The Campaign Spectator/Spending Time With Pat
Frum, David
Spending Time With Pat by David Frum Concord, New Hampshire We're all Big Government conservatives now. Pat Buchanan and President Bush may disagree about many things, but they do agree on one...
...Bush has described himself, after all, as "the environmental President," and 58 percent of the avalanche of new regulations—as many issued in three years as Ronald Reagan eliminated in David Frum is an assistant features editor at the Wall Street Journal...
...In the coming fiscal year, the United States government will spend more than $1.5 trillion, a sum as large as the entire gross domestic product of unified Germany...
...eight—have come from the Environmental Protection Agency...
...He promised universal health insurance...
...As he told the New York Times's Steven Holmes on February 15, "You can't go into those unemployment offices, see those guys about to lose their homes without saying, 'Well, we ought to go ahead with 12 more weeks of unemployment benefits.' " Holmes later sardonically observed, "In sports, going on the road makes you tough...
...t's true that in his standard stump speech, Buchanan promised a "freeze" in federal spending, federal hiring, and federal salaries...
...In politics, it seems to have exactly the opposite effect...
...But when it came time for specifics, both these conservative Republicans succumbed to political laryngitis...
...And when he did come to specifics, Bush exulted in how much his administration was spending, and how much more it was planning to spend...
...Here too, though, he didn't mention any specifics...
...Despite his abhorrence of "big government" in the abstract, and his fierce newspaper columns, Buchanan the candidate was willing to name only two specific programs he would eliminate: the National Endowment for the Arts (1993 budget, $176 million) and foreign aid (1993 budget, defined broadly, $13.5 billion...
...Buchanan proudly insisted that his principal difference with the President was his faith in small government...
...The President told the legislators that he had decided to issue no more federal regulations until March 20, and that he would use the intervening time to do away with federal regulations that "do more harm than good...
...Disgruntled New Hampshirites seeking to cast an anti–big government ballot did not find much of an alternative in Pat Buchanan...
...And he bragged that federal spending on research and development had hit unprecedented highs...
...He promised money for Head Start...
...He didn't have the nerve to name a single one...
...Pat Buchanan and President Bush may disagree about many things, but they do agree on one thing: it's impossible to cut the federal budget...
...The President told the New Hampshire state legislature on February 12 that "government is too big and costs too much...
...He also called for rolling back half the congressional pay raise, for a whopping savings of not quite $9.6 million...
...By that reasoning, federal highway and airport construction—both financed by trust funds that are now in surplus—would also be exempt from Buchanan's freeze...
...That's not what they say, of course...
...Congress's February 4 vote to extend unemployment benefits for an additional thirteen weeks, which followed a November vote to extend them for thirteen-to-twenty weeks more, cost $2.7 billion—about fifteen times as much as would be saved by scrapping (continued on page 81) The American Spectator April 1992 65...
...In his address to the New Hampshire legislature, as in his State of the Union message, the President claimed that he wanted to eliminate 246 separate federal programs...
...But when asked at a press conference shortly before the New Hampshire primary vote whether that freeze would apply to Social Security—nearly 30 percent of the budget, after interest payments and the cost of the savings and loan bailout—Buchanan flinched: No, he said, it would not...
...Buchanan hastily explained that since Social Security is financed by a separate tax, and since that tax now raises more revenue than is actually spent on Social Security payments, the program should be exempt from spending limits...
...Buchanan would exempt unemployment insurance from the freeze, too...
...From that vast ocean of money, fed by roaring rivers of unnecessary and destructive spending, greasy with floating blobs of waste, Buchanan is willingto blot up about $13.186 billion, or rather less than one percent...
...They applauded...
Vol. 25 • April 1992 • No. 4
