Fight for Democracy, Part 7: What does the government do, anyway?

Governments help people. That’s their job. Everyone likes to hate on the government; everyone can find problems with it and point out its excesses and errors. But a nation can’t exist without government. We would have no society, no structure by which to live, no protection from hordes of barbarians from other lands. Government is not just essential to society but it’s really the definition of what civilization is. So the question is: how does the government best help people?

Protecting the nation is very helpful. Everyone agrees on that. But I think most people would agree that it isn’t really necessary to spend ten times as much doing that as any other nation on earth. We really aren’t in that much danger. What danger we do face - nuclear aggression -  isn’t deterred by us having more bombs or more planes or more ships. Terrorism is fought with intelligence and probably more cost-efficiently with diplomacy. We’re doing fine on the protection front.

Law and order is also a great way governments protect people. But this is mostly a local issue, not a federal one. Take time to research who is running for District Attorney, but don’t pretend that your Congressman is going to affect murder or burglary rates in your town.

No, our federal government largely helps people by providing an infrastructure to conduct business and a social safety net that keeps people out of misery and illness. That means an interstate freeway system with bridges that don’t collapse, rail and public transportation that gets people to work, agencies that ensure our food is safe, our water drinkable, and our cars don’t explode. That means Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps - what a lot of people call welfare. These are good things that are worth spending money on because even if they do not help us directly they improve the lives of everyone around us, which allows them to contribute to society - which we benefit from as members.

It’s been shown a lot of people tend to view the government mostly along welfare lines: they like gov’t if they like welfare, hate gov’t if they hate welfare. Fair enough, but the problem is that most people don’t understand how much, to whom, and for what, that welfare really goes. Getting a more accurate picture of welfare will help you get a much better picture of what our government does and hopefully make you consider how we should spend our money (which means deciding who get to spend it).

Our government spends less than 5% of its budget on cash-assistance welfare programs. We spend less about 2% of GDP on welfare programs. We spend twice as much on defense than we do on all types of welfare programs combined.
https://econofact.org/welfare-and-the-federal-budget

Welfare isn’t just for the poor. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/09/18/who-receives-benefits-from-the-federal-government-in-six-charts/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2bfbcca60965)
Lots of it goes to the elderly and disabled (okay, they might also be poor, that they’re not the ‘poor’ most people think of). More of it goes to white people than any other group. Fraud rates are low for most programs (a couple of percent). When people commit fraud, it’s mostly not reporting all their income. Of course, if you’ve ever been paid in cash for a job or not paid taxes on out-of-state purchases, then you’ve committed ‘fraud’ too. The amount of money our government spends on helping able-bodied people who are down on their luck is quite small and actually very effective.  If you hate the government because you think it’s a boondoggle to help out lazy poor folk, it’s like wanting to close down your local hospital because it wastes disposable towels instead of using washable linen: fair complaint if you separate it from any meaningful context, a negligible cost in the real world.

But Welfare isn’t just giving money out. When you avoid paying your fair share of taxes (even if it’s legal), that’s really just you taking advantage of government services (like roads and defense) without having to pay for it. That’s Welfare. A good chunk of that goes to the middle-class, mostly through tax breaks. So if you itemize your deductions, if you’ve put in solar panels, you’re effectively getting government welfare. If you’ve ever ‘fudged’ your taxes, expensed a personal meal as a business deduction, you’ve committed fraud. You might want to think more carefully before you decry ‘welfare cheats’.

The rich also get all kinds of welfare. After all, their money mostly comes from investment, not salary, so even if they pay a higher income tax they pay less through capital gains taxes, through corporate tax breaks, through direct government subsidy of business (like the fossil fuel industry receives: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/10/6/16428458/us-energy-coal-oil-subsidie ).

Everyone gets welfare and that’s okay. Demonizing the few who get it directly, especially those who are already disadvantaged in society by the color of their skin or what gender they were born, is not okay. We are  rich country. We are great. We can afford to help people.