Michael Hiltzik: The real fraud in ‘waste, fraud and abuse’
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Television isn’t the only thing to blame for our reliance on slogans to make political campaign points -- the deceptive sound bite is at least as old as Alexander Hamilton. What’s different today, especially in a state like California where virtually the only way to campaign is via TV, is that the slogans are taken as policy statements, not advertising tropes.
As my Sunday column observes, such was the case with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ‘blowing up the boxes’ promise, and such is the case with Meg Whitman’s -- OK, almost everybody’s -- pledge to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the state budget. This is nothing more than a naked appeal to the reflexive prejudices of voters who at the drop of a hat will gripe not only about inefficiency at the DMV, but also about the DMV being closed on Fridays because of state employee furloughs, which are necessary only because the same voters won’t listen to reasonable debate on budget and tax policy.
The column begins below.
Meg Whitman will ‘root out fraud’ and ‘cut wasteful spending.’ Carly Fiorina wants to eliminate ‘the billions of dollars of waste and bloat that sits in our federal budget.’ Ho-hum. Is it campaign time again? As the crocus heralds the coming of spring, the sure sign that we’re working up to a major election is that we start hearing all about cutting the ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ in government spending. Waste, fraud and abuse, or as I prefer to think of it, WFA, is the WMD of domestic politics. The search for WFA is handy for rallying the campaign troops, but the results on the battlefield tend to disappoint. ‘Railing against waste in government is practically as old as government,’ says Tim Hodson, executive director of the Center for California Studies at Cal State Sacramento. ‘It’s a comforting slogan that doesn’t stand up to any sort of rigorous analysis. That’s not saying you can’t be more efficient, but it’s not enough to fix the budget.’
Read the whole column.
-- Michael Hiltzik
