David Boaz

Back in 2011 there was a titanic fight between President Obama and the newly energized House Republicans over the federal budget. The ballyhooed result, which averted the frightening specter of a “government shutdown,” was “the largest annual spending cut in our history,” in the words of President Obama and the national media. I raised some doubts about it at the time, noting that it certainly wasn’t the largest budget cut in history and then pointing to a National Journal story suggesting that the cuts weren’t really there.

Now, in the Sunday Washington Post, David Fahrenthold follows up: What happened to the much-touted $38 billion in cuts (out of a $3,800 billion budget)? Oops. Not so much: 

Nearly two years later, however, these landmark budget cuts have fallen far short of their promises.

In some areas, they did bring significant cutbacks in federal spending. Grants for clean water dried up. Cities got less money for affordable housing.

But the bill also turned out to be an epic kind of Washington illusion. It was stuffed with gimmicks that made the cuts seem far bigger — and the politicians far bolder — than they actually were.

In the real world, in fact, many of their “cuts” cut nothing at all. The Transportation Department got credit for “cutting” a $280 million tunnel that had been canceled six months earlier. It also “cut” a $375,000 road project that had been created by a legislative typo, on a road that did not exist.

At the Census Bureau, officials got credit for a whopping $6 billion cut, simply for obeying the calendar. They promised not to hold the expensive 2010 census again in 2011.

Today, an examination of 12 of the largest cuts shows that, thanks in part to these gimmicks, federal agencies absorbed $23 billion in reductions without losing a single employee.

Read it all. It’s just an amazing investigation into what happens in the bureaucracy when Congress announces it’s cut the budget, and the reporters move on.

Which is why I wrote last week that if you really want to cut spending, you should shut down agencies and programs. Then you have some hope that the spending will actually stop.

The 2013 International Students For Liberty Conference, now in its sixth year, will bring over a thousand students and young liberty activists to Washington, D.C. to talk about ideas, hear from leading policy experts, and network with organizations and each other. I’m proud to have been the first speaker at the first ISFLC conference, in New York in 2008.  This year, the conference will be hosted at the Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel, just three blocks from the Cato Institute.

I will be presenting two lectures that weekend, a session with Young Americans for Liberty on “The Ten Ways to Talk about Freedom” and a luncheon keynote in Cato’s Yeager Conference Center on Reclaiming Freedom: The Case for Libertarian Ideas in Mainstream Politics. Plus I’ll be on a special taping of the “Stossel” show.

Other Cato scholars will be speaking on policy issues throughout the conference.  All of the below sessions will be taking place in the Hyatt’s Constitution room B.

To attend the student luncheon event, please register online or sign up for your ticket at the Cato booth at the conference exhibit hall.

If you want to cut federal spending, which has doubled under Presidents Bush and Obama, you need to eliminate some programs and agencies. At the Orange County Register – and thus on the World Wide Web – I offer some suggestions. Here are a few:

•Farm subsidies. The Department of Agriculture doles out $10 billion to $30 billion in cash subsidies to farmers and owners of farmland each year (depending on crop prices, disaster outlays and other factors). More than 90 percent of agriculture subsidies go to farmers of just five crops: wheat, corn, soybeans, rice and cotton. Most farms collect no subsidies. Farmers’ income has been booming lately, making this a particularly good time to end the subsidies.

•Head Start. Oh, no! Everyone loves Head Start. It helps poor kids. Who could be against that? But on the Friday before Christmas, the administration released a large-scale study of Head Start’s effectiveness. Its conclusion: “[B]y the end of third grade, there were very few impacts found … in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices. The few impacts that were found did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children.” Head Start costs $8 billion a year, and about $200 billion since its inception. Multiple official studies have shown its ineffectiveness.

•Afghanistan. Americans are tired of America’s longest war. It’s costing more than $100 billion a year. Instead of vague plans to reduce the number of troops next year or thereafter, let’s make the decision to end the war, bring the troops home, and save that money.

More on how to cut programs that are unconstitutional, obsolete, mismanaged, or otherwise dysfunctional at DownsizingGovernment.org.

President Barack Obama and Congress bravely led the country back from the fiscal cliff — by putting the government squarely on a path toward another series of fiscal stare-downs beginning in March. Oddly absent from this continual game of kick-the-can are concrete ideas — from either party — for getting a handle on the spending side of the ledger.

