Tax-Cut and Spend Republicans
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Tax-Cut and Spend Republicans
By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, October 3, 2005; 8:42 AM
As Republicans celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Contract With America, where is the zeal for smaller government that was such a central aspect of the 1994 Republican Revolution?
In the five years he has been in office, President Bush and the GOP-led Congress have added $1.5 trillion and counting to the federal debt they inherited after Bill Clinton left office. Even many of today's conservative pundits and activists are questioning the party's priorities.
But does the president deserve all the blame?
With a large number of Republicans left over from the 1994 revolution, what happened to the zeal for reining in spending?
In a story that ran in The Washington Post in 2000 during the election, Dan Balz and I wrote that Bush was staking ground as a new kind of Republican, "a tax-cut and spend" politician.
Bush's approach has always been more about political strategy than governing philosophy. In other words, it's a way to win elections. After getting a scare in the 1998 midterms, in which Republicans failed to expand their majority, even amid the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, many Republicans bought into the Bush-Rove strategy for expanding the party's power.
In the 2000 election, Bush proposed cutting taxes; he also proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in new government spending without outlining a major spending cut. And he's largely kept that promise as president.
Cutting taxes is popular. But cutting programs to help balance those cuts is not. Combining the two -- tax cuts and spending increases -- is a prescription for victory and potentially political longevity, even it means running up huge deficits and exploding the federal debt. Why? Because most people could care less about the federal deficit -- a fact that many polls have confirmed over the years. Most people assume, hey, what's a little debt? I've got credit card bills up to my eyeballs -- at least the government can print money.
When Bush billed himself as a "new kind of Republican" in his first campaign for the presidency, he was implicitly shedding the label of the mean-spirited right-winger whose primary objective was to simultaneously cut taxes for the rich and slash services for the needy.
A new report from the conservative Heritage Foundation makes it clear just how much the GOP loves big government.
It has been so long since anyone has had a serious discussion about the Contract With America that it's easy to forget that the very first of its 10 planks was "The Fiscal Responsibility Act: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses."
The contract was packed full of ambitious agenda items. And to be fair, the GOP congressional majority that rode into town after the 1994 elections, and the Bush administration that came to power five years ago, have accomplished many of the goals, including increasing defense spending and slashing welfare rolls.
The Republicans have also delivered on cutting taxes. But the party not only has ignored the spending side of the equation, it has spent -- in the words of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) -- "like drunken sailors."
All of this raises a serious question: Is it conservative to cut taxes but not rein in spending? Does it fulfill the promise of 1994's Revolution Republicans to run up massive debts that will have to be paid off by future generations? Can a politician claim to be a fiscal conservative if he or she only pays attention to one side of the fiscal equation?
"Under President Bush, spending has leapt 33 percent in four years," said Brian Riedl, a federal budget analyst for the Heritage Foundation and co-author of its new report on federal spending and revenue. "On an annualized basis, spending has grown twice as fast under Bush as it did under Bill Clinton."
Almost reflexively, the president's supporters give him a pass. The growth in spending is all because of the 9/11 terror attacks, they say. But the Heritage Foundation says not so.
"Defense and 9/11 are not responsible for most of the spending increases," Riedl said. "Instead, we had the largest education bill in history, the largest farm bill in history, and in Medicare, the largest expansion of the great society ever. Furthermore, the number of pork projects has increased from 4,000 to 14,000 per year. That alone has been the cause for a lot of the increased spending."
Heritage put together a chart that shows the spending increases by category. Veterans benefits are up 51 percent; housing and commerce, up 86 percent; health research and regulation, up 61 percent; education, up 100 percent; farm subsidies, up 16 percent. And so on.
Riedl doesn't totally blame Bush. Congress is primarily responsible for budgeting, he argues. Every year, the president submits a budget, which Congress mostly ignores. The president's power is in his ability to veto. But Bush, unlike every president before him in modern history, has declined to use that power.
So Congress, which has been controlled by the GOP since 1994, bears a good portion of the blame. Heritage has a whole series of charts, some of which Talking Points will link to right here, that paint a damning picture of both parties in Washington: spending vs. tax revenue, spending by presidents, presidential vetoes, average deficit spending by president, discretionary spending per household by president.
Heritage slices and dices it in many ways that are too arcane to detail in this column, but suffice it to say, neither party has a patent on big spending.
Then again, Democrats never claimed not to.
"Republicans spend more than Democrats," said Richard Kogan, a 20-year Democratic House budget staffer, who now works for the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. "They also cut taxes more, leading to large deficits."
Kogan has analyzed and charted spending patterns going back to the Eisenhower administration and concluded that Bush "has the second highest rate of spending growth (after Ford), the fastest rate of revenue decline, and the fastest rate of deficit increase. That sounds highly irresponsible."
The Republican National Committee focused on deficit spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product.
"Total Government Spending As A Percentage Of GDP Fell From 21% In FY 1994 To 19.8% In FY 2004," the RNC said in its press release.
But most mainstream economists agree that long-term, structural deficits are bad for the economy, putting upward pressure on interest rates and stifling capital investment as the private sector competes increasingly with the government in the bond markets. And liberals worry that increasing the debt service tax payers pay will ultimately crowd out money for education and important social and environmental programs.
Bush, however, could be long gone -- after having accomplished much of his social agenda -- before anyone realizes the extent of the problem on the fiscal side.
Comments can be be sent to Terry Neal at comment...@washingtonpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/03/AR2005100300322.html
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Machinehead
words when they had a reall fiscal conservative as president
Here we go. It's allready started just as I predicted it would. The
first step is to say that the '94 guys are just as responsible for the
defecit as Bush is. Next they will start morphing the Republicans that
will be up for reelection come midterm. hehe
All I have to say is we'll have a democrat president to bash in a few
years and if the republicans don't do something soon they'll lose the
Senate with the midterm election.
_______________________________________________________________
Tax-Cut and Spend Republicans
By Terry M. Neal
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