The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [143]
It gets pretty expensive. In 1965, President Johnson struggled to hold the federal budget at $118.4 billion. By 1978, the budget reached $453.5 billion. Even when there are sound reasons to terminate benefit programs, as was the case with Medicaid reimbursements for city retirees or federal water projects, a public-interest constituency does not exist to counter the organized voices of special interests.
This leads to logrolling. Urban members of Congress, for instance, promise to support inflationary farm support programs in return for pro-city votes. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
“Frank, that speech yo’ made wasn’t one bit helpful,” President Johnson once reportedly said to Senator Frank Church.
“I’m sorry, Mr. President, the headlines exaggerated what I said,” Church sheepishly responded.
“The headlines were all Ah read, Frank, and they’re all the people read.”
“But I didn’t go any further than Walter Lippmann.”
“Well, Frank,” LBJ retorted, feigning sorrow, “the next time you need money to build a dam in your state, you better go to Mr. Lippmann.”
That’s how the game often works. Ed Koch, like Jimmy Carter, is called a confrontationist if he speaks out and threatens to take his case to the public; if he doesn’t heed the counsel of the domestic equivalent of the military/industrial complex—the banks, unions, landlords and other organized-interest groups who profit from government. Government spending grows. Conservatives like Nixon and Ford didn’t stop it, and liberals don’t try. As spending rises, so do expectations. Parents demand tuition tax credits. Teachers demand more school aid. Farmers demand guaranteed prices. Cities demand more programs. Scientists demand more study grants. The airlines demand more subsidies. Chrysler and gas stations and the steel companies demand federal loan guarantees. Government becomes a giant commissary where free lunch is served. Politics becomes an arena not just where competing interests clash but where gifts are exchanged, often in return for votes—legalized vote buying. For years, many of us said the federal government could afford this because, unlike cities or states, it could print money. And yet in recent years we have learned federal spending does contribute to inflation, just as local taxes contributed to the flight of people and jobs. We have learned there are limits to growth and what government can do. Newton’s law—for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—applies to government, as well as physics.
There are also political limits to growth. As citizens pay more for government and receive less, a taxpayer revolt becomes inevitable. Taxpayers will simply refuse to pay the bill, turning off to all government, all reforms that cost money, all belief in progress. Government becomes the enemy; politicians and public unions will become scapegoats—they’re all a bunch of crooks! Escalating publie cynicism thus poses a threat to democratic government because citizens will not trust their elected officials to make decisions. This attitude toward government threatens the “social contract.” But it is, we shouldn’t forget, a reaction against another kind of cynicism. In New York, politicians lied about their budgets; the police, sworn to uphold the law, broke state law by going on strike; Mitchell-Lama tenants lie about their incomes to remain in subsidized housing. Landlords rip off high rents from the city, nursing home owners rip off Medicaid, hustlers rip off welfare. City workers assume expensive perks are really prerequisites for a good life and that a government job is a right. The public becomes an abstraction. Gimme. Gimme. Why not? Everybody in America’s doing it. The rich usually don’t pay their fair share of taxes. Legislators get rich off lucrative law practices. Politicians buy votes with public money. College students don’t repay their National Student Loans.