Medicare say they “have not used a government social program.”
Polls also find that Americans cling to the belief that government is a sea of waste and inefficiency that can be excised painlessly.When Gallup asked last year how much of each tax dollar sent to Washington is wasted, the answer averaged
51 cents
, the highest since the polling outfit began posing the question in 1979. Yes, the federal government harbors gobs of waste and inefficiency—the Department of Homeland Security recently discovered it was spending $10.6 million onunused wireless devices—but the public overstates the magnitude. Reports on government corruption also reinforce this idea, even when the underhanded dealings ultimately cost taxpayers very little. For example,the
Washington Post
identified thirty-three members of Congress who quietly steered government grants to road improvement and other projects near pieces of private property they owned. The tab: $300 million, less than one hour’s worth of federal spending. Nonetheless, every president vows to pare waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiency, but the budgetary relief is often underwhelming. The Obama budget boasted that theSocial Security Administration took an employee suggestion to use e‑mail instead of snail mail to distribute commemorative flyers to its offices nine times a year. The grand total saved: $5,000 a year.
“Reducing the deficit by cutting ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ never works: there’s seldom any agreement on what qualifies as waste,” says Stan Collender, a Washington public relations man who has built a business explaining the federal budgetto outsiders. “Everyone thinks there’s a lot, but there’s nothing that a majority wants to cut. The average person doesn’t want less government. They just want the government to cost less.”
MERGE WITH CANADA
Rob Portman, a Republican U.S. senator from Ohio and George W. Bush’s White House budget director, understands the politics of persuading constituents that they are going to have to give up something to bring down the deficit. So when he was named to a congressional deficit-reduction committee last year, he asked Ohioans to offer
their
suggestions on his website. “My goal was to actually end up taking some of these and being able to say, here’s something that came from Joe Smith in Akron, Ohio,” he said. “And we would have been able to do that had we come up with something [a committee agreement] because a number of their ideas were part of the mix.”
Not all of the ideas were practical: a constituent from Cincinnati suggested that the United States merge with Canada, while someone from Columbia Station advocated replacing paid congressional staff with volunteers. Others were sober and serious: JZ from Cincinnati suggested raising the age at which Americans qualify for Social Security and Medicare. A farmer from Lebanon proposed paring farm subsidies. CM from Bay Village questioned the merits of allowing holders of municipalbonds to avoid federal taxes on the interest they earn. Even the feasible ones, though, amounted to nibbling at the edges.
When Portman tries to explain the budget to constituents, he slices it into several pieces: “One is the annually appropriated spending that gets all of the attention. But when you take out defense, which is more than half of it, it ends up being 18 percent of the budget. Then you’ve got defense spending … that’s the second big part.
“And the third big part—and the fast-growing part—is the mandatory spending,” he continues, lapsing into Washington jargon for benefits paid to those eligible without any annual vote by Congress. “You can divide that into basically three things: It’s interest. It’s Social Security. It’s the health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid.”
The federal budget can be sliced in any number of ways. Portman’s are as good as any. But his slices are huge, and each has many parts, subparts, and individual
Polls also find that Americans cling to the belief that government is a sea of waste and inefficiency that can be excised painlessly.When Gallup asked last year how much of each tax dollar sent to Washington is wasted, the answer averaged
51 cents
, the highest since the polling outfit began posing the question in 1979. Yes, the federal government harbors gobs of waste and inefficiency—the Department of Homeland Security recently discovered it was spending $10.6 million onunused wireless devices—but the public overstates the magnitude. Reports on government corruption also reinforce this idea, even when the underhanded dealings ultimately cost taxpayers very little. For example,the
Washington Post
identified thirty-three members of Congress who quietly steered government grants to road improvement and other projects near pieces of private property they owned. The tab: $300 million, less than one hour’s worth of federal spending. Nonetheless, every president vows to pare waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiency, but the budgetary relief is often underwhelming. The Obama budget boasted that theSocial Security Administration took an employee suggestion to use e‑mail instead of snail mail to distribute commemorative flyers to its offices nine times a year. The grand total saved: $5,000 a year.
“Reducing the deficit by cutting ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ never works: there’s seldom any agreement on what qualifies as waste,” says Stan Collender, a Washington public relations man who has built a business explaining the federal budgetto outsiders. “Everyone thinks there’s a lot, but there’s nothing that a majority wants to cut. The average person doesn’t want less government. They just want the government to cost less.”
MERGE WITH CANADA
Rob Portman, a Republican U.S. senator from Ohio and George W. Bush’s White House budget director, understands the politics of persuading constituents that they are going to have to give up something to bring down the deficit. So when he was named to a congressional deficit-reduction committee last year, he asked Ohioans to offer
their
suggestions on his website. “My goal was to actually end up taking some of these and being able to say, here’s something that came from Joe Smith in Akron, Ohio,” he said. “And we would have been able to do that had we come up with something [a committee agreement] because a number of their ideas were part of the mix.”
Not all of the ideas were practical: a constituent from Cincinnati suggested that the United States merge with Canada, while someone from Columbia Station advocated replacing paid congressional staff with volunteers. Others were sober and serious: JZ from Cincinnati suggested raising the age at which Americans qualify for Social Security and Medicare. A farmer from Lebanon proposed paring farm subsidies. CM from Bay Village questioned the merits of allowing holders of municipalbonds to avoid federal taxes on the interest they earn. Even the feasible ones, though, amounted to nibbling at the edges.
When Portman tries to explain the budget to constituents, he slices it into several pieces: “One is the annually appropriated spending that gets all of the attention. But when you take out defense, which is more than half of it, it ends up being 18 percent of the budget. Then you’ve got defense spending … that’s the second big part.
“And the third big part—and the fast-growing part—is the mandatory spending,” he continues, lapsing into Washington jargon for benefits paid to those eligible without any annual vote by Congress. “You can divide that into basically three things: It’s interest. It’s Social Security. It’s the health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid.”
The federal budget can be sliced in any number of ways. Portman’s are as good as any. But his slices are huge, and each has many parts, subparts, and individual
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