In recent years, budget woes have led Georgia’s government to furlough workers and make a host of other spending cuts.
One thing the state government hasn’t done is shut down.
Local governments have also remained open even as they’ve navigated treacherous fiscal waters. Elected officials have argued, made threats, wrung their hands, made hard choices. But even in places with sharp political divides, such as Fulton County, they haven’t simply retreated to their respective corners.
There’s a reason the Founders intended government to be done as closely to the people as possible. It’s easier for people in Rome and Valdosta to find common ground than people in San Francisco and San Antonio. The former pairing’s interests and even social circles are more likely to overlap. The people they elect are less likely to be insulated from their constituents, or unsympathetic to the sensibilities of those who elected their fellow lawmakers.
Consider: Thirty-one states elected both of their senators from just one party or the other (New Jersey voters next month are likely to make it 32). That degree of single-partisanship is less of a problem for governance in each of those states than it is in the U.S. Senate, where they’re supposed to ignore electoral incentives and work together.
But this divide is less of a problem for the U.S. Senate when the federal government isn’t trying to do so much.
The paradox highlighted by the latest shutdown in Washington, then, is the federal government continues to grant itself new powers even though it’s the level of government least capable of solving the inevitable disagreements over them.
Let’s put this paradox into numerical and historical context. There have now been 18 federal shutdowns, all since 1976. The timing is not coincidental.
Most of the shutdowns happened because of a disagreement within Congress, or between legislators and the president, about funding. Some fights concerned specific items, some total government funding. Some fights were between groups of Democrats, some between Democrats and Republicans.
But the size, scope and functions of government almost always have been at issue.
It just so happens that we started experiencing shutdowns around the time federal spending began habitually breaking a threshold Washington historically had not crossed: spending at least 20 percent of gross domestic product, or GDP.
Before World War II, Uncle Sam usually consumed less than one-tenth of GDP. By 1947, the country had wound down the war effort and federal spending settled in the teens. From 1947 to 1974, spending hit 20 percent of GDP only twice.
The threshold was breached in 1975 … and in each following year through 1996. The federal government shut down 17 times in those 20 years.
Then a funny thing happened. Federal spending fell below 20 percent of GDP in 1997, staying below that level for nine of the next 10 years. And there were no shutdowns.
In 2008, amid the Great Recession, Washington breached the 20 percent mark again and has stayed there. Voila, the tea party was born and, after a couple of near-misses, we have another shutdown. Forecasts show no sign of spending falling below 20 percent again in the foreseeable future.
The difference between 20 percent and 18 or 19 percent might seem trivial. It isn’t, and not only because, in a $16 trillion-a-year economy, we’re talking about $160 billion to $320 billion.
Since 1946, Washington has done all sorts of things to tax rates and loopholes, but federal revenues have exceeded 20 percent of GDP exactly one time. So, continually spending more than 20 percent of GDP is a sure-fire way to rack up lots of federal debt — and exacerbate the partisan divide.
But just as significant, it represents a kind of break from the division of labor the Founders envisioned between the federal government, and state and local governments. As we debate how to avoid such dysfunction in the future, serious consideration is owed to the possibility of getting back to governing in the way our government was designed.
