(Promoted from the diaries by DavidNYC. Howard Dean says that you can't trust Republicans with your money. Curt, riffing off the New York Times, demonstrates in detail exactly how right Dean is.)
Sheryl Gay Stolberg writing in The New York Times today (2/13/2005) calls attention to "The Revolution That Wasn't". An examination of Republican failure to live up to the promises of their fiscally responsible pledges in the Contract With America, the article quotes Newt Gingrich among others. Reading the early paragraphs a reader might expect that the article is a takedown of Republicans now that they have become the entrenched party of big government. But the article also veers off course by trumpeting Republicans cynical contention that the only way to bring the budget into line is to slash Medicare and Medicaid and make large cuts to the one-half of the budget not spent on defense.
If the history of the Republican revolution were being written today, a single overarching question would have to be answered: Whatever happened to the promise of smaller government?
What indeed?
That question was asked again last week, when President Bush unveiled a $2.57 trillion budget for 2006, the largest in the nation's history. The cuts he called for, in areas like veterans' medical care, farm subsidies and vocational training, were met in Washington with doubts that they would ever get through the Republican Congress.
"Republicans have lost their way," lamented Newt Gingrich, the government-slashing firebrand of a decade ago.
Government has grown since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives. The NYT article describes their ascent to power and then their failure to do anything with it that would control the size of government.
In 1995, a band of 73 freshman Republicans swept into the House of Representatives, with Mr. Gingrich as their speaker. Flush with ideological zeal and determined to get government off the backs of the people, as Ronald Reagan would say, they pushed through a budget resolution that called for eliminating scores of programs and three federal departments.
Their fervor was so politically potent that in 1996, a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, declared, "The era of big government is over."
Yet government has only grown. The Cato Institute, a libertarian research institution, says overall federal spending has increased twice as fast under Mr. Bush as under Mr. Clinton. At the same time, the federal deficit is projected to hit a record high of $427 billion this year.
These trends seem likely to continue. The White House estimated last week that the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries, originally projected at $400 billion from 2004 to 2013, would, in fact, be $724 billion from 2006 to 2015. Republicans called for scaling back the benefit, but on Friday, Mr. Bush said no and vowed to veto any changes to the Medicare bill.
"The Revolution That Wasn't" continues and gives the Democrats a word with this nice quip from Marshall Wittman (aka BullMoose) of the DLC :
"The era of big government being over is over," declared Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist Democratic research organization. That would certainly seem to be borne out in the record of the Republican revolutionaries, known as the "Class of 1994" for the year they were elected. Of the 30 who are still in the House of Representatives, 28 sponsored bills in the last Congress that would have increased government spending overall, according to the National Taxpayers Union, an antitax group.
Apparently, it's not the fault of the party which has steadily increased their hold on the levers of government for the last decade that Clinton's balanced budget has now become Bush's bloated porkfest.
Some of the expansion in government was beyond their control. One big reason for the rise in spending is the growth of mandatory entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid. Another is the administration's "war on terror"; the government has added an entire new agency, the Department of Homeland Security, since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has spent many billions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Here's a list of budget items that are within the control of the Congress and of the President
- Medicare
- Medicaid
- War on Terror
- Department of Homeland Security
- Iraq
Beyond their control the article says. Poor Republicans, what could they have done?
Congress certainly could have passed more budget friendly versions of the above or they could have found alternatives to the above. The Republican President could have signed such (imaginary) fiscally responsible legislation from the Republican Congress. Instead, the Republican government has done nothing to solve the elephantine problem that is health care in this country. On the contrary, they saddled us with a decided non-solution to the problem that adds a trillion dollars to our debt. Their solution to fighting terrorism was another budget-busting non-solution, the Iraq War. Their behometh Dept of Homeland Security still hasn't managed to fix the gaping hole that is port security.
Republican government has spent trillions but accomplished little to solve the largest problems of our day.
That has caused the deficit to balloon under the Republicans. The article does a nice job of encapsulating the problem by putting it in terms common in home budgeting.
To most Americans, the federal budget, more than 2,000 pages of fine print, is hard to grasp; it isn't easy to summon a mental image of $2.57 trillion. One way to look at it is to consider how much the government spends per household. In the 1990's, the figure held steady at about $18,000, according to Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst for the Heritage Foundation. But last year, it exceeded $20,000, adjusted for inflation, the highest amount since World War II. But the government only takes in $17,000 for each household. "So right there," Mr. Reidl said, "we're borrowing $3,000 per household."
How did we arrive at this situation? I would surely like to have seen in the NYT article something along these lines:
This borrowing by the government has largely arisen due to a decrease in incoming revenue due to large tax cuts on the wealthy and an increase in spending on items such as the Iraq war and domestic pork.
That would have put things more in perspective. The Republicans do take a hit as having succumbed to a temptation to dole out pork to win reelection. But apparently they are just following in the footsteps of Democrats who pioneered the practice.
"Ever since the government shutdown was determined to be a political loser for Republicans," Mr. Riedl said, "they have been tentative to take on spending."
By 1998, they didn't have to. That was the year Mr. Clinton and Congress balanced the budget. Without a deficit to rail against, conservatives had little reason to call for spending cuts. And with the budget in surplus, they learned what the Democrats, who had ruled the House for 40 years without interruption, had long known: constituents reward lawmakers who bring federal money home.
"Too many people started to believe that the surest path to re-election is to spend money rather than cut government," says Representative Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican. "The material that comes from the Republican caucus is not to call for the elimination of this program or that, it's to brag that we have increased the budget for education by 144 percent."
Personally, I feel encumbents are reelected more because of gerrymandered districts than for any perceived skill at doling out pork but let's leave that aside. Apparently, the way to get a handle on the problem is to be courageous in cutting social programs. Never mind that one-half of spending is on the military, the real pork according to Gingrich and company is in medicare, medicaid, and the 1/6 of all spending that is neither military nor health care related.
Certainly Democrats agree that health care needs reform, but that reform needs to direct dollars more efficiently in a reformed system, not just hack dollars from an already poorly functioning system. That does nothing to solve the problem but causes more misery for already underinsured Americans. Democrats can do better than that.
This next bit is just laughable:
Still, Republicans say they sense a new budget-cutting fervor on Capitol Hill. Some conservatives whose arms were twisted by their leaders to vote in favor of the Medicare prescription drug bill are vowing, "Never again."
Last week, Representative Jim Nussle, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, warned that Mr. Bush should be prepared to use his veto power, something he has not done since he became president, to enforce spending limits.
There may be a fervor in some on the Hill to cut the budget, but to suggest that President Bush is a leader who will be vetoing Republican bills flies in the face of reality. President Bush has been the largest champion of breaking the budget and will surely sign anything the coordinated Republican machine sends his way.
The article concludes with a snide swipe at Democrats that is supported by nothing in the article whatsoever.
Mr. Flake, the Arizona Congressman, said the future of his party hinges on the revolution's revival. "If voters want bigger government," he warned, "then sooner or later they'll return to the genuine article, and that's the Democrats."
That's an interesting reversal of the reform wing of the Democratic Party's admonition not to try to win votes by being Republican Lite. Here we have a Republican warning Republicans not to act like Democrats lest voters realize that Democrats make better Democrats than Republicans do.
The article originally was on the front page of the NYT online addition but has now moved to the Washington section and is much less prominently featured there. Nevertheless, flaws aside, at least Republicans are coming in for some well-deserved criticism on their terrible fiscal leadership.