The Party Of Fiscal Responsibility

In today's Washington Post, Paul Weinstein and Marc Dunkelman pick and choose evidence to try to paint Republicans as the party of big spending and Democrats as more responsible. Nice try. Here's a bit:

To Washington insiders, Republican commitment to fiscal discipline has been broken a thousand times. They laugh when they hear Republicans go to the House floor to excoriate Democrats as old tax-and-spend liberals. And they roll their eyes as so-called Republican budget hawks simultaneously call for an extension of the Bush tax cuts, a major factor contributing to endless budget deficits.

The entire column is an illustration of unusually partisan framing and selection of facts. The current situation has an extremely important context going back thirty year to Ronald Reagan. Reagan faced an America that believed itself to be in decline, that had lost its confidence and its nerve in the face of unchecked Soviet aggression and the constant drumbeat of domestic partisans--many of them later revealed as agents of the Soviet Union, and many not--claiming that the era of America was over and the era of socialism had begun. Reagan's plan was most likely the best available: militarily outspend a Soviet Union that he knew could never keep up. The military had languished during the Carter years, a victim of liberal neglect and post-Vietnam malaise. This military build-up required the assistance of a Congress controlled by a Democratic party turned away from its old hawkish ways and focused on increasing social spending; the resulting compromise, in which both sides would simply spend a lot more on what they wanted, made sense at the time and was certainly a bipartisan effort. That doesn't mean that Reagan was simply a big spender; some of his attempts to limit government spending on social programs are reviled by liberals to this day.

After the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, Republicans began to concentrate on decreasing spending again. No compromises needed this time; there was no need for a large military build-up anymore, with our major enemy out of the way. The 1994 Contract With America ushered in the first Republican house majority in decades, and a Senate majority as well. Its leader, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich--a former college professor--outlined plans, bitterly opposed by liberals, for term limits, tax reductions, and cuts in spending. A battle erupted; Democrats pulled out every demagogic attack in the book. Those who paid attention to politics in the Nineties might remember how Republicans were attacked for depriving poor children of hot school lunches. Gingrich did not back down, and decided to bring government to a standstill in an attempt to force Clinton to reduce spending. Clinton refused, and the public disapproved of the government shutdown enough for Clinton to prevail. The GOP then passed a line-item veto for spending bills, which was promptly struck down by the Supreme Court. Only welfare reform, a major platform of the 1994 Republican invasion, was successful--and Bill Clinton, after several vetoes, signed and took credit for it.

The general defeat of the Republicans in the spending battles of the Nineties--also hurried along by a booming economy that increased tax revenues without really increasing taxes--led many congressional Republicans to abandon the spending restraints that had originally been so popular. A battle simmered among Republicans, won largely by the bigger spenders with George W. Bush's ascendancy to the White House, with his "compassionate conservatism." Now, the nation had three fiscal camps: a Democratic Party that continued to advocate high taxation and high spending, a GOP wing dominated by social conservatives that wanted moderate spending and low taxation, and a GOP wing dominated by fiscal conservatives and often social moderates who wanted both low spending and low taxation. The battle between the two GOP wings continues to this day, as witnessed in the recent GOP congressional summits and their battles for relevant chairmanships between big earmarkers and fiscal hawks like Jeff Flake and John Campbell.

The truth is that the column above does not ever say how the Democratic Party is more fiscally responsible; the truth is that, although they may have reined in earmarks, they have repeatedly resisted efforts at illuminating the process and have refused to institute a GOP-proposed moratorium on earmarking. But the real issues, the real reasons why the federal budget will continue to balloon--Social Security and Medicare--will never be addressed and will likely only be expanded by Democrats, especially those who are currently running for president. Although an unfortunate number of GOP members have proved themselves totally irresponsible in those areas as well, there are simply no Democrats at all who have proposed meaningful reform in those two all-important areas. The Republican Party is still the nation's only hope for fiscal reform.

The War At Home: The Budget

No, not between Republicans and Democrats, really. Between taking responsibility and fixing a difficult problem or ignoring the problem until it balloons to disastrous proportions.

Several news and blog items have appeared in the last few days that indicate different sides of a serious problem that will likely only get worse. First, as Robert Samuelson points out:

The only way Bush could balance the budget would be by not following Bush's policies. The most telling figures in his budget involve his proposal to eliminate or dramatically reduce 151 programs, for savings of $18 billion. That's six-tenths of 1 percent of federal spending. What's telling, though, is that Congress will probably reject even many of these proposals.

Based on campaign policies, none of the major presidential candidates would do much better. Sen. John McCain, the Republican front-runner, and Democratic rivals Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are alike in not addressing the central budget issue: baby boomers' retirement costs. Already, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are 44 percent of federal spending. In 2007, these programs cost $1.2 trillion, more than double all defense spending.

Yikes. Captain's Quarters then links to a report by USA Today:

The cost of government benefits for seniors soared to a record $27,289 per senior in 2007, according to a USA TODAY analysis.

