I was disappointed with Steve DeCosta’s article (“Big Government”) in Sunday’s paper. His article was framed in the language of conservative tax activists, such as the Tax Foundation, whom he quoted, and it placed the spotlight on local government.
But the real issue is not whether local governments are wasting taxpayers’ money. It is why local governments are not getting the revenue they require to provide essential services.
It is also about our economic priorities at the national level. Mr. DeCosta’s article offered vague statistics and could have dug deeper to contribute to an informed debate over how we as a society choose to live together and determine and fund our social priorities.
Some of his statistics were not helpful. For example, “The Tax Foundation reports that about 30 percent of all American income is turned over to one government or another in the form of taxes.” Unfortunately, this says nothing about how or where the money is spent, or by whom.
So let’s check.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau, federal taxes consume approximately 20.27 percent of average American incomes, state taxes 7.12 percent and local taxes 3.56 percent.
The article goes on to quote: “Between the feds, the state, and our cities and towns, 19.7 million people work for us,” the size of Madagascar, it points out. Or that one out of seven Americans is a government employee. But wouldn’t it be more useful to actually know what services these people are rendering and which type of government they come from?
Using figures drawn from the same government sources, we learn that 1.88 percent of all Massachusetts workers are employed by the federal government, 3.24 percent work for the state, and 6.53 percent work for local government. Of these local government employees, half are teachers; the rest dogcatchers, snow plow operators, police, fire, sanitation and medical workers.
What we see here is that local governments employ the most workers, who deliver the most direct services to taxpayers, yet they receive the least amount of tax revenue, even adjusting for state and federal transfers.
So why is the focus of Mr. DeCosta’s article on local government? Perhaps recent tax override referenda have inspired the theme. But if we really want to deal with the costs of government, we have to acknowledge that the federal government is getting most of our money.
Rather than giving local librarians pink slips and arguing with our neighbors, we should be paying more attention to how our federal taxes are spent and where the government jobs really are. This is where the article missed the boat.
So let’s take a look.
Of the nation’s 2.7 million federal employees, 770,000 are postal workers. After this, many of the remainder either carry guns or provide service to people who once carried guns. The VA runs a vast parallel medical care system that employs more than 250,000 people. Combined, the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and the spy agencies employ more than a million people.
In contrast, the Department of Labor employs 15,000 and Housing and Urban Development 10,000. These figures reflect our national priorities.
So, rather than standing out in the rain, waving picket signs urging the lowest possible local taxes at the local level, it might make sense to pony up for higher local and state taxes, lower federal taxes and exercise restraint on unnecessary expenditures — military spending and servicing the national debt come to mind.
It might make sense to ensure every American has medical insurance and to gradually shut down the parallel VA hospital system.
It might make sense to spend more on education to make Americans more competitive in the global economy, and less in creating defense bureaucracies or building electronic fences to keep out the poor.
It might make sense to spend more on developing mass transit infrastructure and less on automotive research or expanding the highway system.
These are topics we can all argue about, but at least our discussion will have turned to what kind of society we want to live in.
The debate over how we spend tax money is already highly politicized. Mr. DeCosta’s article suggests that local governments are doing their best with what they’ve got, and I agree.
But I would have preferred a more substantive article, particularly addressing use of our federal taxes, to fuel a public discussion of why it is we live together in a society, and what we should expect to both contribute and gain from doing so.
That’s a bigger and more important question.
This was published in the Standard Times on May 21, 2008
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20080521/opinion/805210318
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