Conservatives lose economic arguments, not because they are wrong, but because gorillas are cute.
On the Opinion page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press today (“Minnesota Senate’s bonding bill a responsible action”) state Sen. Keith Langseth, DFL-Glyndon, grabs the guidon of government on the march and hails the Senate’s $329 million public works bill as “the most responsible thing the Legislature could do to help the state climb out of the recession.” More than half the projects in the bill, he writes, are “asset-preservation projects” that are “ready to go,” “will employ local construction workers all over the state,” and “will immediately create jobs.”
Blarney, said Jonathan Blake, vice president of Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, in a Pioneer Press op-ed (“Minnesota Senate bonding bill is irresponsible”) last week, “How many jobs will these projects actually create?” Blake points out that Langseth’s own estimates range from 5,000 to 3,500 new jobs while some media reports suggest 15,000 jobs will be created. Last year DFL Senator Steve Murphy promised that tax increases in the massive transportation bill, passed over the governor’s veto,would create 33,000 jobs “in the very first year.” Murphy now admits his estimate (a polite euphemism for bullsh*t – he didn’t even try to get it right) was off by 100 percent. Blake concludes the job numbers were being “pulled out of thin air.”
And, asks Blake, “How exactly does a gorilla exhibit stimulate the economy? Are bike trails really the most efficient way to put people to work? Why should all state taxpayers fund a new runway in Bigfork?”
And with knockout punches on job estimates and project value, Blake clearly wins the debate, and conservatives lose the issue.
Here’s why. Once the threshold economic principle is breached and liberals get conservatives arguing about the details of tax and spending plans, how cute gorillas are, liberals win. Remember, the public thinks gorillas are cute, and if the perception is that somebody else is picking up the tab, they want to go look at gorillas. They like their bike paths, and they don’t have any (or so it seems) out-of-pocket expense for them. Airports seem important, why shouldn’t government pay. We need roads and bridges; who’s going to build and maintain them if not the government?
If conservatives hope to make any progress at all winning the hearts and minds of the public, they have to keep the context of the debate on the threshold principle, the “big lie,” if you will. In this case the “big lie” is Langseth’s claim that government spending, in and of itself, creates jobs and “will help the state climb out of the recession.”
Government spending doesn’t create jobs. We’ve been down this road before. In fact, non-essential government spending is a swift kick to the privates (pun intended) that is doubly painful. Government can’t spend a dollar building roads, bike trails or anything else of benefit to chest-beating primates until it takes the dollar from a productive taxpayer, i.e. someone who has with his or her labor earned a dollar by creating a dollar’s worth of value for someone else. The dollar spent by the government is an unearned dollar not spent by the person who earned it. The dollar used by the state to “create a job” is a dollar not available to the person who earned it to create a job, support an existing job or invest so as to allow someone else to create a job.
The double whammy occurs when government spends the dollar on a non-essential project. The reason St. Paul’s gorillas need subsidized housing, and Rochester needs a subsidized home for international volleyball events, is that no private individual would invest in those enterprises. In other words, there is a more efficient use of capital creating a higher return for the investor because people want or need something more than they want to go look at gorillas or watch the French actually compete at something. When government subsidizes something because the market will not support it, government is diverting capital from its most efficient use to a lesser use and the community as a whole loses, which is hardly a line to pull us out of a recession.
Government can’t create jobs, it can only change the mix of employment, and when it does so through non-essential projects undertaken simply because they are “ready to go,” it harms not helps the economy, is the threshold principle that conservatives must defend. Why argue with liberals about how wrong their job creation numbers are when the right job-creation number is zero? Why argue about whether gorillas have educational value (might be nice if the kids studied economics) or if volleyball centers draw international events to Rochester when the key to pulling out of a depression is getting dollars flowing to their most productive use? To where we get more for less, not less for more.
If creating jobs were as easy as passing a bonding bill out of the state Senate, why did Langseth and his cronies stop at $329 million? Why not double that number and create twice as many jobs? Triple it even. Seems the “most responsible thing the Legislature could do” is pass an even larger bonding bill. And then, just to create even more jobs, legislators could go on a window-breaking rampage. Just think how many glaziers we would need to employ!
Update: See “Rep. Matt Dean on Bonding for State Buildings“
If these arguments are lost, they’re lost because the basic principle has been forgotten:
Tax money is taken from innocent people, by force, against their will. It’s wrong to take money from people (by force, against their will) to spend it on luxuries.
Thou shalt not steal. Not even if gorillas are cute. Hold a fundraiser for your gorilla exhibit. Ask people to pay. If they want gorillas, they’ll donate. Don’t take the money from people, by force, against their will for your entertainment.
I’ll agree, less is usually more in these debates. Taxes and tax policy are too complicated to forge into effective slogans. Spending might be the better concept.
State spending has more than tripled in 20 years. Are you making 3x the money?
Of course your argument would actually be valid if businesses actually built the infrastructure that the economy is built on. You know..things like roads and such. But if you want to maintain this fiction of yours then I’m quite sure y’all will be quite willing to give up your Social Security, Medicare and all the other things that taxes go to pay for.
Sorry, children, if it’s true that there is such a thing as too much taxes then it’s equally true that there is such a thing as too little taxes. Minnesota has higher taxes then Mississippi..and yet for at least the last 30 years Minnesota has had a better economy than Mississippi. But by your arguments lower taxes should equal a better economy. And oops that isn’t the case.
And oh please “Taxes are taken against people’s will.” Are you honestly so stupid to think that this is a dictatorship or other tyranny? Do you vote? If you say yes then you have absolutely no right to say “against your will.” If you believe it’s so against your will then get your ass out of the country you ungrateful little sob’s. But you’re absolutely stupid to even remotely think that you get nothing or so little for your taxes. Knock off the ideology for once and start dealing with reality.
Here’s the problems with Nick’s argument.
Businesses and individuals do actually build the infrastructure; not only that, the private sector creates the demand for that infrastructure. Government can’t build anything until someone creates the wealth necessary to build it. Infrastructure could easily be built privately, but there is an objective “public good” aspect to infrastructure that makes its construction and maintenance a legitimate function of government. Read the post by Rep. Matt Dean, which poses the proper questions that the state doesn’t ask when deciding “What” to build.
Many of us are quite willing to give up Social Security and Medicare and have been calling for reform that includes the ability to opt out of these programs – not pay in and not take out. The Minnesota/Mississippi comparison is a red herring, if for no other reason than the level of taxation is far less important than the method of taxation in determining the effectiveness of taxation. But that discussion involves math.
The “taxes are against the people’s will” misrepresentation is more interesting, because it makes the classic progressive misassumption that democracy describes an economic system, which it does not.
Democracy addresses the question, “How will society make collective decisions?” It answers the question by putting the power of collective action in the hands of the people. If the state is going to act collectively, it is best the people and not one individual or small group of individuals, makes the decision.
The question democracy does not address is “WHEN should society act collectively?” The answer to that question is found in a republican government’s constitution. A constitution enumerates when society is authorized to act collectively. If government is not authorized to act, then it cannot act – democratically or in any other way.
So, when it comes to bonding, government has a legitimate function. It can and should make decisions about essential projects that further its constitutional obligations. Those projects should be fully funded. Government has no authority (or the ability) to “create jobs” by bonding for projects that having nothing to do with its constitutional obligations. Those projects should not be funded.
Debate and discussion and thinking take a little work, but it’s the only reasonable retort to the chest-pounding substitution of insult for argument.