That's a 24% increase above the inflation rate since 2000. Medical costs are the biggest reason. Last year, for the first time, health care and nursing homes cost the government more than Social Security payments for seniors age 65 and older. The average Social Security benefit per senior in 2007 was $13,184.

Double yikes. Here's what Captain Ed had to say:

George Bush tried tackling the easiest and least expensive of the three major entitlement programs in 2005. Congress rebuffed him, ostensibly because he proposed private-sector solutions and reforms, but mostly because they wanted to avoid the political consequences of facing the coming disaster. Instead of going away, however, it now appears to be growing almost exponentially.

It will only get worse. In three years, the first of the 79 million baby-boomers will begin to retire at 65. The senior population will start increasing dramatically from that point forward, both in terms of percentage and in real numbers, and fewer workers will remain in the system to support their benefits.

In short, we're looking at a mild form of the problem Europe faces now, and it will get worse quickly.

And even better, Rasmussen Reports gives the results of a survey about the public's knowledge about the budget:

Given four choices as to the size of the federal budget presented by the President last week, 39% of American voters did not offer any answer, 36% guessed wrong, and just 24% knew the answer--$3.1 trillion dollars.

Nineteen percent (19%) said the budget presented totaled $301 trillion annually while 10% thought the proper answer was $301 billion. Seven percent (7%) thought it was only $3.1 billion.

Thirty-four percent (34%) of men knew the proper answer along with 15% of women. Voters under 30 and over 65 were less likely to know the proper answer than those between 30 and 64.

The good news is that when these hideous social programs blow up our budget and destroy our currency, there will still be a place to go where they already learned their lesson in this area. Europe.

The Change of Audacity. Err...The Hope of Change!...Erm....

Are all these words more than just cliches to sell a book? (Ahem.) Not according to former U.S. Representative J. C. Watts, one of the all-time greats. (We'll forgive him for having been a star football player at the Oklahoma "University".)

Until we have the political courage to take on mandatory spending reforms -- which not many presidents are going to be willing to do -- there will never be change.

President Bush took a stab at reforming Social Security and got stabbed right back by Republicans and Democrats alike. So we continue to waste good money in bad models of delivery.

The number one threat to our economy in the coming century is going to be the huge government entitlement programs that will spin out of control with far greater fury than military spending. Social Security transfers money from twenty- and thirty-year olds and delivers it to the single wealthiest group of Americans: the elderly. Medicare crowds out private insurance and drives up the cost of health care by artificially reducing demand. Don't even ask about the bureaucratic mess both of these programs entail, which also costs significant cash and will only get worse as more people retire. These programs, which Rep. Watts notes are on "auto-pilot" (because entitlements are mandatory, not discretionary, spending), are the real budget busters. We need someone who will stand up against that. And Rep. Watts says we aren't getting it.

Incidentally, Watts decries conservatives who reject McCain, and on the points he brings up, he's right. McCain has certainly been good on spending and life issues. However, the global warming hoax he embraces should be an automatic no-go for serious fiscal conservatives--and the same goes for Huck--since it threatens much more serious and lasting economic damage to the United States.

The Three Trillion Dollar Congress

Mister, we could use a man like Grover Cleveland again.

That good man severely criticized the 51st Congress, derided as the Billion-Dollar Congress, for its free-spending ways and rode a wave of anti-spending dissent to re-election to the White House in 1892, despite having been defeated by Republican Benjamin Harrison in the 1888 election. The government's obscene billion-dollar budget would be approximately 6.1% of the nominal $16.4 billion GDP in 1892; the budget (hat tip: Michelle Malkin) released by President Bush today is approximately 22% of our 2007 GDP.

And now that President Bush has kept his promise to be a "compassionate" (read: extravagant with your money) conservative and Congressional Republicans so skillfully entrenched themselves by allying with K Street, a whole generation of my own personal friends thinks that the Republicans are traditionally bigger spenders than Democrats. (Despite, of course, the fact the the Republican presidential candidates are all talking about cutting spending, while the Dems are all discussing ways of increasing it. Unfortunately, for the Republicans, "all talking" is right.) And most of these guys think that the biggest budgetary problem is national defense spending!

From the article MM links to:

The 6 percent overall increase in spending for 2009 reflects a continued surge in spending on the government's huge benefit programs for the elderly - Social Security and Medicare, even with the projected five-year savings of $196 billion over five years. Those savings are achieved by freezing payments to hospitals and other health care providers. A much-smaller effort by Bush in this area last year went nowhere in Congress.

No one wants to be the person who cut benefits; that's political suicide. But continually punting it to the next administration until it simply can't be solved without disastrously painful measures? That's national suicide.

How did Mr. Cleveland try to cut spending? He "vetoed hundreds of private pension bills for American Civil War veterans." We all have things we want to spend money on, and some of them seem noble. But that's not what government is for.

This November, Cleveland won't be on the ballot, nor anyone like him. Like Reagan, his party left him; but now, so has the other party.