The Pity Party (28 page)

An even more effective argument, judging by the frequency with which it is employed, is to connect a specific suffering situation to the absence or underfunding of a government program. Paul Waldman invented Betsy Wilson, but Kristof discovered Richard Streeter, a forty-seven-year-old truck driver with “a tumor in his colon that may kill him because Obamacare didn't come quite soon enough.” Lacking health insurance, Streeter put off seeing a doctor, until he learned that economizing on medical expenditures had put his life at risk.
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Liberals say these things so often because they're advantageous as well as gratifying. As I've noted, framing the liberal agenda as the politics of kindness is an attempt, often very effective, to put conservatives on the defensive at the outset of every policy debate. The politics of kindness is even more useful to liberalism, however, by virtue of the subjects it excludes. The sufferer and the mechanism by which the government might alleviate his suffering if only we were a bit more compassionate and generous are always at the top of the agenda, while several awkward questions are ruled out of order. Indeed, even to raise them is to evince the callousness that permits so much suffering in the first place.

So, for example, conservatives never tire of pointing out that a cut in government social welfare spending means . . . a cut, which is not the same as a reduction from some past or anticipated rate of growth. Liberals, for their part, never tire of disregarding this simple fact. The California journalist Peter Schrag declared in 2011 that in both Sacramento and Washington, D.C., “government and government services are being taken down piece by piece,” because the “paucity of revenues has become an immutable political absolute.” It's a story with a villain, one as mendacious as it is malign: “The GOP may not acknowledge that it wants to privatize public schools or drive students of limited means out of the universities, or eliminate tax-funded health care and social services for the poor, or destroy the last vestiges of publicly supported transit or shut the parks. . . . But that clearly is what it's accomplishing.”
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In 2010, however, the last full fiscal year before Schrag issued his indictment, California's state and local governments combined to spend $11,621 for each state resident on all government functions. Adjusted for inflation, those per capita outlays were 52 percent higher than they had been eighteen years earlier. In 1992, it will be noted, California operated schools and universities. Eighteen years later public spending on education was 48 percent higher, adjusted for inflation and population growth, and education advocates complained constantly about how the schools were running out of money. State and local governments also provided health care in 1992. By 2010, when California's conservatives were marshaling the forces of greed and selfishness to deny vital funding to those endeavors, public outlays on hospitals and health programs were 39 percent higher. Spending on public welfare programs, the ones being dismantled as a result of fiscal austerity, went up 47 percent. The parks being forced to close had 36 percent more money, while the housing programs being eviscerated received 83 percent more. In short, ever-bluer California spent two decades increasing outlays on all the causes most important to liberals, at rates far faster than the combined effects of inflation and population growth would dictate. The result, somehow, is a public sector that has gotten worse rather than better at meeting California's basic needs . . . for which conservatives are to blame.
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Liberalism without bullshit, if such a thing is conceivable, would take up Mitch Daniels's challenge to make sure the programs liberals have created over the past century operate so effectively and efficiently that no government dollar capable of benefiting a poor person is being wasted in any way. There's a reason so few liberals sign up for this crusade: acknowledging the importance of making government programs more effective requires admitting they are not, presently, as effective as they can or should be. Such an admission could lead reasonable people, not to mention vicious right-wingers, to conclude that before we turn our attention to creating new government programs and increasing funding for existing ones, we should—both for the sake of taxpayers who fund social welfare programs and for clients who depend on them—make sure the existing array of programs is working as well as can reasonably be expected. Putting the liberal political project on hold until the liberal governmental project is in good repair, however, could involve a long, enervating delay. During it, parading one's compassion and denouncing the empathy-deficient will give way to the useful but less gratifying drudgery of making stuff work right. And if protracted, earnest, but unsuccessful efforts to improve implementation demonstrate that some stuff cannot be made to work right, the political project will endure not just a delay but a defeat, as it becomes clear that conservative opposition to the government program in question had a basis in something more substantial and admirable than greed and cruelty.

Better, then, for liberals to debate the welfare state in terms of whether we're putting as much into it as we're obliged to, rather than whether we're getting as much out of it as we deserve to. All the government we need is not only a great deal of government but always a great deal
more
government than we have at any particular moment, no matter how much government has grown. Liberal rhetoric in default mode, demanding more and bigger government programs, proceeds as though ongoing and even long-established initiatives addressing this or that intolerable problem did not exist. Suffering situations are depicted with harrowing detail, while the efficacy of the government programs to alleviate them is posited. Examining a website where artists explained their preference for reelecting President Obama, the
Weekly Standard
's Andrew Ferguson concluded that liberals invest the words “program” and “funding” with “talismanic power.” They enthuse over programs that “will rescue the environment or curb domestic violence or teach civility or help the disabled or train the jobless. The proper program can do everything but play canasta. And it can be advocated without wondering how it might work or whether it would work or what other programs would not be funded so it could be.”
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Democratic presidents cannot be as blithe about the question of efficacy as citizens venting their opinions. Each of the three most recent has felt the need to say and do something about it. In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama acknowledged that wasteful, inconsequential government was a problem for the party
of
government. He urged Congress to give the people “a government that's more competent and more efficient,” because “We can't win the future with a government of the past.” Noting that “the last major reorganization of the Government happened in the age of black-and-white TV,” Obama promised his administration would “develop a proposal to merge, consolidate, and reorganize the Federal Government.”
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With this declaration Obama was inadvertently or slyly disparaging his most recent Democratic predecessor. In a 1993 speech announcing the creation of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, President Bill Clinton said, “Our goal is to make the entire federal government less expensive and more efficient, and to change the culture of our national bureaucracy away from complacency and entitlement toward initiative and empowerment. We intend to redesign, to reinvent, to reinvigorate the entire national government.”
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For the president in 2011 to state that one must go back half a century to find a government reorganization worthy of the name is to signal, implicitly but unmistakably, that very little came of Clinton's ambitious goals and the council that spent eight years working on them. In a sense, however, it's only fair for Obama to slight Clinton, given that Clinton's vow to upgrade the expensive, inefficient, complacent governmental apparatus
he
inherited signaled just as clearly that Jimmy Carter's promises in 1976 to make government as good and competent as the American people, through innovations like sunset laws and zero-based budgeting, had yielded little of durable value.

