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The GOP is its own enemy
Yes, conservatives, we have reached the promised land.
Looking over the budget, DeLay says there is simply no more fat to be found. To cut further is to carve out muscle and bone. "After 11 years of Republican majority, we've pared it down pretty good."
Presumably, congratulations are in order. But that is not what is coming. "I wonder if we've been serving in the same Congress," snorts Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona.
Even if you exclude the military and homeland security, says David Keene of the American Conservative Union, spending increased $300 billion between 2001 and 2005 as U.S. debt grew by $2 trillion. This translates into a permanent bite on taxpayers of $100 billion unto eternity.
DeLay was trying to shore up the leadership's levee against a storm surge of demands to find spending cuts to offset the Katrina bailout, which is at $62 billion and expected to rise to $200 billion. Among the ideas for "offsets" to pay for relief and reconstruction:
Most of the Katrina spending will come during FY 2006, which begins next week, but the long-term prognosis for the U.S. budget is, in a word, grave.
Spending for Katrina, plus the anticipated loss in GDP and tax revenue from that killer hurricane, should send the deficit toward $500 billion in FY 2006. On top of this is the continuing cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, already between $200 billion and $300 billion.
Meanwhile, the first of the baby boomers, the 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, start reaching 62 and early retirement in 2008. With Medicare underwater and the Social Security surplus to start shrinking in 2009 and disappear in 2018, these two programs alone could consume, if reforms are not made, 20 percent of GDP by 2050.
A sea change has taken place in the character of our national government.
With the passing away of the Greatest Generation and the passing from power of the Silent Generation, born in the Depression and raised in the 1940s and 1950s, the baby boomer generation, in which a "you-can-have-it all!" mind-set was early embedded, now runs both parties and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
The Taft-Goldwater-Reagan-Helms Republicans were prepared to pay the political price for saying "No." But just as the Democrats of the 1930s found the formula for permanent power in "tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect," as Harold Ickes Sr. put it, the Bush Republicans and Big Government conservatives of the 1990s believe they have found an even surer formula for permanent power: "Cut taxes, spend and spend, elect and elect."
One day, not far off, Americans must choose: Either we keep the empire -- or our munificent welfare state. Either we raise taxes and pay as we go -- or we run deficits until foreigners cease to lend us the money and the dollar goes the way of the peso.
When Republican leaders are saying there is no more fat in the federal budget, the proper political translation is that the Grand Old Party of Taft, Goldwater, Reagan and Helms is no more. We have become the very people we went into politics to run out of town.
Pat Buchanan edits The American Conservative magazine.
