State and local government spending is less likely to be seen as wasted, but belief in how much of it is wasted has risen at about the same pace as belief in federal waste:

The elderly and people without postgraduate degrees are more likely to rate government waste as slightly larger, as well as self-identified Republicans, independents and conservatives.

The partisan difference over how much federal government spending is wasted is the reverse of what it was in 2001, under President George W. Bush, when Democrats on average thought more federal spending was wasted than Republicans did, suggesting who is in office affects perceptions of government waste.

The greater perception of government waste on average among those over age 65 contrasts sharply with the reality that a disproportionate amount of government spending goes to the elderly through Social Security and Medicare. As this graph from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities shows, federal government spending largely goes to defense and the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, safety-net programs and interest on the debt.

In the past, when pollsters have asked Americans which specific federal program they think should be cut, very little consensus emerges on which is most deserving. In January, Gallup found that bipartisan majorities of the public opposed cutting Social Security, Medicare, education and anti-poverty programs.

Foreign aid, which makes up less than one percent of the federal budget, was the most popular potential target of cuts. The biggest partisan difference was over defense spending, where Republicans are much less likely to support cuts.

As Gallup says in its own interpretation of the poll, “It is not clear whether Americans believe government wastes money because it spends on programs they believe are not needed, or because it does not spend money efficiently on programs, whether needed or not.” Nor does the poll say whether Americans believe mandatory or discretionary spending is more wasteful.

About two-thirds of state government spending is typically devoted to K-12 and higher education, Medicaid, transportation, anti-poverty programs and corrections. The remaining third varies by state, but is usually comprised at least somewhat by pensions for retired public sector workers.

The following CBPP graph shows average state government spending by area:

Photo by Maureen Hoch

Recent national poll results showing 81 percent of Republicans intend to vote in 2010 — compared to 56 percent of Democrats — indicate an “enthusiasm gap” between the parties, some analysts speculate. Statistics from the October 2009 municipal election in Albuquerque show that Republicans came out strong, while Democrats stayed home.

Overall turnout for the municipal election was low at 25 percent, but that won’t necessarily be the case in the 2010 general election. Nor can voters’ feelings about national politics be judged by the mayor’s race, political analyst and pollster Brian Sanderoff told The Independent.

One municipal election isn’t a great predictor of  what will happen in 2010, when a new governor and lieutenant governor will be elected, and all of New Mexico’s U.S. congressional and state representatives will be up for re-election, he said. It’s more accurate to view what will happen in 2010 through the lens of the 2008 general election.

“I don’t equate the national mood to the non-partisan mayor’s race,” Sanderoff said. “In 2008 the Democrats were a lot more enthusiastic with Barack Obama than the Republicans were with John McCain. In 2010, we see a lot more Republicans upset with the status quo, so they’re more energized. The Democrats will be on the defensive — debating things like taxes, Obama, Bill Richardson.”

Nonetheless, comparison of the 2009 Albuquerque municipal election results with what happened in the 2005 municipal race show Democrats simply didn’t show up in 2009. It was a three-way non-partisan race, but so was the 2005 election, and the demographics of the three candidates were roughly the same: a conservative anglo male from the Heights, a downtown liberal Hispanic male, and a strong Hispanic centrist incumbent from the west side.

In 2009, Republican turnout increased by 272 people from the 2005 municipal election in Albuquerque. But 3,149 Democrats who voted in 2005 didn’t show up in October.

The Republican share of the vote in Albuquerque increased from 38.8 percent to 41.4 percent between 2005 and 2009, and their mayoral candidate, Richard Berry, won with 44 percent of the vote.

The Democratic share of those who actually voted declined from 49.6 percent to 48.4 percent in 2009.

And yet the Republican share of registered voters was down, from 35.4 percent to 32.3 percent, while the Democratic share was up, from 44.7 percent to 47.5 percent. The registration numbers reflect a surge in newly registered Democratic voters from 2008, the year of Obama, but the turn-out itself shows an engaged Republican electorate rather than a Democratic one.

In a nutshell, despite the wave of enthusiasm in 2008 that led the Democratic Party to significantly increase its share of statewide office holders and sweep up all of the U.S. congressional seats, its voters declined to show up in 2009 to help it retain the mayor’s seat or a majority on the city council in the state’s largest metropolitan area. On the other hand, a solid Republican base of voters can be seen getting out to vote in Albuquerque over time, regardless of the percentage of registered voters that the Republican Party holds.

