[Mb-civic] Big government deja vu - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Big government deja vu

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist  |  September 28, 2005

IT IS 1965. You have just acquired a time machine. Eager to try it out, 
you set the controls to take you 40 years into the future. As the 
machine whirs its way through the fourth dimension, you find yourself 
thinking (of all things!) about politics.

In the America receding behind you, the president is Lyndon Johnson. The 
landslide winner of last year's election, he is forging ahead with his 
''War on Poverty" and ''Great Society," spending billions of taxpayer 
dollars and creating vast new entitlement programs. His fellow Democrats 
control Congress and easily brush aside GOP complaints about creeping 
socialism and reckless federal spending.

The contrast between LBJ and Barry Goldwater, the Republican he defeated 
in November, could hardly be greater. A fiscal conservative, Goldwater 
had called for sharply reducing the federal government. He and his 
supporters wanted to end farm subsidies, privatize the Tennessee Valley 
Authority, and balance the federal budget. ''Our government continues to 
spend $17 million a day more than the government takes in," a Goldwater 
surrogate, former actor Ronald Reagan, had said in a fiery endorsement 
speech. ''We haven't balanced our budget in 28 out of the last 34 years."

The time machine slows to a halt. You climb out and set off to explore 
2005. Many things have changed, you discover. The Cold War is over. 
Televisions broadcast in color. Motorists pump their own gas. The 
secretary of state is black -- and a woman!

But one thing that seems familiar is budgetary politics. One political 
party is still running the show in Washington and still spending as 
mindlessly as ever. The budget is now hundreds of billions of dollars in 
the red, and the national debt has soared to more than $7 trillion -- 
well over $1.5 trillion of it added during the current presidential 
administration. The incumbent in the White House, a Texan named Bush, 
burns through money even more extravagantly than the Texan named Johnson 
you left behind in 1964. ''Excluding military and homeland security," 
the American Conservative Union notes in a statement, ''American 
taxpayers have witnessed the largest spending increase under any 
preceding president and Congress since the Great Depression."

In the wake of two hurricanes in the South, Bush and Congress plan to 
spend as much as $200 billion for relief and reconstruction. When Bush 
is asked at a press conference, ''Who is going to have to pay for this 
recovery? And what's it going to do to the national debt?" he answers 
blithely: ''It's going to cost whatever it costs."

Fiscal conservatives are distressed by such irresponsibility. But when 
they propose to balance the whopping hurricane spending by cutting 
unnecessary outlays elsewhere, they are promptly slapped down. ''My 
answer to those that want to offset the spending is: Sure, bring me the 
offsets, I'll be glad to do it," says the House majority leader, 
Representative Tom DeLay. ''But nobody has been able to come up with any 
yet." Asked if that means that the federal budget has been trimmed of 
all fat, DeLay answers yes. ''We've pared it down pretty good."

The conservatives are aghast. ''Pared it down pretty good"? What about 
that bloated hog of a highway bill, they ask -- the one with more than 
6,300 porkbarrel ''earmarks" adding up to $24 billion? Couldn't some of 
those be repealed? Or the new Medicare drug benefit, the one projected 
to cost $1.2 trillion over the next decade? How about delaying it for a 
year?

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/28/big_government_deja_vu/
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