The Spending-Cut Spectator / Wish List
Frum, David
Wish List Republicans are happily interpreting the 1994 election as a mandate for smaller government. Splendid. Unfortunately, if past performance is any indicator, the new Republican majority will...
...Washington spent $1.461 trillion in the 1994 fiscal year—roughly the size of the entire economy of united Germany...
...And on and on...
...8. Rhetoric vs...
...3. Easy on the House cleaning...
...Crime, illegitimacy, illegal immigration, chronic idleness among the very poor, family breakdown, reverse discrimination: it's a grim roster...
...By taking more money from families, and doing more things for them, Big Government weakens and undercuts them...
...Yes, the balanced-budget amendment is sort of a dumb idea, because it can so easily be evaded by cunning congressional accounting...
...reform...
...The best conservative ideas would transform welfare into straightforward grants to states, letting the states experiment any way they wanted to...
...What on earth is Congress doing shoveling money out the door to Archer Daniels Midland...
...Above all: wise conservatives should recognize the growth of government as a values issue too...
...And, if they do, is it truly different in more than its technical details from the Democrats...
...These are some of the weakest claims in the entire budget...
...There's no avoiding the task of producing a real and detailed policy...
...If the Republicans fail to cut spending, they will be tempted to skimp on it, or even abandon it altogether, and do capital gains alone...
...That's why so many of its promises—six of the first eight items of business—address problems in the way Congress David Frum is the author of Dead Right (New Republic/Basic Books...
...Still, the Republicans should be able to go far toward smaller government over the next two years...
...Now that the Republicans hold the Congress, two potentially embarrassing questions arise: Do the Republicans in fact have a values agenda that goes beyond rhetoric...
...They would enact a new civil rights law requiring color-blindness by the federal government and corporations engaged in interstate commerce...
...2. Who goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing...
...Unfortunately, if past performance is any indicator, the new Republican majority will pronounce stirring speeches about the evils of Big Government—but shrink from enacting real cuts...
...Republicans want to shrink government...
...For years, Republicans have been pummeling Democrats on values issues...
...James Carville's 1992 motto needs to be adopted by the GOP...
...7. Don't chicken out of the middle-class tax cut...
...Why is President Clinton handing over nearly $150 million a year to General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler to build an electric car...
...82 The American Spectator February 1995...
...Republicans may be sick to death of the subject, but the brute fact remains: Medicaid is the fastest-growing program in the federal budget, metastasizing from just over $20 billion a decade ago to nearly $100 billion in 1994...
...Never mind...
...Fine, most of them are good ideas...
...But the point of congressional reform is to improve the handling of the people's business...
...by David Frum does its business...
...Like it or not, there is no controlling the federal budget without ending the growth in federal health-care spending...
...Do it anyway...
...Medicare follows close behind, up from $60 billion in 1985 to nearly $180 billion today...
...That's a big enough allowance for anyone...
...Here's a checklist: 1. Never more than in '94...
...It's not an end in itself...
...However, the conservative position on taxes has to be: taxes are too high for everyone...
...6. Don't forget health care...
...They would change the tax law so that married couples pay no more tax than unmarried couples do...
...Think of them as fiscal cellulite, hard little globules of fiscal fat inside the federal body: student loans, rural electrification grants, the Small Business Administration, transportation demonstration projects, women's health programs, minority business development...
...In 1994, the pummeling finally took its toll...
...4. Cut middle-class pork...
...Republicans ought to pledge that—while they intend to do much, much more—in no case will Washington spend more than that $1.461 trillion per year for however long the Republicans retain their congressional majority...
...What kinds of things would they be doing...
...At the very least, they should stop it from growing any fatter...
...David Stockman used to say that the test of Republican integrity was the courage to attack weak claims rather than weak claimants...
...The Contract With America promises three distinct tax cuts: a cut in the capital-gains tax, easier corporate depreciation, and a boost in the per-child exemption...
...They would change jurisdictional rules to free states from endless appeals to the federal courts in death penalty cases...
...It must never be: let the yokels pay...
...The latter is by far the most expensive...
...The worrisome truth about the Contract With America is that it was written by canny pollsters with an eye to attracting straying Perot voters back to the Republicans...
...Suppose, though, that the Republicans were serious about shrinking the government and lowering taxes...
...It's time to close down: grants to agribusiness, subsidies to industry and utilities in the name of energy conservation, the Department of Commerce's grants for economic development, federal underwriting of corporate advertising overseas, contributions to public-sector pseudo-banks like the World Bank, and hi-tech pork barrel like the president's Advanced Technology Program—a program that allows the Department of Commerce to play "let's pretend we're venture capitalists...
...The reasons for succumbing to this temptation are understandable enough: Taken together, the 1986 tax reform's attack on deductions and exemptions combined with the 1990 and '93 increases in the top marginal rate have imposed excessive burdens on society's most productive citizens...
...In other words, the most fundamental values issue of them all comes down to this one nervous question: Will a Republican Congress enact the spending cuts that two Republican presidents failed to achieve...
...5. Cut corporate pork, too...
...With their Medical IRAs, the Republicans have the beginningsof an answer—but only the beginning...
...With the Democrats ensconced in the White House, Republican power is of course limited...
Vol. 28 • February 1995 • No. 2
