Pressdog.com

Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later

By Bill Zahren
(Posted 11/12/03)

This should be inscribed over all entrances to the United States House of Representatives, Senate and White House:

“Pay me now or pay me later.”

Or maybe just require all Congresspersons to repeatedly watch a 25-year-old TV commercial for FRAM oil filters. In it, a mechanic talks about how he’s getting hundreds of dollars to overhaul an engine just because the owner didn’t regularly spend $5 for a new oil filter.

The commercial ends with the mechanic saying, “You can pay me now (holding up the filter) or pay me later (gesturing to the engine overhaul).”

The wisdom of the FRAM commercial is that having the discipline to pay a little bit (the cost of an oil and filter change) now can avoid huge costs (the price of a major overhaul) later.

Someone should explain the concept to Congress and Mr. President.

And, before we get all self-righteous and dismiss Congress as a group that makes drunken sailors seem fiscally Scrooge-like, it seems to me that Congress is just reflecting the people it represents on this deal.

Which is why I chortle whenever some Tax Slasher says a state or the country should “have to do what American families do -- live within their means.” Problem is, the average American doesn't do that. The average American owes about $8,000 on his or her credit cards.

Now it's easy to understand how you get entangled in debt if your only choice is to work for one of our patriotic, upstanding corporate citizen companies that generously pay $7-an-hour with no insurace. And everyone can understand going into debt if you lose a job, but most Americans rack it up on two incomes. Our family dips into credit card debt (albeit way less than $8,000) when the Christmas bills come due. Like millions of my fellow Christians, I end up celebrating the birth of the Savior by plunging into debt. So it seems American taxpayers aren’t much better than Congress at “living within their means.”

America and its Congress further encourage federal fiscal chaos by refusing to pay for now what they could pay much more for later. Which is why we love to slash money for program maintenance while just assuming demand for the program will magically disappear.

That's kind of like skipping dental checkups as a way to save money and discomfort. Sooner or later (if you continue to eat) the root canals and cavities will be impossible to ignore, and the price and pain involved in fixing everything you could have prevented will make checkups seem like a day at the beach.

The reason it's tough to hold Congress entirely to blame is that taxpayers -- so vociferous in their public calls for reduced spending -- if given the choice of A) paying more taxes or B) having fewer services, courageously choose C) reducing taxes and increasing services.

Let’s face it, most Americans consider a house in the suburbs, two SUVs in the garage and a twice-yearly family vacation to Maui to be their American birthright. And nobody’s in the mood to sacrifice any of it for any reason, let alone paying more for the public good, especially when we've become so skilled at blaming public finance problems on alleged “waste, fraud and abuse.”

So the demand for services continues or even grows while the money for those services gets cut off. What happens? Pent-up demand builds like a fiscal aneurysm until something blows and creates an expensive mess -- which we courageously put on the national credit card.

Which brings us to Iraq. My rough math says we taxpayers have spent $150 billion in Iraq in the last year, give or take a few billion.

Nobody seems to have a big problem with that. And how can you? It’s like getting into a gunfight and then having a problem with the price of bullets. (The time to decide if you can afford the bullets is before you start pulling the trigger, not after.) But imagine the screams of treason and accusation of Tax-and-Spending that would have pulsated from Capital Hill just three years ago if someone suggested spending $15 billion more per year for 10 years trying to make the Middle East safer for the U.S. and democracy. Imagine the vilification of a proposal back in 2000 to spend just 2 measly billion more dollars exclusively on finding a way to oust Saddam short of war.

To make things fiscally worse, since the federal checking account is sucking air, Congress and the President have courageously charged the whole Iraq bill to my children’s credit card. That brings their current outstanding balance to around $400 billion.

We’ve changed the axiom to “pay me now or let someone else pay me later.”

Skimping on road maintenance is a good way to buy a bunch of new roads. Chintzing out on social services is a good way to increase the number of abuse victims, raise the crime rate and build a bunch of new prisons. Shorting education today sets off a whole ugly cascade of social, political, moral and economic costs tomorrow. And the best way to avoid war later to invest in peace now.

I used to think a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution was silly. And I still sort of do, because I’m pretty sure the Congress would find some way to comply by just making the states pay for everything. But if we could come up with one that says, “The budget must be balanced every year or taxes automatically rise to cover the shortfall,” I’d vote for it right now. It might be just the hammer we need to snap out of our “you can have it all and pay for none of it” national mentality.

You want to go to war? Here’s the size of the war tax. Still think it’s worth it? Well then lock and load. Want a tax cut? OK, here are the programs we’re cutting to give it to you. OK, we can debate what gets cut, but something has to give. Looking for more services? Here’s the price tag.

Pay as you go. Pay now, not later. That’s the way it should be.

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