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Elephantine

October 6, 2005 1:06 am

The GOP's gobs make Bill Clinton look like a pinchpenny

"ABILLION HERE, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money," the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, an Illinois Republican, once said. He was talking about government spending. And looking at today's political environment in Washington, it's clear that Dirksen said a mouthful.

Among the serious flaws of the George W. Bush administration has been its inability to limit spending. To be sure, this isn't solely a matter of presidential profligacy. The war that began on Sept. 11, the decision to invade Iraq, and the stubborn, bloody insurgency there have made holding the fiscal line all but impossible. Now comes the hurricane-ravaged Gulf region, with a $62 billion rebuilding tag. And that's just a down payment on a predicted $250 billion in storm-recovery outlays.

Bill Clinton announced, "The era of big government is over." But the Republican-run Congress, with ample help from its Democratic minority, has made a (redundant) liar out of him. As that Congress has focused on social issues--some of them, it seems, purely in the interest of politically expedient symbolism--it's forgotten its Dirksenian pedigree of frugality. The president would do his party, his legacy, and our kids a favor by returning, to the extent a dangerous world allows, to his party's fiscally conservative roots. So far, he hasn't vetoed a single spending bill sent his way by a spendthrift Congress.

With Republicans controlling both chambers of the national legislature since 1994 and the White House since 2000, fiscal restraint has been the single most unrealized result. Indeed, the current federal deficit is at least $422 billion. Discretionary spending on the Bush watch has risen to a record high $840 billion in 2005, after averaging between $600 billion and $700 billion during most of the Clinton years, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Bush prescription-drug program, to single out a budgetary blockbuster, threatens to explode entitlement outlays even as the president has evidently thrown up his hands on Social Security reform. Originally put at $395 billion over 10 years, the Medicare plan estimate has ballooned to more than $500 billion--and even that gargantuan figure may be low given the graying baby-boom population.

Congress gets a large share of the blame, as illustrated by the recently passed transportation bill. The watchdog group Citizens for Common Sense reports that the measure came before the House last March with 4,128 earmarked pet projects totaling $12.4 billion. By the time it passed in August, the number of goodies had grown to 6,373 with a price tag of $24.2 billion--almost double the cost of the first slab of pork--and represented nearly 10 percent of the entire $286.4 billion transportation package. Virginia, by the way, is the 12th largest beneficiary of that porcine frenzy, with 152 projects totaling $563 million--a subject the Heritage Foundation's august Ron Utt discusses on the page opposite.

Embroidering the Clinton pronouncement on Leviathan, George W. Bush on the 2000 campaign trial warned: "If the vice president [Al Gore] gets elected, the era of big government being over is over." But, as Sen. Dirksen might point out were he still with us, a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, Mr. Bush, and soon you're talking really big government.