Building a Straw Politician

by Art Woolf

I just received an email alert for the Vermont's Public Assets Institute's new blog post with the catchy title

Cutting School Budgets Could Get Expensive

The post begins by building the most unrecognizable straw man I've ever seen:

As the opening day of school approaches, local school officials gear up for the next budget season, and some campaigning politicians continue to insist that education is a luxury we can no longer afford,

I hope that the next PAI post will identify some of these campaigning politicians.  Even one would do.  No one that I've heard speak has ever said anything remotely like "education is a luxury we can no longer afford."  Several campaigning politicians (and some non-campaigning non-politicians, including me) have been saying that being one of the highest per pupil spending states in the nation is a luxury that Vermont can't afford, but that's very different than the PAI statement.

And there's more.

The PAI post goes on to use the playbook that Mr. Shumlin and Mr. Racine seem to be using:  equate their opponents with the devil George Bush, and his evil ancestor Ronald Reagan:

We’re coming up on the 30^th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s declaration that government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem. Three decades of anti-government, anti-tax rhetoric have created such a phobia about taxes that we’ve lost sight of our self-interest.

Let's look at the facts.  Start with the anti tax part. In 1980 federal government tax receipts were 19.0% of GDP.  Ten years later they had fallen to 18.0%, so taxes did fall during the Reagan years.  By 2000 tax receipts had risen to 20.6% of GDP and by 2010 they were 14.8%, in large part due to the recession--but even in 2007 taxes were 18.5% of GDP, almost identical to where they were in 1980.  And the Congressional Budget Office forecasts tax revenues at 21% of GDP by 2020.

So much for a big impact of the anti-tax  rhetoric we may or may not have experienced over the last 30 years.

What about anti-government?  One way to measure the size of government is by its spending.  In 1980, federal spending was 21.7% of GDP.  In 1990 21.9%.  So after 10 years of Reaganomics, the government had grown slightly.  By 2000 spending had shrunk to 18.2% of GDP,  but that occurred during the Clinton years, so if anyone wants to equate a shrinking government with an administration, it would be with Clinton, not Reagan. 

By 2007, under the not-so-conservative (spending-wise) George Bush, government spending grew to 19.6% of GDP, more than it was under Clinton.  In 2010 it was 25.4% due to the huge stimulus spending of the last couple of years and because the denominator of the fraction (government spending/GDP) had shrunk due to the recession.  Again, the CBO forecast is for spending to be 23.9% of GDP in 2020 and 26.4% under its "alternative" but plausible long term scenario in 2035.

Even more dramatic is what's happened to the size of government excluding defense spending.  Non defense spending, as a share of GDP, was 16.8% in 1980 and declined to 16.7% by 2000 under Reagan (and part of the Bush I administration).  Essentially no change.  President Clinton  succeeded in shrinking non defense government spending to 15.2% of GDP by 2000 and by the tail end of the Bush administration it had grown to 15.6%.  Today it's 20.5%.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said

    Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Comments

[Chris Campion]

What's worse, is that apparently being concerned about taxes is detrimental to our self-interest, according to PAI. No mention of personal freedom or liberty here. One can conclude that PAI believes that our self-interest is only enhanced when taxes go up, and the size of gov't gets bigger.

At least they're not whoppingly subtle about it.

[GEN X Vermonter]

Ah, the PAI, lets lump them together with VPIRG, and the CLF. Groups that have no value add to our communities, but rip down and trample our most basic principles and use our laws against us. Yet our elected officials refuse to call them what they are "special interest groups". That label is reserved for those evil Republican supporting groups like the NRA, and the Chamber of Commerce. I get very leery when a group of lawyers publish their "studies" on how things should be run in this state.

[Tom Licata]

Jack Hoffman, of Public Assets Institute writes, “…Vermont parents and others might like to get a glimpse of the future by reading a recent New York Times article.”

“Vermont parents” might be better served by getting a “glimpse of the [past]”...

1) Total 2010 inflation-adjusted 1999-2010 Vermont Education Spending: +161%

2) Total 2010 inflation-adjusted 1999-2010 Total Vermont State Spending: +90%

3) 1997 (Act 60)-2010 (June) Vermont Government Job Growth: +17%

4) 1997-2010 (June) Vermont Private-Sector Job Growth: 0.6%

5) 1997-2010 (June) inflation-adjusted Vermont Median Family Income Growth: +9%

Erskine Bowles, President Obama’s Co-Chairman of his “Fiscal Commission” recently said this:

“I think it’s a fact that as a nation we face the most predictable economic crisis in our history. It is truly going to destroy the country from within…and it is basic arithmetic.”

It’s worth repeating: “It is basic arithmetic.”

A simple truth:

A society cannot consume and not produce.

[Tom Licata]

This quote was taken from the vtdigger site today (at 1:15pm).

The article compared Lt. Governor Dubie to his democratic challengers:

"His vision for the state’s economic future is based on Reaganomics 101 (a frequent refrain in his speeches is a quote from the Gipper — “the best job is a social program”)."

Out of the mouths of babes.

Talk about revealing.

Not sure if this is a quote from Mr. Dubie's challengers or from the reporter. In any case, this is the accurate quote from President Reagan:

"I believe the best social program is a job."

[Mark Shepard]

PAI is correct about conservatives having the capacity to reduce government to a sustainable level, it is just they are looking at the wrong branch.

The legislative branch is the branch that appropriates money and so in 1994, while Clinton was president, we had the first congress in a long time that was at all open to conservative ideas. And under that Congress we experienced balance budgets and a long overdue reduction in the growth of the national debt.

Reagan bartered away debt for his top priority of ending the Cold War. And he did so with no military action. Had he had a line item veto, he might have done more to hold down Congress' domestic spending, but clearly his top priority was to defeat communism. And since everything is the president's fault or credit, his Democrat Congress had no reason to control their domestic spending. They buy votes and Reagan takes the blame for the rising debt.

Vermont is no different. The fix for spending is not who is governor, but rather the makeup of the legislature. The governor has a bully pulpit from which to make a case for reduced spending, but at the end of the day it is the legislature that determines spending and as we saw last year, the governor veto was even useless in stopping the spending spree.

For a quick view on how the makeup of the legislature impacts spending, take a look at the graph here: www.VermontersHouse.us.