In Half-Still
Norquist, Grover G.
imminent inflation. But today, with some seventy percent of all dollars circulating overseas, the monetary Ms are nearly irrelevant. Even as the Ms expand at record pace, real...
...Federal and state regulations cost Americans an estimated 13 percent of GDE If every public school were as efficient as private school, we could spend 3 percent rather than 6 percent of GDP on kindergarten through high school...
...Economic conservatives, businessmen and investors understand that smaller government expands individual liberty, job creation and economic progress...
...Since then, House and Senate appropriators have voted for new spending initiatives totaling $251 billion~$70 billion for money-losing Amtrak alone...
...Did the government grow or shrink...
...Always...
...Annual sales of 16 million vehicles, therefore, means reduced Big Three revenue of $16 billion...
...Since the end of the Second World War, conservatives have had two pole stars: opposition to communism globally and to deficit spending at home...
...In the 1950s conservatives attacked it, even when their real agenda was to limit the size of government...
...Traditional-values conservatives understand that welfare displaces the family, high taxes force mothers into the workplace, and that, since secular liberalism has banned religion from the public square, it is important to believers of all faiths to shrink that square...
...And in 2025, when no one can remember how to spell bin Laden's name and the government is half its present size, we can then set a new goal...
...Osama bin Laden has only served to remind us and the world that we are an ascendant power and that our commitment to limited government, free trade, lower taxes and less regulation will defeat those who would exploit this war to enrich the state...
...And the massive spending binges of Bush's 1990 budget and Clinton's in 1993 were implausibly pronounced "deficit reduction measures" mthey just tacked on tax hikes, too...
...Republicans pointed out that the Democrats' objection to tax cuts over the past twenty years had been based on the deficit...
...Are there more government employees or fewer...
...R.onald Reagan's victory over the Soviet Union, ironically, removed this central organizing principle of the Right...
...Cleaving the global economy like a titanic force of nature are two imperious trends...
...Democrats said, "You Republicans said you opposed government-run health care because there were deficits...
...How about half again, by 2050...
...The time has come for President Bush to combine his leadership in the war against terror with leadership in the drive against depression...
...Those Americans who want a strong military understand that defense takes only three percent of GDP, while the government at all levels spends ten times that...
...Total government spending in 2000 was 29.78 percent of GDP...
...Even as the Ms expand at record pace, real liquidity~ signaled by plunging spot commodity prices~is not rising...
...But it will not derail the Bush administration or the conservative movement from this goal...
...Republicans wanted to spend less...
...The Big Three are going to post tremendous losses for the foreseeable future," writes analyst Michael Churchill of Polyconomics...
...Pity the poor voter who listened to both parties...
...So, now you have no objection, right...
...On principle...
...and total assets owned by the government--land, buildings, pension funds...
...William E Buckley, Jr...
...Does Osama bin Laden's handiwork mean Big Government is back...
...Republicans ran with the ball, and in 1999 challenged Democrats to join them in abolishing the death tax, the marriage penalty tax and others totaling $1.3 trillion over ten years...
...Automobile sticker prices are not falling, but ubiquitous zero percent financing has the same effect...
...The center-right movement is in a much stronger position today than twenty years ago...
...Both houses quickly passed a 342-page collection of new federal police powers, in the name of fighting terrorism.The Senate voted 100 to zero to nationalize the 28,000 underwear inspectors at airports...
...The 1994 GOP congressional sweep brought modest spending restraint and tax cuts, and killed the threat of nationalized health care...
...Big government crowds out even national defense...
...By the late 1990s that crystallized for conservatives into a new goal: reducing the total cost of government by half over twenty-five yeas---one full generation...
...But it nonetheless passes a key test, and the crucial one for holding political leaders accountable: it is measurable...
...Deficit spending has been the Right's other great touchstone...
...This led to a federal budget in balance by January 1998, forcing a change in the terms of the debate...
...Others pointed out that there would be setbacks, lost opportunities, bad dection years, wars and recessions...
...Now that the deficit was gone, surely the Democrats would join in cutting taxes, right...
...Bill Clinton's presidency exhausted the room for error and demagoguery...
...Democrats wanted to tax more...
...They dropped the noun "spending" and used their opposition to "deficits" as a weapon against tax relief and in favor of"revenue enhancements...
...In times of peace and prosperity, politicians can cavort with interns, pollsters and astrologers...
...one could judge a president's foreign policy by how many countries fell to the Red Army on his watch...
...Measuring economic policy by "deficits" was a disaster for conservatives...
...State and local pension systems have $3 trillion dollars in assets controlled by politicians.We can break those up into personal retirement accounts protected from Jesse Jackson's perennial efforts to "socially invest" them...
