Small Government Failure?
by Donald Devine
Issue 114 - August 20, 2008

Our progressive friends are at it again, helping us poor old time conservatives solve our problems. The books and articles seem endless, from the leftist Century Foundation’s The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing by Gary Anrig to the neo right-leaning Grand New Party by Ross Douthat and Rehan Salam, with leading op-eds from the New York Times and Washington Post to the Weekly Standard – from E.J. Dionne to David Brooks, all the progressives want to help, especially in writing the new Republican Platform.

Whether from left or right, the progressive diagnosis of our troubles is simple--the very subtitle of Anrig’s book tells America has adopted conservative ideas and they have failed. As Douthat and Salam put it, we must “move beyond the [Ronald] Reagan mindset” and his outdated ideas of limited government. Anrig, the liberal progressive, praises Douthat/Salam’s more “positive” conservatism, saying “They suggest plenty of proposals that many progressives would support.” No kidding – they are progressive proposals. Anrig gives away the game, however, saying Douthat/Salam’s reformist “conservatism” “would shift political battles to a playing field on which progressives would have a much stronger footing.” Of course, conceding an opponent’s principles is always a good way to lose.

Thanks for the “help” but “no thanks.”

Proposing liberal solutions under the guise of helping conservatives is fair game. Anyone who falls for it deserves it. But even progressives cannot create their own facts. What is their evidence Reagan’s ideas have failed? Because, as Anrig put it, “President [George W.] Bush “has followed this playbook more closely than any previous president, including Reagan” and “in practice these ideas have failed to deliver.” How has Mr. Bush pushed limited government even more than Reagan? Anrig gives two proofs, tax cuts and hostility to government activism. Bush’s tax cuts “have weakened the country’s fiscal health without significantly improving the lot of the vast majority of citizens” and the “right’s hostility toward government has produced only inefficient government.”

President Bush has “hostility toward government”? As the Budget data clearly show, this president increased nondefense discretionary government spending by more than any other recent president, Democratic or Republican in his first term – in fact by 25 percent or at a rate of 6.2 percent per year. For nondiscretionary spending his Medicare prescription drug program was the first major new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson, with liabilities one-and-a-half times gigantic Social Security’s. Some hostility to active government! Did the tax cuts offset all of this? That is a strange argument from progressives who claim government spending is what helps people. They were the original cheerleaders for deficit spending under their patron Franklin Roosevelt.

President Bush’s domestic spending moderated somewhat over the following two years for which we have data but the total for the six years ending in 2008 is still reported as an increase of 3.2 percent per year, still way higher than Bill Clinton’s 2.5 percent or Jimmy Carter’s 2.0 percent annual increases. Even this understates Mr. Bush’s largess since the government’s figures do not include the stimulus tax refund (which OMB estimates as larger than the total six year increase), the housing bill, and the Medicare “doctor fix” that will increase the Bush numbers substantially – their best guess so far is 8.3 percent increase, rivaling the first term highs. How anyone could call this massive spending increase hostility to government help for the majority of citizens defies comprehension.

Well, the progressives say, Bush might spend but he does not regulate.

Anrig claims the Bush Administration exceeded even the Reagan years in deregulation especially in response to the Katrina hurricane and in its lax oversight of food, toys, the environment and the mortgage industry. Yet, it was the Bush Administration who created, with Congress of course, a whole new regulatory Department of Homeland Security to deal with Katrina-like disasters. It failed but hardly because there was not sufficient regulation. Indeed, all the evidence is that the new security regulations blocked voluntary assistance from outside that was the most effective assistance in prior emergencies. The president’s own brother’s attempts to ship aid to New Orleans were blocked by security regulations.

Indeed, Anrig’s is a very strange list. Food, drugs, toys and the environment are among the most highly regulated of all activities. For the mortgage industry, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, the Federal Housing Administration, the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve bank all did act. There was plenty of regulation. It just did not work. Indeed, it was the government regulatory policy of lending to people with poor credit to encourage home ownership that caused the crisis.

Of course, Anrig would still blame it on Bush’s “hostility” to government. The title of Thomas Franks’ new book is The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. He is upset with a statement President Bush made that “government should be market based.” But the president certainly does not sound hostile – his most famous statement on the matter is “when someone hurts, government must act” - and his appointees all stress their interest and willingness to intervene to “help” consumers. Indeed, the Bush administration has increased regulation of all of these fields. Certainly, President Bush has not had a deregulation agenda like Reagan did and most of his appointees have a highly regulatory mindset as documented by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation and many others.

The most precise over-time measure is by CEI’s Clyde Wayne Crews, measuring the number of pages of regulations published by each presidency in the official Federal Register. The last year of the Carter Administration produced 73,258 pages of regulation. By the end of the Reagan term, regulations were down substantially to 50.616 pages. By the end of the Clinton years, the number of pages was back up to 64,438. But the Bush Administration ended 2007 with 72,090 pages – almost back to where Reagan began. The total number of pages under President Bush was 200,000 more than the 1980’s – some hostility to regulation!

The “helpful” progressives just cannot afford to see the deeper problem. It is progressivism itself. Their “experts” sitting in their big government offices just cannot deliver. Much of the world has come to the conclusion that 1930’s Soviet-style big-government regulation has failed. It is big government that has failed, not the puny GOP efforts of recent years. Who says so? The very people the progressives claim to help. A recent Pew Center poll, part of its on-going study of government favorability, shows that national government is now supported in a positive manner by a mere 37 percent of the public while small local government is supported favorably by 63 percent (and state government by 59 percent) of Americans.

Other than a short-lived improvement in national government favorability following 9/11, this has been the pattern for decades. Even among the poor who are the main justification for progressive policies, a massive study of low income workers by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post found that they just do not believe that government works. The survey found 53 percent said government programs that “try to improve the condition of working families” do not have “much impact” and 20 percent said they actually “make things worse.” They did not believe any change in administration would help either. Big government is a perceived failure by the very people it aims to help – and this has been true long before Mr. Bush.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.