Young Democrats Just Dont Get It - Road to the Middle Class

OUR YOUNG LIBERAL friends seem to divide into two camps. There is the camp of enlightened progressives like Jacob Aronson that is dedicated to “Conserving and Consolidating the Progressive Liberal Tradition” and reforming government “along private-sector lines.” Then there is the angry left of Markos Moulitsas. In “The Case for the Libertarian Democrat.” Kos sees real danger ahead as corporations become more powerful than governments.

It is fine for these enthusiasts to propose, on the margin, what benevolent government should do next, but they completely miss the elephant in the room. There is one thing and one thing only for the Democratic Party to do, and that is to keep the checks coming to its millions of supporters. We are talking about big money.

To understand why this is so let us take a look at government spending in the US. Not just the federal government, but all governments.

Here is the projected spending by all levels of government on the five biggest government programs for 2007:

Government Pensions: $875 billion
Government Health Care: $850 billion
Government Education: $750 billion
National Defense: $650 billion
Government Welfare: $425 billion

Think of that. The primary role for government, they tell us, is to defend us from enemies foreign and domestic. But in the modern world we have to send the checks out to seniors, provide free and subsidized health care, and pay the teachers. Then we can worry about thug dictators and local street thugs.

But where do these spending numbers come from? They are provided by a new website, usgovernmentspending.com. You should bookmark it. usgovernmentspending.com brings you the facts on government spending using the latest in LAMP technology, exactly the kind recommended by the Google guys. And it provides sophisticated navigation technology so that you can drill down and look at the details, 194 spending line items in all.

usgovernmentspending.com sums up the overall spending numbers by stitching together two spreadsheets published by the federal government. The federal budget numbers come from the file Table 3.2 – Outlays by Function and Subfunction: 1962-2010 in Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2008 published by the Executive Office of the President of the United States. The historical state-and-local government spending comes from State and Local Government Finances published by the United States Census Bureau.

Think about the numbers for a moment. They start with nearly a trillion dollars a year in government pensions—and baby boomers haven’t yet started to collect their, I mean our, Social Security yet.

Then there is $850 billion in government health care, mostly Medicare and Medicaid—and baby boomers haven’t yet started to collect on our Medicare.

There is $750 billion in government education—K-12, universities, and the like. When the educators talk about underfunding education, what are they talking about?

Finally, after this important stuff, we come down to the Pentagon, the veterans, and the military-industrial complex.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: Enough with the military-industrial complex routine already.

I agree. That is why I built the amazing website usgovernmentspending.com which, by the way, is a sister site to Road to the Middle Class.

There is no doubt that the Pentagon and its military-industrial complex of defense contractors is a fearsome special interest that affects national defense policy in many harmful ways just as President Eisenhower warned us so many years ago. But the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex are only running a distant fourth place in the “fill-in-the-blank”-industrial complex stakes.

Let us talk about the pension-industrial complex. You can read a horror story about it every day, like this one about the underfunded pensions of the State of New Jersey. Did you know that the payment of pensions to government employees is guaranteed in the constitution of many states? First things first.

Let us talk about the medical-industrial complex. $750 billion is a lot of money for the government to spend on a highly regulated system that hits a mere #40 in the life expectancy world rankings published in The Economist’s Pocket World in Figures 2007 Edition. Some out-of-the-box commentators think that it will soon enter critical condition as people opt for health tourism.

Let us talk about the education-industrial complex. We spend $750 billion a year for that baby. Yet literacy in the United States has not significantly changed in the 160 years since centralized government education began in the United States. As I reported recently in The American Thinker: “15 percent of US adults [today are rated] as "proficient" in literacy and 13 percent "proficient" in numeracy.” That is according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy.

In the current War on Terror, or clash of civilizations, we are being reminded that the war is a failure and that the Bush administration never had a plan in Iraq. In fact our liberal friends feel that the failures in Iraq are sufficient reason to abandon the whole thing as Bush’s fault and a dreadful mistake.

Good point, liberals. So why not ditch the whole mess of government pensions, government health care, and government education, bloody messes that eat up about $2.5 trillion a year, four times the budget of the Pentagon and 25 times the $100 billion a year cost of the Iraq mess?

Jacob Aronson and Kos are missing the point. Who cares if the government could be better-managed, or if corporations are becoming too powerful? That’s kids’ stuff.

The only thing that matters for the next Democratic administration is to keep those trillions of dollars coming to the millions of faithful Democratic voters. Yes. We are talking about trillions.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
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Conversion

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
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Drang nach Osten

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Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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