[10_06_05 L.B. Deyo] WE ARE DOOMED. DOOMED.
In the second year of his first term, Bill Clinton declared “The era of big government is over.” For a moment it seemed that we might have a national consensus on our hands. The Republicans had always talked up smaller government, and now the leader of the Democrats was signing on.
More than a decade later, we stand in the ruins of that hope. President Bush’s $200B Hurricane Katrina Relief package is only the latest burst in a seemingly inexhaustible frenzy of spending, Federal expansion, and centralization.
The Hurricane itself, of course, has been taken as a repudiation of small-government thinking. The reliably irritating Gerhard Schroeder chimed in recently to this effect, as have countless editorials in the United States and around the world. A great many loud persons, eager to blame the present administration, blamed the president’s war budget and tax cuts for squeezing out domestic spending and leaving no money for the levies of New Orleans.
What vain, childish ignorance! And if only it were true. If only the domestic budget had been squeezed, choked and strangled!
In fact, under Bush, the budget of the United States government, excluding Iraq spending, has increased by 35.7 percent, the highest rate in 40 years. The discretionary budget of the United States, again excluding the war’s $200 billion expenditures, has never been remotely so huge as it is now.
And it is huge. Monstrously, impossibly, hideously huge. Far bigger than the human mind can grasp (how can we conceive of numbers in the trillions?). The great physicist Richard Feynman once remarked that the term “astronomical” should be replaced with “governmental,” since very large numbers turned up more in government spending than in astronomy. Our government is the most expensive thing in history, by far. Much of it is borrowed, most of it is wasted. One can scarecely conceive of a more voracious destroyer of wealth and resources. The deficit has been shrinking over the past couple years, but our national debt is $7.8 trillion dollars; we spend almost two percent of our Gross Domestic Product on interest payments towards this debt, while the debt itself continues to grow apace. Meanwhile, Democrats excoriate every timid suggestion Republicans offer to cut programs, and Republicans themselves keep thinking of new ways to spend.
The old arrangement, where the stingy Republicans tried to cut spending and the generous Democrats tried to give money away to everyone in sight, was far from perfect, but it created a kind of balance, an average between two extremes. No longer. This is the era of “big government conservatism.” Both sides are running as hard as ever, but now they’re all running in the same direction: away, with our money.