America has an affordability problem, all right. We can no longer afford the government we have, the programs it operates, or the promises it keeps making on our behalf. Somehow, the people who helped run up the bill have convinced millions of voters that giving them another turn with the credit card will make life cheaper. In any other business, that pitch would come with a subpoena.
“Affordability” is the perfect campaign word because it promises everything without requiring the candidate to explain much of anything. Cheaper housing, cheaper groceries, cheaper healthcare, cheaper living, all delivered by people whose professional specialty is spending money they don’t have. Nobody has to explain where the additional production will come from or who will absorb the expense. Just elect the right people, authorize another program, and prosperity will arrive after the inauguration.
I spent enough years practicing law to recognize linguistic sleight of hand when I hear it. Calling something affordable doesn’t reduce its cost any more than calling a lawsuit frivolous makes the legal bill disappear. A subsidy can move an expense from one person’s balance sheet to somebody else’s, but the expense survives the trip. Washington counts on you celebrating the check without asking what happened to the invoice.
Government has three basic ways to make you pay: take the money now, borrow it and collect later, or help create the conditions under which your dollars buy less. Politicians naturally prefer whichever method makes the connection hardest to follow. An explicit tax increase gives the taxpayer somebody to blame. A shrinking grocery cart leaves him standing in the supermarket wondering how the hell he spent $150.
Borrowing makes the performance even easier. The benefit arrives today, the politician gets the photograph, and the obligation becomes somebody else’s problem. Eventually, interest on yesterday’s promises competes with today’s promises, and another round of borrowing becomes the supposedly unavoidable solution. Try running your household that way and see how long your bank describes you as compassionate.
The older I get, the wiser H. L. Mencken becomes. His famous observation is usually shortened to the proposition that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. His actual wording referred to underestimating “the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” After watching enough campaigns, I’m beginning to think he was being charitable. (quoteinvestigator.com)
You don’t have to understand the entire federal budget to recognize the sales pitch. Someone promises you a benefit and assures you that a billionaire, a corporation, or some conveniently unidentified rich person will pick up the tab. The audience applauds, the candidate advances, and the question of whether the promise can actually be financed gets postponed. Ignorance is useful to this arrangement, but the willingness to believe you’re getting something for nothing is the real asset.
Mencken described the transaction beautifully: “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” The bidders offer benefits, exemptions, subsidies, protections, and preferential treatment, while the people expected to finance the auction are told to appreciate their opportunity to participate. Some of the eventual payers aren’t even old enough to vote. What a marvelous customer acquisition strategy. (quoteinvestigator.com)
And please spare me the suggestion that putting an elephant on the letterhead automatically fixes the accounting. Republicans have had plenty of opportunities to demonstrate fiscal restraint, and borrowing doesn’t become sound economics because the borrower gave a speech about free enterprise. Incentives matter more than intentions. When political survival depends on delivering benefits now and distributing the costs later, the deficits have a powerful constituency.
Real affordability requires enough goods and services to meet demand at prices people can pay. Housing needs homes, electricity needs generating capacity, and medical care needs people and facilities capable of providing it. You cannot subsidize your way around every shortage while making it harder, slower, and more expensive to produce the thing in short supply. Yet another application for assistance is easier to announce than the removal of the obstacles that made assistance necessary.
Instead, government makes expensive promises and then treats the resulting dependency as evidence that we need more government. People become understandably terrified of losing a benefit because their household finances have been built around receiving it. The politician who helped create the arrangement returns as its indispensable protector. The rescue operation becomes permanent employment for the rescuer.
Mencken had something to say about that, too: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” Substitute “make life affordable” for “save humanity” and you have a campaign consultant’s business plan. Every new promise asks us to surrender a little more money, discretion, or independence to the people promising relief. Their authority expands immediately; the relief remains subject to funding. (quoteinvestigator.com)
We have made commitments that politicians refuse to reconcile with what taxpayers can reasonably support. Any serious attempt to do the arithmetic gets attacked as cruelty, while making another unfunded promise passes for compassion. There is apparently no moral objection to handing the obligation to children who had no say in creating it. The only unforgivable act is mentioning the bill before Election Day.
So here we are, shopping for relief from the very political machinery that keeps making the obligations larger. The faces rotate, the slogans change, and another class of officeholders assures us that affordability is finally on the way. I’ll believe it when they explain which promises they’re prepared to stop making and which expenses they’re prepared to stop imposing. Until then, we’ve hired the same caterer for another banquet and been assured that this time we can afford the meal.
