Right-Wing Fiscal Fratricide Running Its Course?

We're at the leading edge of a long, long siege of the Bush Administration and Republicans in Congress by the voters who sent them to Washington, D.C. over the appalling levels of federal spending in which they have engaged. I should know, since I've fired more than a few cannon shots from my pea-shooter myself, and I've read an avalanche of others far more vicious and vehement than anything I've offered up. As in not just criticizing them on the substance of the issue, but burying them as worse than the Democrats and encouraging the GOP base to stay home in November and "teach them a lesson"; even singing the praises of divided government as the most effective way to hold down government spending. It's probably why I haven't gotten carried away myself; that and the fact that I remember what the fiscal results were the last time a president named Bush faced a Donk Congress. And it wasn't what some petulant righties are portraying.

In the mean time, the fiscal period we do seem to be reliving is not the early nineties, but the other half of that decade:

Driven by a surging national economy, tax revenues are increasing and the deficit is rapidly shrinking. The President’s deficit-reduction plan looks like it will not only succeed, but will do so years ahead of schedule.

The country was facing the largest projected deficit in history when Bush promised to halve it as a percentage of GDP by 2009. Due to high wartime spending and the residual effects of the 2000–01 recession, the White House expected the 2004 deficit to reach $521 billion, or 4.5% of GDP. Bush’s goal was to reduce this to 2.25% by 2009.

After all the beans were finally counted, the 2004 deficit came in at $413 billion—roughly 3.5% of GDP. The economy had begun expanding, partly in response to Bush’s tax cuts, creating jobs and boosting revenue. This trend continued into the next year, pushing the deficit down to $319 billion in 2005.

This year, the projections look even better. Through the first eight months of this budget year, the deficit is $227 billion—16.7% lower than this time last year. That’s largely because government revenues in these eight months have reached $1.545 trillion, up 12.9% from last year. This huge revenue boost means that the deficit is going down even as an out-of-control Congress continues its spending profligacy.

So NRO is pleased, at least on the tax side of the ledger. Bush's supply-side tax cuts of early 2003 have, indeed, revved up the "engine of plenty" and federal coffers have benefited handsomely as a result, against all the predictions of the "conventional wisdom." If that sounds eerily familiar, that's because the same thing happened after the 1997 capital gains tax cut that Republicans managed to extract from Bill Clinton in exchange for giving him a blank check to spend to his heart's content domestically. Despite that outflow gusher, the budget inexorably glided past balance into surplus, ironically providing then-candidate Bush with an additional justification for his tax cut proposal.

The other justification was the dot-com bust and concommitant recession that Clinton bequeathed Bush and the latter had the temerity to see coming and warn of. That and the 9/11 attacks (also the product of Clinton policies) produced the downturn that took revenues with it and left the unaddressed overspending problem exposed once again. And that problem has grown even worse since then.

But look who is expressing hope that congressional Pachyderms have seen the light of fiscal restraint:

On June 8, the Senate finally passed a supplemental spending bill to pay for the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina cleanup. At one point during negotiations, the measure was expected to cost more than $105 billion, but in the bill they passed, senators agreed to hold the line at $94.5 billion. All told, they trimmed about $14 billion in pork-barrel projects, including $4 billion for "farm disaster aid." The definition of a "disaster" is clearly getting looser, since the Department of Agriculture declared nearly 80% of all U.S. counties "disaster areas" last year.

In another minor victory, on June 6 the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives passed a spending bill that could ensure the bridge to nowhere never gets built. Representative Mark Kirk (R-IL) added an amendment that would ban the spending of federal money to design or build the bridge, or even to reimburse the state for the project....

At the same time, lawmakers finally showed they won't be railroaded anymore by Amtrak. In the same spending bill that contains Kirk's amendment, the House committee provided $900 million for Amtrak, the amount President Bush wanted. That's a lot of money to spend on a dysfunctional organization that struggles to make the trains run on time. But it's far less than the $1.6 billion the railroad had requested....

Lawmakers also stood up to the powerful air traffic controllers' union. The controllers already average $173,000 a year in pay and benefits, but their union wanted lawmakers to increase that. By a narrow margin, the House voted to allow the FAA to reduce salaries for new hires by 28%. Now, lawmakers should go further and look at privatizing the controllers, a move that would save money and improve service in the long run.

When the head honcho of the Heritage Foundation stops hissing at you, you know that intra-movement rifts are starting to heal.

Heaven knows there's still a long, long way to go, though. As the NRO editors conclude:

We cannot grow our way out of our long-term fiscal woes. Pro-growth tax policies must be supplemented by serious entitlement reform to curtail the huge unfunded liabilities created by Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And spending cuts on other domestic programs would be worthwhile as a way to reduce Washington’s influence to its proper size, quite apart from their effect on budget balances. Surging revenues are a reason to stick with the tax cuts. They are no reason to quit trying to bring spending under control.

Indeed. But that goal will never, EVER attained by intra-party vendettas and petulant "message-sending" and "lesson-teaching" and "trips to the woodshed," all of which would have the end result of restoring the Democrats to control of the federal pursestrings, with no guarantee that they would ever relinquish them again.

Republicans have performed crudily as stewards of "the people's money." But Democrats will always be worse because, as Pat Buchanan once wrote in his sane days, "With the Republicans the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak; with the Democrats there is no spirit." And for conservatives, there will never, as a practical matter, be any better vehicle for influencing public policy than the GOP.

Perhaps the baby-with-the-bathwater-thrower-outers of the Right are finally beginning to remember that.