Copyright 2000 The Washington Post
The Washington
Post
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July 16, 2000, Sunday, Final Edition
SECTION: OUTLOOK; Pg. B04
LENGTH: 1470 words
HEADLINE:
Hey, Big Spenders! Are You at the Right Party?
BYLINE:
Stephen Moore
BODY:
When he was
president, Ronald Reagan used to quip that comparing the spending habits of
Democrats to drunken sailors is an insult to drunken sailors. For at least a
generation now, Republicans have reflexively tarred and feathered the Democrats
in Washington as spendaholics. The GOP's two watershed elections of recent
times, 1980 and 1994, were won on successful attempts, first by Reagan, then by
conservative congressional Republicans and Newt Gingrich as House speaker, to
convince voters that the federal government had become too big and too
intrusive--and that the fiscally reckless Democrats were to blame.
It's
virtually certain that when the campaign season begins in earnest in a few
weeks, Republicans will again skewer Democrats as tax-and-spend, nanny-state
liberals. But this time, the strategy may fail--miserably. And it's not because
Democrats are suddenly turning into a gang of fiscal tightwads. Rather, the
problem is that Republicans have become prodigious spenders themselves.
Over the next five years, the Democrats would like to spend $ 10
trillion, if you consider projections included in President Clinton's final
budget, which is generally considered to be a glimpse of Al Gore's first budget.
Ten trillion dollars? That's more money in real terms than it cost to fight
World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War, the Korean War and the Civil War combined.
Congressional Republicans say that's entirely excessive: Their counter-demand is
to spend $ 9.95 trillion. Not much of a difference. Either way, big government
wins.
In a new Cato Institute study, Stephen Slivinski and I show that
the 106th Congress is on pace to be the biggest-spending Congress on civilian
social programs since the late 1970s. By year's end, federal social spending
since January 1998 will have soared by $ 33.4 billion--or 11.3 percent after
adjusting for inflation--compared with the 105th Congress. Rep. Tom Coburn, the
retiring Oklahoma Republican who is one of the last of the GOP's budget hawks,
frets: "We Republicans have lost control of the budget process."
There
is also a resurgence of big, beefy budgets at the state level, where Republicans
control 31 governorships. Since 1996, state spending has grown at almost twice
the rate of federal outlays. This is partly explained by the shift in
responsibility for programs such such as welfare, but other programs are
burgeoning in the states. New York Gov. George E. Pataki, who came to office as
the antidote to Mario Cuomo's tax-and-spend policies, now wants an 8 percent
increase in expenditures. In Arizona, Gov. Jane Hull has proposed higher sales
taxes to spend more on schools, and in Tennessee, the budget has grown by nearly
50 percent under Gov. Don Sundquist's tenure. He is now pushing that state's
first-ever income tax. All of these governors are Republicans.
For many
years after I started covering the federal budget process in the early 1980s,
all domestic policy initiatives were constrained by the moral crusade to
eliminate the budget deficit. Republicans typically frustrated the Democrats'
spending designs by reminding voters that with $ 200 billion of red ink, the
nation couldn't afford new social programs. But now that the deficit has become
a surplus, the Republicans have lost their stomach for Ali-Frazier-type epic
battles with Democrats over the budget. And so, the gold rush to spend money is
on--in both parties. Call it the curse of $ 200 billion tax surplus, but there
is no question that Republicans are in full-scale retreat from their rallying
cry to make government smaller and smarter.
For an old-school fiscal
conservative like myself, this story is thoroughly depressing.
Back in
1995, as an adviser to Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich, I helped the House
Republicans craft one of the most ambitious fiscal downsizing plans in decades.
The plan called for eliminating three Cabinet agencies and more than 200
programs. The House approved it. Most readers will recall the ensuing
knock-down, drag-out fights between Clinton and congressional Republicans over
the future of the National Endowment for the Arts, education funding, the school
lunch program, and funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Clinton,
his Democratic allies and special interest groups fought furiously against most
of these spending cuts. Ultimately, they prevailed.
What is surprising,
however, is not simply that most of the programs on the GOP hit list received a
new lease on life, but that they are now prospering as never before. To be sure,
in 1995, a few dozen federal programs were eliminated, such as the U.S. Travel
and Tourism Administration and the Cattle Tick Eradication Program.
But
since 1997, not a single federal program of fiscal consequence has been
eliminated. An absurd program, the wool and mohair subsidy enacted before World
War II to ensure an adequate supply of military uniforms, was mercifully
eliminated in 1995--only to be resuscitated in 1998.
Education
Department funding is symptomatic of the GOP's newfound generosity. Education's
budget has grown by more than 35 percent since 1996 and, according to Education
Week magazine, many education programs are faring a lot better under a
Republican Congress than they did when Democrats ruled Capitol Hill. Meanwhile,
on the campaign trail, presumed Republican presidential nominee Gov. George W.
Bush says he wants to add several billion dollars more to the education budget.
(Quick: Name three or four federal programs that Bush says he wants to get rid
of.)
The 65 largest programs slated for extinction by the House
Republicans' "Contract With America" budget in 1995 have actually grown since
then by 17 percent. What are we to deduce from this? That these
programs--including subsidies for peanuts and Amtrak, and tax dollars for
Pillsbury and Ralston Purina to advertise their products overseas--may very well
have attained a kind of fiscal immortality. They are the living dead of the
federal budget process.
If Republicans couldn't cancel these programs
during times of red ink, the chances of eliminating them when the budget coffers
are overflowing with tax dollars are slim. We have arrived at total fiscal
paralysis, with neither party able or willing to clean out the budget of even
its lowest-priority agencies. (One happy exception is the telephone
tax, first enacted to help finance the Spanish-American War of 1898,
which seems to be ready for repeal just 100 years later.) As Jonathan Rauch,
author of "Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government," notes, it's
hard to see why either New Democrat reformers or conservative budget hawks would
applaud this development. The federal budget has become a cluttered attic of
obsolete agencies started in the New Deal and the Great Society days. I'm now
more convinced than ever that this housecleaning is unlikely to occur unless
conservatives and liberals alike join forces in acknowledging that this agency
immortality is the essence of bad government.
Republicans are the
political losers if they surrender their claim as the anti-big-government party.
A Zogby poll in March found that two-thirds of Americans think the government
wastes at least 25 cents of every dollar it spends. And they are right. Despite
all the talk these days about voters wanting more federal spending for education
and Medicare, voters don't seem especially eager for a new Great Society
spending binge.
In 1998, just a few weeks before the election,
Republicans passed a $ 500 billion omnibus spending bill containing lots of pork
for everyone. Conservative voters were so disgusted, they turned away from the
polls, and the GOP's expected congressional gains melted away into losses.
Republicans--particularly Bush--are differentiating themselves well from
Democrats on strategic policy issues: tax cuts, private accounts for Social
Security and missile defense, just to name a few. But unless they begin to
rearticulate the case for a smaller and leaner federal government, Republicans'
early poll advantages may vanish just as they did in 1998.
The
Republicans don't have to try to make the case for getting rid of everything
wasteful in Washington at once, as they tried and failed to do in 1981 and 1995.
But they have to make the case for getting rid of something. And they need to
convince voters that they will be more responsible guardians of the budget
surplus than Gore and congressional Democrats.
But as things stand now,
that's not an easy case to make. The dirty little secret is that there are two
big government parties in Washington. In my book, that's at least one too many.
Stephen Moore is an adjunct fellow at the Cato Institute and
president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: July 16, 2000 
