LAST week, Al Gore basically proposed spending a trillion dollars of taxpayer money – the largest increase in the size of a government in peacetime ever considered by any nation in human history.
The silence from the right has been deafening.
True, Gore did not actually put a dollar figure on his plan to create three new “trusts” – which is to say, massive spending plans – with the extra $1 trillion that’s been added to projections of the size of the budget surplus over the next 10 years. The actual numbers will come later. But in the opening speech of his “Prosperity and Progress” tour, he explicitly abjured using the money for an across-the-board tax cut, which is the only way that $1 trillion will not be spent by Washington.
Instead, a few days later, Gore expanded the size of his own targeted tax cuts to $500 billion over 10 years – or an average of $50 billion a year, at a time when surpluses may average $200 billion annually. Some part of the other $1.5 trillion will go toward reducing the national debt. The rest? Gore wants to spend it.
And with the Orwellian revaluation of the English language that has been one of the horrific hallmarks of the Clinton years, he even claims that his choices would be an act of fiscal prudence in comparison to George W. Bush’s. Gore said his guiding principle was “discipline,” and vowed, “I won’t be profligate with your money.”
How on earth can a colossal increase in the size of government through the creation of an Education Trust, a Health Care Trust and an Environmental Trust be considered an act of fiscal discipline? Evidently, because his own tax cut is so mingy.
“I won’t spend money that we don’t yet have on a huge tax cut our economy can’t afford, in ways that could end our prosperity and progress,” he said (with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin at his side to give his words added weight with financial markets).
This is a logical absurdity, even in Gore’s own terms. If the money is there for a tax cut of the size Bush is proposing – and the new budget-surplus projections make clear that there is in spades – then it is by definition affordable.
It is certainly possible to make the argument that there are better things to do with the money. What the budget surplus offers the American people is a rational choice between an affordable tax cut and affordable government programs. Both are affordable because the IRS is collecting more money than the government needs to do its business.
If the popular opinion is that it should continue to do so rather than rebate the money to the people – who right now are simply paying too much for a government that actually costs less than the amount it’s taking in – then so be it.
But that can only be determined if the matter becomes a subject of open debate. And open debate is something George W. Bush and the Republicans are not engaging in at the moment.
Bush has had a very good three months precisely because he has not engaged Gore. Instead, he has systematically and carefully laid out a governing agenda primarily involving Social Security reform on the domestic side and missile defense on the foreign-policy side.
This has been so successful that Gore and the Clinton administration are rushing to catch up with Bush and the Republicans – Gore by proposing a kind of Social Security reform through advocacy of a savings system that was one of the policy planks of the Contract with America, and the administration by moving to deploy a small missile-defense system.
It’s hard to argue with success. And it’s also the case that Republicans from Bush on down have lost confidence in their ability to take the pulse of the nation’s economy.
We were all convinced that the Clinton tax increase in 1993 would have recessionary consequences, as would his government’s regulatory zeal. Instead, the U.S. economy has grown at such astonishing speed that it’s hard to remember that the initial deal between Republicans and Democrats to balance the budget took place a mere three years ago – and that the most optimistic estimates at the time projected a balanced budget only in the year 2002.
The unifying conviction on the right is that the current size of the federal government is primarily a moral issue – that it gives politicians the incentive and the hunger to seize power and authority from the private sphere in ways that do damage to the ethic of personal responsibility that has undergirded the United States since the nation’s founding.
The budget surplus and its implications for the future size and scope of government are by leagues the most important matters on the national agenda this year. If Bush and the Republicans do not even bother to enter the arena and tangle with Gore and the Democrats, they will cut themselves adrift from their core philosophy.
They’ll lose the argument. And they’ll lose their political souls as well.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com