Column for August 26, 2010

I was at a loss about what to write this week, but one thing kept hitting me every time I read a newspaper, news web site, or local news report today. That was local spending. Every news source seemed to carry some story about local taxes, local spending, local grants received for more spending, and the list goes on.

During my perusing through my favorite sources for news, I found a report from George Mason University that showed that state and local spending in the United States as a whole has increased nearly ten times since 1950. Private spending has only increased five times in the same time period. What does that tell us? Government spending is out of control. Where does government get its money? From taxpaying citizens, which explains why private spending rose only about half of the government rates.

Guilford County is looking at another sales tax increase. North Carolina is looking at tollbooths on I-95. Cities like Philadelphia are requiring people like myself to pay for a business privilege license fee in order to have an internet blog. The cost of the license is $300, regardless of whether the blog is kept as a hobby or as a business, or even if the fee far exceeds any profits from the web site. That is nothing more than sheer governmental greed to feed an insatiable appetite for local spending.

Locally, I have seen grants and loans from the federal government for local spending on police and fire departments, schools and educational equipment, public library system computers, and local road paving projects. One major source of local money supply seems to be the US Department of Agriculture via loans and grants. I fail to see what local water systems, police department facilities, and road paving projects have to do with agriculture.

Just as frustrating to me is the idea that the federal government is making local towns, counties, and states increasingly dependent upon it as a money supply. Either way, the money is from taxation. Taxation comes from our pockets, not some magical, inexhaustible, deep well of cash in Washington, D.C.

When we get taxation on both ends, I am reminded of the admonition from an opponent to the US Constitution's ratification in an Anti-federalist letter written in October of 1787. The author identified himself only as "Federal Farmer" and was thought to possibly be Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, whose resolution was passed by the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776 declaring independence from Great Britain.

In this letter, Federal Farmer (in letter number 3) wrote, "…to lay and collect internal taxes in this extensive country must require a great number of congressional ordinances, immediately operating upon the body of the people; these must continually interfere with the state laws and thereby produce disorder and general dissatisfaction till the one system of laws or the other, operating upon the same subjects, shall be abolished".

Basically he thought that two levels of government attempting to rule on the same topic would clash and cause one or the other to be abolished. Unfortunately, we instead have a huge codependency of one on the other. Both, however, have the same insatiable appetite for tax money. One government is following in the footsteps of the other and taking more and more money from the citizenry to feed itself. Local and state governments following suit have, as I stated, raised local government spending ten fold since 1950 while private spending by contrast has only risen five fold.

As recently as the 1920's local governments did not constantly look to the federal government as a source from which to suckle money. During Calvin Coolidge's administration (a greatly underrated President, in my opinion), there was great flooding along the Mississippi River, far worse than the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Yet the federal government was not in the business of feeding the spending of local and state governments, even in the face of widespread disaster. Nowadays, a town can not pave Main Street or renovate a fire station without looking to Uncle Sam for money to do so.

We fell for this insidious plot decades ago and now it has caught up to us. Our federal deficit has grown (according to the Congressional Budget Office) by $4.4 Trillion since Barack Obama took office only a year and a half ago. States are going bankrupt. States are suckling more borrowed cash from the federal nipple. Local towns are raising taxes to keep up with their smaller yet nonetheless insatiable appetites for control and spending.

I have been decrying this for decades. Now we may have gone well past the rubicon of financial destruction. If so, we have done it to ourselves.