The Senate hasn’t passed a budget in three years. The president proposes no spending cuts. House Republicans, despite their fondness for the refrain “We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem,” find themselves speechless when asked what, exactly, they would cut.

Is there a suggestion box? If there were, here are just a few big expenses we could afford to do without.

• Farm subsidies. The Department of Agriculture doles out $10 billion to $30 billion in cash subsidies to farmers and owners of farmland each year (depending on crop prices, disaster outlays and other factors). More than 90 percent of agriculture subsidies go to farmers of just five crops: wheat, corn, soybeans, rice and cotton. Most farms collect no subsidies. Farmers’ income has been booming lately, making this a particularly good time to end the subsidies.
• Head Start. Oh, no! Everyone loves Head Start. It helps poor kids. Who could be against that? But on the Friday before Christmas, the administration released a large-scale study of Head Start’s effectiveness. Its conclusion: “[B]y the end of third grade, there were very few impacts found … in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices. The few impacts that were found did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children.” Head Start costs $8 billion a year, and about $200 billion since its inception. Multiple official studies have shown its ineffectiveness.
• Afghanistan. Americans are tired of America’s longest war. It’s costing more than $100 billion a year. Instead of vague plans to reduce the number of troops next year or thereafter, let’s make the decision to end the war, bring the troops home, and save that money.
• U.S. Embassy in Iraq. The world’s largest and most expensive embassy is the American embassy in Baghdad. Housing some 17,000 people, it will cost about $3.5 billion a year to operate. As we approach the 10th anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, it’s time to extricate ourselves from running that distant country.
• Urban transit. Local mass-transit systems should be the responsibility of state and local governments. Why are taxpayers from around the country paying for the subway and light-rail systems of Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, New York and other cities? In this as in other areas, federal subsidies make it easier for local politicians to approve spending that isn’t cost-efficient. We could save $5 billion to $15 billion a year by ending national subsidies for local subways.

Almost every federal program has a vocal cheering section, which is why it’s so difficult to cut anything from the budget. But in an age of fiscal crisis, these are among the line items that should be squarely in the cross hairs; they have been clearly demonstrated to be bloated and ineffective, and cutting them would save hundreds of billions of dollars.

“To rescue some measure of credibility, politicians should at least have the courage to embrace a few cuts that make obvious, objective sense based on the evidence.”

More is needed, of course. Transfer payments to individuals — dubbed “entitlements” to make them more difficult to cut — have doubled in real terms in the past 20 years and now account for 60 percent of the federal budget. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Pentagon’s base budget over the past five years averaged $529 billion, greater than the average budget during Ronald Reagan’s Cold War-era defense buildup — and that doesn’t even include tens of billions in supplemental appropriations to fund our wars.

In the long run we have to think more carefully about what government does. Do we want a government that spends 25 percent of GDP? Should the U.S. military act as the world’s policeman? Do taxpayers need to provide retirement and health-care benefits for middle-class and even wealthy retirees? Could private Social Security benefits and Health Savings Accounts employ standard economic incentives to make people better off than the current Social Security and Medicare programs?

Those are hard questions the country will be forced to confront down the line. But the next “fiscal cliff”—like farce is almost upon us already. To rescue some measure of credibility, politicians should at least have the courage to embrace a few cuts that make obvious, objective sense based on the evidence.

My book Libertarianism: A Primer, published in 1997, begins with this paragraph:

In 1995 Gallup pollsters found that 39 percent of Americans said that “the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”  Pollsters couldn’t believe it, so they tried again, taking out the word “immediate.”  This time 52 percent of Americans agreed.

Well, the Pew Research Center has been polling on a similar question, and they’ve just found the highest number ever. They ask a slightly different question – “Do you think the federal government threatens your own personal rights and freedoms, or not?” – and of course pollsters’ methods and samples may vary. Pew’s numbers seem to have been somewhat lower than Gallup’s over the past two decades. But today they report:

As Barack Obama begins his second term in office, trust in the federal government remains mired near a historic low, while frustration with government remains high. And for the first time, a majority of the public says that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Jan. 9-13 among 1,502 adults, finds that 53% think that the federal government threatens their own personal rights and freedoms while 43% disagree.

