Alice Rivlin, who used to be the boss at the Congressional Budget Office and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was on the tube this week lamenting the budget deficit. This is a timely lament, the president having called a press conference last week for the same alleged purpose. The difference between the Bush lament and the Rivlin lament was that Rivlin offered a solution. Her solution is radical, and she is not a radical lady, so it deserves examination.
Rivlin said the only way the federal government will get rid of the deficit is to send some of the tasks it is doing back to the states. She threw in education and transportation as examples.The reason the federal government is so big is not because federal officials are more power-hungry than other officials. It is because, whenever real problems rise, it is easier to pass the buck than to handle them. Welfare could be best administered locally, where the administrators knew or had easy access to the people getting the benefits.
Local administrators can best determine who is deserving and how much they must have to get the basic necessities. Ah, but who is going to pay for them? Towns and villages look to counties for money, cities look to states for money, and states always cry that the federal government doesn't give them enough.
Politicians get elected by promising to do more for the people, which means getting tax dollars diverted from somewhere else to back home. With federal money come regulations and rules to make sure it is being spent wisely. With the rules and regulations comes an army of bureaucrats to make sure the rules are obeyed and the regulations are carried out.
Mountains of paper are generated and millions of man-hours are spent to administer a welfare system in which the people making the decisions never see or know the people whose lives are affected. "Deserving" is having the right pieces of paper on the right desk at the right time.
So here comes Rivlin saying give transportation and education back to the states. We have a federal transportation system and state transportation systems and city and county transportation systems all involved in the same job.
We have a magnificent federal highway system, good airplane travel and poor rail travel. Rivlin raises the question of whether we must have all the overlapping bureaucracies we now have in order to get our people and goods safely around the nation.
Education, despite all the talk about who is an education president and who is not, is still largely in the hands of local school boards under guidance from the states. The federal bureaucracy laid over the top of that has a worthwhile purpose: to make educational opportunity relatively equal for all the inhabitants of the land. There are federal scholarships for students and federal money for schools, always accompanied by federal rules and federal administrators. The concept of national standards for measuring schools, teachers and students seems worthy, but it must increase the size of the federal bureaucracy.
Most of the talk about reducing the deficit involves increasing taxes or nibbling around the edge of spending cuts. Rivlin's proposals are much more radical. The screams would rise to the skies if a Perot or a Bush or a Clinton suggested them. Congressional committees would hold hearings on eliminating a department that was their only reason for existence.
It won't happen, short of a revolution.