The World Needs More Ninjas

You know there must be a problem when even the conservative editorials, like the Wall Street Journal, are wishing for the fiscal responsibility of FDR and Truman over that of a Republican president and Republican Congress.

All this leaves Mr. Coburn and other budget hawks wondering what has happened to what might be called “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” “The president could exercise leadership by insisting that we set priorities and offset the cost of Katrina relief by making changes elsewhere,” says Mr. Coburn. “Sadly, we don’t have that leadership.”

Neither the White House nor Congress appears to be in any mood, for example, to revisit the highway bill’s 6,373 “earmarks,” or individual projects for members, worth $24.2 billion. Alaska’s Rep. Don Young, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has bragged that the bill is “stuffed like a turkey” with goodies for his state. It includes $721 million for Alaska, including a $2.2 million “bridge to nowhere” connecting the town of Ketchikan (population 8,900) to an airport on Gravina Island (population 50). Another bridge, in Anchorage, has a $200 million price tag and is considered such a marginal project that even the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce opposes it.

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Less well known is FDR’s decision to slash nondefense spending by over 20% between 1942 and 1944.

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Harry S. Truman acted with equal decisiveness after the Korean War began in 1950. In just one year, Truman and a Democratic Congress cut nonmilitary spending by 28%.

This is part of the problem that I have with the current instantiation of our political system: it doesn’t force people to think in terms of trade-offs. The simple truth is that there’s a finite amount of resources that must be divided up and you have to make tough decisions. Sometimes you have to decide between having tax cuts and increasing military spending. Sometimes you have to decide between increasing education spending versus continuing to promise infeasible Social Security outlays.

Just how far has the Republican party diverged from their calls for fiscal responsibility? It’s not pretty:

The July issue of Harper’s Magazine reported how Congress has streamlined the process by which members of Congress insert spending items into appropriation bills. The article obliterated the fiction that Republicans are only as corrupt as Democrats who ran Congress until 1995. In 1980, for example, Congress inserted just 62 defense department “earmarks” Last year, it was 2,671. The number of earmarks tripled from $10.6 billion in 1998 to $32.7 in 2004. Harper’s calls it “The Great American Pork Barrel — Washington streamlines the means of corruption,” and it’s not happening with on the Democrats’ watch.

Still don’t believe big-government conservatism exists? Compare spending patterns of the Clinton and Bush years. Under Clinton, federal spending went up 13.3 percent over eight years. Bush needed just four years to jack up spending by 19.7 percent. The difference isn’t defense spending. Clinton raised non-defense discretionary spending by 15.1 percent in eight years. Under four years of Bush, it’s up 25.3 percent.

If you’re really interested in the numbers, see the Cato Institute’s report about how the Bush administration is spending in amounts that would make even Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society Congress blush.

Guess this is one reason why a recent Zogby poll shows that people would have voted for every president since Ford over George W. Bush (yep, even Jimmy Carter is preferred at this point). Of course, the Democrats shouldn’t bust out the bubbly yet. Despite, the strong displeasure with Bush, the same poll shows that he would still beat John Kerry. Doesn’t say a lot for our current state of political affairs or the choices the parties are giving the electorate now, does it?