Frum's piece was interesting, but he makes what I think of as one of the core errors that Republicans make: that Reagan reduced the size of government. What Reagan did was lower tax rates without making any of the choices that would have been necessary to actually reduce the size of government. That is why he ran up the deficit and the debt, had to raise taxes (whoops, I mean "user fees") after being reelected. It isn't a matter of "big government or small government," as Obama has said, it is a matter of "smart government." And, perhaps to be more precise, the government that most American citizens actually want. That is why making the cuts is so difficult, and why no one has done it, why the choices of where to cut is so difficult. And that is why Republicans tried to do it in their backdoor way of "starving the beast." Run up those deficits to force cuts, as David Stockman wrote in The Triumph of Politics. What they managed to overlook was the fact that they would damage the country in the process of doing this, and that the US economic supremacy might not be forever, as a result of both this and the fact that other countries might become wealthy as wealthy as we are.
This myth--that Reagan actually reduced the size of government as opposed to merely talking about it--is destructive, and needs to be put to rest. Until people like Frum--responsible conservatives--finally acknowledge it as myth, we will continue have same unproductive and polarized debates that go nowhere. |
