Respect the Limits that Made the USA
By Karl Zinsmeister

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.

 

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).

 

The evaporation of a Congressional majority in favor of budget austerity and limited government is linked to public opinion shifts. In 1990-’94 polls, 67 percent of Americans said the biggest threat to the U.S. in the future was big government; 69 percent said government creates more problems than it solves; 69 percent said the federal government controls too much of our daily lives; 79 percent stated that a smaller government would be more effective than a larger government.

 

That strong consensus has now broken up. In 2005 balloting, California voters rejected state spending caps, and voters in Colorado suspended (narrowly) a measure that limited growth of their state government for a decade. A poll taken this September, my colleague Karlyn Bowman warns, found that 57 percent of Americans now want public officials to take charge of rescuing household pets after natural disasters. A state charged with tracking down cats and hamsters (among many other desiderata) will never be slender.

 

Our slip-sliding toward a mommy state has taken place in incremental steps. Here’s one little indicator: Before 1993, no snowstorm had ever been declared a federal disaster by a U.S. President. Twelve inches of powder overnight in Syracuse? We’ve handled that sort of thing for generations without handwringing on CNN. Then, in the first four years of the Clinton White House, more than 40 winter storms were designated as official traumas—opening the spigots for FEMA payments from D.C. In 1996 alone, President Clinton declared a record 83 federal disasters and emergencies of all sorts.

 

So a path was gradually paved toward the indiscriminate trucking of federal money to the Gulf Coast, ordered by George Bush amidst a gush of post-Katrina pathos. To be fair, the President had been hammered day after day by some of the most unbalanced reporting since the rise of television—emotional and inaccurate (as we found out later) to the point of unhinged irrationality.

 

After the storm, Louisiana’s congressional delegation asked the feds, without blinking, for $250 billion in aid for their state alone. That is the equivalent of handing every single Louisianan $56,000; paying for it would require taking an extra $1,900 from every single American household. That amount of aid would be two and a half times what the U.S. spent to rebuild all of Europe after World War II (adjusted for inflation). And the requested federal money was above and beyond what private insurers, charities, and corporations were already pouring into the area.

 

For another illustration of how the sturdy independence of Americans has been traded for a place at the federal teat, take farm subsidies. The 1996 farm bill put U.S. agriculture on the road to more reliance on market mechanisms, international sales, private insurance, and innovation in production—an exciting departure from the destructive interference of production controls and checks in the mailbox that Uncle Sam had long used to manipulate our agricultural economy (and buy farm votes). Almost immediately, though, D.C. lobbyists went to work, and every single year from 1998 to 2001 Congress passed “emergency” ad hoc subsidies for ag producers. Then came the 2002 farm bill, which put the government massively back into the business of controlling farming.

 

To, again, give the Bushies their due, they did make one stab at shrinking farm subsidies before capitulating. Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman floated a reform plan, but Democrats and Republicans in Congress—determined to protect their role as kingmakers in the rural economy—screamed, and small government advocates beat a hasty retreat.

 

One big reason farm subsidies have been so difficult to kill is because there is a kind of international arms race in rural socialism, where the Europeans have repeatedly trumped us. In the U.S., 17 percent of agricultural revenue currently comes from the government—a glum indication of how manipulated our farm sector is. But in the European Union, fully twice as much farm income—34 percent—comes from the state.

 

Any President who wants to cut government finagling of the farm economy needs to press our trading partners to make corresponding trims. George Bush has made the right noises about reducing ag welfare—offering this fall to eliminate U.S. payments over 15 years if other nations will do the same. It remains to be seen whether he will press for reductions in next year’s farm bill.

 

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).

 

The re-ballooning of the federal waistline that commenced in 2000 (see graph on page 9) began just a couple of years after a few prominent conservatives, led by Bill Kristol and David Brooks, started arguing that the Right should stop being “unfriendly” to government. They called for using federal power and spending to further “national greatness.” Liberal commentator E. J. Dionne rejoiced that this indicated “the era of bashing government is ending”; he bubbled that “using government on behalf of ‘national greatness’ could get you right back to the New Deal.” He even asked Bill Kristol about this in a follow-up interview, to which Kristol replied: “Are we willing to say that the country is worse off because of FDR or JFK or LBJ? I’m not willing to say that.”

 

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.

 

Is there really so much to be lost in this? Need it be a problem if government in America comes to resemble the heavier, more intrusive style of rule that prevails, for instance, in Europe?

 

One thing’s for certain—it would be a momentous change. Ours has always been an extremely lightly ruled nation. At the turn of the twentieth century there were still only a total of 21,000 people working for the federal government in Washington, D.C. Even at the opening of George Bush’s Presidency, the U.S. federal apparatus remained smaller than counterparts in most other industrial nations by a third or more.

 

Our sharply limited government has been a central element of American distinctiveness and success. As one historical observer put it, the voice of Adam Smith “has been ringing in the world’s ears for years…but it is only in the United States that he is listened to, reverenced, and followed.”

 

And why would anyone discard the formula that has made America America?

 

 

Karl Zinsmeister is editor in chief of The American Enterprise.