Posted on 09/25/2005 10:56:29 AM PDT by Uncle Joe Cannon
September 25, 2005
The Sunday Times
Andrew Sullivan: Is Bush a socialist? He's spending like one
Finally, finally, finally. A few years back, your correspondent noticed something a little odd about George W Bush’s conservatism. If you take Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that a socialist is someone who is very good at spending other people’s money, then President Bush is, er, a socialist.
Sure, he has cut taxes, a not-too-difficult feat when your own party controls both houses of Congress. But spending? You really have to rub your eyes, smack yourself on the forehead and pour yourself a large gin and tonic. The man can’t help himself.
The first excuse was the war. After 9/11 and a wobbly world economy, that was a decent excuse. Nobody doubted that the United States needed to spend money to beef up homeland security, avert deflation, overhaul national preparedness for a disaster, and fight a war on terror. But when Katrina revealed that, after pouring money into both homeland security and Louisiana’s infrastructure, there was still no co-ordinated plan to deal with catastrophe, a few foreheads furrowed.
Then there was the big increase in agricultural subsidies. Then the explosion in pork barrel spending. Then the biggest new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson, the Medicare drug benefit. Then a trip to Mars. When you add it all up, you get the simple, devastating fact that Bush, in a mere five years, has added $1.5 trillion to the national debt. The interest on that debt will soon add up to the cost of two Katrinas a year.
Remember when conservatism meant fiscal responsibility? In a few years, few people will be able to. I used to write sentences that began with the phrase: “Not since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society spending binge. . .” I can’t write that any more. Johnson — the guns and butter president of liberalism’s high-water mark — was actually more fiscally conservative than the current inhabitant of the White House. LBJ boosted domestic discretionary spending in inflationadjusted dollars by a mere 33.4%.
In five years, Bush has increased it 35.1%. And that’s before the costs for Katrina and Rita and the Medicare benefit kick in. Worse, this comes at a time when everyone concedes that we were facing a fiscal crunch before Bush started handing out dollar bills like a drunk at a strip club. With the looming retirement of America’s baby-boomers, the US needed to start saving, not spending; cutting, not expanding its spending habits.
This was one reason I found myself forced to endorse John Kerry last November. He was easily the more fiscally conservative candidate. Under Clinton, the US actually ran a surplus for a while (thanks, in part, to the Gingrich-run Congress). But most conservatives bit their tongues. Bush promised fiscal tightening in his second term and some actually believed him.
They shouldn’t have. When Bush casually dismissed questions about funding the $200 billion Katrina reconstruction with a glib “It’s going to cost what it costs”, steam finally blew out of some loyal Republican ears. When the house majority leader Tom DeLay told the conservative Washington Times that there was no fat left to cut in the budget and that “after 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good”, a few conservatives lost it.
Here’s the chairman of the American Conservative Union: “Excluding military and homeland security, American taxpayers have witnessed the largest spending increase under any preceding president and Congress since the Great Depression.” That would be correct. When you have doubled spending on education in four years, launched two wars and a new mega-entitlement, that tends to happen.
Here’s Peggy Noonan, about as loyal a Republican as you’ll find, in a Wall Street Journal column last week: “George W Bush is a big spender. He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce?”
Here’s Ann Coulter, the Michael Moore of the far right, a pundit whose book on liberalism was titled Treason: “Bush has already fulfilled all his campaign promises to liberals and then some! He said he’d be a ‘compassionate conservative’, which liberals interpreted to mean that he would bend to their will, enact massive spending programmes, and be nice to liberals. When Bush won the election, that sealed the deal. It meant the Democrats won.
“Consequently, Bush has enacted massive new spending programmes, obstinately refused to deal with illegal immigration, opposed all conservative Republicans in their primary races, and invited Teddy Kennedy over for movie night. He’s even sent his own father to socialise with ageing porn star Bill Clinton.” Ouch.
Conservatives have been quietly frustrated with Bush for a long time now. Honest neoconservatives have long privately conceded that the war in Iraq has been grotesquely mishandled. But in deference to their own party, they spent last year arguing that John Kerry didn’t deserve his Vietnam war medals. Social conservatives have just watched as the president’s nominee for chief justice of the Supreme Court pronounced that the constitutional right to abortion on demand merited respect as a legal precedent. This hasn’t cheered them up. The nativist right, long enraged by illegal immigration, has been spluttering about foreigners for a while now. But since few want to question the war publicly, oppose the president’s nominees to the court, or lose the Latino vote, the spending issue has become the focus of everyone’s discontent.
All I can say is: about time. I believe in lower taxes. But I also believe in basic fiscal responsibility. If you do not cut spending to align with lower taxes, you are merely borrowing from the next generation. And if a Republican president has legitimised irresponsible spending, what chance is there that a Democrat will get tough?
This may, in fact, be Bush’s real domestic legacy. All a Democratic successor has to do is raise taxes to pay for his splurge, and we will have had the biggest expansion of government power, size and responsibility since the 1930s. What would Reagan say? What would Thatcher? But those glory days are long gone now — and it was a Republican president and Congress that finally buried them.
"But the faithful will not allow a word spoken against our leader. If a Democrat did these things, Limbaugh, Hannity, and the rest of the cheerleaders would be up in arms"
That's a really good point and a really good test to apply. So to anyone defending Bush's record: imagine John Kerry had won the last election and since then had done and said exactly the same as George Bush has - what would your opinion be now?
