Four Steps to a Smaller Washington
Four Steps to a Smaller Washington By Stephen Moore As congressional Republicans reload for a new round of budget battles with the White House, they might well take the advice that critics used to...
...Outlined below, therefore, is a four-step game plan for the 105th Congress...
...1Whenever and wherever the president offers specific proposals for domestic-spending reduction or tax cuts, Congress should instantly snatch them up...
...For the past four years, the Clinton administration's budget submissions have been flimsy...
...The total savings...
...There are some prominent Democrats who have tried to reduce aid to dependent corporations— Sen...
...Unfortunately for them and fortunately for the country, it didn't happen...
...For at least the past three decades, deficit finance has been the mother's milk of government's bloating...
...So, an end to this '20s-era program is a no-brainer: It saves taxpayers a bundle and goes to the jugular of the AFL-CIO...
...It cracked welfare reform...
...These dollars flow directly into the political war chest of Big Labor...
...John Chaffee and Carol Moseley-Braun to pick industrial winners and losers...
...And its 1996 budget produced the lowStephen Moore is director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute...
...But unfortunately, this progress may prove to be short-lived...
...It cornered Bill Clinton into committing to a balanced budget by 2002, thus (one hopes) limiting Democratic wish lists for new spending...
...But neither hubris nor recession may be present this time...
...Republicans need to announce to the public the cold fiscal reality: Unless the balanced-budget amendment is enacted, there probably will not be another balanced budget out of Washington in our lifetimes...
...When asked during the campaign to list federal programs that America might live without, the administration identified a grand total of three: the Tea Tasters' Board, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and a dairy farm owned by the Naval Academy...
...Which leaves some big game for the 105th Congress to start hunting...
...2The balanced-budget amendment must be preeminent in the political fight over the budget...
...This helps explain why the Democrats made huge gains in 1974 and 1958 and why the Republicans kicked the stuffing out of the Democrats in 1938...
...Nor is Bill Clinton waxing hubristic these days...
...For example, the rescue of the Commerce Department, the command-and-control center of the corporate welfare state, has become a Clintonite crusade...
...Twenty-million dollars—about what Medicare spends in a half-hour...
...Right now, their strategy is hopelessly timid and adrift...
...And even an Olympic-caliber contortionist like President Clinton would be hard-pressed to explain a veto of his own budget recommendations...
...The tombstones should have epitaphs that read, The Bad News About 1998 By Michael Barone Many Republicans are taking it for granted that they will make big gains in the congressional election in 1998...
...Which leads to the second step...
...And the Republicans keep whiffing...
...4Terminate a select group of vulnerable spending programs—particularly those that directly fund the Left...
...Go back and look at the reasons "out" parties have made big sixth-year gains...
...Who knows...
...The president's party, they like to say, usually loses big in elections in his sixth year...
...Indeed, the absence of a balanced-budget amendment permitted the Clinton administration to bully Republicans into adding nearly $15 billion of deficit spending in the waning days of the 104th Congress...
...So where do Republicans go from here...
...Why...
...Bipartisan agreement that government is too big and costs too much is a good thing...
...Speaker Newt Gingrich likes to quantify it: The party out of power, he says, has gained an average of 41 House seats in sixth-year elections...
...It's a good bet that, without a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, the present $107 billion deficit will be the low-water mark for at least the next decade...
...One reason: recession...
...It may very well be that Bill Clinton's moment of hubris came in 1993 and 1994, when he pushed...
...The in-party was shrewd enough to get the economy to soar during the fourth year, when the president had to run for reelection...
...Thus Richard Nixon, reelected in 1972, decided to fire his entire cabinet, to zero-out government programs after campaigning as an almost bipartisan centrist, and to keep covering up the Watergate burglary—and lost big in 1974...
...By singling out these as sacrosanct, he has tacitly acknowledged that everything else is in play...
...Be warned, however: This tactic promises only small, symbolic victories...
...But so far, they have not...
...Clinton's successful MMEE campaign mantra (Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment) has probably taken these four areas off the cutting board for the next two years...
...In the 104th Congress, when Kasich forced up-or-down votes on many corporate-welfare poster children—the Overseas Private Investment Council (run by Ruth Harkin, Sen...
...After a successful reelection, the president felt he could advance all those causes he really wanted to push all along but hadn't dared to because they were politically unpopular...
...The egregious Davis-Bacon Act, for example, requires union wages to be paid on federal construction projects and is estimated by the General Accounting Office to cost taxpayers $2 billion a year in inflated costs...
...His first postelection appointments—Erskine Bowles, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen—suggest a more centrist administration...
...Even with the slightly better numbers forthcoming from the Congressional Budget Office, the deficit is expected to gallop in the wrong direction for years to come, hurdling the $200 billion mark by 2001 and the $250 billion mark by 2005...
...The price of spending programs for business—inside the Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, and Labor departments—exceeds $70 billion a year, enough to halve the budget deficit and still have enough left over to "pay for" a cut in the capital-gains rate and the elimination of the inheritance tax...
...Fred Thompson says, "All that is lacking is the good political sense to capture the issue...
...The $107 billion deficit that resulted is nearly $100 billion less than Clintonomics would have wrought...
...Trying to balance the budget without the moral and legal weight of a constitutional amendment behind such an effort will forever be an act of futility...
...Clinton's veto of Medicare and Medicaid reforms explains much of this increase...
...Exposing the Clinton White House and congressional Democrats as hypocritical defenders of business handouts, and Republicans as adversaries of such handouts, would only be a PR bonanza for the GOP...
...The decision by Gingrich and other GOP leaders unilaterally to forge ahead with a detailed plan to balance the budget by 2002, despite the one-vote defeat of the balanced-budget amendment in the Senate, was an honorable one...