Gallup’s polling found that the level of fear had fallen dramatically in the early 2000s, as did Pew, but that by late 2011 it had risen back to 49 percent. Gallup also, alas, reports a partisan divide in answers to the question:

Americans’ sense that the federal government poses an immediate threat to individuals’ rights and freedoms is also at a new high, 49%, since Gallup began asking the question using this wording in 2003. This view is much more pronounced among Republicans (61%) and independents (57%) than among Democrats (28%), although when George W. Bush was president, Democrats and independents were more likely than Republicans to view government as a threat.

Dan Mitchell noted that divide back in 2010 and suggested that, with a Republican administration spending us into bankruptcy and a Democratic administration continuing the wars and the Patriot Act, partisans ought to start recognizing the threats from their own respective parties. Indeed.

The bottom line, though, is that when a government is viewed as a threat to “your own personal rights and freedoms” by a majority of its citizens, it should probably take a critical look at its policies.

Never say that progress doesn’t happen. The Commonwealth of Virginia may be – in 2013 – about to repeal its longstanding law against (heterosexual) cohabitation by unmarried persons. The legislature may also compensate people who were forcibly sterilized by the state – as late as 1979. The state’s multiple bans on gay marriage remain in force, of course. But progress has to start somewhere.

I wrote about Virginia’s long record of intrusions into the private lives of its citizens in my article “Virginia Is for (Homoracial, Heterosexual, Mentally Adequate) Lovers” at reason.com a few years ago. And about the state’s gay marriage ban in 2006.

In a Wall Street Journal column titled “Silicon Valley’s ‘Suicide Impulse’” (Google the title if you can’t access it), Gordon Crovitz cites Milton Friedman’s speech to a Cato Institute conference in Silicon Valley in 1999:

In 1999, economist Milton Friedman issued a warning to technology executives at a Cato Institute conference: “Is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft? Your industry, the computer industry, moves so much more rapidly than the legal process that by the time this suit is over, who knows what the shape of the industry will be? Never mind the fact that the human energy and the money that will be spent in hiring my fellow economists, as well as in other ways, would be much more productively employed in improving your products. It’s a waste!”

He predicted: “You will rue the day when you called in the government. From now on, the computer industry, which has been very fortunate in that it has been relatively free of government intrusion, will experience a continuous increase in government regulation. Antitrust very quickly becomes regulation. Here again is a case that seems to me to illustrate the suicide impulse of the business community.”

You can find the full text of Friedman’s talk here.

For more on business’s suicidal impulses, see “Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations With Washington, D.C.” by entrepreneur T. J. Rodgers; “The Sad State of Cyber-Politics” by Adam Thierer; and my own “Apple: Too Big Not to Nail.”

Charles Krauthammer zeroes in on the stark worldview expressed in President Obama’s inaugural address:

Obama is the apostle of the ever-expanding state. His speech was an ode to the collectivity. But by that he means only government, not the myriad of voluntary associations — religious, cultural, charitable, artistic, advocacy, ad infinitum — that are the glory of the American system.

For Obama, nothing lies between citizen and state. It is a desert, within which the isolated citizen finds protection only in the shadow of Leviathan. Put another way, this speech is the perfect homily for the marriage of Julia — the Obama campaign’s atomized citizen, coddled from cradle to grave — and the state.

“Nothing lies between citizen and state.” Exactly. That’s why Obama can say things like

No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future. Or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores.

Well, of course not. No one thinks a single person could. It takes many people, working together. But even Krauthammer misses the point that it takes businesses, coordinated by prices and markets. Krauthammer correctly chides Obama for thinking that collective action means only the state and not voluntary associations. But most of our needs are met, most of our progress is generated, by neither the state nor charities.

We are fed, clothed, sheltered, informed, and entertained by individuals, working together with other individuals, mostly in corporations, with their activities coordinated by the market process. As I’ve said before, libertarians “consider cooperation so essential to human flourishing that we don’t just want to talk about it; we want to create social institutions that make it possible. That is what property rights, limited government, and the rule of law are all about.”

What kind of a bleak worldview is it that can look at the bounty provided by business enterprises and charitable associations and see a barren wasteland enlightened only by the activities of the federal government? President Obama’s worldview, apparently. And Hillary Clinton’s.

My further thoughts on Obama’s collectivist speech in this 10-minute audio podcast.