Nothing rings so true as the quote Milton Friedman is known for above. Temporary government programs have a tendency to stick around for a long time- in many cases forever. It is notoriously hard to remove a government program, becuase the government employees people to keep the program running. Unlike the private sector, the profit motive has almost no effect on operation of a government program. The modus operandi is merely having jobs for the public. Hence why most government programs are always in debt- from the Mighty State Department to the mere senate barbershop.
Any and all programs from entitlements, to public works projects end up being permanent programs that are next to impossible to remove. One could argue big expenditures like the Income Tax or Welfare programs federally are temporary, given their origins (Lincoln’s Greenbacks and LBJ’s War on Poverty.) However the current use of each seems to haze the original intentions into a permanent apparatus to fund government & help the poor, respectively.
What about the programs that were clearly intended for temporary use? Here is a list of several programs that still exist today:
Tennessee Valley – “a federally owned corporation in the United States created by congressional charter in May 1933 to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development in the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly affected by the Great Depression….TVA was envisioned not only as a provider, but also as a regional economic development agency that would use federal experts and electricity to rapidly modernize the region’s economy and society.”
The intention was creation of economic activity back in the great depression…so why does it still exist today?
Federal Crop Insurance Corporation: is a wholly owned government corporation managed by the Risk Management Agency of the United States Department of Agriculture. FCIC manages the federal crop insurance program, which provides U.S. farmers and agricultural entities with crop insurance protection…. The legislation was created in response to the economic difficulties brought to the U.S. farming industry by the Great Depression and the weather-related catastrophe of the Dust Bowl…Initially, participation in FCIC was voluntary. However, insurance premiums were subsidized by the U.S. government as a means of encouraging participation in the FCIC program. This changed with the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act of 1994, which required farmers to participate in the program in order to be eligible for deficiency payments related to certain FCIC programs. Mandatory participation was repealed in 1996.
In Short- temporary relief to farmers in the great depression became a federal insuracne program on crops. What the definition neglects to mention is the crop-buying programs which has government forcibly by farmer’s crops each year in order to maintin higher costs. During the depression, these drops were intentionally destroyed to perserve the high cost. Now, they are sent to needy third-world countries. Why are we funding a program decades old to keep prices artifically high? Didn’t the depression end?
Just about any notable program from the great depression has stuck around to today. Here are some more famously known government programs that are now “corporations”, just like the TVA:
Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac- remember these folks? Federally-founded & still funded companies to help americans get into houses. Also intended to be a tmeporary program, the housing markets many fluctations seemed to have blurred the lines to keep these ‘companies’ as permanent figures in government. Yet, they were behind the very issue of the 2008 housing crisis due to those very genrerous federally-backed loans that undercut the true-market rate for a decade. Well, now it seems the federal government may in fact remove them…and instead control the entire housing market with legislation approving them to underwrite 100% of all mortgages. Not good folks…
A recent target of Republican politicans Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, & Justin Amash has been a “government corproation” that is glaring evidence of corporate welfare.
Export-Import Bank– the official export credit agency of the United States federal government… It was established in 1934 by an executive order, and made an independent agency in the Executive branch by Congress in 1945, for the purposes of financing and insuring foreign purchases of United States goods for customers unable or unwilling to accept credit risk….Its Charter spells out the Bank’s authorities and limitations. Among them is the principle that Ex-Im Bank does not compete with private sector lenders, but rather provides financing for transactions that would otherwise not take place because commercial lenders are either unable or unwilling to accept the political or commercial risks inherent in the deal.
If you want a glaring opposition to the fundementals of the Free Market, the Ex-IM bank is it. They are the epitimany of governmt meddling in the economy. No compeititon – undercut market credit rates- unattainable private risk? All are reasons a free-market thinker would NOT invest in a program in the first place. Yet the government is some form of dogmatic entity that defies human nature in order to better mankind. In the Ex-Im bank’s case, it is mostly just Boeing (and even the failed energy titan Enron, which was loaned 1+ billion dollars pre-collapse). I am 100% for the closure of the Export-Import bank with every fiber of my Libertarian Principles.
That is just the tip of the iceburg for temporary government programs. Not all are from the FDR regime, but his New Deal policies ushered in a larger government than any president in our history….almost all programs temporary.
Here is a continued running list of our current existing temporary programs:
- Commodity Credit Corporation (1933)
- Corporation for National and Community Service (Americorps) (1933)
- Corporation for Public Broadcasting aka PBS (1967)
- Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation (1987)
- Farm Credit Banks (1916)
- Federal Financing Bank (1973)
- Federal Home Loan Banks (1932)
- Federal Prison Industries (1934)
- The Financing Corporation aka FICO (1989)
- Legal Services Corporation (1974)
- National Consumer Cooperative Bank (1978)
- Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation (1978)
- Millennium Challenge Corporation (2004)
- National Credit Union Administration Central Liquidity Facility (1998)
- National Endowment for Democracy (1983)
- National Park Foundation (1967)
- National Railroad Passenger Corporation aka Amtrak (1971)
- Overseas Private Investment Corporation (1971)
- Panama Canal Commission (1903) – (still used as a military base, despite losing its established program name in
- Securities Investor Protection Corporation (1970)
So when people say we have nothing to cut in our national budget…..here are plenty of temporary programs that well past their due time.
