Daily Archives: 28 December 2011

False Choices

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This article in The Washington Post centers on falling municipality revenues due to falling housing values and so falling property tax valuations, but it contains an item that wants attention.

The Post cites Thomas Fitzpatrick, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, making this remark in a study he co-authored titled “Municipal Finance in the Face of Falling Property Values:”

It appears that the dramatic fall in property values across the country will accelerate the financial distress of municipalities in the wake of the Great Recession.  If creative ways to make up for this lack of revenue are not found, local governments may face the undesirable choice of either raising property taxes or reducing funding for essential services.

But this is bad logic.  It proceeds from the false assumption that whatever a (even local) government does is perforce “essential.”  Further, Fitzpatrick presents the false dichotomy that the only two options available to such governments are either raising taxes or curtailing “essential services.”

In fact, most of what government does is highly desirable, in the short term, but very little of what government does actually is essential.  Moreover, much of the “essential services” displaces the moral responsibility of individual citizens and arrogates that morality to government, to the long term detriment of individual citizens, the local communities which are made up of them, and to society as a whole.  The only truly useful, essential services are police and fire, and refuse collection.  All the rest are better handled by individuals, churches, and charitable organizations, with (even local) government stepping in only as a last resort, not as the first.  And so government always can cut back on its spending and reduce its nonessential “essential” services.

The article itself concludes with this remark:

Instead, towns across the map have relied on an array of maneuvers to cut costs—renegotiated pensions, furloughs, salary freezes, hiring freezes and layoffs. Many also are charging higher user fees for garbage pickup, recreation centers and other services.  And many cities have explored entering into shared service agreements with one another to save money.

These sound like good solutions, not “instead” solutions.  When government is acting in its proper role of “common good” and as a last resort otherwise, it gets a whole lot cheaper to maintain.

Progressives, Caring, and Politics

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Arthur C Brooks’ 2007 book, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, contains a trove of data that indicate conservatives give more to charity—even after taking out church-related giving—than do Progressives.  This is substantiated by a 2008 Gallup poll covering 2008 in which the polling data indicate that Conservatives donated 3.5% to 4.5% of their incomes to charitable endeavors, whereas Liberals donated just 1.25% to 1.5%.

And now there’s this from The Washington Post concerning the Solyndra fiasco and the Progressive loans for greens program.  The Post went through some thousands of memos, company records, and internal ­e-mails obtained from the Obama administration in an effort to understand the underpinnings of that loan and the motivations underlying the Department of Energy’s general lending practices.  Although nominally about supporting development of “green” energy and “green” jobs, the Solyndra loan, and apparently DoE’s support for “green” loans, was driven more by politics and political optics than anything else.

The documents reviewed demonstrate that, as Solyndra began to falter and its imminent failure became increasingly obvious, administration officials worried almost exclusively about political fallout and the impact that the company’s failure could have on President Obama’s re-electability.  Indeed, The Post reports that

Rarely, if ever, was there discussion of the impact that Solyndra’s collapse would have on laid-off workers or on the development of clean-energy technology.

Ryan Alexander, of Taxpayers for Common Sense, expands on this:

What’s so troubling is that politics seems to be the dominant factor.  They’re not talking about what the taxpayers are losing; they’re not talking about the failure of the technology, whether we bet on the wrong horse.  What they are talking about is “How are we going to manage this politically?”

There’s also a lot of crony capitalism revealed in The Post‘s reporting, but that’s not unique to this administration or to Progressives; rather, the point in this context is the callousness of the Progressives (who piously demand taxation for wealth redistribution in their Roman Circus-like pandering, in contrast to their attitude toward personal charitable giving, and toward the human fallout of their policies).

Now it’s certainly true that a program must be politically feasible, or government can’t do it, no matter how legitimate it may be for government to have that program.  But political consideration to the exclusion of any concern at all for the harm done to the flesh and blood people that do the work associated with the program?