Editorials and Opinion Pieces

Two weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, a Wall Street Journal front-page story announced: "Terror Attack Reverses a Two-Decade Drive to Shrink Government." Albert Eisele, the publisher of The Hill, headlined his version, "The End of the Republican Revolution." The New York Times editorialized that the attacks had turned George W. Bush into a "moderate."

Does Osama bin Laden's handiwork mean Big Government is back?

No. But its friends won't fail for lack of trying. Prior to Sept. 11, White House budgets projected that federal spending would drop from 18 percent of GDP to 16 percent over the next decade. Since then, House and Senate appropriators have voted for new spending initiatives totaling $251 billion-$70 billion for money-losing Amtrak alone. Both houses quickly passed a 342-page collection of new federal police powers, in the name of fighting terrorism. The Senate voted 100 to zero to nationalize the 28,000 underwear inspectors at airports. Liberals are cheering polls that suggest the public now has more trust in the federal government.

The conservative consensus on shrinking government-now facing this concerted counterattack-is a relatively new phenomenon. Since the end of the Second World War, conservatives have had two pole stars: opposition to communism globally and to deficit spending at home. These were measurable efforts; one could judge a president's foreign policy by how many countries fell to the Red Army on his watch. Ronald Reagan's victory over the Soviet Union, ironically, removed this central organizing principle of the Right. It is now much more difficult to measure how an administration is managing national defense. We know now that there were major intelligence and foreign policy failures during the Clinton years, but it was hard to measure at the time.

Deficit spending has been the Right's other great touchstone. In the 1950s conservatives attacked it, even when their real agenda was to limit the size of government; they felt the case was stronger when linked to Americans' aversion to debt. From the other side, liberals argued that deficit spending was in fact an unmitigated good-John Maynard Keynes wrote a whole book on the subject. But by the 1980s they discovered that they could block Reaganite calls for tax cuts by publicly opposing "deficits." They dropped the noun "spending" and used their opposition to "deficits" as a weapon against tax relief and in favor of "revenue enhancements."

Measuring economic policy by "deficits" was a disaster for conservatives. State and local spending ballooned. And the massive spending binges of Bush's 1990 budget and Clinton's in 1993 were implausibly pronounced "deficit reduction measures"-they just tacked on tax hikes, too. Pity the poor voter who listened to both parties. Republicans wanted to spend less. Democrats wanted to tax more. Their rhetoric told voters they were in agreement.

The 1994 GOP congressional sweep brought modest spending restraint and tax cuts, and killed the threat of nationalized health care. This led to a federal budget in balance by January 1998, forcing a change in the terms of the debate. Democrats said, "You Republicans said you opposed government-run health care because there were deficits. So, now you have no objection, right?" And Republicans had to respond, "Well, we were lying. We oppose new government programs and higher spending on principle." This was progress.

Republicans ran with the ball, and in 1999 challenged Democrats to join them in abolishing the death tax, the marriage penalty tax and others totaling $1.3 trillion over ten years. Republicans pointed out that the Democrats' objection to tax cuts over the past twenty years had been based on the deficit. Now that the deficit was gone, surely the Democrats would join in cutting taxes, right? So now the Democrats were forced to explain, "We were lying. We oppose tax cuts whether there is deficit or surplus. We want the government to have more money. Always. On principle."

Everyone coming clean about their real aims has helped bring today's broad center-right coalition together. Economic conservatives, businessmen and investors understand that smaller government expands individual liberty, job creation and economic progress. Traditional-values conservatives understand that welfare displaces the family, high taxes force mothers into the workplace, and that, since secular liberalism has banned religion from the public square, it is important to believers of all faiths to shrink that square. Those Americans who want a strong military understand that defense takes only three percent of GDP, while the government at all levels spends ten times that. Big government crowds out even national defense.

By the late 1990s that crystallized for conservatives into a new goal: reducing the total cost of government by half over twenty-five years-one full generation. Some argued that twenty-five years was too long a planning cycle. Others pointed out that there would be setbacks, lost opportunities, bad election years, wars and recessions. But it nonetheless passes a key test, and the crucial one for holding political leaders accountable: it is measurable.

There are four ways you can measure the size of government: total spending as a percentage of the economy; the cost of regulation as a percentage of the economy; total government employment; and total assets owned by the government-land, buildings, pension funds.
Our goal is to reduce all those by half over the next quarter century. Total government spending in 2000 was 29.78 percent of GDP. Federal spending in 2000 was 18 percent of GDP-down from 22 percent in 1993. In 2000, state and local governments spent $1.1 trillion or 11.57 percent of GDP. Reforming social security to allow all Americans to invest their FICA taxes in personal savings accounts would move 22 percent of the federal budget, or 4 percent of GDP, from government spending into personal savings. That reform alone would get us 40 percent of the way to cutting the federal government in half.

In the wake of the cold war, we have already cut defense spending by half, from six percent of GDP to three percent. Federal and state regulations cost Americans an estimated 13 percent of GDP. If every public school were as efficient as private school, we could spend 3 percent rather than 6 percent of GDP on kindergarten through high school. Privatizing the post office would cut federal employment by almost 25 percent. The federal government owns and mismanages 645 million acres of land. State and local pension systems have $3 trillion dollars in assets controlled by politicians. We can break those up into personal retirement accounts protected from Jesse Jackson's perennial efforts to "socially invest" them.

Cutting the government in half in one generation is an ambitious, reasonable and measurable goal. It can be accomplished with reforms already in place in various states and other nations-look at formerly socialist Chile's private social security system. The terrorist attack on the United States and the one-time costs of rebuilding New York City and the Pentagon will not reverse the secular trend of reducing the costs of the federal government. But we will also need to fight at every juncture to make sure that as much as possible of the battle to keep American homes and businesses secure remains in private hands. And conservatives will need to put as much focus and attention on reducing state and local spending over the next years as they did on the federal budget.

The center-right movement is in a much stronger position today than twenty years ago. In 1980 there were many conservatives who truly believed that America was in decline-both as a world power and as a free and open economy. William F. Buckley, Jr. said the goal of conservatives was to stand athwart history and yell, "Stop!" Whitaker Chambers believed when he left the Communist party to become an American patriot that he was joining the losing side of history.

Osama bin Laden has only served to remind us and the world that we are an ascendant power and that our commitment to limited government, free trade, lower taxes and less regulation will defeat those who would exploit this war to enrich the state. The present war and recession will slow down the progress of cutting government in half. But it will not derail the Bush administration or the conservative movement from this goal.

We once again have a way to measure success. We can now judge how a president, a governor or a mayor is doing over four or eight years. Did the government grow or shrink? Are there more government employees or fewer? Does the government own more or fewer assets?
And in 2025, when no one can remember how to spell bin Laden's name and the government is half its present size, we can then set a new goal. How about half again, by 2050?