Still, Sanderoff doesn’t think it’s wise to extrapolate from that showing to what will happen statewide in 2010.

“It’s hard to draw comparisons between a non-partisan municipal race with no party labels and a partisan general election,” he said. “General elections will have twice the turnout of a municipal race, plus, in 2009 you had the noise of Marty Chavez. He’s no liberal, and got his share of Republican and Independent votes as well. It was an impressive turnout for Republicans, but I’m more comfortable discussing what might happen in 2010 in light of the 2008 general election.”

The executive director of the Democratic Party, Scott Forrester, agrees with Sanderoff that 2010 shouldn’t be compared to the 2009 Albuquerque race. In the municipal race, the Democrats invested only $7,000-$8,000 to get out the vote, he said. No money was spent on trying to persuade voters to choose one candidate over another — unlike the major effort the Republican Party put in to support the Republican candidate for mayor, Richard Berry, who won.

Instead, he said, look at what the party did in 2008 to get an idea of what will happen in 2010.

“The Democratic Party put together a really good grassroots structure to win in 2008, county by county,” he said, “and we’ll do the same thing in 2010. You can expect that we’ll put together a multi-million dollar campaign together this year, organizing throughout New Mexico and reminding voters that we’ve come too far to start going backwards.”

But Republican Party leaders don’t seem worried.

“The key ingredient is whether or not there are strong qualified Republican candidates,” Republican spokesperson Janel Causey told The Independent.

And Republicans have strong candidates going into the election, added Ryan Cangliosi, executive director of the state Republican Party .

“Getting out the vote is the bottom line. If we don’t do that we’re in the wrong business,” he said. “We have strong candidates who will excite the electorate, and you can expect the party to put together an apparatus to get out the vote for those candidates.”

As the news reports will not come out until after my column deadline, I will have to wait to find out whether those health care professionals were good Santa Fe liberals who believe that health care reform is vital and the Democratic plan is just what we need. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

You see, I was not able to attend the town hall, which was announced only a few days ago, because by strange coincidence, it was scheduled for the same evening as  a GOP event at La Posada which I, along with the entire leadership of the Republican Party in Santa Fe, was was already committed to attending.

It’s a good thing I’m not a conspiracy theorist, or I might suspect that it was more than coincidence.

My husband and I divided forces, I going to La Posada and he generously foregoing the fine wine and lovely gardens  to attend Mr. Luján’s townhall — except that when he arrived 40 minutes early the fire marshals were already there turning people away because the crowd had exceeded the building’s capacity.

A conspiracy theorist might conclude that some organization like MoveOn.org had rallied the troops to pack the town hall with sympathetic audience.  A  concerned citizen like myself, however, would of course conclude that this was an issue which concerned my fellow Santa Feans deeply enough that hundreds of them found out at the last minute about a little-publicized meeting and showed up in droves.

I’ve written here before about health care, not once, but twice.  I hesitated to dedicate yet another column to the issue, but decided that it really is too important not to continue discussing, no matter how badly I wanted to write a column advocating a Richards Avenue interchange on I-25.

The other day I read the best article I have read to date about the health care reform issue, and believe me, I’ve read a lot of them.  You may be surprised to learn that it is in The Atlantic and written by a Democrat, David Goldhill.  After reading the title, “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” I thought, here we go with a diatribe about the evils of health care being a commodity not a right, and I almost didn’t read it.  It ran six pages, after all, and I was busy.  I’m very glad I made the time.

After his father died from an infection he contracted in the hospital, Goldhill, understandably, looked for someone to blame.  But he could find no villain.  In the cold light of reason that followed grief, he began to realize

that our collective search for villains — for someone to blame — has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care — from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies — work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that — most important — remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

Exactly. I’ve said more or less the same thing myself at NMI a couple of months ago, though I had neither the space nor, to be honest, the capacity to explain it as Goldhill has. He asks, on page 2,

How often have you heard a politician say that millions of Americans “have no health care,” when he or she meant they have no health insurance? How has a method of financing health care become synonymous with care itself?

Pretty often. Maddeningly often.  He explains how this came to pass.  The explanation is too long for me to block quote, but I urge you to read the article yourself to find out.  Everyone should.  And remember, gentle readers, that Mr. Goldhill is a Democrat.  I’m not referring you to another right-wing “nut job” (to quote my NMI fans) like myself.  It is not partisan rhetoric, but common sense when he states the following:

Insurance is probably the most complex, costly, and distortional method of financing any activity; that’s why it is otherwise used to fund only rare, unexpected, and large costs. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review, and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you’ve paid your share. An expensive and wasteful absurdity, no?

