child in this
country."
The difference between Americans and Europeans is that we
aren't honest about our appetite for big government. We hide it through a
variety of proxies, private contractors, and public/private partnerships.
Leaving aside the Department of Defense, which employs 3.2 million Americans,
government employs more than 20 million civil servants. Only 2 million of those
are full-time federal workers. The Department of Homeland Security, for
example, employs 188,000 federal bureaucrats, but also 200,000 privately
contracted employees. Medicaid doesn't employ an army of civil servants but
instead pays private employees of medical practices, hospitals, and nursing
homes.
The EPA employs between 16,000 and 18,000 full time
personnel. It has been able to expand its regulatory reach though by
cooperating with 50 state EPA equivalents and by hiring tens of thousands of
private contractors.
Most non-profits receive few government subsidies. But
the largest ones with the biggest budgets are heavily government-dependent.
One-third of all non-profit dollars come from government. Catholic Charities
USA, for example, a marquee "private-sector" charity, received
two-thirds of its funding in 2009 from Uncle Sam.
Americans prefer small government to big government -- in
the abstract. But 60 million receive Medicaid benefits, 54 million collect
Social Security, 48 million participate with Medicare, 45 million receive Food
Stamps, 7 million are in prison, jail, or on parole/probation, more than a
million have de facto government jobs working for defense contractors, nearly a
million children participate in Head Start and about 40 percent of K-12 students
receive free or reduced price meals. There's some overlap in those categories,
but it still adds up.
Taking a government check goes down much more easily when
you can persuade yourself that you're only withdrawing money that you have
faithfully paid in over the course of a lifetime. Indignant elderly callers to
C-SPAN constantly invoke the "I paid for my Social Security" myth.
They didn't. The average beneficiary will receive far
more in Medicare and Social Security benefits than he paid for in taxes.
We are, in short, a socialist-style society just like
Europe. And Obamacare has yet to kick in.
The road to recovery begins with admitting you have a
problem.
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