luckydevil
November-8th-2007, 01:12 AM
Long good read.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110010829
A quarter century ago president Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural address: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. . . . It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people." In 1981, the year of that speech, the federal government spent $678 billion; in 2006, it spent $2,655 billion. Adjust that 292% increase for inflation, and the federal government is still spending 84% more than it did when Reagan became president--in a country whose population has grown by only 30%.
Reagan was elected president 25 years after the first issue of National Review declared its intention to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." This was an amazing ascent for a political movement that started out, in the words of NR's first editorial, "superfluous" and "out of place." In the 25 years since Reagan's election, however, conservatives determined to scale back the welfare state might as well have been standing a respectful distance behind history, whispering "Please slow down."
Republicans abandoned their promises to abolish the departments of Energy and Education. Efforts to zero out smaller and supposedly vulnerable agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts accomplished nothing. The only important victory here was the 1996 law abolishing Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a victory that may turn out to be hollow. The New Republic celebrated rather than lamented the 10th anniversary of AFDC's demise, arguing that because of the law, "welfare-bashing has lost its political resonance . . . [and] welfare reform has expanded the constituency for activist government. Democrats now have more political room to fight Republican austerity--and to propose, in its place, a stronger safety net."
Looking forward, government spending as a percentage of GDP is about to rise dramatically. The oldest baby boomers, born in 1946, will be eligible for Social Security's early retirement benefits in 2008 when they turn 62, and become Medicare beneficiaries when they turn 65 in 2011. These two programs, along with Medicaid, accounted for 41% of federal spending in 2006, even before the baby boom cohort had started collecting benefits. All three will increase relentlessly due to the longevity and sheer numbers of Americans born between 1946 and 1964. The columnist Bruce Bartlett estimates that the magnitude of this growth will be "on the order of 10% of the gross domestic product over the next generation even if no new government programs are enacted or current ones expanded." This is the Swedenization of America on autopilot.
There would be many more harsh judgments about how this or that faction betrayed the conservative campaign against Big Government. All such explanations, however, agree on one dubious premise: But for the weakness or hubris of some key player, the conservative project could have succeeded. That premise disregards the central fact--cutting back the welfare state is very, very difficult. Paul Pierson, a political scientist at Berkeley, showed in "Dismantling the Welfare State?" (1994) that Margaret Thatcher had no more success in curtailing Britain's social programs than our conservatives had in undoing ours. As prime minister for 11 years, Mrs. Thatcher had more leverage to change policy than President Reagan or Speaker Gingrich ever possessed. Mr. Pierson concludes, however, that her government "had only modest success" in cutting back individual welfare state programs, while her record in modifying the context of future struggles over the welfare state "was if anything less impressive."
Lacking an appreciation of the challenges they would face, conservatives never developed a political strategy adequate to the task. There was no systematic effort to pare back the welfare state, no disciplined preparation for the inevitable and aggressive counterattacks by interest groups and liberal journalists. Instead, conservatives time and again were shocked to discover that the people who built the welfare state were so unhelpful about dismantling it. Right-wingers fell into long periods of sullen, stupefied resentment, punctuated by frontal assaults that were brief, furious and futile. Think of David Stockman's crusade to cut spending in 1981; or the 1995 government shutdown, the Pickett's Charge of the Gingrich rebels.
At the other end of the spectrum, House Republicans kept their majority for eight years after Newt Gingrich resigned in 1998, but the revolutionaries who came to Washington in 1994 to do big things wound up staying around just to be big shots. After the 1995 government shutdown, the mission of the congressional Republican Party shrank steadily, and finally amounted to nothing more than clinging to its majority. In the end, the meagerness of that aspiration negated it. Voters connected the unprincipled personal behavior of thieves and frauds like Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley with the unprincipled political behavior of a congressional majority that spent millions on a bridge to nowhere and billions on a Medicare drug plan to the moon. After the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, declared in 2005 that there was really nothing left to cut in the federal budget, voters concluded, plausibly, that if we're going to have Big Government we might as well entrust it to politicians who don't pretend they oppose it.
Supply-side economics was, in political terms, an effort to break out of Mr. Ponnuru's dilemma, to secure a majority without sacrificing the mission. In 1963, Sen. Goldwater had voted against the Kennedy tax cuts, saying the dangers of inflation and deficits required "firm, principled decisions" about spending prior to any tax reductions. The "Reagan gambit," as Mr. Frum called supply-side economics, was an attempt to reverse the political equation. Liberalism had flourished by making government spending the independent variable and taxes the dependent one: Give the people a cluster of attractive and successful social welfare programs, the logic went, and voters will gladly pay the taxes required to support them. Supply-side conservatives tried to make taxes the independent variable and spending the dependent one: Give the people a cluster of appealing tax cuts and count on their attachment to them to set spending at the level defined by the resulting revenue stream. To the extent that lower taxes, along with smarter regulatory and monetary policies, strengthened the economy, they would also increase government revenues and make the attainment of revenue-defined spending levels that much easier.
