eighteen who had had any significant experience in business or agriculture. Sixty-three of the hundred senators were lawyers who had moved into one government position or another within a half-dozen years of graduating from law school. So it is hardly surprising that they should exhibit so little understanding of economic causes and effects. Thus, while lawmakers will castigate corporations that relocate overseas, they refuse to bring taxes on American businesses in line with those paid by their foreign competitors; nor will they recognize that when marginal tax rates rise beyond a certain point, those who make the high-risk investments that launch the new enterprises that have revolutionized our economy will instead devote their ingenuity to sheltering their incomes from taxation.
The second reason for declining to ask Washington to take over matters that lie within the competence of the states is financial. The states have limited borrowing powers, and so they are ultimately restrained by the willingness of their citizens to be taxed. The federal government, however, has virtually limitless borrowing power, which it is now exercising to a dangerous degree. And unlike the states, it is ultimately able to lighten the burden by debasing the dollars with which it will meet its debt obligations and, in the process, impoverishing its citizens.
During the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs were being unveiled, Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois observed, “A billion here, a billion there—pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Now, it seems, the word that trips off political tongues is “trillion.” Within a few months in 2008-09, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama commandeered more than $1.5 trillion in order to restore liquidity to the financial markets and jump-start a recovery. Obama added about a trillion to what had been Bush’s record-setting half-trillion-dollar deficit. Meanwhile, after a year of contentious debate, Congress bulldozed a trillion-dollar health-care bill into law. All of this required Congress to raise the debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion, on top of an unfunded Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security liability of $107 trillion. No doubt about it, we’re talking real money. What is in doubt is whether we will ever be able to pay this debt; and if so, at what cost to future generations and the resilience of our economy. This runaway spending has to be contained, but that will happen only if we change some now deeply ingrained political habits.
Finally, there is the cost to Congress and the quality of government itself. Once upon a time, the Senate could be referred to, with reason, as the world’s greatest deliberative body. But that was long, long ago, when Congress was in session no more than six or seven months a year and its members worked at a leisurely pace. They had the time to study the bills under consideration and discuss them with their colleagues, and they were routinely in their respective chambers to hear the merits debated. They could do so because Congress pretty well limited itself to the half-dozen areas of responsibility assigned to it by the Constitution. And when their work in Washington was over, they would return to their home communities and resume their normal lives. They were essentially citizen legislators.
The situation today is radically different. Congress’s compulsion to scratch every itch on the body politic has so overwhelmed congressional dockets that members live on a treadmill. Although they may be reasonably informed on the legislation generated by their own committees, that represents only a fraction of the bills on which they will be called upon to vote. So, on most matters, they will cast their votes on a largely reflexive political basis; and because nearly all of today’s members of Congress are career legislators, a member’s calculus will inevitably include an assessment of the impact of a particular vote on his chances for re-election rather than being based solely on his best judgment as to where the public interest lies.
It is that calculation, I suspect, that has encouraged the changes we have seen in the scope of our social programs. What began as a system of safety nets for our most needy citizens (e.g., welfare, Medicaid, food stamps) has evolved into a broader concern for the comfort of the electorate at large. Witness the promises to ease the lives of the middle class that are now a routine part of presidential campaigns. This trend is reflected in the striking changes that have taken place in the obligation to pay federal income taxes. In 2000, before the first George W. Bush tax cuts took effect, 25.2 percent of those filing federal income-tax returns had no tax liability. By 2007, that figure had risen to 43.4 percent. Over the same period, the share of income-tax receipts contributed by the wealthiest 1 percent increased from 20.8 to 40.4 percent. So much for the notorious tax cuts for the rich.
These costly distortions of the original constitutional plan need to be reversed. But how do we go about it? How do we wean the public of the illusion that money that comes from Washington is somehow free? My recitation of the costs of doing things Washington’s way is hardly new. The problem has been that too few Americans have been sufficiently aware of the profound changes that have taken place in how we govern ourselves. Call it the frog-in-a-pot-of-slowly-warming-water phenomenon: until very recently, the increases in economic and other regulations, the intrusions on the authority of state and local governments, have been too gradual to alarm the public at large.
Fortunately (if that is the proper word!), the excesses of the Obama administration may have turned the heat up fast enough to ignite a public rebellion against the dramatic expansion of federal power that is now occurring. In its first year in office, the administration persuaded Congress to enact a $787-billion stimulus package that to date has stimulated little more than a growth in government jobs; took over two car companies and a fistful of banks; nationalized large segments of our health-care system; and launched programs that will increase our national debt from 40 percent of our gross domestic product to a projected 80 percent within the next ten years. This should be shock therapy enough to induce the American people to return to constitutional virtue, and there are signs that that might in fact be happening—witness a mid-2009 poll of independent voters which found that 56 percent of those polled favored “smaller government with fewer services,” three times the number who had held that position just one year earlier. A mid-2010 poll of likely voters found 63 percent holding that position.
I am not such a romantic as to believe that we can return to the division of governmental labors that obtained even fifty years ago. Too many federal programs are too deeply imbedded in our society, and too many institutional adjustments have been made to accommodate them. What we can do is consciously establish strict standards for the adoption of new federal initiatives, standards based on the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution. In the first instance, we must call a halt to all new grants-in-aid programs and then see which of the existing ones we can pare away. By definition, these do not relate to national imperatives, because the states retain the option of declining them. In the second instance, before Congress adopts a new program that is within the competence of state governments, we must require that it first explain why the program must be of universal application.
To illustrate how these standards would work in practice, I cite two relatively recent expansions of federal authority. Washington’s assumption of responsibility for the environment clearly meets the test. Air, water, and wildlife move across state boundaries, acid emissions generated by industrial plants in the Midwest will kill fish in New England lakes, and the conversion of Carolina wetlands into trailer parks can affect fisheries up and down the Atlantic coast. On the other hand, George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program and earlier interventions into the field of education by previous administrations are out of bounds. As bad as too many of our public schools are, they clearly fall within the competence of state and local officials; and, although that point alone is sufficient to rule out federal intervention, there is no reason to believe Washington can do a better job of managing the schools: witness the District of Columbia school system, for which the federal government is constitutionally responsible.
My proposed reform, therefore, would retain federal responsibility for the health of the environment, but it would shutter the Department of Education. The weeding out of unwarranted federal programs, of course, can’t be accomplished overnight. Phasing out the myriad grants-in-aid programs, for example, will take time because of the commitments that state and local governments have been required to make in order to qualify for federal dollars. This must be done, however, if we are to restore to state and local governments the autonomy and authority they need to deal with their own responsibilities in their own ways, and if we are to free the federal government to concentrate on concerns that require attention at the national