The Lost Fig Leaf
"You now work from the first
of January to May just to pay your taxes so that the party of government can
satisfy its priorities with the sweat of your brow because they think that what
you would do with your own money would be morally and practically less
admirable than what they would do with it. ... Somewhere, a grandmother
couldn't afford to call her granddaughter, or a child went without a book, or a
family couldn't afford that first home because there was just not enough money.
... Why? Because some genius in the Clinton administration took the money to
fund yet another theory, yet another program, and yet another bureaucracy." The
words are Bob Dole's (actually, they're Mark Halperin's, but Dole said them in
his acceptance speech in San Diego). They are the key to understanding why the
Republican Revolution, which seemed so unstoppable only a year ago, has
stopped.
Dole's speech tried to put
over, one more time, the fiction that the federal government takes away your
hard-earned money and spends most of it on things that only social workers
want. Supply-side economics, with its promise that tax cuts would pay for
themselves, may have given conservatives the courage to be irresponsible. But
what sold the public on conservatism was the images of vast armies of
bureaucrats and of welfare queens driving Cadillacs.
Conservatives were able to get away with such stories for one main reason: They
could always blame their failure to slay Big Government on the Democrats who
controlled Congress. Then they suddenly found themselves in control--and the
fig leaf was gone. Spinmeisters of the right are already saying that this
election was all about tactics--that if only Dole were a better campaigner, if
only Clinton hadn't shamelessly veered right, if only Gingrich hadn't thrown a
tantrum on Air Force One, the conservative wave would have rolled on. And they
insist that this looming defeat is only a temporary setback. But the truth is
that the political appeal of radical conservatism has always been based on a
fundamentally untrue vision of what the federal government is and does.
To get an idea of the gap between conservative mythology
and reality, let's look at the best book published in America. It's called
The Statistical Abstract of the United States , and if more people would
get into the habit of checking it, our politics would be utterly
transformed.
The Statistical
Abstract makes it quite easy to get a realistic picture of where your
tax dollar goes. For example, here is a list of 10 major federal programs. The
number after the colon indicates each program's percentage of fiscal 1994
spending:
Social Security:
21.6
Defense: 18.9
Interest on the debt:
13.7
Medicare: 9.7
Medicaid: 5.8
Pensions for federal
workers: 4.2
Veterans' benefits:
2.6
Transportation (mainly
highways, air traffic, etc.) : 2.6
Unemployment
insurance: 2.0
Administration of justice (courts, law enforcement, etc.) :
1.1
There are three important things to say about
this list. The first is that it encompasses the bulk of government
spending--82.2 percent, to be precise. Anyone who proposes a radical downsizing
of the federal government must mean to slash this list.
The second is that with one
possible exception, these are programs that the public likes--they are not at
all what people object to when they rail against Big Government. We believe in
honoring our debts. We like our strong military; indeed, Bob Dole wants it
stronger. We like our highways. We want strong law enforcement. The only
possibly unpopular item on the list is Medicaid, which is the only "poverty"
program. But Medicaid is increasingly a program of aid not for the poor per se,
but rather, for the old. More and more of it pays for nursing-home care--and
many of those patients have middle-class children.
And that
brings us to the third point: Aside from defense and interest payments, the
U.S. government is now mainly--yes, mainly--in the business of taxing the young
and giving money to the old. Look at that list, and consider how utterly
shameless Dole was in imagining a grandmother who couldn't afford to call her
granddaughter because she pays too much in taxes. That grandmother almost
surely lives better than people of her age ever lived before, supported by
Social Security checks that will greatly exceed the value of the contributions
she and her husband paid into the system. And her children could easily have
sent her the money for phone calls, except that their Medicare contributions
had to cover her hip replacement.
There is a good case to be made that America's gerontocracy
has gone too far, that we are too generous to our retirees, especially to those
who could afford to do without some of those benefits. But that is not a case
the right has ever made. An honest advocate of smaller government would
campaign not against elitist bureaucrats but against nice middle-class retirees
in their Florida condominiums. Somehow, that wasn't in Dole's speech.
It isn't as easy to summarize
federal regulation as it is to summarize federal spending, but the basic point
is similar: Most of what the government does is actually serving, not opposing,
the public's will. Lots of people snicker at snail-darter jokes, but only a
small minority wants to see a repeal of the clean-air or clean-water laws. And
the voters are prepared to punish those Republicans whom they suspect of
belonging to that minority.
Of course, the federal
government wastes a lot of money; so does the private sector (have you read
Dilbert lately?). But the kind of oppressive government, run by meddling
elitists, that Bob Dole tried to tell us about in San Diego exists only in the
conservative imagination. And that is why Gingrich and Dole did not snatch
defeat from the jaws of victory. Their reversal of fortune was preordained,
because their doctrine could not withstand the responsibility that came with
success.
