A $95 Billion Lesson in Who Pays the Unseen Bill

The spectacle is vivid enough. Leaders in one chamber of your legislature propose a $95 billion reconciliation bill, bundling $73 billion to support a war with Iran and $10 billion for altering election rules, while colleagues in the other chamber mutter that this is “risky” and warn of political ruin if voting is not tightened nationwide. The White House, for its part, sends a friendly memorandum of support. We are told of defence hawks, fiscal hawks, poison-pill amendments, and an approaching election, but of something more important we hear almost nothing: who, in the end, is to pay, and by what alteration of his daily bread, his rent, his employment, his hope.

In my Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I urged that the wealth of a people consists not in splendid projects, nor in the grandeur of their leaders, but in the annual produce of the land and labour as it comes, at last, to the great body of citizens. When a government contemplates $95 billion of new expenditure, the question is not whether defence is respectable, or election integrity desirable; it is whose consumption, present or future, is to be abridged. The benefits are concentrated and clamorous; the costs, whether by higher taxes or hidden borrowing, are diffused, delayed, and dumb. It is precisely these quiet sufferers whom good legislators ought first to imagine.

The bill’s architects insist on two aims: more money for war, and new restraints upon voting in order to avert electoral calamity. Here are two powerful human motives in close embrace: fear of foreign danger and fear of domestic defeat. As I observed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, men overrate the charms of power and the terrors of losing it; they toil for it all their lives as the poor man’s son toils for riches, and discover too late that the real pleasures of life were cheaper. When rules for choosing rulers are altered under the immediate shadow of an election, the impartial spectator — that imagined fair judge within the breast — will suspect that the love of victory has outpaced the love of justice.

Defence is one of the few unquestionable duties of the state; I said so when I wrote of the sovereign’s three great obligations. But even necessary wars are costly to the present generation and dangerous to the next. They divert labour and capital from the peaceful arts; they narrow the extent of the market by making trade more perilous; they encourage that race of contractors, suppliers, and dependants who, living by public expenditure, are always ready to find excellent reasons for enlarging it. When a great fund is proposed “to help pay for the Iran war,” and when some confess they wish still more than the $60 or $73 billion already at issue, one must ask whether the natural progress of opulence is being sacrificed to the unnatural progress of patronage.

In matters of trade I long ago noted that people of the same craft, when they meet, tend to contrive against the public, and I recommended that their proposals to government be received with the most suspicious attention. The maxim applies no less to coalitions of office-holders and would-be office-holders. When factions press for vast sums to be spent swiftly, and for changes to election law to be coupled to that spending, they do not invite the cool examination of each measure on its separate merits. They seek to yoke the fear of appearing weak abroad to the fear of appearing soft at home, so that representatives, terrified of one reproach or the other, may swallow what in their calmer judgment they would reject. This is not the invisible hand, but the very visible arm-twisting of faction.

Some senators, we are told, fear “consequences that could appear along the way,” from poison-pill amendments restoring cuts to food assistance, to the sheer political risk of forcing colleagues into difficult votes before November. Their prudence is sound as far as it goes, yet notice what chiefly alarms them: not the effect upon the labouring poor if war expenditures and election changes misfire, but the effect upon their own majorities. They ask, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” but mean by the juice their party’s advantage, and by the squeeze their colleagues’ discomfort. The impartial spectator would invert the terms: the juice is a safer, more prosperous society; the squeeze is the burden borne by ordinary families when other people’s money is spent with theatrical urgency.

There is, finally, the temper of the scheme. To press a “megabill” through a narrow party-line channel on the eve of an election is the conduct of what I once called the man of system, who imagines the great chess-board of human society to be composed of pieces without motion of their own. Voters are treated as numbers to be managed, welfare programmes as pawns to be sacrificed or restored for tactical effect, the distant war as a backdrop rather than a calamity in human lives and fortunes. A legislator of self-command, looking not at the applause of his party but at the judgment of an impartial posterity, would disentangle defence from partisanship, elections from panic, and remember that the true measure of any budget is what, after all the noise, it leaves in the hands of the poor man at week’s end.