Is this really a big problem for our health-care system? Well, for every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee — more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance. Much of this enormous cost would simply disappear if we paid routine and predictable health-care expenditures the way we pay for everything else — by ourselves.

His solution, which he admits would cause a difficult period of transition, is outlined on page 6, and contains a healthy dose of government spending to create a safety net so that the destitute do not fall through the cracks.

Despite what you might think, I am not opposed to this.  Our tax dollars already pay for the health care of the destitute. I am all in favor of a system that would require fewer tax dollars to achieve the same — or in all likelihood far better — results.

Nobody — not even Republicans — wants poor people dropping dead in the streets because they can’t pay a doctor.  Okay, maybe some libertarians do.  But I’m not a libertarian.  I’m not opposed to all taxation and all government.

But I am opposed to the disastrously misguided attempt by Congress to “reform” our system of paying for health care.  If any of the committee bills pass, our health care system is going to get worse, not better.

I know at least one person in Ben Ray Luján’s office reads my column. I hope he or she is reading it today, and takes the time to read Mr. Goldhill’s article.  I hope the Congressman himself reads it.  I hope it makes him rethink his preconceptions, makes him think outside the narrow, stultifying Democratic box.

Because if he and enough of his colleauges in Congress do not, the rest of us will pay a very high price.

One even called me the Marie Antoinette of New Mexico.

Conservatives are routinely branded as heartless by those on the left.  We are said to be uncaring and selfish, concerned only with holding onto our own money whatever the consequences for those less fortunate.

Once when I was in grad school, a good friend and fellow student said to me in angry, almost tearful frustration after the U.S. Senate had voted down a social program she thought should have passed, “Those Senate Republicans are just evil. They want children to die!”

Even though I was a closet conservative (I wanted that doctorate, after all), this friend knew the terrible secret of my political persuasion. She knew my policy position was the same as the “evil” Senate Republicans, and yet she knew I wasn’t evil, and didn’t want children to die. We’re still friends all these years later, and she knows full well that I am not as heartless as the infamous French queen who quipped that if the peasants had no bread, then let them eat cake.

Nevertheless, as a good liberal she had been conditioned to believe that fiscal conservatism meant cruelty, and the idea that a friend whom she knew to be kind and compassionate could be opposed to a “necessary” social program created such cognitive dissonance that she simply couldn’t keep to our usual practice of not talking politics.

Conservatives believe in the founding principles of our republic. We believe that the appropriate role of the federal government is set forth clearly in the Constitution, and that most of the powers it has arrogated to itself over the last century have been unconstitutionally usurped, and then given the false cloak of legitimacy by judges who have taken it upon themselves to view the Constitution as a “living, breathing document” whose meaning can be stretched beyond recognition to cover just about anything the federal government cares to do.

Conservatives believe that most people are capable of earning a living and taking care of their own needs for food, clothing, shelter and medical care — or at least they would be if they weren’t (a) paying so much income, Social Security, property, gasoline, utility, import, sales and who knows how many other taxes to support our many layers of government bureaucracy, and (b) being told by demagogues on the left that they shouldn’t have to take care of themselves because they really aren’t capable of it at all.

Our society’s culture of entitlement is asphyxiating the spirit of enterprise that made this country great. Leftist fear-mongering has persuaded increasing numbers of Americans that they are like helpless children who need government hand-outs to survive.

If, when told the poor have no bread, a conservative points out that farm subsidies the federal government unconstitutionally doles out increase the price of that bread, leftists interpret this as, “Let them eat cake.” Indeed, any answer save, “Then give them some bread and charge it to the 1 percent who pay 39 percent of the federal income taxes (while earning 18 percent of the pre-tax income)!” gets us branded as the moral equivalent of Marie Antoinette.

The Democrats in Congress and the White House seem to think there is a bottomless pit of wealth into which they can reach to bail out failing businesses, fund desperate spending sprees in hopes of “stimulating” the economy, and tack still more federal programs onto the rickety scaffolding of the bureaucracy that has still not won the “War on Poverty” Lyndon Johnson declared more than 40 years ago. They think, to rework the Marie Antoinette metaphor a bit, that they can have their cake and let us peasants eat it, too.

There is no bottomless pit of wealth. Their socialist vision of America’s future is eroding the spirit of enterprise that is necessary to create wealth. They are gobbling up the last of the bread and the cake and there are not enough productive bakers to replenish the supply.

