re: #318 Fat Bastard Vegetarian

The government resembles a hybrid of a business and a household. I mean, really, it resembles a government; comparisons to anything else are always going to fail. Anyone making such a comparison is distracting us from the actual subject.

The government is the public system that underpins our private one. The government is, at its most basic, the laws of this land and the enforcement of them. It also is a tool to promote our general welfare, to engage in activities that benefit our society as a whole.

To that end, it spends money on projects that are beneficial to our society. Everything from meat inspection (hey-o) to mail delivery to basic science research, things which are not provided for by the private market and inherently can’t be, are done by the government.

Many of these things give us back a greater return than they cost. Science research, public health clinics, unemployment, food stamps, all of these programs benefit the economy and the nation, either by supporting private industry, which does little basic science research on its own, or keeping the velocity of money high.

Remember, there’s never a point where someone ceases to be the responsibility of the government. If someone is dead broke, absolutely without money, and unemployed, then it’s going to wind up in the governments’ lap somehow. They might get evicted, in which case the courts, the sherrif’s office, etc. gets involved, all of which costs a bundle. They might resort to crime, in which case, again, the government gets involved. They may be able to scrimp and save and get by on almost nothing, but not be able to afford to pay for their kids to go to college interviews, and so the money that the government put into the education of those kids gets wasted.

Government is always the last resort, and to that end, it works to prevent things from getting there. Instead of evicting the poor on a regular basis, we have Section 8 housing, because it’s hard for someone to find work if they don’t have a place to stay. This isn’t to give them a freebie, it’s because no matter what, they’re going to cost us money. Giving them a break on housing, helping to pay their rent is the least costly and best solution.

So, all of this means that in a recession, like now, the need for all of this is more. The government is a AAA security, no matter what S&P or anyone else says; the market demonstrates that. Everyone wants to buy our bonds. The government is what can provide surety and velocity to the market when the private market can’t, or won’t.

The problem is not the debt, or the deficit. The problem is that we keep our high levels of spending going even when we don’t need to, even when the economy is roaring along at gangbusters. That’s when it’s idiotic to be getting deeper into debt; when the market is working at high efficiency.

The time for the Tea Party to have made their claims, the time for the GOP to squawk about the debt ceiling, was during times of prosperity. Like, say, the period before the crash.

Of course, then we were engaged in a huge orgy of spending on the Iraq war.

To put a final analogy in: the government is a lot more like a company than a household. And a company tries its goddamn best to never cut services, never lose market share. It tries to cut costs by becoming more efficient, learning how to do things cheaper— it doesn’t just stop doing them.

Those who propose cutting the ‘entitlement’ programs can never explain what happens next. So we have a ton more poor people with even less money, a ton of seniors who can’t afford their health care. What happens? How are they not still a drain on the economy? How are they not more of a drain than if we went about helping them in a more efficient and sane way?