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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (35144)	2/23/1999 9:34:00 AM
From: Les H	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

SHRINKING BUDGETS, AND A GROWING GOVERNMENT Chicago Tribune February 21, 1999 When it comes to the taxpayers' money, Bill Clinton is all things to all people. Unlike presidents who claimed to be stingy, he offers a budget plan that delivers tidy surpluses. Yet he also manages to hand out goodies faster than the Easter Bunny, proposing dozens of new programs for the next fiscal year. When confronted with the question of whether Clinton is a conservative or a liberal, the average voter may be inclined to answer, "Yes." Despite his unquenchable fondness for spending, federal outlays are a shrinking share of an expanding economy. Under Ronald Reagan, they rose as high as 23.6 percent of total economic output. Under Clinton--and a Republican Congress--they've fallen below 20 percent and are projected to drop to 18.5 percent by 2004, which would be the lowest level in more than 30 years. Does this mean the era of big government is really over? It doesn't look that way when you consider the federal tax load, which has been increasing briskly and will snare fully 21 percent of our national income this year. That, of course, is precisely why the budget is in surplus. For three decades, we got more federal programs than we paid for. Now, we're paying for all of them. But the method of financing doesn't affect the size and reach of the government, which from outward appearances is in retreat. In fact, that's an illusion. As fiscal constraints have pressed on policymakers over the last 20 years, they've had to find new ways of enlarging their control over the economy and our lives. Their key discovery was that they didn't have to write checks that quarrelsome taxpayers would have to cover. They could make someone else write the checks and leave taxpayers out of the whole deal. You want to help the disabled? Force businesses and municipalities to undertake costly changes to accommodate their needs. Would higher wages be nice? Pass a law making it illegal to hire someone for less than $5.15 an hour. Do more generous health insurance policies sound good? Compel employers to furnish them. Family leave? Proclaim it as a right, and let someone else foot the bill. "Unfunded mandates," it turned out, offered our elected officials all the fun of the Great Society without the onerous obligation of persuading taxpayers that it was worth what it cost them. For all taxpayers know or care, it costs them nothing. They should be so lucky. Every regulatory burden imposed on a business is one that its customers, employees or shareholders ultimately end up carrying on their backs. Prices rise, wages stagnate, or dividends evaporate--sometimes all three. Money does not fall out of the sky to supply the president's every wish. This "stealth" approach has been so enticing that it has become the chief method of legislating new favors from Washington. The result is that as the budget gets smaller, the amount of government in our lives gets bigger. How big? Thomas Hopkins, dean of the College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology, estimated that complying with federal regulations consumed $688 billion in 1997. That's nearly half as much as the entire federal budget and more than all individual income tax payments. Last year, the average family paid nearly $7,000 in invisible regulatory expense. Though the ultimate expense may be invisible, it's doubtless higher than it would be if the federal government were getting the bill. The incentive to save money that exists when lawmakers are dividing up their pitifully scarce allotment of dollars vanishes when they are playing with someone else's apparently limitless supply. In the 1980s, Washington excused itself from any number of spheres where it had done more harm than good--deregulating airlines, trucking, oil prices, broadcasting and banking. But since then, the itch to dictate has returned. Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, points out that the number of pages in the Federal Register, which lays out all actual and proposed new regulations, soared to 68,571 last year--the highest count since the Carter administration. Defenders of the regulatory state will reply that all these new rules have vast benefits. But a joint study by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution estimates that "more than half of the government's regulations would fail a strict cost-benefit test using the government's own numbers." In other words, we're getting Chevys at Mercedes prices. What counts to politicians, though, is not the economic and social value of a regulation but its political payoff, which only has to be bigger than zero to make the effort worthwhile. Bill Clinton is a master magician, with a knack for distracting his audience and escaping any trap. But it would be hard to think of a better trick than presiding over a funeral for big government while giving it a new lease on life.