In the final analysis, where conservatives and leftists differ, it is because the latter are utopians and the former are not.  Conservatives do not believe government can solve all the ills of the world. The world has always, and will always, have ills to spare. Recognizing this is not tantamount to saying with brutal unconcern, “Let them eat cake.”

About the utopian dreamers who think they can fix all the ills of the world if only we relinquish to them enough of our money and our liberty, I will say, “Let them read the Constitution.”

According to the Washington Post, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the stimulus proposal a “first step along the way” in what is expected to be an intense, four-week negotiating period with the Senate. Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, D-Nev., say they’ll deliver the final bill to Obama before Congress departs for a President’s Day recess, and that legislators won’t sleep until that happens.

Their arguments — presented in the summary of the proposal — rest on a stark assessment: Without it, the country faces “economic chaos.”

The summary, by the way, is excellent reading.

The economy lost 2 million jobs in the last four months and is projected to lose another 3 million to 5 million in the coming year. Unemployment is going to continue to rise, they say, even with this stimulus package. But without the infusion of federal cash, it will soar into the double digits — and that doesn’t count the numbers who’ve been shifted from full-time work to part time.

And while the deficit will grow dramatically, the Democrats say that without the stimulus spending the growing deficit “…will be devastating and we face the risk of economic chaos.”

While it might seem counter-intuitive that the deficit will grow more if we don’t spend close to a trillion dollars, the Democrats contend that the spending will lead to more economic activity, which will decrease the payment of unemployment benefits and increase tax revenue.

The economic crisis is laid at the feet of consumer debt, which was propelled by stagnant wages while the rich got a heck of a lot richer during the recent economic boom.

The figures given are stunning: 96 percent of income growth in this country since 2001 went to the wealthiest 10 percent, while the rest of the country sustained its standard of living by “…borrowing…and borrowing…and borrowing”:

Since 2001, as worker productivity went up, 96% of the income growth in this country went to the wealthiest 10% of society. While they were benefiting from record high worker productivity, the remaining 90% of American’s were struggling to sustain their standard of living. They sustained it by borrowing… and borrowing… and borrowing, and when they couldn’t borrow anymore, the bottom fell out.

The result is that the credit market eventually froze up because of a consumer base stretched beyond its ability to pay debt–including mortgages, a subsequent lack of consumer spending, and businesses consequently laying off workers or simply shutting down.

The document also gives the rationale behind the bulk of the stimulus package being designated for direct spending rather than tax cuts.

In a nutshell, Americans are so strapped by debt that they’re more likely to spend any tax cut or stimulus check on paying down their debt, rather than consuming new goods and services:

The tax rebates last spring showed that Americans have become so concerned about
their debt and saving that they will not spend a large fraction of any tax cut. Over the last two
decades, Americans’ saving rate went from 8 percent of income to near zero. … As we saw in the spring [when the federal government issued stimulus checks], a sizable fraction of any tax cut to them will be used to pay down debts and not be spent. The same logic applies to tax cuts for corporations who have become more obsessed with reducing their excessive leverage than in hiring or investing.

On the other hand, the authors state, direct federal spending will have nearly complete “pass through” to new goods and services.

Even after the economy hits rock bottom, we’ll continue to need a fiscal boost, the authors say, because the “usual drivers” of recoveries from recession don’t seem viable this time around: housing and auto sales.

So if not housing and auto sales, then what?

The spending proposals are focused in these key areas:

~ Increasing renewable energy production capacity plus renovation and weatherization of buildings to make them energy-efficient.

~ Expanding science and technology research plus broadband access.

~ Investing in transportation infrastructure: roads, bridges, highways, transit, rivers.

~ Investing in education at both the local and state level, from K-12 to higher ed.

~ Health care Investments to computerize health care records, plus investments in preventative care.

~ Helping the unemployed by expanding the food stamp program.

~ Providing state fiscal relief to save public-sector jobs, particularly teachers and public safety workers.

The stimulus plan lays out a laundry list of targeted spending, and between now and President’s Day we’re likely to see quite a few changes. Not to mention, the Washington Post noted, the Republicans already don’t much of it:

GOP lawmakers also balked at the thousands of individual projects designated for funding in the House plan. “Oh, my God,” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said to reporters. “My notes here say that I’m disappointed. I just can’t tell you how shocked I am at what I’m seeing.”

To be continued–stay tuned.

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