Posted on 12/31/2004 6:48:16 PM PST by Spiff
A year of legal theft in review By Craig J. Cantoni December 31, 2004
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) wrote that "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." That was certainly true in the United States in 2004.
As an example, millions of Americans under the voting age of 18 opened presents from grandma and grandpa on Christmas Day, 2004. Instead of finding a gift, they found a bill for $96,000, which is what each person under the age of 18 will have to pay for grandma's and grandpa's Social Security and Medicare.
Merry Christmas, kiddies!
President Bush ended the year saying that he wants to fix Social Security. Bravo! But this is the same "conservative" who added $7 trillion to the Medicare deficit with his "free" prescriptions for seniors, most of whom can well-afford to buy their own medicine. Boo!
The free prescriptions bring the net present value of the Social Security and Medicare deficits to $70 trillion, or as mentioned above, $96,000 for each American under the age of 18.
Admittedly, President Bush and his fellow Republicans didn't forget the children. Although the federal government has no constitutional authority to stick its national nose in local education matters, the Bush administration increased federal spending on education to over $100 billion for the year, according to the Cato Institute. That's a 400 percent increase since 1965.
The Chairman of the House Education and the Work Force Committee, Republican John Boehner, is proud of increasing federal education spending and violating the Constitution. He has bragged that the federal education budget increased 5.6 percent in 2004 and a whopping 118 percent since Republicans won a majority in the House in 1996. Also, since the passage of Bush's No Child Left Behind program, or more accurately, No Wallet Left Untouched program, Title I spending has increased 40 percent.
Education spending also reached record levels in most states and local districts. For example, at current spending levels, the heads of the average household in my home state of Arizona will pay a whopping $190,000 in state, local and federal education taxes for K-12 public schools over their adult lives, even if they do not have any kids in public school. The figure is even higher in higher tax states.
Total federal spending is approximately $21,000 per household. State, county and municipal spending varies by locale, but where I live, the spending is $3,700, $2,200 and $2,700 per household, respectively. That brings the grand total of spending at all government levels to $29,600 per household, excluding the portion of property taxes that goes to the local school district. If $2,000 is added for that portion, the grand total is $31,600, which is an astonishing 79 percent of the average household income in Arizona. And that number excludes regulatory costs, which are estimated to be $8,000 per household.
How much of the $31,600 is legal theft? To answer that question, it is first necessary to define "legal theft."
Legal theft is the taking of money from some people by the government for the benefit of other people. It is the opposite of the general welfare, which is the taking of money from all people by the government for the benefit of all people, such as national defense. It is also the opposite of user fees for government services, such as homeowners paying for the amount of water they use, and car drivers paying for roads through gas taxes.
It is impossible to calculate exactly how much of total government spending is legal theft, but the best estimate is almost 50 percent. State differently, almost half of government activity involves taking money from some people for the benefit of other people. This degree of legal theft is the primary reason why there is now so much money in politics, why citizens are cynical about voting, and why politics has become so nasty.
It may not be possible to precisely calculate the amount of legal theft, but we know that the bottom half of taxpayers pay only four percent of federal income taxes. We also know that transfer payments are 40 percent of the federal budget, up from two percent 100 years ago, a 20-fold increase.
If you believe that all of this money is going to the poor, let me disabuse you of the notion. According to the Cato Institute book, Cowboy Capitalism, only 41.4 percent of cash transfers go to the poorest 30 percent of the population. Surprisingly, that is a higher percentage than in the social-welfare countries of France, Germany and Italy.
Of course, transfer payments do not include the scores of subsidies that are given to a myriad of special-interest groups. To take one example out of thousands of examples, funds are purloined from the Highway Trust Fund to subsidize the rides of passengers on mass transit. In other words, the honest practice of drivers paying for highways through gas taxes has been turned into legal theft by giving part of the money to transit riders.
Locally, in Metro Phoenix, close to $4 billion will have been taken in legal theft over 10 years for sports subsidies, light-rail subsidies, and public-private partnerships in which public money is given to private industry. That is equivalent to the average annual income of 100,000 households. The "civic leaders" behind such massive theft are honored in the local media as visionaries and have statues of them put in the public square, instead of being pilloried in the public square. At the same time, those who fight to stop the theft and restore constitutional rights are pilloried in the press as obstructionists and extremists.
No doubt, legal theft will increase next year, as it has increased in 2004. But I wish you a happy New Year, anyway. _________
Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (www.haalt.org). He can be reached at either ccan2@aol.com or haalt1@aol.com.
cut spending bump.
Hoppy
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