Bush the Budget Buster
By James P. Pinkerton
Sunday, February 8, 2004; Page B-01
Conservatives and other limited-government types are furious at President George W. Bush for his big-spending ways. One group said the Republican-controlled government is dispensing cash like a "drunken sailor."
But in fact, there's nothing spontaneous or accidental about the spending spree. What we're seeing is the sober logic of a changing Republican Party, as well as a changing American psyche, post-9/11 -- from peacetime consumerism to wartime welfarism. Those seeking to measure suchchanges might dip into Bush's newly released Fiscal Year 2005 budget; its pages offer proof that the era of big government is back again.
Those who dislike the trend have been vocal in their opposition. On Jan. 15, six right-leaning groups -- including The Club for Growth, The National Taxpayers Union and Citizens Against Government Waste -- announced that they had made a "major break" with the Bush White House and the Republican-controlled Congress in response to budgeting that had driven discretionary spending up 27 percent in Bush's first three years in office. The Cato Institute calculates that Bush has presided over the largest increases in discretionary spending since President Lyndon B. Johnson's budgets of the late '60s.
That's no coincidence. The late '60s were another time of escalating wars overseas and escalating government on the home front. History shows that you can't have one without the other. As the American radical Randolph Bourne lamented during World War I, surveying a similar time of explosive government growth, "War is the health of the state." So while spending for defense and homeland security has soared, other programs have swelled, too. When Bush took office, the Education Department's budget was $35.7 billion; next fiscal year, if he has his way, it will total $64.3 billion -- an 80 percent increase. But the biggest-ticket item is the new prescription drug benefit for seniors. When the president signed the bill into law on Dec. 8, he projected its cost to be $400 billion over 10 years; now that projection has been upped to $540 billion.
While war is the ultimate big government program, just about everything else can be folded rhetorically into the "war effort" -- that is, wars on poverty, cancer, drug abuse and so on. In fact, that's what has happened in the last few years: All of Washington has gone to war. As Bush speechwriter-turned-memoirist David Frum observed of the post-9/11 presidency, "There was no more domestic agenda. The domestic agenda was the same as the foreign agenda: Win the war -- then we'll see."
In the fiscal pell-mell of wartime Washington, anything goes. The Bush administration proposes, for instance, to increase spending on the National Endowment for the Arts by 15 percent. Way back in the 1980s, Reagan targeted the NEA for "zeroing out"; yet it survived. Today, if a Republican-run federal government feels the need to increase spending on the NEA, then it's simply not serious about controlling spending at all.
No wonder the deficit is so huge. It's $521 billion this year, a number that even the deficits-don't-matter Bush people deem to be too high. So after three years of fiscal inebriation, they claim to have gone on the wagon; the '05 budget envisions domestic discretionary spending rising by only 0.5 percent, and it calls for the abolition of 65 federal programs, saving $4.9 billion.
But veteran budget watchers know this cynical game. Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, labels assumptions about controlling such discretionary spending as "illusory." Put simply, in an election year, Congress isn't likely to agree even to small cuts in transportation spending, let alone a whopping 8.9 percent cut in environment spending. If anything, pork-minded pols will provide more money for such popular programs.
So Bixby is skeptical that Bush can get on a declining deficit path, from $364 billion next fiscal year down to $237 billion by fiscal 2009. Instead, he projects that deficits will average $500 billion a year for the next decade -- and probably increase after that.
But of course, as libertarian icon Milton Friedman has always argued, the real issue isn't the size of the deficit, but rather the overall "bite" that the government takes out of the economy. So what to make of Bush's $2.399 trillion budget overall? That 13-digit total will represent a 20 percent chomp out of the gross domestic product -- up substantially from the 18.4 percent cut of the economy taken by President Bill Clinton's government in 2000.
Yet while many activists and ideologues are unhappy with Bush, the 43rd president sits serenely atop his party. Not only is he unchallenged for re-nomination, but he is also unquestioned by all but a few fringe elected officials. There's some grumbling among back benchers, but Republican leaders across the country are will still be lining up to praise Bush at the Republican National Coronation in New York City this summer.
So what explains this devotion?
The Republican Party has changed. In 1962, Barry Goldwater warned, "If you cherish your freedom, don't leave it all up to big government." Two years later, the GOP nominated him for president. And Gerald R. Ford famously said, "A government big enough to give you everything that you want is big enough to take it all away." That is, a rich, strong state has a way of both impoverishing and debilitating its citizens.
But this philosophical commitment to self-reliance and limited government has not survived into the era of "compassionate conservatism." Although Bush once pushed some interesting ideas about "faith-based" social work, those notions have been buried under a cascade of federal money, doled out without regard to anyone's morality.
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