Uncommon Sense: More Nansense

Written by Jeff Morris
Thursday, 26 January 2012 01:00

On Monday, Jan. 23, Alan Chartock of WAMC in Albany interviewed our own Rep. Nan Hayworth. I listened online — over and over — in order to copy it down word for word. Why? Because Ms. Hayworth poses as a sensible, middle-of-the-road representative of this district's residents, yet her unquestioning repetition of extreme anti-government rhetoric and half-truths exposes her as anything but. Fortunately, she might no longer be Lewisboro's problem after redistricting. I have my fingers crossed.

Q: You have in the past talked about the bloated federal government. Where is the bloat?

A: Well, it's in some large identifiable pieces, I would say, and it's also distributed throughout the federal government. And in our last conversation I was mentioning that the difference between letting our dollars that we work so hard for stay in the free part of our economy — the marketplace, the enterprise part — as opposed to giving them to government, or being compelled to give them to government — even Warren Buffet says that, he says the point of taxes is you're forced to pay them, 'cause he says that's why he doesn't want to write a check to the Treasury on his own — well, going back to taxing our public more, there is no guarantee whatsoever that human beings who form the bureaucracies, the regulatory bodies, the legislative bodies that comprise what we would refer to as the "federal government" are going to be less subject to human foibles and failings — mendacity, self-dealing — than any other human beings. And the problem becomes when we allocate our treasure to government, to big government, which we need for certain functions, but when we allocate ever more of our hard-earned treasure to them, we are also, the difference between the federal government and the free enterprise part of our society, is that the federal government has the force of law and arms, you know the difference is that the government can force these things out of you, you can be put into jail if you don't pay your taxes.

Q: Let's go through a little litany here: Social Security.

A: Well, Social Security in and of itself has a bit of an arithmetic problem, as we know, and I'm saying a bit of, just the reason I'm using those words is because Social Security's challenge is that the trust fund is running out of its investments faster than it's being replenished by payroll tax contributions, so what that means is that the baby boom generation, and I think the trust fund is scheduled to run out somewhere, not nearly as acute a problem as it is with Medicare, somewhere around, somewhere in the 2030s ... it's predictable, but it's far enough in the future that we can probably deal with that making some fairly minor tweaks, but it is still a problem and it comes, it stems from the fact that when Social Security was established in the 1930s and it started paying out benefits I think initially in the very early 1940s, but you know age 65 was actually two years beyond life expectancy, I mean it really was designed to be a little program, a backstop if you will for the neediest, it's a fairly modest thing, and of course it became, and you know everybody could contribute and everybody could expect to receive something if they lived that long, but again in the 30s living to 65 was hardly assured — thank God! Thank God today we live far beyond that, but of course we're still, and Social Security payroll tax contributions have been adjusted over the years but just not enough to keep up with the predictable obligations of Social Security, and that problem is magnified when we look at Medicare, and people, a lot of folks a lot of Americans, do rely on their Medicare and their Social Security benefits, and Medicare's trust fund is expected to run out at this point in the early 2020s, probably less than 10 years from now, given the rate of acceleration of Medicare expenditures, 'cause again thank God, we can do a number of things to give people longer lives in better health, and they tend to be costly, health care in this country in particular is very costly for a number of reasons, and Medicare is the bigger challenge ...

Q: What do you want to do about it?

A: I was going to mention, Sen. Ron Wyden of Wisconsin, who's a Democrat — oh, Oregon, rather — and Paul Ryan, Republican representative from Wisconsin, have gotten together and proposed a very sensible plan to address the administrative changes we need to make in Medicare for those of us who can plan ahead somewhat. You know people like me, I'm an early, I'm a late-born baby boomer so to speak, I'm early in my baby boom eligibility so to speak for these benefits, so people like me can plan ahead, we need to, we need to, we need to adjust these things, and the federal government when we talk about bloat, you know we're really talking about so many of the departments, that unfortunately arguably haven't benefited the American public in the way they were supposed to, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education being conspicuous in that regard, but again because the federal government can force money out of your pocket to pay for things, they don't necessarily have as we all know dealing with certain types of governmental agencies some of them do well but a lot of them can do a lot better, they don't have competition, they don't have a particular incentive to do better until the voting public stands up and says "we've got to do things" ...

Q: So give me an example in terms of Energy and Education, what should the voting public do?

A: Well, I would, and I've said it, I think we could, and unfortunately it would only be a partial way to say the least, to address the debt, the mounting debt that we face now, 100% of gross domestic product, as you know, over $15 trillion, that's huge, and looming obligations in Social Security and Medicare in particular that amount to upwards of $70 trillion depending on how those calculations are done, enormous things we face. So you look at the Department of Energy, I think it was established in 1977 and was supposed to ensure our energy future, it was supposed to ensure that the price of oil was something we could control. Well we're nowhere near doing that, we're nowhere near developing the energy economy that we would like to see, and why? Because the federal government tends to make investments that are political in nature, and not the most sound and sensible ones in terms of where you actually could develop potential, you know, look at Solyndra, that's one small example, so arguably the Department of Energy has not been useful. Should we assure environmental protections as we develop our energy? Absolutely. The Department of Interior could do that. Department of Education was supposed to enhance the educational quality for America's young people. Well, there is no statistical evidence that definitively shows that all the exertions and the millions and billions of dollars that we've thrown at the Department of Education have helped at all, and I think that should be a function of our states and our communities to supervise children's education. It doesn't mean that as a nation we don't think about those things, clearly we do, but to endow the federal government with this kind of micromanagement power on a local level unfortunately has not made any sense.