I'm writing this from beautiful La Guardia airport, where the concession stands look more like the impulse buy counters at Trader Joes. Ah, yuppy airports. Also: It's time ATA changed their logo. I feel like I'm flying Transformers airlines.
In any case, I've got one of those LA Times op-ed thingies today, so folks should take a look. Readers of the site will be pretty familiar with the argument: Hollowing out the public sector is not only bad for society, but economically inefficient as well. And you're not going to keep much of the public sector if you steadfastly refuse to fund it. In 2000, the last year of the Clinton administration, federal receipts were 113 percent of federal outlays. In 2005, receipts were only 87 percent of outlays. Over that period, government spending increased by over $600 billion. Revenues went up by a bit over a sixth of that. And the deficit doesn't account for all of the difference. This is the point of the op-ed, which also serves as a bit of a rejoinder to the Democratic Party's obsession with deficits: When you're fiscally irresponsible, debt is not the only consequence. Good government dies, too.
So what you're seeing is not merely an expansion of our debt, but cutbacks and contractions in all manner of public services that operate beneath the radar of the national media and powerful interest groups. Medicare retains its budget, but Pell Grants, infrastructure repair, and all the rest don't. Add in that conservative groups were very effective in getting states to adopt propositions and constitutional amendments that impede the raising of new revenues, and you've got the recipe for a real problem. Rick Perlstein and the gang over at Campaign for America's Future have been doing wonderful yeoman's work documenting the effects of this systematic defunding and handicapping of government.
Lastly, the editors took this part out, but I think the Bush administration's approach to personnel is a similarly huge problem. You're not going to get much out of the public sector if you aren't attracting, retaining, and empowering talent within it. Positions requiring highly skilled civil servants have instead been filled with big donors and political hacks. Michael Brown — “Brownie,” in Bush's famous diminutive — is only the most prominent example of the Bush administration's dispiriting approach to talent recruitment. His obsession with loyalty easily trumps his concern for skills, and so we get Monica Goodling, Alberto Gonzales, the political hacks second-guessing global warming data, and all the rest.
Its no way to run a government.
