Not-So-Radical Republicans

Why the GOP budget revolution failed--and how it might succeed

Stephen Moore from the July 1998 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

The double lesson of the Reagan and Gingrich eras is that Republicans are perhaps a necessary but not a sufficient condition for achieving smaller government. After 12 years of GOP presidents and four years of a GOP Congress, all of the public choice barriers to cutting government that existed in 1980 are still present today. The political process is still severely biased in favor of spending, rather than cutting. This suggests that the most promising political strategy for cutting government is to devote money and energy to institutional reforms--to actually change the rules of the game, rather than simply trying to outplay the other side.

Foremost among these rule changes is term limits. When Republicans took over Congress in 1995, the new majority leader, Dick Armey, one of the few dedicated limited-government conservatives in Congress, declared that if Republicans did their jobs, "maybe the public's desire for term limits will subside." Just the opposite has transpired: The 104th and 105th Congresses have been shining monuments to the need for limiting terms. My colleague at the Cato Institute Aaron Steelman has found that the propensity to tax, spend, and regulate rises in an almost linear fashion with length of time in office. In fact, that's particularly true for Republicans, since Democrats usually come to Washington already inclined to spend other people's money. For Republicans, taxing and spending are learned behaviors.

Tax limitation measures are also imperative. Here the experiences of the states are instructive. The Western states--such as Arizona, Colorado, Montana, and Nevada--that have enacted supermajority or voter approval requirements for tax increases have stopped them dead in their tracks. Other states have constitutional constraints on the rate of spending growth--normally tied to population growth plus inflation--that require tax rebates instead of spending hikes during boom periods. A two-thirds supermajority requirement for new taxes would have prevented the last five federal tax increases--including the Bush and Clinton hikes. At the end of April, the House voted down a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds majority, 238- 186, primarily along party lines.

Fiscal conservatives should have by now been jolted from their 30-year fantasy that if only Republicans controlled Congress, government would become smaller, less consequential, and less intrusive. Those (including me) who once upon time believed this fairy tale should have known better. As in the early 1980s, we have once again collided with the central reality that despite the appealing rhetoric, the GOP is not a small-government party. The Democratic cardinals on Capitol Hill have simply handed over the reins of power to a cast of Republican cardinals.

This is not to say that libertarians and fiscal conservatives should conclude that cutting the government is infeasible, as Rauch, and apparently Kristol and Brooks, have surmised. Before advocates of limited government can change the country, they must change the GOP. It's not a fantasy to imagine that someday Republicans can cut the budget and rein in the federal government; it's just that these Republicans won't do it.

When Bud Shuster was recently asked to justify all the pork spending projects in the highway bill, he cavalierly replied: "Look, congressmen aren't angels." No, they certainly are not. And the lesson of the last four years has been that they are not angels even--and in some cases especially--if they have an R next to their names.