Guest columnist Douglas J. Amy: Why government is so easy to attack

A snowplow clears the area as snow blankets Capitol Hill ahead of a joint session of Congress to certify the votes from the Electoral College in the presidential election in Washington on Jan. 6.

A snowplow clears the area as snow blankets Capitol Hill ahead of a joint session of Congress to certify the votes from the Electoral College in the presidential election in Washington on Jan. 6. AP PHOTO/JOSE LUIS MAGANA

By DOUGLAS J. AMY

Published: 01-14-2025 7:01 AM

 

When the Trump administration comes into power, we will see an unprecedented attack on the federal government. He and his appointees are hostile to many of the departments they will control and have pledged to eviscerate them. And many Americans seem OK with this, because they have bought the Republican line that while they pay a lot of taxes, they get virtually nothing back in government benefits. So they believe they have nothing to lose in reducing government.

This kind of delusion is possible because the very nature of government benefits makes it easy for citizens to ignore how their lives are improved by government programs.

For one thing, many of our most effective federal programs have been around for so many decades that we’ve become used to them and simply take them for granted. Benefits that are provided reliably for long periods of time — such as clean water and workplace safety — tend to fade into the background and to not be considered benefits at all. Many Americans, for example, seem to have forgotten the medical horrors created by polio, the flu, measles, etc. before we had government-sponsored vaccines. Or what it is like to lose your life savings in a bank failure. Or when our rivers and lakes were so polluted with sewage that we couldn’t swim in them.

Another reason why people don’t appreciate the benefits of government programs is that these benefits frequently take the form not of the presence of something, but of the absence of something.

Think of it this way: Much of the job of government in our lives is to ensure that bad things don’t happen to us. We pay taxes so that our food doesn’t make us sick, accidents are prevented by traffic law enforcement, our bridges don’t collapse, and the air doesn’t worsen our asthma. In other words, often when the government is working well, nothing happens to us.

No wonder no one notices. So while we really do get a lot for our taxes, we often get it in a form that is largely invisible to us.

Interestingly, in many European countries where higher taxes fund more extensive government programs, their citizens have no trouble seeing how they benefit. It’s obvious. They all get free or low-cost medical care, free college education, retirement benefits they can live comfortably on, months of parental leave, cheap day care, etc. Their government programs virtually eliminate most of the financial worries that keep many Americans up late at night. And there is little public demand for cutbacks in these programs.

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Of course, our government could do more to remind us of all the ways that its programs make our lives better — like how many lives a year are saved by vaccines. Even charities send out letters to donors letting them know all the good things their donations have made possible. But our federal, state, and local governments rarely inform us about what we get for our tax payments.

Several years ago, I worked with the Northampton League of Women Voters to address that issue in our city. We created a one-page insert in the Daily Hampshire Gazette detailing many of the benefits Northamptonites received from their city taxes, including: helping to educate 2,700 children, recycling 7.5 million pounds of valuable materials, maintaining 150 miles of roads, 70 miles of sidewalks, 20 bridges, and 115 miles of sewer pipes, responding to 4,992 emergency medical calls, providing over a billion gallons a year of clean water, answering 43,784 calls for police assistance, lending out 340,000 items from Forbes Library, and much more.

It would be great if the federal government did something similar to remind us of all the very real benefits they provide. Sadly, of course, we will probably become much more aware in the next few years of these “invisible” government benefits when they start to disappear under the assault of the Trump administration. As they say, “You don’t miss the water until the well runs dry.”

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.” And it is exactly this civilization that will be under attack by the right-wing, anti-government zealots in the coming Trump administration.

Douglas J. Amy is professor emeritus of politics at Mount Holyoke College. He lives in Northampton.