A Spectacular Failure and Guide to Success The Struggle to Limit Government: A Modern Political History John Samples, The Cato Institute, 375 pages W. James Antle III
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ow serious are the Republicans about limited government? It’s a perennial question posed by lovers of liberty that has usually yielded a disappointing answer. On the campaign trail, Republican “revolutionaries” say all the right things about devolution, shutting down federal agencies, and cutting spending. In power, they customarily create new federal programs, start new government agencies, and increase spending. Increasingly, in even-numbered years Republicans promise balanced budgets and fiscal restraint while in odd-numbered years they deliver deficits and war. This sad history already seems to be repeating itself with the new Republican majority in the House and their allies in the Senate. President Obama proposed a federal budget with a $1.65 trillion deficit. The Republicans countered with an “austerity” budget that runs a $1.55 trillion deficit. The Democrats in the White House are thus proposing to add $13 trillion to the national debt. The Republican plan would add $12 trillion. Talk about the lesser of two evils! In some ways, this is not surprising. Back in the 1990s, Republicans pledged to balance the budget in seven years. Today, the boldest GOP plan for reversing the tide of red ink—one with barely more than a dozen sponsors and without leadership support—balances the budget in a little over 50 years. Yet all is not quite lost. When the first Republican continuing resolution came up for a vote, six GOP House members voted against it because it didn’t go far enough in reducing spending. That number increased to 54 on the second stopgap spending bill. A critical mass of Republican senators clamor for spending cuts. Republicans who care about limited government may be an endangered species, but they are not extinct. The Tea Party may even begin growing their ranks. If such Republicans can overcome the complacency of their leaders, they ought to consult John Samples’ latest book for some handy “do’s” and “don’ts.” Samples, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Responsive Government, has written The Struggle to Limit Government: A Modern Political History. So one-sided is this “struggle” that cynics could be forgiven for wondering if future volumes will be titled Custer’s Struggle to Win the Battle of Little Bighorn, The Struggle to Defend the Alamo, and The Struggle of Nice Ugly Guys: A Modern Romantic History. Even on the rare occasions Republicans have seriously tried to cut government spending, they have failed spectacularly. But that’s not to say they never did any good whatsoever or that there isn’t
anything future advocates of limited government could learn from their mistakes. Those are the very lessons Samples imparts. After explaining how the New Deal and the Great Society enshrined the welfare state as the country’s established political order, Samples begins with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Although a former Franklin Delano Roosevelt Democrat himself with vestigial attachments to his former liberalism, Reagan had a mandate to mount the first serious challenge to the post-New Deal order. The results were mixed at best. During Reagan’s first year in office, he signed into law reductions in taxes and spending, including an across-the-board 25 percent cut in marginal income tax rates. But as Samples documents, the spending cuts were wee things: overall projected federal spending was reduced by 4.7 percent in 1981. Factor in inflation and the Reagan budget cuts totaled about 5 percent of the total cost of government. Domestic discretionary spending was cut by 14.2 percent in the first year, with some Great Society programs taking major hits: the Community Development Block Grant Service “lost two-thirds of its funding;” mass transit spending was cut by one-third. Samples quotes Sen. Pete Domenici, a Republican from New Mexico, as saying that the 1981 budget represented “the most dramatic reduction in the ongoing programs in the history of the country.” But the Cato scholar also acknowledges that this was partly because federal spending had risen so much in the previous three decades, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the economy. Reagan halted a trend that would have ballooned federal spending to 25 percent of GDP without his spending cuts but hardly reversed it by actually shrinking government. Worse, most of Reagan’s budget cuts were reversed by future Congresses. Reagan lost his bipartisan conservative working majority in the House in the 1982 elections. Republicans lost control of the Senate in 1986. Entitlement spending was largely untouched, with attempts to slow Social Security’s growth thwarted. Defense spending increased. Reagan left office having signed into law the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988, an expansion of entitlement spending so disastrous it was actually repealed a year and half later. Deficits ballooned and the national debt doubled. Reagan had more enduring successes on taxes. He slashed the top marginal income tax rate from a staggering 70 percent in 1981 to 28 percent by the time he left office. The number of tax brack-
37 Young American Revolution