This article was written by Geoff Schoos, President and Founder of RICLAPP.
Lost in last week’s wall-to-wall Cairo coverage was the beginning of a public policy debate that will impact our state and community. At the heart of this debate is how much federal money will come to the states and cities to support a variety of vital community programs.
A couple of weeks ago, Representative Paul Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee, proposed a 15 percent reduction in “non-security” federal funding. What constitutes non-security federal funding? Non-security funding includes, but is not limited to, K-12 education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Centers for Disease Control, food safety inspections, and a number of programs that serve low-income children, seniors and people with disabilities.
I suppose we should be grateful for Congressman Ryan’s restraint. A recent proposal released by the House Republican Study Committee advocated the reduction and freeze of such funding at 2006 levels. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), by 2021, funding for these programs would be reduced 42 percent below what is needed merely to keep these programs operational.
Such a proposal would not only decimate programs vital to the health and safety of our most vulnerable citizens, but by removing substantial purchasing power from an already weak economy, it would almost guarantee a double-dip recession.
During last year’s election, many candidates demagogued the issue of the economy and the budget deficit as a way to win votes. It worked and the republicans took control of the House of Representatives. Shortly after the election, during the so-called “lame duck” Congress, the Bush tax cuts were extended with bi-partisan support. This happened in spite of the CBO’s projections that only 3 percent of those receiving any business income would receive any real tax relief, that over $1 trillion would be added to the overall deficit, and that an extension of the tax cuts would increase the national debt to 95 percent of our Gross Domestic Product. The CBO projected that if the Congress failed to extend the tax cuts, the debt would increase “only” by 79 percent of the Gross Domestic Product.
Let’s be clear about what the past decade’s economic policies have wrought. The gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of Americans more than tripled between 1979 and 2007, according to Congressional Budget Office data. In fact, while the incomes of median families rose by 13 percent during the years of 2002-2007, the incomes of just the 400 wealthiest Americans multiplied by five times.
And thanks to recent proposed and enacted tax and spending policies, the rich will just get richer while the rest of us will fall behind. And none will fall further behind than our most vulnerable citizens.
Last year, the demagogue’s big issue was “earmarks.” Eliminate earmarks, they argued, and we’d go a long way toward eliminating waste and bloat in our federal government. If you’re not clear what they meant by earmarks, they often used another term - “pork.” By framing the argument as they did, they implied that earmarks were added spending that only increased the budget deficit.
Thus the demagoguery.
A brief, and apologetically simplistic, primer on earmarks: During the budget process, the Congress sets specific funding authorization levels for each budget item. Once the authorization is set, the Congress goes about determining how much money will actually be appropriated per item.
So let’s say Congress authorizes $1 billion for health clinics. Now let’s suppose as the Congressperson from Rhode Island, I obtain $50 million to fund health clinics in Rhode Island’s core cities. These clinics would focus on providing preventative care to the poor and aged. By so doing, the instances that these patients would need to access more expensive emergency room services and be hospitalized would be reduced. This $50 million would enhance the quality of life and reduce health care costs.
By earmarking that $50 million, I did not add one penny to the public debt. I focused this money on health care for discreet populations. And in so doing, this expenditure hopefully reduced costs and thereby saved money in the future.
No bridge to nowhere is this earmark. But that wasn’t what the demagogue wanted the voters to see. Nobody wants to fund the bridge to nowhere or the state-of-the-art library used by only 80 people. But by focusing on these types of expenditures, these demagogues ensured the diversion of the voters’ attention to worthless programs and away from worthwhile programs.
By lumping all earmarks under one aspersion, once elected they were free to eliminate them all, both the good and the bad.
Now they’re on to budget deficit/tax reductions. We saw democrats and republicans virtually trip over themselves last December to extend the Bush tax cuts. What this has effectively done was to balance the federal budget on the backs of poor people and those on fixed incomes.
The decisions in Washington permeate down to the states and through the states, to the cities and towns. With the State of Rhode Island facing a possible $290 million shortfall for the next fiscal year, with Recovery Act money all but drying up in 2012, and with the aforementioned proposed non-security spending reductions, policies and programs that we took for granted will either be so gutted as to be unrecognizable, or cease to exist.
I could go on about why this is so but you’ll have to wait until I write my book. The current working title is “The Lobbying firm of Dewey, Screwem & Howe, and the quest for the Public’s Gold.” Or perhaps, “PACman feasting at the expense of public programs.” Either way I’m sure it’ll be a bestseller.
But for now, we face more basic issues. What are our priorities? Where should we invest our public money? What is our strategy for investing our public funds? And should we prevent the select few from getting so much in order that a much larger group can get a little more? And should we rebalance our economy so that no one group disproportionately benefits at the expense of our middle class and those vulnerable in our society?
Add to those issues the question of how we reach out to help those who need a little boost. The point is we need to decide who we are as a society. What do we stand for? Do we stand for a society and culture that rewards the bluster and swagger of the rich and their agents, or do we recognize that often, by helping those less fortunate to take their place in society, we are also helping ourselves and our kids in the long run?
The coming debate is not so much about dollars as it is about priorities. We, all of us, must participate in that debate. We must inform ourselves about the issues, identify the empty promises, ask the tough questions, and make a real effort to come to consensus as to who we are and what we want to be.
It’s been decades since we’ve had a real serious discussion about what Aristotle would call “civic virtue.” Simply, it is a discussion about what it means to be a good citizen looking out for the good of the community.
I think about civic virtue while watching the demonstrations in Cairo. Thousands of people, at the risk to their lives and safety, stand to demand that their government be more open and responsive to the needs of all people. They do so not because they hate the government, but rather because they love their country.
We all should aspire to that same level of civic virtue.
This article was originally published in Geoff Schoos’ column, A Different Drummer, which can be found in the Cranston Herald.