Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: Money

Government Money

Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: MONEY 52 Government Money Michael Masch gOVERNMENT PROVIDES for some needs of the members of society better than individuals could do on their own. This requires, among other things, taking money from people by law and force through taxation. Those who run government decide how much of the wealth and the income of various members of society government will take for shared public purposes and what those shared public purposes will be. That is one of the reasons why we, in Western societies, generally believe that the best form of government is democracy, for we think that the people who are being taxed and thus being forced to contribute should have some say in how their money is used by choosing the people who make these decisions. This includes how much wealth and income is to be appropriated for public purposes. But what should those public purposes be? What should be the relative size of the shared, public government sector relative to the private market, individual sector? What should we do as individuals, and what should we do as a community through government action? The Expanding Role of Government Beyond police power, government manifests itself on many different levels. States focus primarily on educational and social services. We Americans have decided that it is the government’s responsibility to provide people with the education that will enable them to be economically self-sufficient. This now includes college and even graduate education. We have also decided that for broad groups of people whose incomes are below a certain level or who are disabled we will provide services and supports that we expect other people to provide for themselves. This is especially true for those who have encountered some type of misfortune that is completely beyond their individual control. If someone has a child who is severely mentally retarded, for example, we have decided as a society that this is not just that family’s problem. The state provides various types of support in the home and the school that otherwise would bankrupt most of us. John Kenneth Galbraith, in the last century, pointed out that the 20th century was probably the first time in human history that we had societies , with the United States in the vanguard, wherein the poor were a minority. According to Galbraith, this meant that such a society could readily choose not to focus its social priorities exclusively on ameliorating Part II: Symposium 53 and preventing poverty; it might rather choose to provide services to other segments of the population. Indeed, the sphere of government in our day is much larger relative to the private sphere than it was in times past. In part, this is because our communities are getting bigger and bigger. An ever increasing percentage of the world’s population is living in highly urbanized areas with more than 1 million people. As a result, people increasingly expect that the federal government will provide public services that used to be delivered to residents by the province, state, county, or town. If only because it takes a structure of that size to deal with the scale of services that are needed—and when the federal government fails to fulfill such expectations, as in the case of rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, residents are outraged. For the same reason, more things that were private are now public. For example, Pennsylvania provides 1 out of 7 people with medical care assistance, 1.9 million people. When such a large governmental agency makes decisions that affect such large numbers of citizens, individuals’ preferences and values may be overlooked. Evaluating Government’s Effectiveness Perhaps because governments nowadays are so big and bureaucratic, people feel alienated from governments and think that they accomplish much less than they actually do. The Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Kennedy School at Harvard conducted a poll about government attitudes in 1996 on a variety of public policy issues. A statistically random sample of Americans was asked if poverty among senior citizens was lessened because of government programs. Of those polled, 39 percent thought that government had little effect on poverty among senior citizens. The fact, though, is that the creation of Social Security during the Depression and then the addition of Medicare , some 40 years ago, have clearly changed what it is like to live as an older person in American society. As recently as 1959, one out of every three senior citizens lived in poverty...