At least when Bill Clinton was president, we used to pretend that
the era of big government was over. Such an illusion is
impossible to maintain in the present political climate. It’s the
big spenders versus the bigger spenders.
First George W. Bush presided over the biggest binge in
discretionary spending and the largest new federal entitlement
since Lyndon Johnson. He proposed the first $2 trillion federal
budget in the nation’s history. Just five years later, Bush
followed up by unveiling the first $3 trillion budget.
Now Barack Obama wants to spend at least another $800 billion on
top of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout passed just months
ago. And of course the president wants the stimulus package
signed into law before his Treasury secretary
deigns to tell the taxpayers how he plans to spend the
remaining bailout money.
It gets worst: all that stands in the way of the Democrats
rubberstamping Obama’s new spending is the tiny Republican
minority — made up mostly of the same people who rubberstamped
Bush’s spending.
Republicans did what they could in the House, voting unanimously
against the stimulus bill. But there isn’t much a House minority
can do. In the Senate, however, the Republicans (just barely)
have the votes to delay or even stop legislation in its tracks.
If the stimulus measure were to run into another unified wall of
Republicans in the upper house, it would be in serious trouble.
Don’t count on it. A group of moderates from both parties —
Republicans Susan Collins and Arlen Specter, Democrats Ben Nelson
and Joe Lieberman — swooped in Gang of 14-style to salvage the
spending package. The Nelson-Collins deal excises some $100
billion in spending from the House version. This includes $3.5
billion intended for energy-efficient federal buildings, $75
million that would have gone for the Smithsonian, and $100
million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The biggest single item is the elimination of $40 billion in
state fiscal stabilization funds. Yet in typical Washington
fashion the final price tag is no smaller than the House version.
In fact, at $827 billion it presently costs about
$7 billion more.
Even so, House Democrats want to restore as much of their
original spending as possible. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
described the Nelson-Collins cuts as “very damaging” and said she
was “very much opposed to them.” Even as the moderate senators
are suggesting they may withhold support from whatever emerges
from conference if their deal unravels, the Congressional
Progressive Caucus is threatening to make trouble in the House if
they don’t get their spending on education or the states.
But cutting spending is not an option. An alternative Republican
stimulus bill that would cost a little more than half as much
exists, but has no chance of passing. The entire debate will
focus on the composition of the stimulus and how close to $1
trillion (before interest) the cost to the taxpayers gets. Not
whether government will get bigger, but exactly how big it is
going to get.
The rush toward another expansion of government continues even
though Washington doesn’t have the money. The budget deficit for
2009 is already approaching $1.2 trillion, almost triple last
year’s and the largest dollar amount in history. The political
class is unlikely to pause, even though the nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office has
estimated that the stimulus package will harm the economy
more in the long term than doing nothing. And what is being
undertaken now as a one-time emergency may well have enduring,
even permanent consequences.
When the country’s first $1 trillion deficit was projected, House
Minority Leader John Boehner urged his fellow lawmakers to
exercise caution. “The deficit estimate makes it clearer than
ever that we cannot borrow and spend our way back to prosperity
when we’re already running an annual deficit of more than one
trillion dollars,” he told reporters.
That won’t stop the federal government from trying.
