Big Government by Stealth
STELZER, IRWIN M.
Big Government by Stealth With Cat-like Tread, Bill Clinton Is Bringing It Back By Irwin M. Stelzer Conservatives have a tendency to delude themselves. First they decided that the Republican...
...Gone are the days when massive new regulations could be imposed on business...
...Irrelevant he wasn't...
...he suckered the Republicans into shutting down the government and then whipped them soundly in 1996...
...One of the interesting things about this covert expansion of the state is the attitude of the business community—or, more precisely, a part of the business community...
...First they decided that the Republican victories in 1994 proved that Bill Clinton had become irrelevant...
...Never mind that these other advanced industrialized countries are suffering from double-digit and rising unemployment (France, Germany, Spain) or have economies on the verge of collapse (Japan...
...And he may be right...
...But the cost will be borne by the companies...
...Irwin M. Stelzer is director of regulatory policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute...
...True, corporations will have to raise prices or cut back on investment...
...It creates a new middle-class entitlement program—a tax credit to offset the cost of college tuition for middle-class kids—that is certain to grow at least as rapidly as have its predecessors...
...Indeed, "acquiesce" is perhaps too weak a word: Many large companies welcome these rules because they impose costly burdens on smaller, less well-heeled competitors...
...So corporations should give time off to new mothers and new fathers, to parents who want to visit their children's schools or take their pets to the vet...
...And why shouldn't it...
...But they are less eager to admit that that was then and this is now, that since securing his second term the president has rediscovered the virtues of activist government, new taxes, and a budget doomed to perpetual imbalance...
...For Clinton has learned two tricks with which they cannot seem to cope: corporate looting and regulation by stealth...
...It even relies on price controls to reduce health-care costs...
...Their compliance with the new "stakeholder" theory will have to be compulsory, through legislation that mandates the desired behavior...
...So there you have it...
...Of course, responsible companies will do all this voluntarily—and be rewarded with a photo-op with the president (a night in the Lincoln Bedroom costs slightly more...
...Besides, acceptance of the new rules gives a CEO an opportunity to be photographed with an approving president fulsome in his praise for the public-spirited and humane way in which the CEO is willing to spend his shareholders' money...
...Guess what his answer is...
...After all, the trio says, "[c]ompared to other advanced industrialized countries, the overall U.S...
...I haven't analyzed them carefully enough to know...
...For example, within a week of his reelection, Clinton ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to tighten regulations governing air quality—an action that will impose added costs estimated at $16 billion annually by industry spokesmen...
...It goes something like this: Businesses, particularly large corporations, have a responsibility not only to shareholders but to "stakeholders...
...The economy may be growing, the trio writes, but "overall growth does not . . . lead to improved economic well-being for typical families...
...No matter, say the conservatives...
...Among other things, the nation suffers from "greater income inequality and a tighter squeeze on the middle class...deteriorating wages...jobs have become less secure . . . only corporate profits and CEO pay are doing better than in the past...
...And they should provide their workers with health care that includes provisions for minimum hospital stays and wide coverage...
...Consider the wide press coverage that the Economic Policy Institute managed to get for The State of Working America, 1996-97, a tome by Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt...
...But what to do about those compa-nies—and there are always more than a few of them—that fail to see the light...
...Conservatives have delighted in pointing out that Clinton dressed in their clothing immediately before and during the 1996 campaign...
...Not so fast...
...He also directed the Corps of Engineers to tighten regulations concerning the use of so-called "wetlands" (often a damp bit of ground on which some migrating bird not spotted for years might some day decide to rest en route to a southern vacation after a pleasant autumn up north...
...When costs soar and regulations multiply, there will instead be bland, small-type inserts in the Federal Register, and obscure entries in an impenetrable budget document...
...But they do show that the age of balanced budgets and nonew-taxes need not also be the age of fewer government intrusions into business affairs...
...Dionne, Jr., "that conservatives, after a great run, are now the folks with the tired ideas, and liberals, of all people, the possessors of intellectual energy...
