With the country facing a nearly $17 trillion — and rising — national debt, it’s somehow comforting to know that we still have enough money to pay $876 a year in federal survivor’s benefits to two children of Civil War veterans.
That war ended in 1865.
Another 10 Americans are receiving benefits relating to the Spanish-American War, costing taxpayers about $50,000 a year for a conflict waged 115 years ago and helped get Teddy Roosevelt elected vice president . . . in 1900.
The character of these “legacy” programs changes a bit (and grows more costly) as their birth grows less distant. For example, we’re still supporting a New Deal-era agency — the Rural Utilities Service, part of the Agriculture Department — originally set up as the Rural Electrification Administration back in the Dust Bowl year of 1935.
The goal then was bring the wonders of Edison’s invention of the light bulb to the benighted hinterlands. Mission accomplished, decades ago — yet the RUS still employs nearly a thousand bureaucrats; its budget this year is $578 million.
And back in the Carter administration, when the feds finally deregulated the airline industry, they kept their teeth in aviation’s backside by establishing the Essential Air Service program, which subsidizes commercial air travel for some 163 rural communities, so folks can fly from Decatur, Ill., to Chicago (a three-hour drive), and suburban Maryland to Baltimore.
The cost now? More than $200 million a year.
All of these outlays have their defenders — of course we should support our war veterans and their families — but few ever stop to consider their net effect, and not just the financial one. Or what they portend for the future of a nearly bankrupt country with a steadily aging population whose demand for services and subsidies is climbing steeply.
According to a recent AP report, Vietnam War benefits now top $22 billion a year. Incredibly, the Veterans Administration now includes some forms of heart disease as a qualifying condition for benefits (as long as you blame the defoliant Agent Orange). Yet heart disease is the leading cause of death of all adults over 60, which most Vietnam vets are.
Government programs — even well-intentioned ones — never die; instead, they experience self-sustaining mission creep.
Consider another New Deal artifact, Social Security. Oh, not its impending bankruptcy (by 2033, its trustees predict), but the things that have been added on to what was once purely old-age insurance.
In particular, disability payments — added in 1956 to cover work-ending illnesses and accidents. The cost of these payments has skyrocketed, rising 5.6 percent a year over the past two decades — even as the number of American manual-labor jobs has plummeted.
The annual cost now exceeds $124 billion. The average age of persons who start receiving disability benefits? Forty-nine. It’s impossible not to look at the numbers and see a whole lot of people opting for “early retirement” courtesy of Uncle Sam. Yet reform of the program isn’t even on the horizon.
Once entrenched in the federal budget, there’s generally only three ways for entitlements to go: up, up and away.
Normally, that’s also true of “temporary taxes,” sold to the public as one-off solutions to transient problems, but which rarely vanish.
Once in a while, sanity prevails. Another Spanish-American War relic, the “temporary” 3 percent federal luxury tax on long-distance telephone service, was finally put to sleep in 2006, a mere 108 years after the war ended.
In the absence of a national income tax, this levy was designed to soak the rich (the only people who could afford phones back then) — and naturally wound up soaking everybody for more than a century.
Ending the tax was estimated to “cost” the Treasury around $46 billion, but don’t worry — that 3 percent excise tax still applies to your local phone service.
Remember the Maine!