Jenganomics

Wow. I listened to President Bush's State of the Union speech last night and I came to a realization. Our President is building a government based on a popular party game. Jenga is the game where you have a tightly packed stack of blocks and you pull pieces out of the middle to build the tower higher. The object is to avoid being the player who pulls the piece that topples the tower for lack of structure.

Last night I heard the President say a lot about new things that need to be done. One, for example, was that Congress should approve $23 million for drug testing high school students. I don't want to argue the merits of such requests, this is just a concrete example. Along with several such suggestions for spending increases there were requests to cut spending (there's always wasteful spending, right?) and to make the recent temporary tax cuts permanent.
OK, we're running a deficit, which happens from time to time, but shouldn't we be looking to eliminate it instead of increase it. Perhaps I am just dense and simple but when you increase spending and decrease income AND THEN claim that you are going to cut the deficit, too...that just seems disingenuous.

I thought Republicans were the party of the deficit hawks. Even though he says the economy is getting better, he is only planning to cut the deficit by half in the next five years. If he mentioned when the deficit would be eliminated, I missed it. He blamed Clinton for the need for deficit spending because he mismanaged the 90's boom and its resulting budget surplus. Shouldn't we be planning to get to surplus, not just to cut the deficit in half?

The plan seems to be this, attach more programs to the system without an increase in revenue. He said himself this will mean cutting wasteful spending. We are to gut the middle to build to the outside. Jenganomics. It sounds reasonable for now because there is still some strength in the whole on which we can draw. But the time will come when we begin cutting things out of the existing system that will weaken the whole, and then building more on the top will further weaken it. It will tumble down like a tower of wooden blocks. That's the point at which our children will be picking up the pieces and wondering why their parents acted so foolishly. When you play a game, you should be willing to clean up after it. Let's work to leave as little mess as possible.

I noticed that he threatened the members of Congress, too. Did you catch it? He told them that if they let the temporary tax cuts expire, they would be raising taxes. What a load of crap! Eliminating permanent tax cuts would be raising taxes, but these weren't meant to continue. You can bet that everyone in that House chamber last night understood that to allow the cuts to expire would give the Bush administration the excuse to brand anyone with a label like"anti-economy," "tax and spend liberal," or "anti-American." Don't think it won't happen! It's an election year. Just because Howard Dean had to learn a hard lesson about negative ads doesn't mean that the President won't play hard ball.

The President said something to the effect that people are much better at determining good spending than the government is. With some of the bone-headed things we read in the news sometimes, it is hard to argue with that. That does not mean that there isn't an argument to be made, however. It is good capitalist theory to say that the people will choose the best way to spend their own money. It's the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith at work. But who do we look out for? Number one, of course! We live in a "me first" society. So who handles the common good? The government and social agencies.
I would argue that the more we return to the people, the more is spent based on the principle of "me first." And where will the spending cuts come from to offset these tax cuts? Programs that do not appear to hurt much. Government will cede the role of funding social programs to independent agencies who are at the mercy of local fundraising. In a "me first" society, people put such agencies at a very low personal priority because they may not recognize that they are getting any benefit from it. So homelessness, poverty, education, etc. are sloughed off by government and then ignored by those who think it should be someone else's problem to solve.

Ladies and gentlemen, government does have a role to play. It is at least in part to provide for the common good; things such as roads and law enforcement, as examples. I would also argue that government should have no right to create a law for which it is not willing to pay the costs. "No Child Left Behind" is arguably a helpful law for setting standards, but to impose standards that cost money to implement and not provide the finances is wrong. School districts across the country are already hurting financially because bonds and levies are not being passed. (Someone else's problem, maybe?) Columbus Public Schools in Ohio are having to weigh the possibility of laying off 800 of their 5000 teachers to balance their budget. Sounds like there will be some children left behind. What good are the standards if you can't afford to keep your teachers? Kind of a moot point. In New Mexico, arts education may be totally defunded for 2005 for lack of money. It won't get merged into the rest of the program, don't go there. Teachers are spending so much time preparing students for the proficiency tests they are mandated to take that there will be no meaningful time for the arts.

It looks like we're in the process of killing education as we know it. Some might say that isn't so bad. I'm not voting for them.