Capitol Ideas / Back Back to the Future
Bethell, Tom
Back to the Future by Tom Bethell C an the endless encroachment of government into so many aspects of our lives be turned back? That is the question after the November 8 election. Liberals, who...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...That will have two effects, as I see it...
...And ex–college professors to boot...
...One feature of the GOP's Contract With America that makes me uneasy is the pledge to rescind defense cuts...
...It is this coalition-building that is likely to be undermined by a citizen-legislature...
...The Clinton administration will actually benefit, because the surge of transactions will strengthen the economy (although John Mueller of Lehrman Bell Mueller Cannon, Inc...
...For some reason, businessmen have a very hard time figuring these things out...
...It looked strong, but was on the verge of collapse...
...Knowing that democracy has its hazards, they have tried to impart an aura of inevitability and irreversibility to their hard-won political triumphs...
...The various subsidies, income transfers, and inflations of the postwar period have worked greatly to the advantage of Bob Dole's generation...
...The chart was compiled by the Hoover Institution's John Cogan, a former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget...
...Bob Dole, the ad pointed out, has served his country courageously, "but by his own admission his political views were shaped by Dwight Eisenhower...
...Liberals, who have dedicated their lives to maximizing the power and influence of Washington, have long told us that "the clock cannot be turned back...
...The (probable) difficulty of cutting spending may mean that the dynamic effects of tax cuts will become unattainable if the budget is put into a constitutional straitjacket...
...The trouble with the World War II generation is that it doesn't really understand that a cultural war is under way at all...
...Are we ever well rid of them...
...The balanced-budget amendment, which Gingrich seems so eager to put to the vote, may not be such a good idea...
...The lesson should be clear for the friends of liberty: beware of foreign entanglements...
...The younger generation, at the wrong end of the inter-generational Ponzi scheme called Social Security, facing real estate prices with inflation premiums already built in, and marginal tax rates in excess of 50 percent on income over $30,000 in states like California and New York, is far more eager for political change...
...tells me that the Fed's recent money tightening will probably push the economy into recession in 1996 and a capital gains cut won't be enough to revive it...
...How would term limits change voting...
...The threat was averted because Reagan wouldn't countenance the defense cuts that were part of the deal...
...The court does not like to oppose the popular will too conspicuously, and term limits are undeniably popular...
...So emerged the "military-industrial complex," and bipartisan big-spending coalitions...
...congressmen...
...A leading example is the former Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, Al Hunt...
...Twenty-two states have passed them, twenty-one by initiative...
...At a key moment in late 1987, real spending cuts wereabout to bite as a result of the Gramm-Rudman provision...
...In 1990, George Bush was told that "deficit reduction" (reneging on his no-new-taxes pledge) was the price he would have to pay for Democratic support for the Gulf War...
...After the election, Gingrich came in for fierce criticism...
...They understand that ideas are important, and they also grasp that they have enemies who are upto no good...
...At long last, the World War II generation is no longer in charge, on the House side at least...
...Like the proposal to reform welfare by making recipients work, it sounds good on the campaign trail and can be conveyed in a sound bite...
...increased by kinder, gentler Bush (taxes and spending went up, and a new "rights" bill permitted legal accusations of discrimination based on statistical disparities...
...But centralism at home went unchallenged, and was Tom Bethel...
...Contras and freedom fighters were funded, Grenada was invaded, and the Soviet empire did collapse...
...As a measure of the change, compare the new House leadership with the people Reagan had around him: Jimmy Baker, David Gergen, Michael Deaver, Howard Baker, Donald Regan, Kenneth Duberstein, Richard Wirthlin, George Bush...
...The case will put the court in a bind...
...A few days after the election, a full-page ad appeared in the Washington Times, paid for by a Mr...
...Military spending has admittedly declined sharply, from about 85 percent of federal outlays at the end of World War II, to 50 percent in 1959, to about 18 percent today...
...A balanced-budget amendment might well have the effect of locking in spending at existing levels, and liberals will waste no time in telling us that tax cuts will in the future be "unconstitutional...
...Possibly it will declare the initiative unconstitutional, but if so it will make plain to many uncomprehending voters that the court's guiding if unstated philosophy is the imposition of federal will on the states...
...Eighteen months ago, that seemed optimistic...
...Did I forget anyone...
...And he appears to be uncomfortable with success...
...The calculus of re-election will presumably yield to a more disinterested view of what's good for the country...
...They have been happy to retain political power, meanwhile spending a great deal of time on the golf course and traveling about in motor-homes...
