Saturday Morning Crazy Talk

I walked up D Street NE this morning through the cold and snow to spend 45 minutes on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal talking about the education section of the State of The Union. It’s always a fun program to do, partly because there’s actually enough time to talk through the issues, and partly because half the program is spent taking calls from the audience, which lends a certain air of unpredictability to the conversation.

At 26 minutes into the broadcast (watch it here), we got a call that began like this:

“I live in New Jersey, where basically all the money for education goes for three things: teacher salaries, teachers and administration, and all their pensions. Out of a dollar, maybe ten cents, maybe six cents gets to the students. It’s embarrassing for unions to suck up all of the money for education.”

Now, there’s no way to know for sure, but there was nothing to indicate that this man was calling from some kind of secure state facility providing long-term residential care to the mentally ill. He didn’t introduce himself by saying, “Speaking as someone who recently suffered a sharp blow to the head,” nor did he offer any later qualifications such as, “It’s possible that this is just the hallucinogens talking.” And yet he thinks that only six to ten cents of every public dollar spent on education in New Jersey goes to students, because the rest is being sucked up by salaries and pensions for teachers and administrators. This says a lot about how degraded our public dialogue has become regarding issues of taxation and public spending.

The size of government is a perfectly legitimate subject for debate.  There are plenty of examples in our own past of too-high marginal tax rates and public spending that proved wasteful or unwise. Taxation isn’t something to be taken lightly, the government is inherently bad at performing many functions, and there are real tradeoffs when dollars are transferred from private to public hands.

But the fact of the matter is that government is relatively small in America when compared to other countries with similar economies and cultures. When you confine the discussion to domestic non-defense spending, it’s smaller still. And most of the services our government provides are things that people like to receive. People like to have their trash picked up and their neighborhoods patrolled by police. They like the fact that when they pull their car out of the garage, there’s a paved road at the end that’s connected to other paved roads in a logical fashion. They want bike paths and parks to play in and the they want dangerous criminals to be locked away in prison. When they get too old to work and can’t afford health care, they’re grateful for help. And they really like to pay for public schools.

People who don’t want these things are entitled to their position, but they’re also clearly in the minority. And people who want these things but don’t want to pay taxes to support them don’t have a logical case to make. So the rhetoric has shifted over time away from opposition to government services toward opposition to government workers. It’s a deliberate and conscious attempt to conjure up a faceless, powerful enemy who should be hated and feared.

You hear it Rick Perry’s casual slur of “unelected bureaucrats” who supposedly want to wrest control of our children’s educational future away from parents. Politicians pay zero price for saying stuff like this; it has become accepted as a normal way for public figures to speak. It’s what keeps us from having a grown-up conversation about deficits and debt, among many other things. And it’s what makes otherwise non-deranged people get up on Saturday morning, call into nationally televised news programs, and say crazy, crazy things.