...The question now is, Easter of which year...
...For a half-century, Democrats proved expert at creating a plethora of agencies, boards, and bureaucracies...
...We can expect from Clinton's January budget what this administration always produces: a high, spiraling punt back to Congress...
...Thus Franklin Roosevelt, reelected in 1936, proposed to pack the Supreme Court and push the centralizing programs of his Third New Deal—and lost big in 1938...
...Or the Advanced Technology Program, which channels tech-no-pork to politically well-connected firms like General Electric, Texas Instruments, and Motorola...
...It is left-wing Democrats, not middle-of-the-road voters, who right now can legitimately claim to have been ignored by him...
...Imagine how differently the debate over the budget might have gone if, back in April 1995, Republicans had first targeted, not school lunches, but the Export-Import Bank, which provides cut-rate insurance to America's Fortune 500 companies...
...But Republicans should not be too quick to count their chickens...
...Another reason: hubris...
...For more than two years, this issue has been nicely teed up, just waiting to be whacked out of the park...
...Any political effort to achieve one—by deficit-hawks in either party—will fail...
...Yet it is a strange fact that the Left appreciates the implications of the amendment to a far greater extent than do many on the right...
...If Republicans don't have enough sense to stop aiding and abetting their mortal enemy, they deserve to have another $35 million times two spent against them by labor in 1998...
...So we first have to fix the rules of the game...
...The rope-a-dope strategy of letting Clinton go first on spending cuts, Medicare, and tax relief makes sense in the aftermath of the 20-month-long blitzkrieg of dem-agoguery from the White House and the union bosses...
...Or sugar subsidies to multi-mullion-dollar plantation owners...
...Tom Harkin's wife), the Export-Import Bank, the USDA Market Access Program—Republicans by a nearly two-to-one margin voted to pull the plug, while Democrats by the same margin voted not to...
...Much of the money is now used for class-action political advocacy—to fight welfare reform and tax reduction, to defend rent control and free public services for illegal aliens— rather than to represent poor people in small-claims court...
...A lot of Republicans thought that a recession would help their presidential nominee in 1996...
...Reducing the deficit and erasing those anti-growth taxes would do far more to benefit American industry and U.S...
...3Get business off the dole...
...Thus Lyndon Johnson, after his 1964 landslide, pushed through Great Society and anti-poverty programs, formulated by professors but with little support from either politicians or voters, fought the Vietnam war with no strategy for victory— and lost big in 1966...
...Shortly after the 1994 election, Newt Gingrich triumphantly declared that Republicans would "radically transform the way government works by Easter...
...Even though a flood of tax dollars is poured down the corporate-welfare rat hole each year, less than 15 percent has been cut since the Republicans assumed power in Congress...
...So, the day after Clinton releases his budget, the House and Senate should immediately approve all of his proposals to make government smaller or less costly, then send them back for the presidential signature...
...As Sen...
...The Institute for Policy Innovation recently discovered that Clinton is the first president in a quarter-century to propose higher spending than the level later approved by Congress...
...One of the critical reasons voters lost confidence in the Democrats is that even some fervent believers in the New Deal and the Great Society don't imagine that these programs should be afforded eternal life...
...Consider also the Legal Services Corporation, which gift-wraps $300 million in taxpayer dollars each year to left-wing legal-aid groups...
...global competitiveness than asking the likes of Sens...
...there may not...
...The Children's Defense Fund, the labor unions, the education establishment, and countless Keynesians moan that the balanced-budget amendment would mean the slow fiscal strangulation of domestic programs...
...But that's fine...
...To expect a stockpile of useful ideas in this year's Clinton budget is to believe that, just this one time, Lucy is going to hold down the football for Charlie Brown...
...There may be a recession in 1998...
...But it led to a political dead end, because it allowed the Democrats to block tax cuts and rail relentlessly against spending reductions without having to propose a serious agenda of their own...
...After that, Gingrich, majority leader Trent Lott, House budget chairman John Kasich, and the rest are going to be left with the heavy lifting...
...A balanced-budget amendment is imperative because, without it, the political system will retain its heavy bias in favor of borrowing over the will to cut programs...
...Big gains are possible, but they are not automatic—and Republicans might not gain at all...
...Admits Sen.-elect Sam Brownback of Kansas, "We need to prove that we're willing to gore the ox of taxpayer-funded Republican constituencies...
...And much of this support for subsidies was rallied from the White House, the chief defender of the corporate safety net...
...The revolutionary rhetoric of the early days of the 104th Congress far outdistanced that Congress's fiscal achievements...
...But then the economy tanked in years five and six, and voters switched...
...Apart from the House barber shop and the Consumer and Homemaker Education program, after two years of GOP control of Congress, there isn't much of consequence that the government was doing two years ago that it isn't still doing today...
...Russ Feingold, for one—but they are exceptions...
...They may well be right...
...Defunding big business would be political pay dirt for one other reason: Although there is no scarcity of corporate statists inside the GOP, it turns out that, on balance, liberal Democrats are the fiercest supporters of industrial pork...
...To be sure, the GOP did grind out some impressive work...
...Four Steps to a Smaller Washington By Stephen Moore As congressional Republicans reload for a new round of budget battles with the White House, they might well take the advice that critics used to give John F. Kennedy: less profile, more courage...
...A high-profile attack on these giveaways would have discredited the Left's caricature of conservatives...
...So, the 105th Congress needs to create a graveyard of obsolete federal programs...
...est rate of increase in federal spending in nearly a generation...
...The amendment is one of those rare issues around which smart politics and sound policy coincide...
Vol. 2 • January 1997 • No. 17