...But they remain shell-shocked by the Democratic attacks on them as the party willing to cast sick old people out into the snow, and they seem unwilling to risk a real showdown with the president lest they be accused of fomenting discord in newly bipartisan Washington...
...Not to be outdone, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has resumed its campaign to set ergonomic standards intended to reduce repetitive stress illnesses...
...OSHA is also proposing to order all-night convenience stores and restaurants to employ more than one clerk on the evening shift, apparently on the theory that criminals carry only single-shot weapons and will therefore refrain from nighttime robberies when faced by two clerks (who have probably been disarmed by Clinton's gun-control laws...
...But who will notice...
...If this could be dismissed as harmless outpourings by the usual suspects, conservatives could remain calm—indeed, even slightly smug...
...Many of them already provide the benefits the government wants to make universal, having conceded them in collective-bargaining agreements...
...Large corporations, run by cor-pocrats, are quite willing to acquiesce in these impositions, although at times only after emitting a squeal or two...
...Unfortunately for conservatives, even if they head the president off at the fiscal pass, they will lose the fight to make government smaller and less intrusive...
...If only America would emulate the redistributionist policies of its European and Asian allies, all would be well...
...A grim picture, and one crying out for an activist, redistributionist government to ride to the rescue...
...The second weapon in the hands of those politicians not entirely reconciled to shrinking government is regulation by stealth...
...Clinton's health-care bill, and many have learned how to use environmental regulations to their advantage...
...We may have lost the battle for the presidency, but we have won the war for the hearts and minds of America, reelecting a Republican House and an even more conservative Senate...
...This is one Clinton flip-flop that conservatives prefer to ignore, for to acknowledge it would be to admit that liberalism redux is abroad in the land...
...Is it possible," asks Washington Post columnist E.J...
...As Stephen Sondheim wrote of the arrival of heroes, there won't be trumpets...
...Such mandates are the only free lunches left to politicians...
...The cost of these regulations may or may not be justified by the benefits they will achieve...
...The Republicans, of course, may succeed in eliminating some of these throwbacks to the good old days of tax-and-spend...
...the trucking industry estimates that compliance would cost it $6.5 billion per year...
...No one denies that this will cost a lot of money...
...The day of big govern-ment—but big government by stealth—has returned...
...And a Republican Congress that proved itself unwilling to oppose an increase in the minimum wage is already showing signs that its members will submissively watch the president devour these lunches until they decide they might like a bite or two themselves...
...Workers and consumers, the argument continues, have a stake in the performance and conduct of the companies for which they work and from which they buy, and corporations have a responsibility to these stakeholders...
...But the EPI study is really an expanded version of the thinking of Robert Reich, the Clinton soulmate and former labor secretary who found the president such a demanding employer that continuing in his service would require neglecting the Reich family (family-leave bill or no...
...Thus, many of our big corporations supported Mrs...
...And, unless you think Al Gore's first act as president in 2001 will be to roll back increases in environmental spending and other such programs, it mandates budget deficits as far ahead as even a young conservative's eye can see...
...tax burden is light and has increased little in the last 30 years...
...Corporate looting is a variant on the corporate-responsibility theme so important to flat-broke liberal politicians...
...Break out the champagne at think tanks all over Washington...
...the programs require no new taxes and no increase in the budget deficit...
...More important, the notion that there are still plenty of things that need fixing in America, and that government should be the fixer, was almost immediately reflected in the president's post-election program...
...It increases spending on domestic programs...
...The president's budget includes almost as many tax increases as tax cuts...
...Besides, the president says that the age of big government is over and that the budget must be balanced by 2002...
...We are quite possibly witnessing a revival of liberal, activist government, rather than a consolidation of the conservative intellectual triumphs of the past 20 years...
...But the president has proved himself a master at sneaking new regulations through the legislative and rule-making processes with a minimum of fanfare...
Vol. 2 • March 1997 • No. 24
