Screeds
Sunday, September 26, 2004
As Many As We Choose To Pay For
June 28, 2002
There’s quite a storm in progress in Tennessee. Faced with a large projected budget deficit, the legislature is entertaining a wide variety of measures for coping with it. Most of those measures are directed at “revenue enhancement"… and if that sounds like tax increases to you, well, you’re not alone.
Tennessee has gotten along without a state income tax since its founding. However, the pressure to enact one has grown all but irresistible, largely because of a program called TennCare.
TennCare is state-subsidized health insurance, delivered through health-maintenance organizations and patterned upon Tennessee state workers’ health insurance benefits. Proponents claimed that it would only serve Tennessee’s “poor,” and that its growth could be easily restrained. They were wrong. Opponents predicted that the new obligations would bust the state budget inside a decade. They were right.
Today there are 1.3 million TennCare enrollees, in a state whose population is 5.7 million. In 1993, when TennCare was enacted, its stated purpose was to provide health insurance to the state’s medically uninsured, whom the University of Tennessee estimated at 319,000. Accusations of widespread fraud among enrollees, with the willing connivance of the TennCare bureaucracy, have been many.
Tennessee isn’t some sort of exception. New York’s state-subsidized health insurance scheme, promoted and approved by Republican Governor George Pataki, is experiencing similar growth, and similar accusations.
The defenders of these programs will not address the divergence between the claims of the original proponents and the actualities that have emerged. They prefer to keep the discussion centered on emotional matters, and accuse those who demand a review of the programs of “heartlessness.” Rather than entertain the idea of cutting back the programs—reducing the subsidy, reducing the variety of conditions insured, or toughening eligibility requirements and penalties for fraud—they want tax increases to cover “these urgent needs,” and guarantees of further tax increases should the “needs” expand still further.
Victorian social analyst Thomas Mackay, in a classic volume titled Methods Of Social Reform, noted the propensity of those who administered State charity never to be satisfied with any level of support. Mackay did not delve into the motives of these administrators. He took their beneficence for granted; in those days, to doubt the integrity of a gentleman was simply not done. But he could not be prevented from noticing that, whenever the amount of public money dedicated to any charitable mission was increased, the number of beneficiaries who flocked to its teats would increase as well—and the drumbeat for still more resources for “relief” would intensify in proportion.
Mackay was merely noting something economists had known since Adam Smith, if not before: that there’s an unlimited market for free goods. “We can have as many paupers as the country chooses to pay for,” he wrote, and the history of State charity has never proved him wrong.
Of course, every good thing has a price that must be paid by someone. The beneficiary of a State giveaway program sees his benefits as “free,” but his is a highly provincial viewpoint. Tennesseeans who face the prospect of a state income tax will naturally feel otherwise.
The attitude among Tennessee legislators appears to be that TennCare is an untouchable sacred cow, but that a state income tax to pay for its burgeoning cost is quite thinkable—even though the Tennessee State Constitution explicitly forbids an income tax. Granted that the state constitution doesn’t get a lot of respect in most states. Heard about the Colorado judge who’s forbidden any mention of the Colorado Constitution (or of the federal one, for that matter) in his courtroom? In Tennessee, perhaps half the sitting legislators regard their state’s constitution as not even a formal barrier.
We’re not Victorians, and we don’t live in Thomas Mackay’s world. We’re free to examine the motives of the supposedly selfless public servants who continually add to our burdens. Their giveaway programs are permanent and continually expand, as does their appetite for our money. Their ingenuity at finding new ways to tax us knows no bounds. They regard tax cuts, and constitutional tax limitations such as California’s Proposition 13, as personal affronts to their prerogatives and their integrity. The elected ones feel the same way about term limits. What conclusions can we reach?
One conclusion stands beyond all hope of contradiction: There is no spending limit they will not challenge, no barrier to additional expenditure they will not try their mightiest to surmount.
A dear friend of mine, a conservative but not opposed to all welfarism, once concluded a rant about the forever swelling expenditures of government charity by asking me, “Is there any point at which this is no longer my problem?” I knew what I wanted to tell him, but I also knew that, in the minds of the beneficiaries of the charitable programs, the bureaucrats who draw their salaries from the programs, the vendors who sell to the programs, and the legislators who buy votes by enacting and expanding those programs, the answer would be otherwise.
Tennessee, be on your guard.
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