Recipe For Disaster

Ask any Republican member of Congress what's wrong with this country, and you'll get the same answer: big government. Return power to the states, they say, and do away with the federal government's huge, invasive bureaucracy--see the light of "New Federalism."

But having large programs such as Aid for Dependent Children, school lunch subsidies and the Women, Infants and Children supplements under one big roof makes a lot of sense. We have national standards (though even now the states have too much leeway for compliance) and a fantastic capacity for gathering and pooling information in utilization reviews.

Splintering federal programs into 50 smaller bureaucracies nationwide would destroy any existing efficiencies. Each state, receiving only block grants from the federal government, would face the complete burden of coordinating social programs. For example, New York and California's Health and Human Services Departments would have to grow to the size of the federal departments to cope with their large populations.

Accordingly, citizens' tax burdens would balloon to support the dead weight of these redundant yet autonomous bureaucracies. States with small populations would feel the inefficiencies most. California's bureaucracy would easily be able to handle Nevada's comparatively tiny needs, but no, Nevada has to have its own departments for its own block grants. States would be smart to combine their efforts, but then, isn't that exactly what they do now?

Some supporters of this atomization of federal oversight forecast a slew of new innovations from the workings of 50 separate governments. But these innovations would doubtlessly be superficial, indigenous to their states of origin. Republicans also tout the agility of smaller state bureaucracies in reacting to societal shifts, in comparison to the purportedly unwieldy federal system.

But they neglect a far more important facet of the large federal system--it absorbs shocks and distributes bumps in trends far more evenly than any small state system could. The federal government, with its unmatched powers of taxation and debt creation, will always be better equipped to deal with sudden onrushes of demand for social services than easily-bankrupted states.

Then again, this whole scenario could end up costing Republicans their leadership. Examine the following logical sequence:

If states do take over the majority of social services, this country will face a dangerous rash of self-sorting. Jobless families, with little to anchor themselves in one place, will move to states with better services. The rich have little need for services and thus little reason to support them; they will stick together in states that will abolish services and entitlements designed for the needy. The nation's treasured middle class will split up along the borderline of need.

This sorting will eventually lead to a polarization of the states--some for the rich, others for the poor. Soon enough, almost all block grants will go to a particular set of states. Of course, the poor overwhelmingly outnumber the rich in this country. Strangely enough, less well-off voters also tend to support Democrats much more than Republicans. With all the wealthy collected in a few states, the poor will massacre them with electoral votes.

These events wouldn't happen immediately. But they give even more evidence that the Republican Congress is not planning for the nation's future, or even for their own future. Moreover, this scenario points out one problem of unmatched current importance.

If every adult citizen voted in this country, Republicans might never win another election. Taking 50 percent of the vote when turnout amounts to less than 40 percent of eligible voters cannot be called a mandate. The populace that does vote is disproportionately weighted towards the wealthy and elderly. Representative democracy could save the programs that the Republicans would cut--it's time it did.

Daniel Altman's column appears on alternate Mondays.