The voting faction of the US populace—the electorate—frequently does not seem to think very clearly. Everybody wants government-provided services, and nobody favors taxes. How do they think those services are going to be provided for? Where is the government to get the money it needs to provide services, if not from taxpayers' taxes?
Maybe people should bear in mind two extremes and think about which one they'd like better. On the one hand, Sweden is the very model of the welfare state, with health care and many other services taken care of at government expense. Concomitant with that, taxes in Sweden are high.
You could take Mississippi as the other extreme. Government expenditures, for example on education, are low. As a result, Mississippi ranks low on a lot of measures—education, health of its citizens, etc. Also directly connected, Mississippi has low taxes—and a low standard of living. Maybe when government money is spent, that money circulates and makes everybody more prosperous.
Also, polls show that the populace disapproves of Congress. Congress gets a 17% approval rating. On the other hand, when people were polled for their opinion of their own representative, 45% approved. (And historically, nearly 96% of House members get re-elected.) How can the individual congressmen be good and the collective body be bad? Maybe this has to do with a phenomenon I blogged about before: people decry pork-barrel legislation (or "pork") when some other congressman is doing it. When their own congressman is doing it, it's "bringing home federal funds to our district." I see that phrase in the materials that my own congressman sends to his constituents. A verb declension: He's advocating pork, you're not careful with the people's money, I'm helping my district. (Like "He's a tightwad, you're cheap, I'm thrifty.")
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
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Come now and consider that everything to blame is not the direct fault of an electorate. The election process and those placed in office more often than not leave much to be desired by the public in terms of things like ethics, performance, abiding by campaign promises, and especially in remembering that public service is a priviledge and not a divine right.
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