By Alan Burkhart
Not the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, but wars being fought right here at home. Want to know what President Nixon's War on Drugs is costing us? Or President Johnson's War on Poverty?
The Drug War...
"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." - - Albert Einstein, 1921
In June of 1971, President Richard Nixon declared that, "America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse."
Two years later he declared that "...this Administration has declared all-out, global war on the drug menace..." and shortly thereafter created the Drug Enforcement Agency.
I dare say that more lives are destroyed every year by the War on Drugs than could ever be destroyed by the drugs themselves. And we're spending billions of dollars on a war that cannot be won. Billions that we do not have and cannot afford to borrow.
Here's an excerpt from a report compiled by the CATO Institute regarding the so-called War on Drugs:
State and federal governments in the United States face massive looming fiscal deficits. One policy change that can reduce deficits is ending the drug war. Legalization means reduced expenditure on enforcement and an increase in tax revenue from legalized sales.
This report estimates that legalizing drugs would save roughly $41.3 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. Of these savings, $25.7 billion would accrue to state and local governments, while $15.6 billion would accrue to the federal government.
Approximately $8.7 billion of the savings would result from legalization of marijuana and $32.6 billion from legalization of other drugs. The report also estimates that drug legalization would yield tax revenue of $46.7 billion annually, assuming legal drugs were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco. Approximately $8.7 billion of this revenue would result from legalization of marijuana and $38.0 billion from legalization of other drugs.
You can download and read the entire report in PDF format here.
The Drug Enforcement Agency is becoming a significant spender of taxpayer dollars. This chart is created from data pulled from the DEA's own website, and shows their yearly budget from their inception through 2009:
And the DEA represents only a small part of the total expenditure of the War On Drugs. You must also consider other law enforcement agencies and the cost of imprisonment.
It's legitimate to ask if we're getting a decent return on our investment, which would be a decrease in the use of harmful drugs (note that marijuana is not a harmful drug, imo). According to the National Drug Intelligence Center (2009 data), yet another arm of the bureaucracy...
There are no current estimates for the amount of drugs available in U.S. drug markets, nor are there sufficient data to more accurately measure quantities of specific drugs nationally. Thus, a determination of whether drug availability is increasing or decreasing is based on analysis of indicator data, including foreign and domestic production estimates, price and purity data, seizure data, transportation and distribution trends, and demand data. These indicator data show that in 2009, cocaine availability was decreasing, while heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine, and MDMA remained readily available, with increases in some areas.
You be the judge if the above is good news or bad news. According to the data I saw, cocaine use has decreased, but there appears to be a significant short-term increase in meth use.
People who wish to use drugs, will use drugs. Whether it's nothing more than a joint or two on the weekend or a rotten-toothed crack head, people will use drugs if they wish. History has shown us without any room for doubt that prohibition does not work. All the Drug War is accomplishing is the enrichment of illegal drug dealers and the loss of freedom of Americans. Do you feel like you're getting your money's worth?
The War On Poverty...
During his first state of the union address in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an "...unending war on poverty..."
In his final state of the union address in 1988, President Reagan declared that "poverty won." But we're still fighting that war. We're still dumping billions of dollars into failed programs that have never and will never end the cycle of poverty in America.
How much are we spending?
Consider this excerpt from a 2008 article by Edward K. Browning, Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University:
People who wish to use drugs, will use drugs. Whether it's nothing more than a joint or two on the weekend or a rotten-toothed crack head, people will use drugs if they wish. History has shown us without any room for doubt that prohibition does not work. All the Drug War is accomplishing is the enrichment of illegal drug dealers and the loss of freedom of Americans. Do you feel like you're getting your money's worth?
The War On Poverty...
During his first state of the union address in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an "...unending war on poverty..."
In his final state of the union address in 1988, President Reagan declared that "poverty won." But we're still fighting that war. We're still dumping billions of dollars into failed programs that have never and will never end the cycle of poverty in America.
How much are we spending?
Consider this excerpt from a 2008 article by Edward K. Browning, Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University:
I estimate that Social Security benefits for those in the poorest fifth of the population totaled $100 billion in 2005. Medicare provided another $115 billion, and educating the children of low-income families cost $105 billion more. (These figures do not measure total spending on these programs but only the expenditures benefiting those in the lowest fifth of the income distribution.) To these sums we may add $40 billion in uncompensated medical care and $78 billion in private charity.
Grand total: $1.058 trillion in 2005. It would be larger today.
To put a trillion dollars in perspective, it's more than twice our total spending on national defense.
It's larger than the total revenue collected by the federal individual income tax.
It's about ten times as much as we spent on redistributive policies in the 1950s (in inflation-adjusted dollars).
It's equal to the total before-tax cash income of middle-income households. That's right, we transfer to the low-income population an amount equal to the entire income of middle-income households, that is, households in the middle fifth (40th to 60th percentile) of the American income distribution.
If a trillion dollars were simply given to those counted as poor by the federal government (37 million in 2005), it would amount to $27,000 per person. That's $81,000 for a family of three, higher than the median income of all American families, and far greater than the poverty threshold of $15,577.
If that isn't enough to frost you, consider this: Before Johnson declared his war, the poverty rate was actually coming down. You read right. The percentage of people living below the poverty line had been dropping for several years. It continued to drop for a few more years (though the rate of reduction was less) under Johnson's plan (implemented by Sargent Shriver), but then crept back up to around fifteen percent. In 1965, one year after Johnson's declaration of war, the poverty rate was around 14 or 15 percent. And in 2009 (my most recent data), it was still 14.3 percent.
So, more than 4 decades and trillions of dollars later, Johnson's war has made no real difference. Some might maintain that it's "holding the line." But that's a cop-out. The bottom line is that the federal and state plans to combat poverty have done nothing to reduce poverty in America. We've flushed untold boat-loads of taxpayer dollars down the political toilet that might have otherwise gone to creating jobs (and lifting people out of poverty).
The chart below is a public domain image of US Government information. I have added a couple of arrows, the left one showing the approximate point of one year after Johnson's declaration, the right one pointing to where we were in 2009. Seeing is believing.
Not to belabor the point, but here's a quick rundown of the federal government's revenues, outlays and publicly-held debt from 1969 to 2007. Revenue is blue, outlays are red, debt is yellow. Data pulled from the Congressional Budget Office. This was the most current data I had and it doesn't include the Obama Administration. But we all know the debt is even higher now. In fact at $14 trillion, the yellow debt line would in this case run all the way into the chart above it. Scary.
So what now? Do we continue to throw taxpayer money at a bureaucracy that has become a monetary black hole? We're literally running out of money. Unemployment is rising. The dollar is losing value faster than my mobile home. To continue doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result, is generally defined as a form of insanity. Or as we say in Mississippi, "If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you always got." There's a word for what we're getting, but I won't use it here.
Poverty Chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Drug War Article: http://www.theatlantic.com/
Einstein Quote: http://deoxy.org/prohib2.htm
National Drug Intelligence Center: http://www.justice.gov/ndic/pubs38/38661/index.htm
Congressional Budget Office Chart: http://www.cbo.gov/budget/data/historical.pdf
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