Fiscal Responsibility

Karl Zinsmeister, of The American Enterprise Online, takes a critical look at Republican fiscal responsibility.

As 2005 closes, and the next year’s federal budget season opens, fiscal conservatives are up in arms. Though he talks a good line about battling government bloat, our current President has shown an eerie lackawanna when it comes to actually keeping a lid on the federal Pandora’s box. Quite apart from Katrina or the war on terror, there has been a pattern of troublesome spending spikes right from the beginning of the Bush Administration: Dubya’s 2001 education bill (“No Child Left Behind”) was the most expensive in history. His 2002 farm bill was the highest priced ever. His 2003 Medicare law was our most costly entitlement expansion. George Bush has not vetoed a single spending bill during his Presidency.

There’s no sense in exaggerating how profligate the current Administration has been. In the latest fiscal year, federal spending totaled 20.1 percent of our national output. Compared to the recent low of 18.4 percent in 2000, that’s an ugly loss of ground over five years. It’s not, however, the Great Society all over again, as some hyperventilating commentators are now claiming. Every single year from 1975 to 1995, federal spending as a percentage of our economy was higher than in our latest budget, with the peak being a heart-clogging 23.5 percent in 1983.

While laying a fair share of responsibility for the government’s orgy of spending smack dab on top of the in box on the President’s desk, Zinsmeister doesn’t fail to hurl a flaming dart or two at the RINOs in Congress or their collegues on the other side of the aisle.

The talking heads who say a Republican President and Congress have proven no more thrifty than LBJ or Senator Kerry might be surprised how quickly the budget needle would jump today were true enthusiasts for government given the keys to the vehicle. The truth is, it’s senators like Olympia Snowe and congressmen like Sherwood Boehlert and Jim Leach working in parallel with Democrats who are feeding budget bloat much more than anyone in the White House. As I write, Snowe and the Democrats have unilaterally blocked extension of federal tax cuts, while a couple dozen GOP squishes in the House have joined with Nancy Pelosi to reject modest 2006 spending cuts (even demanding an extra billion dollars in home heating subsidies with one hand while torpedoing oil and gas production from ANWR and other parts of the U.S. with the other).

Perhaps the most pointed remark comes near the end of Zinsmeister’s piece.

So: While there are caveats qualifying his role in our recent federal weight gain, the undodgeable reality is that President Bush is the only person positioned to halt the gorge-out. Up to now it hasn’t been clear whether the growth of government on the Bush watch was a sin of omission—a failure to push back against the natural empire-building of congressmen and special interests—or whether Bush actually has a soft spot for big government (like most of official Washington).

How painful, but oh, how so very true.

And finally, Zinsmeister’s conclusion:

The lesson from all this, it seems to me, is that whenever conservatives become ambiguous about maintaining strict limits on government, self-aggrandizing forces in D.C. will cause the state to overflow its banks and intrude on many other sectors of life. The expansion of government as a portion of our economy is only one manifestation of this. The growth of state diktats will also be felt in obnoxious courts, intrusive regulators, and pressures on individual liberty—symptoms all on display in 2005 America, as Christopher DeMuth illustrates in his essay on page 18.

For those of us that considered ourselves conservative, long before we donned the “Republican” hat, this piece makes ‘tons O sense’. Please read the entire thing.