Cut Spending! (Your Program First)

March 18, 2010

The U.S. Census Bureau is taking well-deserved heat for its $340 million campaign to boost “public awareness” of the government’s decadal count of the citizenry.

The videos created for the bureau by mockumentary director Christopher Guest -- several ran during the Super Bowl at a cost of $2.5 million -- are being singled out as unfunny and unhelpful. (Advertising Age suggested that hiring “a troupe of well-heeled, middle-aged white people who are famous mainly to well-heeled, middle-aged white people” might not be the best way to appeal to a diverse nation with more than 300 million residents.)

But the most offensive thing about the media blitz is being overlooked. Its message isn’t that filling out your form is a way to help Washington meet its constitutional duty to enumerate the population. No, the feds want us to know that the census is a method for obtaining goodies. In the words of one radio commercial, it’s “how we get our fair share of funding for the things we need.”

If your “needs” include a lower standard of living and national insolvency, then perhaps the bureau’s pitch makes sense. If not, the “what’s in it for me” approach is fiscal folly.

Let’s start with the small stuff. A 2007 BusinessWeek investigation of earmarks, “those specially targeted spending measures that members of Congress slip into legislation to send money to favored companies and organizations,” revealed that playing the pork game pays. The average return-on-investment for every lobbying dollar spent by politically juiced entities was $28.

Sleazy skullduggery? Sure, but remember who enables it. Congresscritters, eager to “save or create” jobs, appropriate the dough. Research by Citizens Against Government Waste found that between the 1994 and 2009 fiscal years, inflation-adjusted pork rose by 73 percent -- to $19.6 billion. (The number of projects rose by 671 percent.) The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards documented that during George W. Bush’s administration, total subsidy programs increased from 1,425 to 1,804. (Growth since 1970 was 77 percent.)

Evidently, voters are cool with such wastefulness. In the Aughties, Senate incumbents won 84.6 percent of their races, while members of the House enjoyed a 96 percent reelection rate.

If no progress can be made on relatively meager expenditures, what hope is there for reform of the federal budget’s major cost drivers?

Not much, if the Heritage Foundation’s latest “Index of Dependence on Government” is any guide. The foundation’s William W. Beach reports that not counting federal employees, “60.8 million Americans now depend on the government for their daily housing, food and health care.” There’s more: “Nearly 80 million baby boomers are about to begin relying more on government, as the number of retirees doubles. They’ll be eligible to collect from Social Security and from Medicare or Medicaid. These programs, which already make up 41 percent of federal spending, will account for nearly 62 percent in 20 years as 10,000 baby boomers a day retire.”

The laws of economics and demographics can’t be ignored forever. According to the Government Accountability Office’s most recent long-term outlook, “absent policy changes the federal government faces an unsustainable growth in debt.” Social Security is likely to “run small temporary cash deficits for the next 4 years,” then freefall into “persistent cash deficits beginning in 2016.” (Medicare’s unfunded liability could be as much as $89 trillion.)

The GAO predicts that “debt held by the public as a share of GDP could exceed the historical high reached in the aftermath of World War II by 2020.” That a full decade sooner than auditors predicted just two years ago. By 2030, pensions, healthcare, and interest payments will fill nearly the entire budget, and “there will be little room for ‘all other spending,’ which consists of what many think of as ‘government,’ including national defense, homeland security, investment in highways and mass transit and alternative energy sources, plus smaller entitlement programs such as Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and farm price supports.”

Without massive cuts or huge tax hikes, bankruptcy is inevitable. Under one GAO scenario, even if action is taken immediately, the federal tax burden will need to rise by 50.5 percent to fill the predicted chasm between revenue and expenditures. Have fun paying that bill, Generation X and Millennials.

Washington has a constitutional duty to tally the number of Americans, and you should answer the census bureau’s questions. But when you finish filling out the form, take a moment to write a check to one of the principled, if outgunned, organizations fighting to downsize D.C.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.

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