The experience of a quarter century shows that tax cuts have served important purposes, but the cause of scaling back Big Government is not one of them. Fiscal policy-making is an ongoing political science experiment, testing the relative strength of the aversion to taxes, the appetite for government programs, and the feasibility of large-scale borrowing. The results are in, and they're not ambiguous: Under every set of circumstances, the levels of taxing and borrowing increase to accommodate government spending, to a far greater extent than government spending decreases in order to avoid excessive taxation or deficits.
More recently, Mr. Frum has argued that the GOP might settle for being the "party of less government," content with slowing down the liberal project of bringing Scandinavian-style social democracy to America. The more audacious goal, to be "the party of small government," will not succeed, he says, without an "affirmative small-government vision." As matters stand, however, the small-government vision needs work. Between 1981 and 2006, conservatives made the least of a good situation. If the more difficult years ahead are not going to be a debacle, conservatives need to wrestle with some important strategic questions.
A half century later, this question of whether conservatives can, cannot or must make their peace with the New Deal remains. Conservatives who feel the need to accept it, stress political realities. George Will wrote this year that "the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over." An argument can be over without being won or lost. Will implies that conservatives will never round up a majority against the welfare state, no matter how sturdy their syllogisms or compelling their evidence. The underlying calculation is that the persuasive argument conservatives can offer in favor of less government will never get a hearing until conservatives make it clear that this argument is not a stalking horse for small government--for revoking the New Deal.
According to this argument, the two goals proclaimed in Reagan's inaugural address define one mission, indivisible; conservatism will never "curb the size and influence of the federal establishment" without insisting, once again, on "the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people." The real question for conservatives, then, is not whether to reject the New Deal but which New Deal to reject--the one on the ground, the thick roster of activist government programs; or the one in the air, the rhetoric and ideas justifying the perpetual existence and expansion of those programs.
You can read the whole thing by clinking on the link
http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110010829
A quarter century ago president Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural address: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. . . . It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people." In 1981, the year of that speech, the federal government spent $678 billion; in 2006, it spent $2,655 billion. Adjust that 292% increase for inflation, and the federal government is still spending 84% more than it did when Reagan became president--in a country whose population has grown by only 30%.
Reagan was elected president 25 years after the first issue of National Review declared its intention to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." This was an amazing ascent for a political movement that started out, in the words of NR's first editorial, "superfluous" and "out of place." In the 25 years since Reagan's election, however, conservatives determined to scale back the welfare state might as well have been standing a respectful distance behind history, whispering "Please slow down."
Republicans abandoned their promises to abolish the departments of Energy and Education. Efforts to zero out smaller and supposedly vulnerable agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts accomplished nothing. The only important victory here was the 1996 law abolishing Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a victory that may turn out to be hollow. The New Republic celebrated rather than lamented the 10th anniversary of AFDC's demise, arguing that because of the law, "welfare-bashing has lost its political resonance . . . [and] welfare reform has expanded the constituency for activist government. Democrats now have more political room to fight Republican austerity--and to propose, in its place, a stronger safety net."
Looking forward, government spending as a percentage of GDP is about to rise dramatically. The oldest baby boomers, born in 1946, will be eligible for Social Security's early retirement benefits in 2008 when they turn 62, and become Medicare beneficiaries when they turn 65 in 2011. These two programs, along with Medicaid, accounted for 41% of federal spending in 2006, even before the baby boom cohort had started collecting benefits. All three will increase relentlessly due to the longevity and sheer numbers of Americans born between 1946 and 1964. The columnist Bruce Bartlett estimates that the magnitude of this growth will be "on the order of 10% of the gross domestic product over the next generation even if no new government programs are enacted or current ones expanded." This is the Swedenization of America on autopilot.
There would be many more harsh judgments about how this or that faction betrayed the conservative campaign against Big Government. All such explanations, however, agree on one dubious premise: But for the weakness or hubris of some key player, the conservative project could have succeeded. That premise disregards the central fact--cutting back the welfare state is very, very difficult. Paul Pierson, a political scientist at Berkeley, showed in "Dismantling the Welfare State?" (1994) that Margaret Thatcher had no more success in curtailing Britain's social programs than our conservatives had in undoing ours. As prime minister for 11 years, Mrs. Thatcher had more leverage to change policy than President Reagan or Speaker Gingrich ever possessed. Mr. Pierson concludes, however, that her government "had only modest success" in cutting back individual welfare state programs, while her record in modifying the context of future struggles over the welfare state "was if anything less impressive."
