Can the public’s confidence in government at any level survive?

By Dan Calabrese - The North Star National

A curious “controversy” has momentarily been stilled in Pontiac, Michigan, where the city’s state-appointed “emergency financial manager” has moved on from his job after several years of force-feeding local elected officials rational financial decisions.

Fred Leeb turned Pontiac’s budget from a red-ink-bleeding catastrophe to a healthy situation with a $3 million surplus, although it remains to be seen if the locals can keep things that way.


You think they're mad now . . .
Down the road in Detroit, another state-appointed emergency financial manager, Robert Bobb, battles the local school board daily to achieve some sort of fiscal sanity.

These are two examples of a troubling fact of life in American governance: Fiscal irresponsibility is not limited to Washington D.C., nor is it limited to state capitals like Sacramento and Springfield, where officials have taken to sending out IOUs in lieu of actually paying their bills.

At just about every level, government has been irresponsible and spent more than it had – or at least more than it could sustain over the long term. Federal, state, county, local – you name it. During the boom times of the 1990s and the mid-2000s, elected officials made big-time spending commitments, sweetened union contracts and increased hiring.

And don’t leave school districts out of this. They are the biggest offenders of all, as they regularly bend over and acquiesce to anything teachers unions want to demand – all as the price for labor peace.

This house of cards could stand as long as there was someone at the level above you who was willing to cover your losses. The locals, the counties and the school districts ran short? They looked to the states. The states ran short, they looked to Washington for federal aid. Congressman and senators, regardless of party, would make sure their states got what they needed.

Washington ran short of money to do all this because of exploding entitlement obligations it refused to reform? It would simply print more money or borrow it – from everyone from domestic bond-buyers to the communist Chinese.

Washington finds itself with a debt approaching the entire gross domestic product? Washington forms a commission to study the issue.

The danger here is that public confidence in government at all levels is heading for a complete collapse. The public is starting to get the message that none of the people it elects have been dealing with fiscal reality. Not the mayor or the city council. Not the superintendent and the school board. Not the governor or the legislature. Certainly not your congressman or your senator.

And certainly not Barack Obama.

More than once in recent generations, we have had “change elections” in which the public was so fed up that anyone who yammered on about “change” could win. It was like that in 1992. It was like that in 2008. But no matter what happened in elections like these, one thing didn’t change: Public officials at every level kept spending.

If the public is really getting the message that government at every level is driving the nation toward bankruptcy, the result may well be a determined and permanent push back in the direction of limited government – and that would be a good thing.

But even though I am a limited-government guy, I still want the public to have confidence in the basic institution of government. Not that those in charge of these institutions deserve said confidence at the moment, but if the public by and large loses all faith in the very idea of representative democracy – having been so seriously hosed by those entrusted with the practice of it – elected officials, even the good ones we might elect to replace the slugs we have now, might find themselves incapable of governing because they are essentially operating without the confidence or the consent of the governed.

This is one of the reasons I do not like libertarians. They want the public to lack faith in government. To them, that’s the objective. I want the public to expect less of government, and to hold it more accountable for performing its more limited duties in a responsible manner. But if government comes through, I want the public to respond by giving good elected officials its trust.

The more clear it becomes to the public just how badly government has been operating at every level, the less plausible this seems. And what we get if all confidence in government breaks down – however justifiably – is not good at all.