Dogs Bark

by Don Boudreaux on February 4, 2010

in Business as usual, Politics

New York Times columnist Gail Collins writes today as if she just attended a seminar featuring Jim Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and some of my other GMU Economics colleagues.  Here’s a slice of her spot-on public-choice ruminations:

Cutting a federal program is next to impossible because there’s usually somebody who cares much more about keeping it than the White House does about making it go away. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida is already making soft whimpering noises about the NASA budget cuts, which will, if necessary, eventually rise to guttural howls.

Before the budget document even went out, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York had issued a scathing press release attacking plans to eliminate $5 million in grants to manufacturers of worsted wool.

“I will fight to make sure this proposal never sees the light of day,” said Schumer, who claimed that dropping the grants could ruin “Rochester’s iconic Hickey Freeman,” a men’s clothing company. It turned out that Hickey Freeman gets a different wool-manufacturer break entirely. Rochester is saved!

My own favorite target for extinction is a $9 million annual appropriation for museums and educational programs that highlight the “shared culture and tradition” of Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians and “children and families of Massachusetts.”

In other words, whaling.

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  • steve
    Yes, it's true that there are lots of programs and funds going to 'heritage trails," whaling museums and other enterprises the gov. has no business financing.

    But they are small potatoes compared to all the money the government wastes on programs that are supposed to address BIG problems but which are ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. See Charles Murray's Losing Ground and the $200 billion spent on War on Poverty programs from 1968 through 1980. Or the billions being spent today on the so-called HOPE job training programs. Or block grants...

    Collins predictably goes after the easy stuff, which is small potatoes.
  • ArrowSmith
    We the people want this spending, thus it will continue.
  • vidyohs
    Unfortunately there is more truth in your observations than most would like to face in their mirror each morning.
  • ArrowSmith
    Of course what I mean by that is that 51% want it. People like us are always in the minority, generation after generation.
  • Steve_0
    I've been thinking lately about John Galt's technique of simply stepping out of the way so people can see the guy holding the gun. Sometimes kung fu is subtle instead of powerful. The Republicans out to do a temporal version of "take one for the team". They should hold a big press conference and announce, across the board, that their new policy is to be completely bi-partisan. In fact, they will suspend their agenda until a future date. Henceforth, all democratic proposals will be voted on as the democrats direct. Committee placements, bills, everything dictated by the dems for a good full 4 year, or 8 year term. Republicans will kindly agree with whatever the dems want to do.

    When you always work with the constant tension, the checks and balances prevent full revelation of the consequences of policies. It's like never being allowed to touch the stove.

    I look around me and see the vast majority of people have grown up in the relative luxury, prosperity, and non-partisan controlled comfortable middle of the road. Thus they have no reason to have a clue about political or economic theory.

    Let the dems just run it into the ground for 8 years. I think we're due for a suffering.

    (This is of course based on the absurd assumption that the Republicans actually believe and support any of the things that they claim; and/or have faith that their policies are right, and the dems wrong- as would be revealed by actual practice.)
  • tw
    It's simply amazing how much money continues to be wasted. I'm always reminded of our "Strategic Helium Reserve" in Texas that our government has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on through the years...justified by one congressman years ago as being 'necessary in case we ever have to fight a war using blimps.'
  • Economiser
    At first I thought this was a joke but a quick Googling revealed that it's not. Unreal.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Re...

    What was that Milton Friedman quote about spending other people's money...?
  • vidyohs
    We fight back against government when they wave the red flag of programs like Health Care deform in front of us, outraged by the excessive billions of public money needed to fund them. Though government would be quite content to take the program if they can get it, while we are focused on that, behind that screen of contentiousness they are passing, unnoticed, a plethora of less individually expensive bills that accumulatively may add up to near the cost of the one single one we are contesting.

    We still get screwed by run-amok government; because, as implied in Don's post, once these things are passed they are cast in stone and will never go away. A one ton stone will crush you, but a ton of sand contained in a lump form will crush you just as effectively.

    Imagine being strapped down in a large jacuzzi and having your opposition tossing one grain of sand per second in on you. Even strapped down and helpless your response would probably be to sneer. But, at some point in the near future that sneer will begin to turn to panic and fear, ultimately winding up in sheer terror as that steadily increasing volume becomes evident to the the deadly thing it is.

    That is what government regulations and spending have been doing to the American people.
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