LITMIR.BIZ

      Congress began down the road toward something-for-nothing legislation in pursuit of laudable ends. The passage of the Civil Rights Act helped build popular support for legislation to deal with other instances of unfairness in our society.²⁷ It was unfair that the poor had to rely for medical care upon the quirks of charity and local government, especially as the costs of care escalated. It was unfair that pollution increasingly poisoned us and our environment. Moreover, the American government undeniably had the capacity to do more to address these problems, as was evident from its outstanding successes. The government had, as already noted, gotten the people through the Great Depression, won World War II, invented the atomic bomb, built the interstate highway system, come to preside over the world’s richest economy, and put humans on the Moon.

      While these earlier successes had not come from using the Five Tricks, Congress would resort to them in dealing with the new challenges of health care and pollution. One reason is that whereas outlawing racial discrimination had required imposing burdens on a distinct subset of voters—bigots—with whom most other voters did not sympathize, financing health care for the poor and controlling pollution would require imposing burdens on most voters.

      Another reason Congress resorted to the Five Tricks is that it had begun finding it tougher to make the hard choices needed to achieve compromise. Its Democratic and Republican contingents, once overlapping in ideology, were increasingly ideologically distinct, as political scientists have found. Moreover, as has also been found, while members of Congress had once communicated with their constituents primarily through broad-based organizations with ideologically diverse memberships, such as the Kiwanis or Elks, legislators were increasingly finding themselves dealing with organizations dedicated to fiercely advancing a particular agenda on a single issue, such as environmental protection, abortion rights, right to life, or lower taxes.²⁸

      Thus, members of Congress prefer to pass something-for-nothing legislation rather than make hard choices for which they would take heat. In writing the Medicaid and Medicare statutes in the late 1960s, Congress left to future Congresses and states the job of raising most of the money needed to pay for caring for the poor and aging in the future. In writing the Clean Air Act and other environmental statutes in the 1970s, Congress left it up to federal agencies and states to impose most of the duties needed to protect health.²⁹

      Congress could get away with something-for-nothing legislation because our government’s past successes made it seem credible. Because our government presided over the world’s richest economy, it could afford medical care for everyone, or so people thought. Because it had sent humans to the Moon, it could make the air absolutely healthy on Earth, or so people thought. Besides, to question such legislation was to coddle unfairness. Democrats and Republicans joined in passing these statutes.

      Although something-for-nothing legislation takes many forms, they all share one essential feature: The current Congress and president leave to some other body—a federal agency, the states, or future Congresses and presidents—the task of defining the burdens needed to actually deliver the benefits. This shifts most of the blame for the burdens that come with delivering the benefits, or the failure to deliver them, away from the members of the current Congress.

      Once federal legislators had gotten away with claiming the credit yet shifting the blame for Medicare, Medicaid, the 1970 Clean Air Act, and other early instances of something-for-nothing legislation, they resorted to such trickery throughout the entire gamut of federal activity (see chapters 4 and 7).