The New York Times’s “The Morning” newsletter today laments the “Perils of Invisible Government”. The “perils” that worry it are not silent governmental intrusion into every nook and cranny of life but, rather, the failure of so many people to take note of all the wonderful things that the government is doing for them.
More than a decade ago, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler coined the phrase “the submerged state” to describe a core feature of modern American government: Many people don’t realize when they are benefiting from a government program.
“Americans often fail to recognize government’s role in society, even if they have experienced it in their own lives,” Mettler wrote. “That is because so much of what government does today is largely invisible.”
Her main examples were tax breaks, including those that help people buy homes, pay for medical care and save for retirement. The concept also included programs so complex or removed from everyday life that many people did not understand them, like federal subsidies for local governments.
The Times writer’s specific lament is that voters aren’t giving the Biden Administration credit for the so-called “American Rescue Plan”, the $1.9 trillion grab bag of spending (following the Trump Administration’s $2.2 trillion “CARES Act”) that Democrats muscled through Congress in the hope of claiming credit for an economic recovery that would have inevitably followed as the Covid-19 panicdemic subsided. The “program has become a case study in how easily voters can overlook even a lavishly funded government initiative delivering benefits close to home”.
Examples in the American Rescue Plan include community center renovations, housing initiatives and health programs. Collectively, the projects may be valuable. Individually, many may be so modest as to go unnoticed. Americans also may not realize that the projects are connected to a federal law.
A specific example cited is three bus lines in Boston that are now free of charge thanks to federal subventions. “It hardly seems like the kind of program that all of Boston will be talking about.” The not-too-hidden message is that President Biden and his party would regain their popularity if only the public talked more about how much largesse has been showered upon it.
That is, the Times complains, quite different from the good old days of Democratic Party hegemony. “Social Security, Medicare and the G.I. Bill – as well as New Deal parks, roads and bridges, many with signs marking them as federal projects – helped popularize government action because they were so obvious.”
Let’s not discuss for the moment the reality vel non of the “submerged” benefits. (They have certainly been real for fraudsters; the amounts stolen from the various Covid relief programs are staggering.) There is another side of the ledger that is likewise submerged or, more accurately, concealed: how the recipients of “benefits close to home” also bear the costs.
The New Deal and its immediate successors at least made a show of paying visibly for visible benefits. Over two-thirds of American households pay more in Social Security and Medicare taxes than their income tax bills. The American Rescue Plan and its ilk weren’t paid for by raising taxes, a step that would have immediately exposed their very high cost-to-benefit ratio. Instead, the cost was concealed by borrowing.
From the point of view of legislators with two-, four- and six-year time horizons, borrowing is a wonderful expedient, and it was especially attractive in an era of low interest rates. So long as the federal government could borrow at one or two percent, servicing a debt load not seen since World War II didn’t look all that difficult. True, the government’s capacity to borrow in the future would be reduced, but that was a problem for posterity, and, as the Irish politician famously asked, “What has posterity ever done for us?”
Now we are discovering, as we should have known all along, one of the lesson of “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”:
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don't work you die.”
A vast influx of dollars coupled with the enforced idleness of Covid lockdowns had its inescapable consequence: Prices are rising and with them interest rates. Both are costs of that benevolent “submerged state” that the Times touts. Let us by all means talk about free bus rides in Boston, but also about five dollar a gallon gasoline, rising grocery bills and the government’s diminished resources with which to confront whatever crisis comes next. All of those costs, by the bye, fall most heavily and immediately on the least wealthy segment of the population.
“Submerged state” is, one might say, an apt term. The fatal prow of an iceberg is also submerged.
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