Setting the Record Straight

Why conservatives are responsible for so much government red tape

Over the last few decades, you would be hard pressed to find a major conservative political figure in the United States who didn't regularly make government bashing a central theme of his or her campaign. You know the rap - most of us could recite it in our sleep:

"The problem, ladies and gentlemen, isn't with our people. The problem is with the liberal government bureaucrats in Washington [or Raleigh or Columbia or Richmond - feel free to substitute your own capital city]. These meddlesome busybodies are constantly inundating us with their confusing rules and regulations and red tape. They only have two objectives: to protect their own jobs and to limit our freedom by micromanaging everyone's life!"

Here in North Carolina, such speechifying is a staple of committee meetings and floor sessions at the General Assembly. For years, conservative lawmakers of both parties have regularly cued up the "beat on the bureaucrats" speech when discussing everything from the environment to taxes to the supposed evils of health care reform.  

A fatal problem with this argument, of course, is that one of its central premises - that bureaucracy is somehow exclusively the work of "liberal" activists - is simply and flat out wrong.

Even if one sets aside the egregious inconsistencies with this argument in the area of civil rights and liberties (where it is the far right that seeks to police people's bedrooms and libraries), one need only look to some recent news developments to find other glaring examples of government bureaucracy gone wild in service of the conservative political agenda.

Medicaid for seniors

This past Wednesday at the General Assembly, members of the Senate Health Committee heard and discussed a proposal by Senator Ellie Kinnaird and others that would address a vexing bureaucratic problem in the world of health insurance. The problem is this: Every year, the federal government provides Social Security beneficiaries with a small cost of living adjustment or COLA. The idea, of course, is to help recipients keep up with inflation. For many vulnerable folks living on fixed incomes, the COLA (even if it's just a few dollars) is an extremely welcome income bump. Unfortunately, when COLA's are provided, they can put people slightly over the income limits for Medicaid eligibility - which are set in relation to the official Federal Poverty Level (an obsolete and inaccurate measure, but that's another story).

The results of this bureaucratic math can be quite absurd. At the Health Committee meeting, senators of both parties related anecdotes of elderly constituents who had seen their health insurance completely cut off because they were, literally, one or two dollars "over income." In one case, the person in question now faced a $300 per month drug bill because he was one dollar over the Medicaid threshold.

Though the committee approved Kinnaird's bill to direct state government to stop enforcing the rule so rigidly, it's not at all clear that it will become law or that such a change is even really possible. Federal rules governing the reimbursement of states for Medicaid (the feds pay more than two-thirds of Medicaid costs) may not allow it. If North Carolina tries to act without federal approval, it could jeopardize up to $117 million in federal Medicaid reimbursements.

The irony in all of this is that the bureaucratic Medicaid regulations in question are not the work product of bleeding heart do-gooders. They are the handiwork of tough-talking conservatives who do their utmost to oppose and/or limit every social safety net program that comes along. The purpose of these rules is, in short, to make public benefits harder to get.

Georgia's elimination of welfare

Another recent example of bureaucracy gone wild in furtherance of the conservative agenda has been on display of late in Georgia. According to this incredibly sobering recent article, there has been a concerted state effort to, effectively, do away with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (also known as TANF or "welfare") for most of the state's most wretchedly poor residents.

The article tells the sad story of a young mother named Letorrea Clark who, despite being essentially on the street, could not get past the incredible (and even dishonest) bureaucratic maze established by state officials in the administration of arch-conservative Governor, Sonny Perdue.     

"Clark patched things together with food stamps and $256 a month in child support. But after nine months, Gabby's father stopped paying just long enough for Clark to get evicted. She went back to the welfare office, where caseworkers turned her away, saying-falsely again-that because she'd been getting child support she was ineligible for TANF.

What Clark didn't know was that Georgia, like many other states, was in the midst of an aggressive push to get thousands of eligible mothers like her off TANF, often by duplicitous means, to use the savings elsewhere in the state budget. Fewer than 2,500 Georgia adults now receive benefits, down from 28,000 in 2004-a 90 percent decline. Louisiana, Texas, and Illinois have each dropped 80 percent of adult recipients since January 2001. Nationally, the number of TANF recipients fell more than 40 percent between then and June 2008, the most recent month for which data are available. In Georgia last year, only 18 percent of children living below 50 percent of the poverty line-that is, on less than $733 a month for a family of three-were receiving TANF."

While Perdue has touted his bureaucratic anti-welfare rules and policies as a success, the article describes a much bleaker reality of life lived underneath the safety net.

Setting the record straight

Both of these cases illustrate what is a widely ignored reality when it comes to government bureaucracy/red tape: A huge proportion of it is the direct result of the conservative demand that government benefits to individuals be meted out under only the most extreme level of scrutiny.

To see this brand of lawmaking in action, click here to watch a recent video of Senator Richard Burr referring to kids who benefit from the highly successful Children's Health Insurance Program as "hogs at the trough." 

In the real world, it's this kind of miserly messaging from elected leaders like Burr that leads to the absurdly bureaucratic and disastrously harmful policy results that one sees in denied Medicaid and TANF eligibility and in dozens of other areas in which public systems intersect with average people.

Whether it's a denied school lunch for a hungry child, the disproportionately numerous IRS audits of poor families, or resistance from lawmakers to Food Stamp outreach plans that might increase participation from those lawfully eligible, too many American public systems erect complex bureaucratic barriers in order to effect the conservative goal of jealously rationing services and benefits.

"God forbid that some disabled grandmother somewhere might get a few extra dollars in Food Stamps each month," goes the reasoning, "better to discourage her from applying at all with a confusing application process than to allow that."

Especially in today's era of profligate and decidedly un-bureaucratic spending on behalf of the corporate elite that dwarfs the often pitiable assistance made available to average Americans, there's something incredibly ironic about such an attitude.

And there's something rather ironic, as well, in the spectacle of conservative lawmakers complaining about bureaucratic policy results that are, in large measure, the byproduct of their own flawed and simplistic ideology.   

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 8:26 am and is filed under Setting the Record Straight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.