Lacking an appreciation of the challenges they would face, conservatives never developed a political strategy adequate to the task. There was no systematic effort to pare back the welfare state, no disciplined preparation for the inevitable and aggressive counterattacks by interest groups and liberal journalists. Instead, conservatives time and again were shocked to discover that the people who built the welfare state were so unhelpful about dismantling it. Right-wingers fell into long periods of sullen, stupefied resentment, punctuated by frontal assaults that were brief, furious and futile. Think of David Stockman's crusade to cut spending in 1981; or the 1995 government shutdown, the Pickett's Charge of the Gingrich rebels.
At the other end of the spectrum, House Republicans kept their majority for eight years after Newt Gingrich resigned in 1998, but the revolutionaries who came to Washington in 1994 to do big things wound up staying around just to be big shots. After the 1995 government shutdown, the mission of the congressional Republican Party shrank steadily, and finally amounted to nothing more than clinging to its majority. In the end, the meagerness of that aspiration negated it. Voters connected the unprincipled personal behavior of thieves and frauds like Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley with the unprincipled political behavior of a congressional majority that spent millions on a bridge to nowhere and billions on a Medicare drug plan to the moon. After the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, declared in 2005 that there was really nothing left to cut in the federal budget, voters concluded, plausibly, that if we're going to have Big Government we might as well entrust it to politicians who don't pretend they oppose it.
Supply-side economics was, in political terms, an effort to break out of Mr. Ponnuru's dilemma, to secure a majority without sacrificing the mission. In 1963, Sen. Goldwater had voted against the Kennedy tax cuts, saying the dangers of inflation and deficits required "firm, principled decisions" about spending prior to any tax reductions. The "Reagan gambit," as Mr. Frum called supply-side economics, was an attempt to reverse the political equation. Liberalism had flourished by making government spending the independent variable and taxes the dependent one: Give the people a cluster of attractive and successful social welfare programs, the logic went, and voters will gladly pay the taxes required to support them. Supply-side conservatives tried to make taxes the independent variable and spending the dependent one: Give the people a cluster of appealing tax cuts and count on their attachment to them to set spending at the level defined by the resulting revenue stream. To the extent that lower taxes, along with smarter regulatory and monetary policies, strengthened the economy, they would also increase government revenues and make the attainment of revenue-defined spending levels that much easier.
The experience of a quarter century shows that tax cuts have served important purposes, but the cause of scaling back Big Government is not one of them. Fiscal policy-making is an ongoing political science experiment, testing the relative strength of the aversion to taxes, the appetite for government programs, and the feasibility of large-scale borrowing. The results are in, and they're not ambiguous: Under every set of circumstances, the levels of taxing and borrowing increase to accommodate government spending, to a far greater extent than government spending decreases in order to avoid excessive taxation or deficits.
More recently, Mr. Frum has argued that the GOP might settle for being the "party of less government," content with slowing down the liberal project of bringing Scandinavian-style social democracy to America. The more audacious goal, to be "the party of small government," will not succeed, he says, without an "affirmative small-government vision." As matters stand, however, the small-government vision needs work. Between 1981 and 2006, conservatives made the least of a good situation. If the more difficult years ahead are not going to be a debacle, conservatives need to wrestle with some important strategic questions.
A half century later, this question of whether conservatives can, cannot or must make their peace with the New Deal remains. Conservatives who feel the need to accept it, stress political realities. George Will wrote this year that "the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over." An argument can be over without being won or lost. Will implies that conservatives will never round up a majority against the welfare state, no matter how sturdy their syllogisms or compelling their evidence. The underlying calculation is that the persuasive argument conservatives can offer in favor of less government will never get a hearing until conservatives make it clear that this argument is not a stalking horse for small government--for revoking the New Deal.
According to this argument, the two goals proclaimed in Reagan's inaugural address define one mission, indivisible; conservatism will never "curb the size and influence of the federal establishment" without insisting, once again, on "the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people." The real question for conservatives, then, is not whether to reject the New Deal but which New Deal to reject--the one on the ground, the thick roster of activist government programs; or the one in the air, the rhetoric and ideas justifying the perpetual existence and expansion of those programs.
You can read the whole thing by clinking on the link