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national Democratic party wants to start a national debate over
the issue of who lost the budget surplus. The latest projections
from the Office of Management and Budget foresee a deficit in each
of the next 3 years. Democratic pollster Mark Penn told the Washington
Post that the budget deficit is "Bush's mess and he's going
to have to fix it."
But if there's any single culprit for the return to deficit spending
it is Mark Penn's boss, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Daschle's
pro-spending and anti-tax-cut crusade over the past year has contributed
mightily to the twin deficits that now befuddle Washington: the
budget deficit and the economic-growth deficit.
Daschle-nomics is a version of the European welfare state creed
of economic growth through government growth. At Daschle's pit-bull
insistence, this past fiscal year we have seen the most gigantic
inflation-adjusted increase in government spending since the days
when Jimmy Carter was president. President Bush requested a pro-taxpayer
budget at the start of the year. The White House suggested a 4 percent
increase in discretionary-spending increases to roughly $660 billion.
Instead the final tally is closer to $706 billion. It was Daschle
and his Democratic-committee chairmen who took the lead role in
larding the appropriation bills with fat slabs of bacon (though
Republicans could hardly be heard howling in protest). Yes, it's
certainly true that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives
also participated in the spending spree. But in almost every instance
it was Daschle and the Senate that shoveled on billions of dollars
of extraneous spending.
Thanks primarily to Daschle, this year's discretionary spending
will not rise by the 4 percent that Bush sought, but 8 percent,
according to the latest analysis by Congressional Quarterly. (I
have excluded the 3 percent spending hike that was a result of 9/11
emergency spending.) This additional federal spending cost taxpayers
about $25 billion in 2001 and will cost another $30 billion in 2002.
Even that avalanche of funding was insufficient for the South Dakota
majority leader. The Daschle economic-stimulus proposal would have
forced taxpayers to play Santa Claus to every conceivable interest
group in Washington. There was $9 billion for Amtrak, millions for
Indian reservations, and hundreds of millions for Montana Bison
ranchers, California cranberry growers, and other aggrieved farmers.
The Senate Democratic bill would have added another $40 to $50 billion
on to the bloated appropriations bills the Senate had already passed.
Wisely, Bush squashed the deal with Daschle, or else the budget
deficit in 2001 and 2002 would have been tens of billions of dollars
larger.
Daschle's most
insidious impact has not so much been to accelerate government growth
as to derail economic growth policies that could get Americans back
to work, return companies to profitability, and raise federal revenues
to return to balanced budgets. Daschle lead the Democratic opposition
to the Bush tax-relief plan back in May and though he didn't succeed
in preventing a tax-cut plan from passing, he did help neuter the
bill by delaying most of the rate cuts into 2005 and beyond. Now
he wants that tax plan repealed even before any of the growth-stimulus
measures have been permitted to take hold. He savagely attacked
a plan by GOP Senators Wayne Allard and Judd Gregg to cut the capital-gains
tax. He opposed the death-tax-repeal plan and was instrumental in
making sure that the inheritance tax will be reinstated in 2011.
He slams business tax relief as "corporate give-aways"
in one breath and in the next, he sanctimoniously decries savage
corporate layoffs. One moment Mr. Daschle is on the Senate floor
pleading for the most expensive farm bill in U.S. history, the next
he screams that George W. Bush is squandering the budget surplus.
He is endowed with a Clintonesque talent for refusing to allow the
observable truth ruin a good story.
It gets worse. There was no economic-stimulus bill in the last days
of 2001 because Daschle rejected any tax-reduction measure that
would have actually created jobs and wealth. There was no energy
plan to allow the U.S. to drill in Alaska and to become more energy
self-sufficient because Daschle refused to bring the president's
plan up for a vote. Of course, the biggest beneficiaries of Daschle's
gridlocking maneuvers are the oil ministers of the Middle East.
We might as well be writing checks directly to the agents of terrorism.
Mr. Daschle either doesn't understand or doesn't much care that
it is precisely the curse of slow economic growth that is the single
largest factor behind the disappearing surplus. At least $100 billion
of the squandered surplus from 2001 was a result of the economy
downshifting from 3.5 percent growth to 1 percent growth. Without
a return to the high growth path of the late 1990s, there will be
no return to surpluses — at least not anytime in our lifetimes.
Daschle always speaks soothingly in TV interviews of the need for
bipartisanship in Washington. But his actions belie a ferociously
partisan agenda that is single-mindedly meant to destroy George
W. Bush. If the cost of bringing down the president is to torpedo
the U.S. economy and to keep workers unemployed, that is a price
the nation's leading Democrat is evidently willing to pay.
There is, alas, some truth in the Democratic charge that Republican
policies have caused the surplus to vanish into thin air. But tax
cuts are not the explanation for budget deterioration. Congressional
Republicans have been converted into minor league big spenders over
the past several years, with each passing year since the Gingrich
revolution began bringing about more obese domestic-spending budgets
and more failing fiscal grades on the National Taxpayer Union budget
report card.
But Washington's unrivaled big-league spender these days is Mr.
Daschle. George W. Bush's guardian of the federal Treasury, Mitch
Daniels has announced that "we are unlikely to return to a
balanced budget before fiscal 2005." The truth is that we are
unlikely to rebalance the budget until the day Tom Daschle leaves
the Senate and Washington for good.
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