If your teenager, on that average allowance of $30 per week, came back and said that an emergency had cost her 9 cents, gimme more, what would your reaction be?
Mine would be laughter, followed by a lecture on the necessity of budgeting, reserves, and allowances for said emergencies. No dime for her.
When the states demand $8 billion for vaccine rollout, that same amount being equal to one-third of 1% of their collective $2.3 trillion budgets, the skeptics are all immediately considered Hitlers for not immediately caving. We might begin to wonder whether those running the states are adults or not, for, yes, people running budgets of tens and even hundreds of billions should actually be running budgets, no?
Though that is not the way that modern federalism works, as opposed to how it was originally designed. Sure, there were a few contretemps a while back about whether anyone could ever leave the Union, but the aim of maintaining federalism was to ensure that power flowed upward. Those things that can be done at a local level should be so and paid for at that local level, too.
Local taxes pay for local things, and those who benefit are those who carry the cost. As things become larger and more efficient at larger scales, then the body corporate that gets charged rises in size as well. That’s the entire idea of a federal system.
Sticking a needle in an arm is a local activity. The development of the vaccine itself is a national, even global effort (the Pfizer-BioNtech one is a joint venture between an American company and a German one). The approval of it, as and when the FDA gets around to it, is a national effort.
Here’s the point: appropriate scale for the task at hand. We would think it positively insane if it were some careerist in D.C. detailing how the line works in Fargo to get vaccinated.
Additionally, the delivery of the vaccine is a local thing, to be paid for by local taxation and for the benefit of those local, as a liquor license is local.
We can and should take this further. The very demand shows that the states are improvident. That means that, like the teenager, they need the lecture and no dime. They are not competent to handle the budgets they already have. We do not, except in the most extreme delirium tremens, make the drunk better with more booze. Curtailing access is the solution. So, too, with the importuning of access to the federal budget. Say to states, “You have proven you can’t handle it. Now, go home and sleep it off.”
Seriously, states flashing around $2 trillion per year can’t cope with a 0.3% variance in their budgets for an emergency? No more money for them, then, and that determination is made before we even start asking where it’s all gone already.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
