Frequent readers of this blog will know that I prefer to gauge government size using spending and not tax revenue, and America’s spending as a percent of GDP places it almost even with Germany. We just don’t collect the necessary taxes, and whether you think want to resolve this discordance through tax increases or, um, not tax increases largely correlates with one’s political affiliation. Further, it’s well-established that Republicans uses taxes as a canard and, with the exception of Representative Ryan (R-WI) and some final-term governors, don’t actually want to cut government services. The simple reason they don’t is because their Republican constituents, just like anyone, don’t want a decline in government services. And no one wants this, I believe, because the vast majority of services government provides – ensuring security, creating and maintaining parks, cleaning our water, providing roads and mass transportation, educating our kids, putting out fires, and making our food safe, among others – substantially benefit our lives, and we realize this. Government’s role is to protect us from the uncertainties of life and help us enjoy the life we’ve been given.
See Wagner’s Law. Governments have become bigger not because they’re more rapacious and intelligent than competing interest groups but because we elect to spend our money, in the form of taxes, on services that improve our lives and the private sector cannot furnish. In trendy pseudo-scientific terms, depravity of life on the savannah conditioned our minds to react to situations in broadly predictable ways. In the realm of food, evolution is why we are now fat. In the realm of government, evolution is why every industrialized country has universal health care, welfare, and standing armies. Then, no one wanted their kinsman to die suddenly from an unseen plague or a broken bone, so we have pushed our governments to aid us when we’re sick. Then, one drought could mean death, so we want government to help those down on their luck and unable to help themselves. Then, we gained wealth and women through defeating other tribes, so now we pay taxes to defend against external enemies and ensure access to resources.
In other words, I believe it is against our evolutionary nature to want smaller government. I know most national Republicans do not actually want smaller government, but let’s take their rhetoric at face value. To get America on a sustainable fiscal path, they will have to enact policies that slice against thousands and thousands of years of learned behavior. I don’t think a majority of voters will throw off their evolutionary past in a matter of two to four years. Any Republicans supporting such austerity will quickly learn that, and most will quickly lose their cushy job in D.C. We face huge deficits not because government is a waste but because we are human. While either cutting services or raising taxes is politically difficult, only the latter is realistic. For self-interested politicians, the most feasible option is to increase our taxes.
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