Citizen Responsibility for Government Spending

CITIZEN RESPONSIBILITY FOR GOVERNMENT SPENDING

Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D.    12-10-10

Abstract:  If democracy is to work in the modern world, citizens must have a greater sense of ownership of government and better tools to influence government than they do now.

Keywords:  responsibility, government, citizen, democracy

As governments struggle to rein in spending and balance budgets in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis of the last few years, we see citizen demonstrations (or even riots) in the streets, protesting cutbacks in government spending on various programs.  Yesterday, cars of the British government were damaged by students protesting higher university tuition, and the demonstrations in France have always been legendary.

These demonstrators are saying to government “You aren’t taking care of me as well as you used to” and “I can’t trust you to take care of me.”  The need for government to “take care of” citizens is based on the fact that as we make life more complex, we need joint action (government) more and more (post-secondary training and education, food safety monitoring, oil drilling safety rules, investment rules, etc.).  (Conservative wishes to turn back the clock and have smaller government can never be fulfilled unless life is made less complex, including the financial “vehicles” of Wall Street.)  Understandably but unfortunately, we then respond to government as if it were a parent, and we lose sight of our responsibility as citizens for our democratic government.  If government is spending less on us, it is really us who are spending less, because we elect representatives and officials to make these spending decisions.  If they are not carrying out our wishes regarding spending, then we should elect other people.

We also lose sight of the fact that we provide all of the money for government’s spending, and if we want them to spend more on us (or not to cut back) then we must provide more money to the government, in the form of taxes.  Too many citizens view taxes as having money taken from them, rather than putting in their share of what will become government’s spending, and too many have the vague notion that “they” will come up with money to do whatever “they” want, regardless so our job is to make enough noise to get “them” to come up with the money to do what we want.

Since we are a profligate nation (we spend everything we possibly can get our hands on), in a time of economic retrenchment, reductions in government spending are bound to hurt many citizens, who have become dependent on the previous level of spending and are loathe to give up the benefits they have been receiving.  Those citizens don’t grasp that if they don’t provide adequate money for government to spend, then there will be limits on what government can spend for them.

It should be clear from this that the basic problem is not economic but is a loss by citizens of a sense of ownership of government and responsibility for government.  Our challenge is how to recreate that sense of ownership and responsibility.  (1) Our election system does not elect the best qualified candidates, because we allow candidates to avoid the issues or over-simplify them and instead to appeal to our baser motives (fear, greed, hatred) in order to get elected.  Then, when in office, we get little or no information about what they individually are doing to work on the nation’s problems.  If candidates were expected to explain how exactly they intend to approach the nation’s problems, and if citizens received frequent notice of officials’ voting records and their reasons for those votes, citizens could make better voting decisions, could see what the candidate actually does, and would feel once again as in charge as citizens can be in a representative democracy.

(2) Another useful idea is to have citizens do a straw vote by computer on how government’s budget should look, as a guide to representatives for how to proceed.  Several website programs are available now that allow one to rearrange spending in various areas and see what the total budget would be.  Citizens could also indicate their priorities for spending through a computer poll.

(3) Psychologically, in order for citizens to have ownership of government in a complex world, citizens have to accept that many issues are very complex and do not permit clear or perfect solutions.  Citizens would have to live with the ambiguity of always trying to do our best but never being sure what the outcomes will be.  Many are tempted by this circumstance to simply throw up their hands, divorce themselves from responsibility, and join the protests as their only input regarding government.  Democratic citizenship requires intelligence, patience, and tolerance.

The fact that many citizens feel as if government is a parent

may be telling us that many citizens do not have the skills to participate meaningfully in modern democracy.  That anyone can be president (or senator or representative or mayor) may now be just a myth, since the majority of people do not have the intelligence, patience, and tolerance to perform the duties of government leadership positions.  We still want to believe the myth (and Sarah Palin’s popularity is a testament to our wish to believe the myth), but it is simply no longer true.  The implications are troubling, since they point toward a more paternalistic form of government as necessary in the modern world.  Only if we work hard to regain citizen ownership of government can we combat this trend.  Most citizens have the good sense to take some ownership responsibly, even if they themselves could not carry out the duties of elected office, but more and better information for them is the only weapon we have.  If those in power seek to restrict this information, so they can get elected and do what “they” want to do instead of what is good for the country, then the battle may be lost already.

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