It’s funny. I guess Duncan wasn’t in the mood to listen to my request that progressives engage in less all spending is good spending analysis, since he retorted with exactly that rhetoric. I understand his point and it will take a small bit of argument to explain why I disagree with it. Duncan says, in his typical way, that we’d be better off paying people to dig and fill ditches or build and explode bombs than we are letting them languish in an economy that simply doesn’t have enough jobs. In the abstract, he is correct. But let’s make this a little more concrete.
One point I made that Duncan ignored was that $1.74 billion of these cuts came from appropriations that were made for the 2010 Census but which were not spent. Kudos to the Commerce Department for coming in so under budget, by the way. How’s that for government efficiency?
In any case, I mentioned the Census money because it’s an example of a huge chunk of money that was not removed from the economy when it was slashed from the budget. That money was going to sit in some drawdown account for the next eight years until we started gearing up for next constitutionally-mandated accounting of our citizenry in 2019. You might remember seeing employment-level reports last year that gave you numbers that included and excluded temporary Census workers. We hired a ton of people on a temporary basis to walk door-to-door and conduct the Census. It gave a temporary boost to the employment numbers.
Now, thinking of Duncan’s ditch-diggers, and ditch-fillers, and bomb-makers, and controlled bomb-exploders, we could just as easily use them to do something less idiotic. We could have them conduct another census. They could do a census every year for the next nine years. It wouldn’t be the real Census; the one that matters. But it would help us more closely track the changes in our demographics. Sociologists might be thrilled with all the data. It would do the exact same thing for the economy and the unemployment rate as Duncan’s plan, but we’d get something marginally more valuable out of it.
But what would happen? We’d get a bunch of people who are reliant on temporary jobs that have little intrinsic value. We’d delegitimize the ‘real’ census by aggravating and confusing people with fake surveys, and they’d be less willing to cooperate when we needed them to cooperate. And we’d open ourselves up to deserving and undeserving ridicule that would delegitimize our greater political goals.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. What seems sensible in the abstract may not be worth it in the real world. All spending is not good spending. Some spending is simple waste. Other spending is political foolishness. Spending in one area can make it harder to spend in another area. Do you think the big earmarkers wish they’d never authorized that Bridge to Nowhere? It was a bridge too far, and it came back to bite them in the ass and put all their projects at risk.
It is unlikely that hiring people to dig and fill ditches would work out for the best even though it would make a certain amount of short-term sense. I know Duncan likes to make short-hand arguments. And I do understand his overall point, and I agree with it. But all spending is not good spending.
