You Shall Know Them By Their Fruits

Government spending: are we doing good, or merely giving the appearance of doing good?

The title is from Matthew 7:15-20.

This is Part 2 in a 3-part series:

Part 1: Whom Shall Ye Serve

Part 3: The Simple Pass On

In my post, Whom Shall Ye Serve, I wrote about the extent to which we have become servants of government. After being able to see the full extent, and put into perspective the required time, energy, and of course money, one of the questions I asked was, “what the hell are we spending all that money on?!” The full answer to that would consume entire bookshelves I’m sure, but I just want to share an example that might shed some light on the question I ask in the subtitle, “are we doing good, or merely giving the appearance of doing good?”

The chart above is from the wiki, “United States federal budget.” If my memory serves from “Whom Shall We Serve,” the total take by governments at the federal, state and local levels was 38.21%; you can see from the chart that the federal is the lion’s share, at 30.5% of GDP. And disturbingly, Total Revenues are “just” 18.1%. The shortfall is known as “the deficit,” which adds to the debt. Or, if money is “printed” to cover the difference between revenues and expenditures, which is nothing less than legalized counterfeiting on a massive scale, a combination of inflation and devaluation of the dollar is created. But that’s a story for another day, today we are just looking at the “outlays.”

If we look into the blue, the “Mandatory” outlays, which account for 2/3rds of total outlays, we will see the entirety of the welfare state we have created. None of that existed until 1935, when the Social Security Act was created as part of the “New Deal” under the FDR administration, and in the wake of the Great Depression. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” as they say. The rest of it more or less, including the “war on poverty,” itself part of Johnson’s larger “Great Society,” was created in 1965. I think it’s safe to say, regardless of whether or not the programs are bringing about their desired effect, New Deal and Great Society programs in toto are literally bankrupting the nation. But again, that’s a story for another day.

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

Thomas Sowell

In the interest of full disclosure, Thomas Sowell is one of my heroes. The man is wise, even beyond his 90 years. You can read some quotes here, I will probably use a few more of them, and he has published eight or more books since he turned 80.

The question I want to address today is this; are we doing good, or merely giving others the appearance of doing good? To get a feel for that I want to look at the war on poverty in particular.