 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
There is much to admire in President Bush’s new budget. The president’s $670 billion tax cut will propel economic growth and deprive the spenders in Washington of dollars they would otherwise squander. The proposal to turn more control of Medicaid over to the states is ingenious — and has the potential to spawn health-care reforms at the state level in a manner similar to the dramatically successful state-based welfare reform of the 1990s. The White House also deserves praise for calling for a substantial expansion of IRAs so that Americans can build privately owned pools of capital. This will increase the savings rate in America; will move us closer to a genuine flat tax that ends punitive tax treatment of saving and investment; and will make Americans more financially secure and less dependent on government programs in the future. But in this budget — just like the president’s first two budgets — there is way too much government spending. President Bush has requested a 4% hike in discretionary programs. Given the $200 billion to $300 billion in deficit spending expected this year, and given that we may soon be fighting a costly war in the Middle East, a 4% increase in domestic spending — including funding for the Legal Services Corp., the National Endowment for the Arts, bilingual education, and other such oinkers — is excessively generous in the extreme. Domestic discretionary spending should be at most frozen at current levels, at least until the budget is brought back into balance. If history is any guide, the 4% hike in spending is likely to be a floor, not a ceiling, on expenditures this year. In recent years, congressional appropriators have nearly doubled President Bush’s spending requests. Consequently, the discretionary budget has grown by nearly 15% in Bush’s first two years in office — more than it did in President Clinton’s first four years in office. In fact, Bush is on pace to be the biggest spender in the White House since LBJ. Obstructionism by the Democrats is not the only culprit here. In fact, discretionary spending has, after an initial decline, rapidly expanded since Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994. In their first three budgets (1996-98 fiscal years), the Republicans increased domestic spending by $183 billion, compared with a $155 billion increase in the three years prior to GOP control of Congress. Not a single cabinet agency has been eliminated. And only a small handful of the three hundred federal programs that were targeted for closure — a list that included the National Endowment for the Arts, the Legal Services Corp., bilingual-education funds, urban-transit grants, and Goals 2000 — has actually been terminated. President Bush should call for a Commission to Terminate Wasteful, Inefficient, and Unnecessary Federal Programs. Spending is also growing faster than the economy, as the chart below shows. We are now back to Uncle Sam pick-pocketing 20 cents of every dollar we earn. That does not include the money that states and cities take from our paychecks. President Bush must make the case that during times of war, spending on domestic programs must be curtailed until the crisis is over. Domestic spending has fallen in most wartime periods in American history, allowing the nation’s resources to be fully deployed to defeat foreign menaces. The war on terrorism is the top national priority for our government today. Fixing the economy is a close second. Both of those priorities are compromised when congressional appropriators waste scarce tax dollars on domestic pork and special-interest projects. Bush can reverse the spending spree that has stained his presidency and defend his spending priorities by starting to make aggressive use of the veto pen. Virtually every spending bill that Congress has sent to his desk over the past two years has deserved a veto stamp. Powerful presidents like Reagan and FDR used the veto to force their spending priorities on Congress. As Reagan used to say, “controlling government spending is like protecting your virtue; you just have to learn to say ‘no.’” — Stephen Moore is president of the Club for Growth. |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
hatever
happened to the GOP’s crusade against bloated government? President Bush’s
$2.25 trillion budget released this week is almost one-third larger than
the budget Bush inherited three years ago. Since the Republicans took
over Congress in 1995, the budget has grown by 50%. If the Republicans
are fighting a war against big spenders, the big spenders are winning.
