Conservatives are fighting the last war, and it’s a war that they arguably won.
They fear that American society, built on free market principles and individual rights and liberties, is imperiled by big-spending neo-socialists and a ravenous federal government that knows no limits. Um, maybe in 1935? Or in 1968?
Didja know it was Jimmy Carter who, alienating liberal Democrats, fought and won the battle to deregulate American industry?
Am I the only one who remembers the Clinton-Gore “reinventing government” period? Wasn’t it Bubba who said, “The era of Big Government is over”?
But no, we’re told by some of our smartest and most astute pundits that we’re in an epic struggle for the soul of the nation. Charles Krauthammer, for example, argues today that the debt-ceiling debate is but part of a protracted death-match between irreconcilable visions of American political life. He writes:
“We’re in the midst of a great four-year national debate on the size and reach of government, the future of the welfare state, indeed, the nature of the social contract between citizen and state. The distinctive visions of the two parties — social-democratic vs. limited-government — have underlain every debate on every issue since Barack Obama’s inauguration: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, health-care reform, financial regulation, deficit spending. Everything. The debt ceiling is but the latest focus of this fundamental divide.”
Dramatic stuff, but it’s only true if you’re at a Tea Party or taking lunch at the faculty club.
Decimated though “the center” may be, the radicals on either side will not prevail. Americans will not elect a Tea Party president, nor a Tea Party Congress. This is because the epic debate over the type of nation we will have has largely been decided. It was decided over the past four decades.
We live today in the kind of country we will be living in a decade from now and two decades from now and in all likelihood five decades from now.
At the risk of wildly oversimplifying — it’s just a blog, right? — I’d describe this as a country with a mixed economy, one in which the free market is not entirely unconstrained by regulation but is fully capable of nurturing entrepreneurial talent and bringing profits to shareholders. It’s a country in which the federal government spends roughly a fifth of the nation’s GDP (yes, more than that lately, but it’ll come down under every conceivable fiscal plan), provides national security, a social safety net for the poor and generous programs for retirees.
That’s our system. There is plenty to debate and fuss about within that framework. Like, how closely should Wall Street be regulated? What should the retirement age be and how can we provide for the needy without bankrupting ourselves? How should health-care coverage be extended to people who don’t have it and maybe don’t want it? These debates will keep us busy.
But the idea that we’re in an epic struggle is a fantasy. It is an idea nurtured by self-interested radio pundits and TV shouters.
This is still, amazingly, a country that has to be governed in the middle. It is because of this simple fact that Obamacare is not, and could never be, a left-wing construct. It’s not the single-payer plan that Bernie Sanders and most liberals would prefer. It’s a plan initially embraced by Republicans for its free-market elements. It was passed only after Obama got some buy-in from most of the affected industries. Wasn’t there something of a trial run under Mitt Romney in Massachusetts? Yet we are to believe it is deeply Bolshevik.
Conflict is a commodity in today’s media environment, and long gone are the days when paternal figures like Walter Cronkite served up the news in a manner apparently designed to reassure rather than inflame the audience.
Boehner complained that Obama moved the goal posts in his negotiations on the debt, but it is the Republicans who are marching these days with goal posts in hand. They want to shrink the size of government dramatically. Grover Norquist a few years ago told me he would like to see federal spending cut in half to just 10 percent of GDP, and then cut in half again.
It’s true that government is in the midst of a fiscal crisis — and, just FYI, I’ve been a deficit hawk since roughly the Harding administration. Our leaders have promiscuously overspent and undertaxed. They have used debt as lubricant until now, and perhaps this debt ceiling crisis is as good a time as any to face the fact that the trendlines aren’t sustainable.
But this is really about entitlement spending and specifically about how to treat the elderly. That’s where the growth in spending is. “Government” as traditionally construed is something more than a Treasury check going to a retiree. Discretionary spending hasn’t been growing in recent decades; I would bet that, as a percentage of GDP, non-military discretionary spending has been going down in recent decades. This is the war the conservatives already won, circa 1980.
In a recent column, George Will wrote:
“Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats’ dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.”
Again, dramatic stuff! But is Obama really Eugene Debs? Are we talking about the same guy? Republicans hated stimulus, and it wasn’t the most elegant of operations, but a Keynesian response to a free-falling economy (one that included tax cuts, by the way!) was hardly a radical notion. Obama has repeatedly ticked off his liberal base, has already frozen discretionary spending, and pushed through health-care reform that included major cuts to Medicare (cuts that Republicans demogogued). Obama is willing to alienate the Krugman wing of the party by further cuts to entitlements.
Let’s take a look, just for fun, at the number of government employees in recent decades. You can look it up at the Bureau of Labor Statistics site (though I needed help from a specialist to navigate my way around).
In January 1971, federal, state and local governments employed 12,878,000 people in a country with a total of 70,866,000 non-farm jobs.
In January 2011, federal, state and local governments employed 22,226,000 people out of a total of 130,328,000 workers.
Someone smart do the math, please, and tell me if the ranks of government employees as a percentage of the workforce have been swelling over the past 40 years.
By | 12:57 PM ET, 07/29/2011
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