From Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute, via Carpe Diem:
January 22, 2010 is a day that should live in infamy, at least among believers in limited government. On that day, the federal government added its 2,000th subsidy program for individuals, businesses, or state and local governments.
This chart reminds of a recent quote from Ross Douthat about blaming bloated government for the failure of health care reform:
If the legislation fails, liberals will have a long list of scapegoats…But they might want to save some blame for the welfare state their predecessors built…
Under Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, liberals created a federal leviathan that taxes, regulates and redistributes across every walk of American life. In the process, though, they bound the hands of future generations of reformers. Programs became entrenched. Bureaucracies proliferated. Subsidies became “entitlements,” tax breaks became part of the informal social contract. And our government was transformed, slowly but irreversibly, into a “large, incoherent, often incomprehensible mass that is solicitous of its clients but impervious to any broad, coherent program of reform.”
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Thursday ~ January 28th, 2010 at 11:30 am
Brian H. Bragg
OK, I suppose a number like 2000 offers an excuse to dust off the old “government-is-the-problem” bromides. Now is an especially good time, what with Tea Party placards proclaiming the presence of a socialist administration (or is the president a communist? A fascist? A Nazi? So many placards, so many sound bites . . .). Yes, the dreaded welfare-state bogeyman wears an even darker mien these days.
But first, lest we be carried away by libertarian polemics, let it be known that a preponderance of these 2000+ federal programs serve to subsidize corporations, not individuals. Indeed, that is a redistribution of wealth — but upward, the same direction it has flowed for 30 years.
Next, let us be apprised that much of this federal subsidy money goes to state and local governments to support budgets at that level — think police departments, schools and colleges, roadbuilding, housing, health care, environmental security.
Also, it would be helpful to point out that the Agriculture Department and the Interior Department oversee more than 20% of the programs cited in this report. Multimillion-dollar corporations in agribusiness and extraction and natural-resource-harvesting industries are the principal beneficiaries of this largesse, most of it in southern and western states where demagogues in ten-gallon hats and lizard-skin boots love to rant against Washington while pocketing taxpayers’ billions.
Further, would it be impertinent to ask: If conservatives so deplore federal handouts, why do most U.S. government subsidies end up in the red states? Look it up.
Finally, regarding Ross Douthat’s observation, let me paraphrase what I have concluded about that gentleman’s political philisophy: The masses, if they are incapable of finding enough cake, are perfectly free to starve so long as there are enough priests to perform unction and enough privately owned mortuary enterprises to shield the corpses from the view of more worthy society.
Thursday ~ November 8th, 2012 at 2:22 am
Ralph
Thank you Mr Bragg…enjoyed the read.