Tim Pawlenty’s “Google Test”: “Who Needs Mail Delivery?”

Tim Pawlenty (Michael Tercha/Chicago Tribune)

Do we really need the federal government to provide services like mail delivery or passenger rail service when there’s Google around to help Americans find private alternatives? And should we fund massive tax cuts for the super-rich with the cost savings? Those are the questions being asked by Tim Pawlenty in a proposal that is austerity on steroids.

Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor and Republican presidential candidate, delivered the first major economic speech of his young presidential campaign this week, laying out a decidedly conservative agenda of tax cuts, spending cuts, and a paen to “small government.” The checklist of Republican policy favorites was necessary because there are lingering questions over Pawlenty’s own fiscal fortitude, with Minnesota facing a $5 billion budget gap that many blame on the former governor.

Included in his campaign speech was what Pawlenty termed “the Google test,” a catchy slogan for what would mean an outright slaughter of all sorts of federal services and programs. The GOP contender said that if an American can find “good or service on the Internet,” then there is no need for the government to provide it, too. As examples of potential victims of his “Google test” Pawlenty mentioned mail delivery, Amtrak, and the government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Such programs and services “”were all built for a time in our country when the private sector did not adequately provide those products,” Pawlenty said. So he wants to kill them all.

Republican presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty laid out an economic vision for America on Tuesday that would cut taxes and dramatically reduce the size and scope of government operations.

Among his more novel ideas: If you can find it on Google, the government shouldn’t be doing it.

“We can start by applying what I call ‘The Google Test.’ If you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it,” Pawlenty said.

Among the services he would cut: Amtrak, the U.S. Postal Service, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Government Printing Office.

Pawlenty said those organizations “were all built for a time in our country when the private sector did not adequately provide those products. That’s no longer the case.”

Interpreted broadly, the test could spell the end of federal involvement in the storage of nuclear waste, environmental clean-up efforts and disaster relief — all services that a Google search reveals are offered by private sector firms.

Thinking more about the “Google test” and the idea that private services that are easily found on the internet should or can replace redundant services funded by the government, all sorts of potential victims of Pawlenty’s proposal come to mind. Firefighters, police, public schools…even the United States military. All could theoretically be replaced by private contractors or service that could be found online.

These are probably unintended targets since the governor’s stump speech is most likely just red meat for the Republican base than a serious economic plan.

Obvious glitches in Pawlenty’s plan include mail delivery, which private package services like non-union FedEx and UPS do not come close to matching, and Amtrak, an even more glaring example. Considering the private rail industry actually gave up passenger rail service on its own in the 1970′s, which led to creation of Amtrak, cutting the only nationwide passenger rail system may fail the test. But other possibilities are endless, as Mother Jones points out in a quick review of the “Google test.”

The US Postal Service’s problems are well documented, although it provides a public service that its competitors simply don’t aspire to do—and a quick Google search for “Amtrak competitors” doesn’t yield much of anything. But beyond that, Pawlenty’s Google Test seems to have one very serious failing: you can find a lot of things on Google.

Here, for instance, is a very short list of goods and services that would also fail Pawlenty’s Google Test:

• the military
• police
• fire departments
• hospitals (if we’ve replaced the army with Xe, we probably don’t need the V.A.)
• schools
• prisons
• diplomats
• food inspectors

Some of these are serious points of contention—Republicans governors are making a huge push in the direction of private prisons, for instance, and the debate over private school vouchers isn’t going away any time soon. Some of them aren’t. The point is that “can you find it on Google?” is really a pretty useless question to ask when you’re evaluating the value of a government service.

The Pawlenty “Google test” is not a serious proposal and, until it becomes one, probably should not be treated as such. But the idea that mass amounts of government programs and services could and should be cut or eliminated is very real and is being pushed by both political parties. And the impacts on the broader economy are devastating.

Spending cuts in state and local governments have led to staggering layoffs and job losses among public workers. Government job cuts are set to hit a record level of 110,000 next month, a huge number that is dragging down a potential economic recovery. And with hundreds of thousands of teachers facing layoffs, the impact will certainly go beyond basic economic terms. It is the ideology like that behind Pawlenty’s “Google test” that has caused such vast destruction across the nation.

Another facet of Pawlenty’s economic blueprint is an $11.6 billion tax cut proposal that would give an unprecedented cut to the very wealthiest of Americans. An independent review of the plan found that the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers would receive an average tax cut of $1.4 million.

The top 0.1 percent of U.S. taxpayers would save an average of $1.4 million in taxes under the economic plan of Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, according to an independent analysis.

Pawlenty’s $11.6 trillion tax-cut plan, which reduces rates on income, capital gains, interest, estates and dividends, is almost three times larger than the proposals endorsed by House Republicans.

Compared with current tax policy, 63.6 percent of U.S. households would receive a tax cut, with most of the remainder experiencing no change. Almost half of the benefits would flow to taxpayers in the top 1 percent of income distribution, or those earning more than $593,011 in 2013.

“It’s heavily weighted toward benefits for the wealthy, giving big tax cuts for the wealthy, and it makes the tax system much less progressive,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center in Washington, which conducted the analysis and released it today.

Pawlenty’s blueprint and the other proposals that seek to curtail what conservative lawmakers bemoan as the “high” tax burden on the rich ignore two basic facts: Income inequality in America is at unprecedented levels and the tax rate of the super-rich is tumbling to minuscule levels.

In 2007, as the financial crisis was hitting the country and the economy was being to implode, income inequality was reaching levels not seen since the 1920′s and the Gilded Age that came before the Great Depression. The top 1 percent of households in America accounted for nearly 24 percent of the income earned in 2007.

And the tax rate on those booming incomes of the wealthiest Americans has been rapidly receding. The income tax rate on the very top earners, the richest of the rich, has sunk to 17 percent from 26 percent in 1992, all well below the “advertised” rate of 35 percent.