Big spenders
Dionne, E.J. Jr.
OF SEVERAL MINDS E.J. DIONNE Jr. BIG SPENDERS The new Republican philosophy President George W. Bush likes to talk about the need for "fiscal sanity in Washington." His decision to run up the...
...It doesn't stop there...
...It is a weird form of public financing of campaigns-confined to one party...
...As the Washington Post's Tom Edsall reported, the bill provides benefits to at least twenty-two executives and their spouses who have qualified in Bush's two top categories of fundraisers...
...Politicians who can't say ten words without praising free markets back big subsidies that will tilt the market toward their contributors...
...At least a fifth of the benefits of this year's tax package went to a mere four-tenths of 1 percent of taxpayers, those making over $500,000 a year...
...Another $6 billion in the bill for health savings accounts also helps Republican contributors...
...Assume all that spending is justified...
...At least fifteen lobbyists for interests helped by the bill (and their spouses) achieved similar Bush MVP fundraising status...
...Paul Gigot, the Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page editor, once called this approach "balanced-budget liberalism...
...A share of it is for big increases in defense spending...
...By recycling a small fraction of the cash back to Bush and his party in the form of campaign contributions, those friends are financing the construction of a mighty political machine...
...One-third of Americans got nothing, and half got less than $100 a year...
...And when it comes to the politics of payoff, the president and his allies are nothing short of brilliant...
...2003, Washington Post Writers Group...
...Building transit, roads, and schools, and helping the young and the poor to buy health insurance and to get a better education-these might justify deficits to finance investments for the next generation...
...The government's coffers can also be run down by redistribution to the wealthy and to favored interest groups...
...Disgorging public money to your friends makes political sense...
...The New Big Spenders are very different from the old ones...
...Few challenge their capitalist credentials...
...It still helps build a Republican majority...
...Now, many of the same supposed deficit hawks happily vote for budget-busting giveaways that benefit their party's ideological and business allies...
...The president's first tax cut distributed just enough to middle-class families to give cover for a plan that largely helped the best-off Americans...
...Fiscal conservatives might want to contain taxpayer outlays to the drug manufacturers...
...That is what liberals have usually done...
...Where is it going...
...Another $25 billion goes to rural hospitals...
...How long will it take us to understand that...
...The president doesn't care a whit about deficits...
...Yet it is possible to be generous toward social needs, and to pay as you go...
...It is also forgotten that redistribution to the poor is not the only way to shift money around...
...Then there is that amazing $31-billion energy bill, blocked so far by genuine fiscal conservatives such as Senator John McCain (R-Ariz...
...Sending us into a hole to buy an election and to help well-connected interest groups just doesn't seem worth it...
...He is a political conservative who is out to buy himself a majority in 2004 and is spending the next generation's money to do it...
...The Medicare drug bill seeks to expand Bush's reach to senior citizens...
...Drug company executives love it that the drug bill forbids Medicare to use its bargaining power to bring down the cost of drugs...
...Next came the tax cut on dividends, an even more naked transfer of cash to the wealthy...
...It is conservatives, not liberals, who twice over the last quarter-century have created extravagant deficits...
...Political conservatives prefer to protect their industry friends...
...Some Americans act mystified, as if conservatives are always more responsible with the people's money than liberals...
...That's because he is not a fiscal conservative...
...His decision to run up the national debt is entirely sane- as long as you understand his real purpose...
...Back in the Clinton days, self-styled "deficit hawks" decried efforts to pass universal health coverage on the grounds that doing so might deepen the deficit...
...Troubled urban hospitals don't get similar help, but urban areas didn't vote for Bush...
...And why not...
...The pharmaceutical companies are so generous to Republicans that they might start giving out free Viagra and Lipitor at fundraisers...
...Public spending per person is higher under Bush than it was under Bill Clinton...
...But many of its provisions help core Republican constituencies, including private health plans that get billions to compete with Medicare...
...The president and most Republicans had been fighting hard for the bill's extravagant subsidies to all sorts of special interests, beginning with the oil and gas industry...
...The people at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the like give the bulk of their campaign contributions to the Republicans...
Vol. 130 • December 2003 • No. 22
