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Friday, January 25, 2008
Big Government? It’s time to wean Americans of dependency
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Whether the limited-government party of Ronald Reagan can win the White House or whether its chances would be improved by reinventing conservatism, is a subtext of a long primary season which is yet to establish a clear Republican front-runner.
Throughout the administration of President Bush, the party has wrestled with accommodation with Big Government. That dilemma will persist for decades to come.
After the initial success of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, American Enterprise Institute scholar Henry Olsen and others questioned whether Republicans were tempted to invent themselves as a pro-faith, pro-government party akin to Europe’s Christian Democrats.
“Christian Democrat parties have always distinguished themselves from liberals and socialists,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “favoring private property and traditional values while supporting government regulation and taxation to ameliorate what they perceive to be capitalism’s defects.”
Whether the model is perceived as European or as Democrat-light, it is increasingly clear that a limited-government party that exercises fiscal discipline is a tough sell — no reason to give up, but a reason to keep focused on the end game.
The reasons for the tough sell are many. Workers who feel threatened by global competition, those with whom Huckabee connected, want a government that will protect them and their jobs. Baby boomers who’ve now begun to retire will be an aggressive constituency for expanded benefits. The federal government was projected to spend about a fifth of the nation’s economic output, $2.7 trillion, in 2007. Of that, about 45 percent went to support Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
A cultural trend does not bode well, either. Children increasingly are being brought into the world without a mother and father in the home. Some 70 percent of black children, almost half of Hispanics and a quarter of whites are born to unwed women. For poor families, the government has become the father and husband.
Illegal immigration increases the demand for government, too. An analysis last year by Robert E. Rector and Christine Kim for the conservative Heritage Foundation found that “at least 50 percent, and perhaps 60 percent of illegal immigrant adults lack a high school degree.” Low skills equals high poverty — meaning that immigrant households, legal and illegal, need far more in services than their taxes support.
The point is that claimants grow while the tax base shrinks. A worrisome disconnect exists between those who pay for government and those who demand its services.
The Washington-based Tax Foundation found that in 2005, Americans filed 134.4 million tax returns, with 90.6 million paying something — meaning that 44 million filers paid nothing or got a check from Uncle Sam.
That’s 32.6 percent of those who filed returns. In 1988, at the end of Reagan’s second term, that percentage was 20.6 percent.
“Personal income” is not just salaries and investments. It also includes benefits, such as medical insurance and employer contributions to retirement plans.
The top 50 percent of taxpayers pay 97 percent of the individual income taxes.
The argument here is not tax policy, but simply to note that the base is narrowing while dependency grows.
Trends favor Democrats. A party that offers smaller government appeals to Reaganites, but it cannot sustain a majority by making grand efforts to whittle away at programs, only to see Democrats restored to power on the power to expand them.
The trick is to wean dependency by offering alternatives that build self-reliance. Health savings accounts. Retirement savings accounts. Promoting private-sector alternatives and competition in health care, transportation and other services. The GOP has to come up with a viable alternative for security conscious individuals who have grown dependent on the mailman. But first it has to get into position to do that.
It’s easy to look at the current field of presidential contenders and want for more — more in the sense of a Reagan clone. Conservatives have to be willing to accept that the nominee most likely to win the White House won’t be the one who tells the country to suck it up and go. John McCain told Michigan voters that about their factory jobs — and got waylaid in the primary. This is not a suck-it-up-and-go country anymore.
It’s a country comfortable with big interventionist government, one financed by somebody else. That can be changed. But it will take time.
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