Life would be better if we starved the beast of government, some say. But while the idea of minimal government beguiles many, deep cuts may render vital functions of government less effective.
A recent Associated Press article points out that the U.S. Food and Drug administration food safety inspections dropped 47 percent between 2003 and 2006. The number of food safety tests fell by 75 percent. FDA food safety employees in field offices are down 12 percent.
I’m no food safety expert. Moreover, as an occasional teacher of statistics, I know the danger in causal assertions of cause and effect. But the recent news of salmonella-tainted peanut butter makes one wonder.
Inevitably, some contamination gets by any food inspection system. Even if the FDA could afford to monitor at the levels of 25 years ago, it still might have might have missed the specific lots of tainted peanut butter, spinach, tomatoes and iceberg lettuce that turned up in the last year. After all, the FDA had inspected the ConAgra peanut butter plant in February 2005 and found no problems.
Still, the number of people hospitalized because of food-borne illnesses has increased sharply in the last six years. Even before the most recent belt-tightening, many public health officials, including Minnesota’s Mike Osterholm, had warned of increasing food-linked illnesses and decreasing federal oversight for years. It is hard to assume there is no linkage between skimpier food safety oversight and increasing illness.
Food safety is not the only kind of oversight that’s been stretched. Internal Revenue Service audits and other enforcement measures have fallen dramatically in recent decades, a direct result of smaller budgets and fewer agents.
In the 1960s, 6 percent of personal income tax returns were audited. Now the figure is well under 1 percent. Estimates of how much the government loses due to tax evasion are in the range of $200 billion to $300 billion, or about 15 percent of all the tax owed. It’s difficult to know how much cheating is going on, since Congress banned a program studying noncompliance levels after audits of randomly selected taxpayers generated bad publicity.
No one wants to be audited by the IRS, but failure to enforce tax laws means that those who are largely honest end up paying more in taxes because dishonest people file fraudulent returns. More enforcement would be fairer and more efficient.
Critics of government retort that there is plenty of waste to cut without reducing the few government functions they see as legitimate. The problem is that no Congress has ever succeeded in making that distinction.
The increases in federal spending are almost entirely in Social Security, health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and defense. Many bread-and-butter government functions like food inspection and tax administration are funded at lower levels in real terms than when our population was 50 million smaller and our economy half the size. Eventually, someone pays a price.
© 2007 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.