One of my classes at Berkeley this past semester was a Political Science Colloquium where each week we heard from a different speaker. One week we had Art Torres, Chairman of the California Democratic Party. This was before the election, so party lines and affiliations were clearly drawn. Torres spent most of his speech telling the hundreds of students in the class that under Obama, their families would receive more tax credits. The only variation was exactly how much a family would get based on how many students were in school and their particular situation.

I couldn’t help but think of how similar it was to a candidate for student body president handing out candy to potential voters, so I asked Torres in the Q&A session if he didn’t think there were more important criteria to base one’s presidential choice on than who will give you the most stuff. He seemed taken aback, but quickly recovered and began to say that Obama would be better on the War, and so forth. However, why wasn’t this the first thing he told us? Because he assumed that Berkeley students are primarily concerned with themselves and their finances. And he is for the most part, right.

In this past election more than any other, we saw promises, not policy from our presidential candidates, especially Barrack Obama. Healthcare? Yep, you got it. Tax credits? No worries. People weren’t looking for what would benefit their country the most, but who would give the most to them, and the politicians know this. “Who cares if we go into greater debt as long as I get my money?” seemed to be the common theme, although even Obama admitted there was no viable way to fund all of his promises.

How do we compete with free handouts in a democracy? At some point, our country will have to realize we cannot provide everything or we will collapse. But if everyone is fighting for their share, how do convince people to cut back? The answer is visible expenditures. The money that goes out of paychecks every week without us hardly knowing should be more visible. Like the signs for public projects that state something like, “This park was paid for by measure Z”, we should state exactly what the opportunity cost was- what is it exactly that we are missing out on to pay for the park. For example, imagine if instead the park sign stated that a .5% property tax paid for the park, meaning that the average household paid n dollars. If the park or other public good is worth more to us than what we could have obtained had we kept the money, that public good was a wise expenditure. If not, it’s wasteful spending that should be cut out.

It would be nice if people were more unselfishly motivated, but realistically, there’s no way governmental policy can change that. What the government can change is the visibility of its spending and what people are missing out on by handing over their money.