Big Government Conservatism Is Here To Stay
Matthew Yglesias blog
Radley Balko writes that "There are really no excuses now for the big government debacle that was [Bush's] first term." It's extraordinarily foolish to look at this in terms of "excuses" as though shrinking the size of government were the true objective of Bush & co. and any departures from that agenda were temporary deviations from the true path. In good public choice theory fashion, the Republican Party has -- since capturing the levers of the state some time ago -- proceeded to direct public monies toward groups that, in turn, support the Republican Party. This means we can look forward to shrinkages in the size of the public sector workforce since those people (and their money) tend to support the Democratic Party. Instead, funds will be disbursed to corporations that will, in turn, kick back some of the money to the Republicans. This will likely mean some things that (at least some) libertarians and small government true believers support. Private accounts for Social Security will, among other things, generate surplus profits for financial managers who will, in turn, provide financial support to the GOP. This is not the only reason one might have for favoring private accounts, but it will be Bush's reason for supporting them. As with the Medicare bill, the priority will be given to maximizing the profitability of GOP-friendly corporations, not to reducing expenditure levels.
Health savings accounts have a similar dynamic to Social Security privatization. The energy bill, blocked in congress last time around, will be passed this time. Whether or not one wishes to regard this bill as a "small government" measure is largely a matter of interpretation. Unlike the farm bill, it will not subsidize corporations primarily through increased expenditures. Instead, increased expenditures on subsidies for resource-extraction companies will be called "tax credits" which amounts to the same thing, but looks different on an accounting ledger (we can thank Bill Clinton for popularizing this particular scam, which will soon come around to bite us in the ass). On the Medicare front, we can expect the quantity of public funds devoted to purchasing prescription drugs at uncontrolled prices to increase. School vouchers may happen -- again, not as a method of reducing federal education spending, but as a method of increasing the amount of money in the hands of increasingly partisan churches and religious groups.
The question is less whether Republicans will get religion on small government, than whether small government advocates will accept measures of this sort -- mild spending increases, business-friendly regulations, and massively decreased revenues -- as an adequate form of what they're looking for. And all this is to say nothing of the hikes in the Defense Department budget to which we can look forward. Hikes that will not, of course, include the costs of ongoing military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever. The tax code will grow more complicated, not simpler, because the complexity of the tax code is a major factor in creating public resentment of the tax system which, again, is key to gaining political support for lowering the top rates. It'll be a fun, fun, fun four years. |
