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by John Berthoud
The National Taxpayers Union
George Orwell’s 1946 classic Animal Farm is a tale of
the rising up of the long downtrodden animals to
overthrow the hated humans and establish a new order.
Under new management, the farm seems to move in the
right direction for a while, but the pigs slowly
decide that the lifestyle of their former masters was
pretty good, and consequently morph into a ruling
class indistinguishable from that which they
displaced. Originally intended by Orwell to parody the
Soviet revolution of 1917, one can now see parallels
to the Republican Revolution of 1994.
There is no better example of the new management’s
taking on the manner of the old regime than the
highway bill that President Bush signed this week.
This bill combines spending excess, poor allocation of
public dollars, gross political self-interest and
fudged numbers to boot. All of these ingredients are
smothered in oily rhetoric about "creating jobs."
The official cost of the new highway bill is $286.4
billion, which is a record. But maybe the most
shocking aspect is the pork. Nearly 6,500 pork-barrel
projects are stuffed into the bill. In 1987, President
Ronald Reagan vetoed that year’s highway bill because
he (rightly) objected to the inclusion of a “mere” 152
member-requested projects for their districts. That
politics trumped good public policy in this year’s
bill can be seen maybe most clearly in Alaska, where
Republican porkers – Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don
Young – managed to secure the fourth highest number
of earmarks for the third least populous state.
Paralleling the legerdemain of the 2003 Medicare
prescription drug bill, Republicans even threw in
phony numbers to try to pretend the bill doesn’t
dramatically exceed the spending limit that had been
set – with a veto threat – by Bush. The bill
contains a promise that on the very last day the
measure is in effect – Sept. 30, 2009 – Congress
will make an unspecified spending cut of $8.5 billion.
Long years of experience have shown time and again
that when a sitting Congress promises unspecified
spending cuts by a future Congress, it is meaningless
rhetoric.
All told, the bill exceeds by $11 billion the spending
level that Bush promised would elicit his first veto.
Fiscal conservatives must continue to wait for that
veto, as the administration has again capitulated to
the big spenders on Capitol Hill.
The Republican base is told to be happy about this
mess. After all, the legislation will – in the words of
House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R.-Ill.) – “create
jobs,” and is, according to Bush, “fiscally
responsible.” Scroll back to the late 1970s and
imagine how Republicans then would have responded to
such claims by Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill (Mass.)
and Democratic President Jimmy Carter about a similar
pork-filled spending bill.
The highway bill is not an isolated incident. Federal
spending is up sharply in almost all categories. The
President’s own budget office is estimating that
federal spending this year will be 33% higher than
just four years ago. This is hardly just the result of
Defense and Homeland Security expenditures. Consider
that over these same four years, spending at the
Department of Agriculture will have skyrocketed 40%,
while spending at the Department of Education will
have grown at almost twice the rate of military
spending.
As a consequence of this spending splurge, the tax cut
train has stalled and, in fact, it is quite likely
that many of the tax cuts enacted during the first
Bush term will fall by the wayside. (When tax rates
are higher tomorrow than today, we fiscal
conservatives call that a “tax hike.”) If taxes start
to rise under GOP rule, the unraveling of the
Republican Revolution will be complete and – just as
with Orwell’s pigs – the new rulers will be
completely indistinguishable from the pre-1994 manor
lords.
John Berthoud is President of the National Taxpayers
Union.
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