All Kinds of Welfare

The national debt that has now surpassed $18 trillion includes spending on an inordinate number of things in a gargantuan array of Federal programs.  We support a dozen or so Cabinet departments, including vital ones like Defense and Commerce, and then ones with which the USA did splendidly without for 200 years (and could again), such as Education and Energy.

Along the way, we have funded, at lease for the past fifty years, a couple diverse paths to spend taxpayer dollars, and I wonder if we can take them in isolation and ask ourselves what it says about our nation that we spend a lot on them, and their relative contribution.

I'm thinking of the space program, which along with the intangibles such as national pride (which is a pretty good thing, and was even better when national pride was thought to be a virtue), has produced immense technological advancement for here on earth, from solar-cell technology to advanced communications, but let's say I'm a fan.  It is a major government-driven R&D effort of over fifty years duration that, until recently, could not much be passed over to industry to fund productively, in part, on its own.

Then there is the welfare state, wherein we provide taxpayer transfers to non-income and low-income Americans (and apparently illegals, depending on whose articles you read).  A civilized society takes care of those unable to provide for themselves; an intelligent civilized society sets up such a program so as not to encourage sloth, self-victimization and abuse of the system.  We appear to be the former, but that's not the point.

The "point", such as it is, is that we do have to look at the return on investment of everything we spend.  In the case of federal spending, this is a bit amplified in that two of the major sources of those dollars being spent are:
(1) The taxes taken from the income of hard-working Americans
(2) Money borrowed from close friends like China, because our profligate Federal government still spends a lot more than it takes in.

Neither of those sources is a good place to get money from; the former because excessive taxation drags the economy, and the latter because, well, borrowing from anyone is a bad idea, and borrowing from countries who are hacking our systems, are committed to opposing us, enslave their people and, for the global warming crowd, belch lots of nasty carbon into the atmosphere unchecked, is a terrible idea.

So I think that we do indeed need to look carefully at the different forms of Federal spending, which is to say specifically those not for constitutional mandates like defense, mail, interstate commerce, etc., that are some form of welfare, with a careful eye.  That "welfare" can be to sponsor large research and development programs (e.g., NASA), in which we can engage the best and the brightest minds to work, where the fallout is the advancement of technology and a better life for us all.  It can be in a reasonable program to provide essential needs for those incapable of doing so themselves.

It is certainly the former that makes the country as productive as it can be, to allow us to afford to support the latter objective.  We are the country we are, because both are respected ends of Government.

Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton