Over at City Journal Oren Cass does a masterful job of describing how our present federal government operates. It’s longish for a blog post but well worth reading. He then goes on to propose a reform that he calls “Flex Fund” which boils down to the federal government retaining the taxing power and redistributing the funds for social programs back to the states unencumbered by the myriad of mandates, requirements, etc. that exist under our present system.
Whatever sense such a system would make, it will never happen for one reason: the urge to power.
It will never happen because we’ve seen how states manage these things. It’s utter nonsense to assume that states are competent, look no further than out your window. The entire idea of states is absurd and outdated. I know we’re stuck with it, thanks to our godlike omniscient founders, but they are nonsense entities. 50 states is 50 different places for corruption to flourish.
I think that this may be one of our major differences of opinion, Michael. You appear to think that the federal government is inherently less corrupt and/or inefficient than state and local governments. I think the federal government is more opaque than state and local governments.
The federal government is bigger, bloated with over-lapping, inefficient bureaucracies that flourish without much accountability or oversight. It has become too big to manage or even challenge.
OTOH, having more power in the states at least spreads power around, with a greater ability for these smaller entities to experiment with different governing methods/policies to see what might work best, rather than have a behemoth central master calling all the shots and getting into everyones’ business!
“The entire idea of states is absurd and outdated.”
Having actually lived in six states and been a legal resident four of them, I could not disagree more. America is too diverse for a one-size fits-all governance and concentrating power at the federal level would just be too attractive a target for various powerful interests. The federal government is already bad at resisting those interests – handing them the authorities present in state and local governments would be a disaster IMO.
As far as sending federally collected monies to the states, I doubt Congress could do so equitably. The members of key Congressional and Senate committees would be well positioned to ensure their constituents get an extra share of the federal money. Under the current system, these committees are already very powerful. Also, states that contribute more in federal taxes than they receive in the transfer would be understandably angry with the situation.
Further, it would increase corruption at the state and local level since the federal money would be “free” in the sense that state and local governments have no control over the collection of the funds. That would greatly reduce accountability for local politicians who spend the money. I just don’t see how it would work without the feds attaching a lot of strings to how the money is spent.
Finally, look at how most state spending has changed over the last 40 or so years. Just to use California as an example, since 1970 pension spending (on a constant dollar per capita basis) increased 725%, education increased 225%, protection services increased 500%, transportation doubled, etc. A lot of other stuff stayed relatively flat. So many of these states have pension funding problems combined with politically powerful public employee unions. Who do you think would win when federal funds are transferred to states with no strings attached?