...There are four ways you can measure the size of government: total spending as a percentage of the economy...
...These were measurable efforts...
...they felt the case was stronger when linked to Americans' aversion to debt...
...Privatizing the post office would cut federal employment by almost 25 percent.The federal government owns and mismanages 645 million acres of land...
...said the goal of conservatives was to stand athwart history and yell,"Stop...
...In 2000, state and local governments spent $1.1 trillion or 11.57 percent of GDE Reforming social security to allow all Americans to invest their FICA taxes in personal savings accounts would move 22 percent of the federal budget, or 4 percent of GDP, from government spending into personal savings...
...But in crisis leaders must emerge to tell the truth about real perils and possibilities...
...Some argued that twentyfive years was too long a planning cycle...
...But we will also need to fight at every juncture to make sure that as much as possible of the battle to keep American homes and businesses secure remains in private hands.And conservatives will need to put as much focus and attention on reducing state and local spending over the next years as they did on the federal budget...
...We once again have a way to measure success...
...In 1980 there were many conservatives who truly believed that America was in decline--both as a world power and as a free and open economy...
...We oppose tax cuts whether there is deficit or surplus.We want the government to have more money...
...IN HALF--STILL NO CEASE-FIRE ON BIG GOVERNMENT BY GROVER G. NORQUIST T wo weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, a Wall Street .Journal front-page story announced: "Terror Attack 1Reverses a Two-Decade Drive to Shrink Government...
...We can now judge how a president, a governor or a mayor is doing over four or eight years...
...State and local spending ballooned...
...Originating in the private sector, one is overwhelmingly positive and redemptive: the ever accelerating advance of technology...
...The New York Times editorialized that the attacks had turned George W. Bush into a "moderate...
...This was progress...
...So now the Democrats were forced to explain, "We were lying...
...From the other side, liberals argued that deficit spending was in fact an unmitigated goodmJohn Maynard Keynes wrote a whole book on the subject...
...Big Three incentive packages, averaging $2,400 in October, are $1,000 more than a year ago...
...Federal spending in 2000 was 18 percent of GDP--down from 22 percent in 1993...
...Our goal is to reduce all those by half over the next quarter century...
...Their rhetoric told voters they were in agreement...
...Liberals are cheering polls that suggest i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i ii iiiiiii Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...The terrorist attack on the United States and the one-time costs of rebuilding New York City and the Pentagon will not reverse the secular trend of reducing the costs of the federal government...
...It can be accomplished with reforms already in place in various states and other 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 nations--look at formerly socialist Chile's private social security system...
...And Republicans had to respond, "Well, we were lying...
...That reform alone would get us 40 percent of the way to cutting the federal government in half...
...That's almost double the combined pre-tax earnings last year of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors," said Saul 1Kubin of UBS Warburg in Barron's...
...Which of the two conflicting trends in Washington wins will determine the outcome of the war against terrorism, the future of capitalism, and the survival of freedom...
...The auto industry provides an excellent illustration of why and how deflation trumps interest-rate cuts in terms of their impact on the economy...
...Albert Eisele, the publisher of The Hill, headlined his version, "The End of the Republican Revolution...
...We oppose new government programs and higher spending on principle...
...Whitaker Chambers believed when he left the Communist party to become an American patriot that he was joining the losing side of history...
...Does the government own more or fewer assets...
...Prior to Sept...
...Cutting the government in half in one generation is an ambitious, reasonable and measurable goal...
...total government employment...
...But its friends won't fail for lack of trying...
...But it faces a powerful force of negation and decline...
...Everyone coming clean about their real aims has helped bring today's broad center-right coalition together...
...11, White House budgets projected that federal spending would drop from 18 percent of GDP to 16 percent over the next decade...
...In the wake of the cold war, we have already cut defense spending by half, from six percent of GDP to three percent...
...The present war and recession will slow down the progress of cutting government in half...
...Likewise, a lame and lagging indicator is the consumer price index...
...the cost of regulation as a percentage of the economy...
...the public now has more trust in the federal government...
...The conservative consensus on shrinking governmentmnow facing this concerted counterattackmis a relatively new phenomenon...
...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2OO...
...But by the 1980s they discovered that they could block Reaganite calls for tax cuts by publicly opposing "deficits...
...To every man and nation comes a moment to decide whether to embrace reality and truth, however harsh and harrowing, or to indulge in evasions and alibis...
...It is now much more difficult to measure how an administration is managing national defense.We know now that there were major intelligence and foreign policy failures during the Clinton years, but it was hard to measure at the time...
Vol. 34 • November 2001 • No. 8
