From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THE WESTERN FRONT
Can They Cut It?
GOP spending hawks are respectable again. But will they get anything done?
"We went from being in the doghouse to being feted as the heart and soul of the party," Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona said recently. The good news for Mr. Flake and his small band of budget hawks is that they are back in the good graces of their party's leaders after publicly criticizing the GOP for post-Katrina spending. But then again, the Republican Party has always had heart when it came to fighting spending. In some ways its all heart and no brain.
This is not meant to be disrespectful. Starting at the top, there are a lot of smart people in the Republican congressional caucus and more than a few in the Bush administration. And there are plenty of Republicans who've been pushing worthwhile initiatives. One of the bigger ones was an effort to trim 1% across the board from "discretionary" programs a few years ago. Another in the works now is to wring $50 billion from next year's budget (up from $35 billion agreed on in a budget resolution earlier this year). Another, albeit smaller, initiative is to kill off 98 of some of the most wasteful, duplicative and counterproductive federal programs on the books, for a savings of nearly $20 billion over the next five years.
It's a good idea, maybe even a smart idea, to kill these programs. (A complete list is here.) So points go to Speaker Dennis Hastert, interim majority leader Roy Blunt and Budget Committee chairman Jim Nussle for swinging the ax against the Jobs in the Woods program (which spends $6 million a year for job training for "timber dependent" communities in the Northwest) and the Robert C. Byrd scholarship program (which spends $41 million a year on high school students), to name just two. For most of the stinkers on this list, few people ever knew they existed and fewer still will ever miss them once they are gone.
But what seems to be confounding the Republican Party as a whole is a coherent and broad-based plan to shrink the size of government by controlling spending. Targeted or across-the-board cuts are great--and hopefully appreciated by conservatives for the difficulty in achieving them--but without constant scrutiny and "congressional oversight," such measures won't hold the line on spending in the long run. Once a new Congress or a new administration is seated, all bets are off.
Even with scrutiny it's more likely than not that the cost of "entitlement" programs--Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the like--will continue to grow apace and consume ever larger portions of the budget. Eventually Congress will have to face one of two options: fundamentally reform entitlement programs or hike taxes. It appeared to many conservatives that we had reached that point when Treasury Secretary John Snow declared after Katrina that renewing some of the Bush tax cuts would probably have to wait.
Conservatives are noticeably frustrated with Republicans in Congress because there appears to be no plan on the table or even under development to head off such an entitlement driven eventuality. Earlier this year, Congress passed up its best opportunity in a generation to reform Social Security. There's little dispute on the right that private accounts would have relieved taxpayers of billions of dollars in liabilities in the coming decades, but Republicans in Congress blinked. Even the House plan to put "surplus" Social Security dollars--those paid into the system now that aren't used to pay benefits--into private accounts isn't going anywhere because of a lack of interest in the Senate. On Medicare and Medicaid a few modest reforms have been put on the table, while a massive new federal Medicare drug benefit has been created.
The revolution from "defined benefits" to "defined contributions"--which would get taxpayers off the hook for unlimited increases for as far as the eye can see--isn't under way on the federal level. This isn't for a lack of ideas on the right. It is, rather, because there are more than a few Republicans--particularly in the Senate--who don't understand why Americans voted the party into power in the first place.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
