“Broken promises are not the major causes of our trouble,” Barry Goldwater once said. “Kept promises are.”
“All too often we have put men in office who have suggested spending a little more on this, a little more on that, who have proposed a new welfare program, who have thought of another variety of ‘security,’” he argued. “We have taken the bait, preferring to put off to another day the recapturing of freedom and the restoration of our constitutional system.”
Goldwater, whose failed 1964 presidential campaign is now best remembered for newcomer Ronald Reagan’s breakout speech, understood that behind every irresistible promise lies something politicians are far less eager to advertise: the cost to taxpayers. As soon as candidates start handing out favors like Oprah Winfrey distributing cars, one of three things will inevitably happen: taxes will rise, inflation will rise, or the national debt will rise.
Campaign season magically converts politicians into professing philanthropists; April 15 — Tax Day — serves as our reality check. Philanthropy with someone else’s money isn’t charity; it’s called theft.
It’s called buying votes.
First, taxes are collected by the federal government, mainly through income taxes, payroll taxes, and corporate taxes. This money goes into the U.S. Treasury.
Next comes Congress. The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, which means lawmakers decide how federal money is spent. Each year, Congress works on a budget. This process includes two main steps: authorizing and appropriating.
Authorizing creates or continues government programs. For example, a law might establish a transportation program or renew funding for education. Appropriating is when Congress decides how much money each program actually gets. These decisions are written into spending bills.
Easy peasy.
There’s just one problem.
Congress is seen by the American public as a hyper-partisan, financially illiterate institution, quick to promise benefits, yet frequently unable to pass funding bills on time, even as its own salaries continue without interruption. Indeed, as Pew Research reported, “Congress has passed all its required appropriations measures on time only four times in nearly five decades,” making the modern process a “hodgepodge of late budget blueprints, temporary spending measures to keep the government running, and omnibus appropriations packages that sprawl over hundreds of pages.”
These largely unsupervised omnibus packages contain many of the most egregious examples of wasteful spending — an open invitation for politicians to slip in favors for their constituents at the expense of the general population.
Once spending bills are passed by Congress and signed by the president, federal agencies take over. Agencies like the Department of Defense, Department of Transportation, and Department of the Interior receive funding and are responsible for using it, as directed by law, to finance everything from the U.S. military to highways and a $12 million pickleball complex in Vegas.
You may protest that you never agreed to the Department of Health and Human Services’ $1.5 million program to combat “drug use in ‘Latinx’ communities through celebrity influencer campaigns” or its $6.9 million project to “analyze and model trauma and surgery outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa.” But it doesn’t matter. That’s what happens when federal budgets run longer than the Bible.
It’s also important to understand that not all spending is decided fresh each year. A large portion of the budget is “mandatory spending,” which includes programs like Social Security and Medicare. These are funded automatically based on eligibility rules set in law and can be a real pain for fiscal crusaders who seek to limit federal spending.
As Goldwater’s disciple, Reagan, once noted of his own presidency, “Spending for government ‘entitlement’ programs—money committed by Congress for various programs in past years that is as good as spent before the administration ever gets a shot at writing its budget—accounts for forty-eight percent of federal spending.” More recently, mandatory spending has outpaced discretionary spending by $4.1 trillion to $1.8 trillion.
From taxes to Congress to agencies to programs, your money is hopelessly linked to a government that cannot even agree on a budget, let alone address the national debt. As a taxpayer who contributes annually to Uncle Sam’s coffers, you deserve to know what that process looks like.