The Kroog Versus The State Of The States

Paul Krugman argues that the refusal of Republicans and ConservaDems to provide more help to state governments is wiping out the effects of the stimulus and the results are getting truly ugly now.

It’s crucial to keep state and local government in mind when you hear people ranting about runaway government spending under President Obama. Yes, the federal government is spending more, although not as much as you might think. But state and local governments are cutting back. And if you add them together, it turns out that the only big spending increases have been in safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, which have soared in cost thanks to the severity of the slump.

That is, for all the talk of a failed stimulus, if you look at government spending as a whole you see hardly any stimulus at all. And with federal spending now trailing off, while big state and local cutbacks continue, we’re going into reverse.

But isn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle.

And what about the economy’s future? Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere. 

That's true.  We are going in reverse now.  Increased federal spending is being canceled out by sharply decreased state spending, and remember: Republicans apparently want as many states to go bankrupt as possible to "teach them a lesson" or something, particularly the biggest blue state of them all, California.

Thirty years after Reagan said "Government is the problem" and then promptly expanded the national debt by cutting taxes on the rich and boosting government spending, Republicans have become increasingly blind to government providing any useful service at all.  We don't need schools, we have home schooling.  We don't need police, we have the Second Amendment.  We don't need social services, we have church charities.  We don't need public transportation, we have SUVs.  We don't need regulatory agencies or oversight, we have the free markets.  We don't need roads, streetlights or sanitation because those cuts happen to those people who live in urban hellholes, not in our neighborhood.

Sharron Angle knows exactly who she's talking to when she said that she considered government to be a false God.  Millions of Americans feel the same way.  "Why should I pay taxes?" has become the central question of the last quarter-century even though taxes now are the lowest they've been in generations.  They're plugging their ears are yelling like babies.

And we continue to rocket down the path of oblivion.