There isn't a spending bill that I can think of that became law without President Bush's signature.
Bush is certainly a social conservative, but he's a bigger fiscal liberal than LBJ. He believes that the answer to almost every problem is expansion of the federal government.
Are you suggesting that the Reagan Defense build-up was due to the spending of the Democratic Congress?
"Borrow and spend" is a completely different animal than "tax and spend".
Right--"Borrow and spend" means defer the tax to your children and grandchildren (or outsource American foreign policy to Peking).
Of course the 'Rats who have districts/states with large military bases and contractors are happy to spend everyone else's money in their districts.
That's a lovely piece of filth by the court.
Agreed. It's particularly painful when our side engages in verbal nonsense. Given that the Cold War has been over for 15 years, "socialist" and "communist" are losing their cultural framework, especially for the younger crowd. "Fiscal irresponsibility" is ideology-neutral, plus accurate. Unfortunately, we can't successfully pin this one on the dems (even though they are happily pulling in pork for their districts), when the repubs control both houses of congress and the WH.
"That means he thinks no further than getting elected and keeping his popularity reasonably high."
Constitution check: Presidents get two terms only.
Politics check: By exploding the budget, Bush is damaging his base. God knows he's not going to win over the libs.
"Possibly he has enough foresight to think of his cohorts future in government and certainly of his personal future economic security."
Sounds like you're making some pretty unsavory charges against our C in C.
i don't know just what the hell he is, I do know that he and these repubs are spending a hell of a lot of MY MONEY.
When the %$#@^& finally hits the fan people are going to look back and wonder why we traded so much away for so little.
I don't have kids or grandkids but if I did, I would wish for more from life for them than to be virtual sharecroppers buried under a mountain of debt to Red China.
Right. The President proposes, the Congress disposes, as the saying goes.
There is a subtlety about what Bush is doing that is missed by most. He and Rove decided early on, even when campaigning for the 2000 election, that the government has grown so big that it cannot be easily cut. The best that can be hoped for at this point is to redirect it.
Tax cuts were a start but to get them passed many compromises were made. Sunsetting them was the most important. That battle is on the horizon.
The education bill greatly increased spending but it also imposed accountability on the schools and teachers. It had a three year faze in and now that it is working the left is screaming.
The drugs for seniors program is expensive but it has the seeds for privatizing the whole thing. That could later l;ead to privatizing Medicare rather than a Hillary national healthcare plan.
He is working on SS and the tax system to make each more involved with free enterprise and the economy rather than government control.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were unavoidable. So is the cost. However, many functions are contracted out rather than done by the government. That is another step in the right direction.
All this new money for hurricane rebuilding is directed toward empowering people with jobs, job training, and is being put into the hands of independent companies who hire people, not government employees.
All conservatives are against big government and big spending but Bush is redirecting this for a better outcome in the long run. The liberals are being out foxed by Rove again.
The new Department of Homeland Security supposedly is not under the Civil Service Administration. That means more freedom in hiring, promoting, and firing people, a longtime problem with government. I hope it got through. If not, Bush tried.
In addition the tax cuts and improved economy keep bring more money into the treasury.
Correct, but the WH has two distict domestic functions concerning the budget: 1) It can propose a budget, and set the priorities and roadmap that the congress can follow. 2) It has the veto pen, the mere threat of which, in the hands of a capable leader, can affect the direction congress takes.
"Leadership" in a democracy isn't dictatorship, by design in the Constitution. It is, however, persuasion, guidance, negotiation, and above all, articulating a clear vision for those in congress to latch onto. Bush has a great opportunity here to shine.
Well said sir.
Socialism and communism are merely varying degrees of Marxism. While I don't like the massive amounts of spending that this administration is doing and I am adamantly opposed to his Medicare drug giveaway, I wouldn't label him a socialist. I would prefer "borrow and spend" to "tax and spend" because - like I said before - once the government puts a tax in place, it doesn't go away. Emotional appeals about burdening our children with debt is hyperbole.
Addressing the question, "Is Bush a Socialist?", from the Communist Manifesto, there is a list of ten things that should be put in place for a country to be considered communist and/or socialist. Do these questions look like the agenda of this administration or of the current Democratic party?
1.Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2.A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3.Abolition of all right of inheritance. (ie. Inheritance or Death Tax)
4.Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5.Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6.Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7.Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8.Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9.Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10.Free education for all children in public schools. (and only public schools. No school vouchers, no homeschool tax breaks, no school choice for parents).
Yep.
Gingrich and the Republican Congress probably deserve more respect for the deficit reductions of the 1990s than Sullivan gives them.
And if a Republican president has legitimised irresponsible spending, what chance is there that a Democrat will get tough?
It looks like the lesson is that if you want to get tough on deficits, elect a Republican Congress and a Democrat president. They won't give him what they'd give a Repubican president, and he won't get what his own Democrats would give him.
Across the street from where I grew up in nyc, on a storage facility building used by a church on the corner of Thompson & Prince, was quite a bit of graffiti.
One of the slogans was 'Au H2O.'
As a kid in the 70s I never 'got it,' until I leared about the legendary Mr. Godlwater in my young teens! :-)
gridlock! you're right i fear.
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