Many in our country are calling for smaller government and lower taxes. ‘Tea party’ activists call for abolition of programs that are not clearly within the functions specified by the U.S. Constitution.
But several recent news items, all water-related, raise questions about what government programs the American people are willing to pay for and what should be left to individual households and businesses.
Flood damage subsidies. The heavy rains last week in southern Minnesota caused flooding in several communities. Elected officials, including a governor with national aspirations who prides himself on his budget-balancing ability, are falling all over themselves in calling for federal and state payments to help.
However, nothing in the Constitution authorizes the federal government to tax the general populace to help a few hurt by natural events. Nor did the feds do much of this until recent decades. There was virtually no federal aid after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. During the 1927 floods in the lower Mississippi valley, federal action was largely limited to politicians exhorting the citizenry to give money to the Red Cross and other private charities to carry out relief.
This is not to say that individual states should not decide to help flood victims if their voters wish. But they should be aware that such assistance creates incentives for people to continue to build and live in areas where nature says they should not.
Stream gaging. After rains like the ones we’ve had lately, I like to check the U.S. Geological Survey’s website to see how high different streams are. (When I was a kid, after big rains our mother always took us out in the 1949 Chrysler to see how high the “cricks” were.) I can see as I write this, at 11 a.m. Wednesday, that the Minnesota River at Jordan is at 80,900 cubic feet per second, almost exactly five times the 15,900 cfs in the Mississippi at Anoka. But the Rock River, which gets runoff from our farm, is now back to 2,200 cfs, down nearly 90 percent from its peak four days ago.
A quaint hobby, but should the federal government spend tens of millions of dollars per year on stream gages so I can see how high the creeks are? Is this expenditure constitutional? Yes, the commerce clause authorizes the federal government to regulate commerce between states, and the interstate barge system — including the Mississippi and Missouri rivers — falls under that. A few stream gages might be necessary to manage locks and dams, but should the feds fund 138 of them in Minnesota?
Sure, the data is valuable for flood planning by state and local governments, but why not let the state decide where it needs gages and pay for that minimal number itself?
Lake levels. While the rivers are too high, White Bear Lake is too low. A few hundred lakefront property owners are distressed that they cannot access the lake as they once could. Many in the town would like some level of government to fund pumping water from some other source to maintain lake levels. Here the general precedent is to let local government handle the problem. If the property owners want to tax themselves to pay for equipment and electricity, fine. Ditto for the city of White Bear Lake itself. But Ramsey County, the state of Minnesota and the U.S. government don’t generally help. In years past, when state budgets got flush, this was the sort of thing that often got picked up by generous legislators, however.
What then about North Dakota’s Devils Lake, where rising lake levels may disastrously overflow eventually, with possible damage down the Sheyenne and Red rivers through Fargo, Grand Forks and even Winnipeg? Moorhead and other cities on the Minnesota side also are threatened. In the meantime, more than 140 square miles of land and many homes have been lost to higher water.
Interstate and international squabbles over water quality have limited artificial drainage initiatives, although a project was initially approved under which the federal government would have kicked in about $100 million, with the state picking up the rest. Why federal funding — why not just ask Minnesota and Manitoba to pick up part of the tab to abate flooding danger?
To forestall angry e-mails, let me make clear that I have no particular objections to any of these programs, except for public funding to raise White Bear Lake. But if we are not willing to reduce big entitlements like Medicare or Medicaid or eliminate smaller programs like missile defense and farm subsidies, then fiscal responsibility demands we eliminate nearly everything else, including things like stream gages and payments to flood victims.
If we are serious about bringing the federal government’s role back to that narrowly defined in the Constitution, what are we willing to jettison entirely and what should we pick up at the state or local level?
© 2010 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.