ANDREW SULLIVAN
C'mon, Big Spender
Bush's Fiscal Betrayal
One of the reasons many of us supported George W. Bush for president in 2000 was his quiet but clear endorsement of the responsibility society. After the drift of the Clinton years, the new president seemed to be saying that he would not trivialize his responsibilities for personal pleasure or political expediency. And in many instances - especially the war on terror - he has more than lived up to those pledges.
But there is one glaring exception to this. It's such a basic presidential responsibility we sometimes overlook it; or we think of it as an economic or technical matter, rather than a profound moral one. But in three short years, this president has so ramped up government spending that he has turned a fiscal surplus into a huge and mounting debt. Far from taking responsibility for the nation's finances, the president has shirked basic house-keeping in order to foist crippling debt on the next generation. If a president is in some sense the father of an extended family, Bush is fast becoming a dead-beat dad, living it up for short-term gain, while abandoning his children to a life of insecurity and debt.
Not all borrowing is bad, of course. When recessions hit or wars break out, it makes sense for governments to borrow - as long as they pledge to run surpluses in better times. And a big chunk of the current deficit can be blamed on the recession that followed the burst bubble of the late 1990s and the vital expenditures for a war that shows no sign of abating. But what's remarkable about the Bush record is that this does not explain the full extent of our fiscal dilemma. Leave aside the tax cuts. What's really worrying to conservatives is the spending side of the equation. If you take defense and entitlement spending out of the picture altogether, Bush has upped domestic spending by a whopping 21 percent in three years. That compares with an actual decrease in such spending of 0.7 percent in the first three years of Bill Clinton.
Spending on education is up 61 percent; on energy 22 percent; on health and human services 22 percent; on the Labor Department a massive 56 percent. According to a new study by the Brookings Institution, the Bush administration has also ramped up the numbers of people working for the federal government to a 13-year high. While the president argues that his tax cuts remain permanent, he is still endorsing the biggest new federal entitlement since 1965, a prescription drug benefit for seniors. The official cost over ten years is $400 billion, but, given rocketing prices for drugs, it could well be far higher. At the same time, he has done nothing substantive to reform Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security to avert the looming burden of the baby-boomers' retirement years.
The only way to describe this philosophy is: "If it feels good, do it." Wasn't that the very notion that George W. Bush actually ran against? The president is not merely reversing over a decade of sane fiscal management, begun by his father and continued by the very odd couple of Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton. He is racking up the next generation's debt in a way even unmatched by his hero, Ronald Reagan. Reagan, after all, also oversaw tax cuts and a big increase in military spending during a recession; and he bequeathed huge deficits as a result. But at least Reagan restrained domestic spending at the same time. As a Cato Institute report shows, the Gipper's total domestic spending grew 6.8 percent in his first three years, compared to an increase of over 15 percent by Bush. And Reagan had a Democratic House to blame, while Bush has Congress entirely under his own party's control. In 1995, Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, declared, "By the year 2002, we can have a federal government with a balanced budget or we can continue down the present path towards total fiscal catastrophe." If Clintonomics was a "total fiscal catastrophe," what does that make Bush's record?
Worse, the president doesn't even seem to care. When you ask administration officials about the deficit, they tell you that it doesn't hurt the president politically. So what? Wasn't this president supposed to be about taking responsibility rather than checking polls? Or they say the Democrats would be worse. Maybe. A USA Today study found that GOP-controlled state legislatures increased spending an average of 6.54 percent a year from 1997 to 2002, compared with 6.17 percent for legislatures run by Democrats. And the biggest hikes in federal spending since LBJ have come in a Washington entirely controlled by Republicans.
One thing we know: the era of the end of big government is now over. Bush has ended it. The choice now is between Big Insolvent Government (under the Republicans) or Big Slightly Less Insolvent Government (under the Democrats). No wonder voters are restless. And no wonder fiscal conservatives who backed Bush in 2000 are beginning to feel not so much disappointed as betrayed.
September 5, 2003, Time.
copyright © 2003, 2003 Andrew Sullivan
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