Obama's promised transformation was completely forgotten months after he introduced it. The boldest, most visionary proposal toward the goal of merging, consolidating, and reorganizing the federal government was to transfer the Office of the United States Trade Representative from the Executive Office of the President to the Department of Commerce. Congress wasn't interested and, it became clear, neither was the White House.
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Having made no changes that anyone hails or even recalls, the Obama crusade to make the government more competent and efficient leaves the next Democratic president free to make the same promise yet again, and well positioned to achieve the same result. The fate of a chronic problem, evidently, is to have a chronic solution. If any recent Democratic administrations' bold proclamations about transforming American governance had produced tangible outcomes that turned out to be even quasi-transformative, successive Democratic presidents would not keep finding it necessary to push what sounds like the very same boulder up what sounds like the very same hill. These serial futilities suggest either that activist government's flaws are irremediable, or that liberals' efforts to address them are exercises, deluded or cynical, in going through the motions. It is fitting that the problem of government programs that are busy but inconsequential, doing much but accomplishing little, elicit periodic government reform crusades that are also busy, or at least noisy, and inconsequential.

There are, then, many arguments about the unnecessary suffering that people—preferably, specific people, ones with sad stories that can be told in affecting detail, who'll struggle not to but ultimately cry on camera in a way that makes television viewers want to cry, too—will endure because of the failure to create this government program or “adequately” fund that one. (That not a single well-intentioned government program has ever been adequately funded is axiomatic.) One possible response is that rather than talk about this sufferer and that program, we need, like the diversity professionals in college admissions offices, to consider the question holistically. Doing so would argue that, in the context of America's overall efforts to alleviate suffering situations, the problem is not that the amount of money the government spends is insufficient but that the manner in which it spends money is ineffective. Frame the issue in that way and the key issue cannot be inputs, such as how much money is spent on a program; or outputs, such as how many people it employs or how many beneficiaries it enrolls; but out
comes
, the measured, provable performance Governor Daniels called for. And if outcomes matter—indeed, if they're the only thing that matters—then it's a mistake to put demands for more social welfare spending on the national agenda before we establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the money we're presently spending is being spent well. To proceed otherwise, to increase spending now and demand effectiveness at some indeterminate point in the distant future, deals in bad faith with Americans in their capacity as (1) people who do or might depend on a government program; (2) taxpayers who fund the programs; and (3) citizens of a republic, since the refusal to talk about programmatic efficacy until that fine day we achieve budgetary adequacy means we'll
never
make efficacy a high priority. The engineers who build the social welfare machine can, as a result, eternally postpone a day of reckoning about the design and operation of their marvel by insisting on the need to build a bigger, better, more expensive one before we judge them or their creation.

In 2012, for example, the federal government spent $7,085 per American on the five major areas of what the Office of Management and Budget categorizes as the Human Resources “superfunction.” (These “functions” include: [1] Social Security; [2] all other income support programs, such as unemployment or disability insurance; [3] Medicare; [4] all other health programs, such as Medicaid; and [5] all programs for education, training, employment, and social services. I exclude the sixth OMB human resources function, programs for veterans of the armed services, since the moral basis on which we discharge those obligations is sui generis.) Spending on these five functions in 2012 represented 63 percent of federal outlays, and one-seventh of GDP. That level of human resources spending also amounted to $28,340 of resources per four humans; in 2012 the “poverty guideline,” known colloquially as the poverty line, was $23,050 for a family of four.
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According to the Census Bureau, state and local governments spent an additional $728 billion in 2011 (the latest year available) for “social services and income maintenance,” which is roughly another $2,300 per American.

Federal spending on human resources, on a per capita, inflation-adjusted basis, was 57 percent larger when Barack Obama took office in 2009 than it had been sixteen years earlier when Clinton was inaugurated, and 57 percent larger when Bill Clinton took office in 1993 than it had been in 1977, when Jimmy Carter was sworn in. After compounding, this means that human resources spending was nearly two and a half times greater in 2009 than in 1977. Meanwhile, the proportion of families living in poverty in 1977, according to the Census Bureau, was 9.3 percent. In 1993 it was 12.3 percent, and in 2009 it was 11.1 percent. That figure was 13.9 percent in 1965, when the War on Poverty was launched, and has never been higher since then, nor lower than 8.7 percent.

It requires a deeply eccentric computer program to crunch such numbers and produce the conclusion that America's main problem is that it's not devoting enough resources to the alleviation of suffering. William Galston contends that America did not lose the War on Poverty but, rather, “fought poverty to a draw” over the course of half a century during which changes in the world's economy and the nation's sociology “became increasingly unfavorable for lower-wage workers and their families.”
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Even this tempered conclusion leaves Johnson's War on Poverty looking like his war in Vietnam, one to which the nation devotes escalating resources in the service of a strategic goal that grows increasingly distant and amorphous the more aggressively we pursue it. In both cases, good governance demands reassessing the goals and conduct of the war, rather than making the lazy, inertial assumption that deploying one more increment of resources in the service of the same strategy will make it succeed, even though all the previous increments that were supposed to secure victory did not.