How to avoid a budget disaster

GOP Must Be Anti-Big-Government Party

In the next few weeks Republicans may make the same tragic political error they made before the elections of .1998: passing obese spending bills to avoid a budget confrontation with the Clinton White House.

In 1998 this strategy of fiscal retreat led to a catastrophic tanking of GOP congressional candidates in the mid-term elections. The Republicans' expected pickup of 20-30 seats in the House melted away in the late months of October, and the GOP instead lost seats-and nearly handed the majority back to Dick Gephardt and the Democrats.

Why? The anti-big government agenda was abandoned, and conservative voters stayed home.

Already we are seeing the first worrisome signs of history repeating itself. House Republican leaders have begun to capitulate to the Clinton leftist agenda. The minimum wage will be raised for almost no meaningful concessions on the part of the Democrats. There is also talk of preemptive political surrender on a lousy and costly health care "bill of rights" agenda that will mostly benefit trial lawyers and will only add to the cost of medical care in the United States.

Expect beefy increases in the budgets for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Legal Services Corp., Goals 2000, and the Education Department. Even the IRS is slated for a big budget boost.

The House leadership now says it is worried about the adverse political ramifications of failing to enact a prescription drug benefit. George Bush has already outlined such a plan, and Sen. William Roth (R.-Del.) has put part of it in legislative form, so it seems very likely we'll soon get a new multibillion dollar entitlement as well.

What's going on here? There's certainly a strong case for closing down congressional business as quickly as possible this fall. A short session-ideally finished (for once) by the start of the new fiscal year, October 1-would give incumbent Republicans plenty of time to go back to their districts and campaign. It would also be the best policy to keep the economy on its sizzling course.

The Wiley Coyote Congress

But Republicans can't win this November if they seem to favor a slightly cheaper version of Ted Kennedy's agenda. Even that claim would be a stretch these days. When Ronald Reagan entered the White House complaining that "big government is the problem, not the solution," federal spending was at just over $500 billion. Now the budget is $1.8 trillion, and by 2002 it could reach the dubious milestone of $2 trillion. Almost one-half trillion dollars has been larded onto the budget since the Republican Contract-withAmerica days.

The Democrats, of course, have instigated most of this unhealthy government growth. But in recent years congressional Republicans have become prodigious spenders themselves.

Over the past three years Republicans have actually spent some $25 billion more on social programs than the White House originally requested. This year Congress may outspend the Clinton-Gore team yet again. In fact, a justreleased study by my colleague Steve Slivinski and me finds that the 106th Congress is on pace to hike social spending by more money in real terms than any Congress since the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter occupied the Oval Office.

Back in 1995 Republicans vowed to end the kinds of counterproductive social programs that have been rotting in the budget-in some cases for decades. Back then the future lifespan of the National Endowment for the Arts, education funding, the school lunch program, and TV shows like Sesame Street on public broadcasting seemed seriously in doubt. But not only have almost all of these programs been issued a new lease on life; most are prospering as never before. Since 1996 not a single federal program of any fiscal consequence has actually been eliminated. Not one.

The Education Department budget has soared by more than 35% since 1996. That's the biggest four-year increase in the department since Jimmy Carter created it as a favor to the teachers' unions. (For years the educrats in Washington boasted that they were "the only special interest group with their own cabinet department.") It will grow by another 5-10% this year. Not only that, Republicans now list funding of education programs beyond even Bill Clinton's requests as one of their "accomplishments."

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Bush says he wants to add still several billion more to the federal education budget. If the current trends continue of snatching funds away from national defense programs in order to pad the federal education budget, within about 15 years the Education Department budget will be bigger than the Pentagon's.

The federal government has become a cluttered closet full of obsolete agencies started in the New Deal and the Great Society but never tossed away. The voters need to be reminded of all the bureaucratically inept ways that Washington is spending their money.

One of the few GOP stars here is Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra, who publishes a monthly "Tale of Bureaucracy" with easily digestible horror stories of how Washington is mis-spending our tax dollars. Hoekstra's reports show that most federal agencies cannot pass a simply audit-a requirement for all private firms-and that dozens of agencies have tens of billions of tax dollars unaccounted for by the bureau heads.