“The Fallacy of the Family Wallet” Hangs Republicans by Their Own Rope

Monday, 25 January 2010 16:39

Written by Sam Hurst

When Gordon Howie walked to the podium at last Saturday's Cracker Barrel, to argue for a freeze in state spending, Republicans in the audience (including several legislators on the dais) squirmed uncomfortably in their chairs. While some of the legislators grasped the fact that this year's cuts in the state budget will strike bone rather than fat, Howie plowed ahead with the confidence of God's warrior. "South Dakota families can't spend what they don't have, and neither can the state government."

Among the West River legislators sitting at the dais, not a single one was a Democrat, and that's what made the moment so awkward. For decades Republican approaches to government have been constructed on two simple, quaint, slogans. First, government should operate more like a business (Perhaps Enron, or AIG Insurance, or General Motors, or NBC). Second, government fiscal policy should mimic private families. If you don't have the money, you can't spend money. Now, Gordon Howie is throwing their own slogans back at them. This year's GOP gubernatorial primary is destined to be a wild ride.

What has been lost by stacking the legislature and the dais with Republicans? What is lost by living in a single-party state, where there is no competing economic narrative from Democrats? We become so comfortable with the delusions of our isolation that we do not even try to understand the flaws in our narrative. We become The Ostrich State. Meanwhile, mainstream Republicans are left to squirm, and whisper their terror of a Howie campaign, and wonder how powerful the Tea Party grassroots might be. The threat is not just that Howie might mobilize the grassroots. He has also commandeered the mainstream message.

Republicans are dead wrong about family spending habits. Their basic premise is wrong. South Dakota families routinely spend more than they have. When we have needs that we cannot afford, we socialize their costs (we share the costs). We each give a little (less than the full value of the service or infrastructure) to gain a lot. No individual family can afford to hire private teachers for their children, and very few can afford to send their children to college without the help of financial aid. We do not pay for the construction and maintenance of roads, sewers, and parks out of our individual checkbooks, but they are essential to our everyday life. We cannot afford to pay for police and fire security, clean air, clean water, safe food, or prairie dog control on our ranches. We do not pay, individually, for the financial security of our elders. And we do not pay for our own individual health care.

We have honed the idea of Gordon Howie's rugged individual to a fine edge in South Dakota, but strip away all the tough talk, and we are a community of shared responsibilities.

In South Dakota the "fallacy of the family wallet" is even more exaggerated than it is in the rest of the nation. We live in a dream world of self-satisfied fiscal responsibility that is sustained by transferring the costs of our quality of life onto the struggling taxpayers of urban states.

Several legislators at the Cracker Barrel suggested that the state might look at a modest increase in the sales tax to generate revenue. Their justification? We can get outsiders, tourists, I-90 wagon trains passing through, to pay the tax. Good old South Dakota, make someone else pay.

While Republican legislators were cowering in the shadow of Gordon Howie, two incidents occurred last week that suggested a new day is dawning. First, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger complained that Californians are sick and tired of sending more money to the federal treasury than they get back in federal services. "We want our money back." He demanded. Where does California's money go? You guessed it. Next, in his first press conference on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, Senator-elect Scott Brown suggested that a major issue that rallied Massachusetts voters to his cause was their anger at having to pay for a sweetheart deal for Nebraska. Hummm. Urban voters angry that they are being held hostage to a small population, Great Plains state that is unwilling to pay its own way.