...A nother development giving hope for real change is term limits...
...Led by the AARP, they would like to keep everything going the way it has been for a while longer yet...
...The pent-up demand for a cut in the current unjust, unlegislated expropriation of nominal gains is so great that large revenue increases are bound to result...
...Owen Jones, calling upon the Senate Republicans to elect a new majority leader "who really understands the concerns of Americans entering the next century," and "who is a leader in the culture war as well as a fighter for economic freedoms...
...So, thank goodness for Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, younger men...
...representatives who really believe that more socialism is good for America, for example, will haveless reason to fear the voters' wrath...
...That is a most important change, and let us hope that it endures...
...Our co-signatory, the Soviet Union, no longer exists, nuclear 16 The American Spectator January 1995 proliferation is a growing problem, and we have had a nationally televised demonstration in the Gulf War that missiles can shoot down missiles...
...Not much changed at home, although Reagan did challenge the Brezhnev Doctrine abroad...
...Only on closer examination do the defects emerge...
...I think it was Irving Kristol who said that, in Washington, academics do much better than businessmen...
...It was called the Cold War...
...Oh yes, Dick Darman...
...A look at the chart below, showing the percentage of national income captured by the federal government since the first Congress, suggests just how difficult that is going to be...
...As Cogan's chart makes clear, war and socialism are strongly correlated...
...I refer to the ABM treaty, signed in 1972 and still in force, wherein we forswore the use of missiles to defend against incoming missiles...
...term limits would insulate them from that wrath...
...I keep turning back to 1980: Reagan elected, GOP majority in the Senate...
...This is not exactly what the framers of the Constitution had in mind...
...No sooner were the election results in than he threatened Gingrich with an exposé of his private life if he didn't clean up his "slashing personal attacks on Democrats' ethics and behavior...
...If they propose to make welfare recipients work, Republicans will find that they have committed themselves to a government jobs-program...
...A country that agrees not to defend itself truly has a death wish...
...Someone who knew nothing else about the last forty-five years might conclude (with outlays remaining near World War I levels) that the country had been in a permanent war...
...At the same time, log-rolling on behalf of the military provided political leverage for domestic programs...
...Some journalists have made no attempt to disguise their dislike of him...
...But the big-spending coalitions we have now are more creatures of log-rolling than ideology...
...Can our own domestic Brezhnev Doctrine be undone...
...Bless him, he seems to be unafraid of his enemies...
...Liberals supported defense as long as their own pet programs were enacted...
...And we have been...
...A far more urgent requirement is that the U.S...
...For the last eight years this has been the Democrats' secret weapon in preventing what they dread most: tax cuts...
...This less than a year after Hunt's anointed successor as Washington bureau chief, Alan Murray, disparaged David Brock's exposé of Bill Clinton's extramarital antics as "two troopers who are trying to get a book deal...
...The liberals' bitter antagonism to term limits strongly suggests that their interests have been well served by career pols, and that they know it...
...Farm subsidies find support not because many congressmen think that socialism on the farm is a good idea, but because farm-state representatives agree to support other pet projects in exchange for support of theirs...
...The Supreme Court is pondering a legal challenge to an Arkansas initiative, approved by 60 percent in 1992, imposing term limits on U.S...
...171 18 The American Spectator January 1995...
...I remember Bill Kristol saying in the summer of 1993 that, although the left had successfully completed its long march through the major American institutions—the press, publishing, universities, state and federal governments—its real position resembled that of Brezhnev's Soviet Union...
...Secondly, and most important, we will finally be able to say goodbye to Washington's "static revenue" estimating, according to which transactions are unaffected by tax rates...
...Nonetheless, there are grounds for hope...
...Communism, too, had its Brezhnev Doctrine: Soviet territorial gains could not be reversed—until suddenly they were...
...abandon its absurd agreement not to defend itself with the latest technology...
...Since becoming a columnist, Hunt has not bothered to disguise his left-wing leanings...
...Perhaps that is enough for one presidency...
...The most urgent item on the agenda is to cut the capital gains tax and index it to inflation, as promised in the contract...
...Ideological voting is likely to increase...
...Until now, it had been as though the Duke of Wellington were still in charge in the age of Disraeli...
...Today it looks prophetic...
...Let's hope they don't resurface in a Dole administration...
...A nother promising development, post–November 8, is the long-delayed generational change in the Republican leadership...
...Once again, this just might give liberals the leverage they will need to preserve domestic programs intact...
Vol. 28 • January 1995 • No. 1
