The Obama Administration knows exactly how to lead us in a national freakout over a federal budget cut so tiny, if it was cocaine it would melt before you get the paper open. (I miss you, Richard Pryor.) Its latest salvo is to send around dire warnings to each state about what they might lose if 2.3 percent of the projected larger budget is cut in the sequester.
It's the usual stuff governments wring their hands about. Teachers. Meals for the elderly. Programs to help you look for a job. (A side note: If you can't even figure out on your own how to look for a job, why would I hire you to actually do one? But I digress.)
They always lead with sob stories about teachers, cops and firefighters, of course. No one is going to shed a tear if Obama holds a press conference surrounded by paper-pushing bureaucrats from the Department of the Interior, also known as people who actually work for the federal government. And that leads us to a question whose answer actually makes clear why Washington can so easily scare the bejeezus out of people and, with the help of the pliant news media, get them to oppose almost any reduction in federal spending.
Consider: In Michigan, they tell us the sequester will put the jobs of 300 teachers "at risk," whatever that means. Now, teachers do not work for the federal government. They don't work for the state. They work for local school districts, who are funded with mix of local property taxes and state sales tax proceeds. Why should federal budget decisions have anything to do with whether a teacher keeps his or her job?
Because: Washington is forever passing targeted expenditures designed to facilitate the hiring of teachers, cops, whoever. Remember Clinton and his 100,000 cops on the street? Washington graces state and local governments with grants designed for this specific purpose. You take the money, you hire the teachers. Free money! Problem, however: Because the money that pays for the teachers is a gift from someone else, you have no control over whether you will continue to receive it. Budget situations change. Congresses come and go. Presidents come and go. Today's priority is tomorrow's waste. But you didn't hire that teacher with the thought that his or her status would come into question every year. Rational organizations never hire people under those conditions. They hire people because the organization has the kind of financial strength and fiscal stability that makes you confident that you can continue to support that position, with revenue you generate under a process you control.
But the local school district goes ahead and hires the teacher with the federal money. The federal government has never promised, but the local district assumes, that this year's grant will be followed by another one next year, and so on and so forth. And if congressional priorities change and the continuation of the grant is ever questioned - everyone freak out! Everyone loves Mrs. Crabtree!
The truth is that no one should ever hire an employee when the money to pay that employee relies solely on the promise of an outside gift that is not guaranteed over the long term - and no outside gift can ever be so guaranteed, no matter what anyone tells you. School districts should only hire employees that they can reasonably expect to support from their own local revenues.
But no school board or superintendent ever likes to turn down free money, so they happily accept the grant and hire the teacher, only to go into meltdown mode a year or two or 10 down the road when someone threatens to pull the money. Of course, if the teacher is that important, the school district could always shift funds from a lesser priority and keep the teacher on. That's called making decisions about what to do with limited resources, and it makes a lot more sense than relying on money from a gigantic Leviathan that is, in fact, bankrupt and just keeps going deeper into debt in order to pretend otherwise.
So this is one of the reasons it is so difficult for the federal government to ever cut spending, even a little. There is always someone who has the public's sympathy that is addicted to federal money, and any time a budget cut is threatened, you can bet Democrats and the media will make this object of public sympathy the Face of the Budget Cut. And terrified Republicans will back down rather than be portrayed as the meanies who fired that favorite teacher.
Even if you are not a teet-sucking beneficiary of government money, or a raving left-winger, you still don't like the idea that the funding for Mrs. Crabtree will be cut, and couldn't some big corporation pay just a little more to keep that from happening?
That is the game. This is why the taxpayers always lose.
