Bush's Spending Spree -- Making LBJ Proud

Pete DuPont, policy chairman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, writes in his monthly column for OpinionJournal.com:

"[I]n the first three budgets of the Bush administration, nondefense discretionary spending will have increased an average of 5.8% per year, exceeding in just three years the total increase of such spending in all eight Clinton budgets. In other words, American government is on a domestic spending spree....So the largest domestic challenge facing the Bush administration in the next 5 1/2 years is limiting and controlling federal spending. The president cannot look to Congress for help, for it has a perpetual bipartisan bias towards spending. Nor can he count on economic growth to cover 5% annual spending increases."

He rightly criticizes the Administration for its $26 billion education bill, its $85 billion farm bill, and the proposed $400 billion Medicare prescription drug program, which will carry forward an unfunded liability of $7.5 trillion. While George W. Bush campaigned on the prescription drugs for seniors platform in 2000, he also advocated a partial privatization of Social Security for younger workers. Massive new commitments under the present system are not the road to substantive reform. Such commitments simply only dig the fiscal hole deeper and make the public even more wedded to the welfare state's promises of security and largesse.

Several months ago, the new editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller, wrote a compelling piece on George W. Bush as "Reagan's Son." His contention was that the current president is more a kindred policy spirit of his father's predecessor than his father, given his penchant for tax cuts and a muscular foreign policy. But the mantle of Reagan has yet to be carried, especially in this era of relatively secure Republican majorities. Which raises the larger issue of whether the national GOP is a "big government for me, but not for thee" party. The Wall Street Journal ran a lead editorial after the "revolutionary" 1994 elections entitled "The Rest of Him," in response to the hypothetical raised by Reagan's first autobiography, Where's The Rest of Me?, penned shortly before his run for governor. We all know now that the "era of big government being over" was over after President Clinton outplayed Newt Gingrich over the government shutdown and in the disastrous 1998 congressional elections.

With these domestic spending programs (including the little-known New Freedom Initiative), and the expenses --- financial and human --- of protracted global entanglements, Bush seems much less like Reagan's son than he does LBJ's poker buddy: all too content to play cards indefinitely on a diet of pork rinds, guns and butter.