HNN Poll: Is President Bush Trying to Undo the New Deal?

"There you go again," said Ronald Reagan, during his 1980 debate against Jimmy Carter. His simple, gentle jab at his opponent for misstating the Reagan record brought down the house.

Well, there goes Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., again. She accuses President George W. Bush of trying to "undo the New Deal." What?!

Undoing the New Deal? Does she not see the steam blasting from the ears of principled conservatives flatly astonished by President George W. Bush's and his Republican colleagues' willingness to spend, spend and spend? During Bush's term in office, excluding defense and homeland security, non-war government expenditures increased at a rate faster than under former President Bill Clinton. By this time in his term, Reagan vetoed over 20 bills, President George W. Bush, none.

Reagan campaigned to shut down the Department of Education. President Bush shook hands with a smiling Ted Kennedy, D-MA, as they united to pass the so-called "No Child Left Behind Act," increasing the federal government's role in education and, by the way, dropping the dreaded-by-liberals voucher provision. Bush also expanded Head Start despite the program's questionable effectiveness. Ditto with Title I, a program designed to close the academic gap between urban and suburban school districts. Bush's own Secretary of Education Rod Paige said, "After spending $125 billion of Title I money over 25 years, we have virtually nothing to show for it. Fewer than a third of fourth-graders can read at grade level."

Former President Clinton enacted the AmeriCorps program, paying volunteers to volunteer. Bush not only retained the program, he expanded it.

Bush extended unemployment benefits and proposed something he calls a "reemployment account," which, if enacted, gives the unemployed up to $3,000 for job training or services like child care and transportation. It also lets the individual keep the money, assuming he or she finds work within 13 weeks.

President George W. Bush hailed the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law by his father, as a landmark piece of compassionate legislation. The ADA requires employers to "make reasonable accommodations" for employees and prospective employees with disabilities, yet it has actually increased the percentage of unemployment for the work-seeking disabled.

President Bush proposed, and Congress accepted, the largest expansion of a social program since the enactment of Medicare -- the prescription drug plan for senior citizens, expected to cost $400 billion in its first 10 years. But, remember, when Congress enacted Medicare in 1965, they under-projected costs for 1990 by a factor of eight, even after adjusting for inflation.

Similarly, expect the ultimate tab for the prescription benefit bill to exceed $1 trillion in its second decade, paid for, of course, on the backs of young workers in their 20s and 30s. The undoing of the New Deal?

Source:frontpagemag.com

This argument betrays a common misunderstanding of the precise nature of the president's right-wingery. Bush's extremism does not lie in the purity of his devotion to the teachings of Milton Friedman but rather in the slavishness of his fealty to K Street. The distinction is a fine one, but it's highly revealing. In most instances, being pro-free market and pro-business amount to the same thing. Businesses usually want the government out of their way, which is why the business lobby threw its weight behind Bush's efforts to cut taxes, scuttle workplace safety standards, and so on. The way you tell the difference between a free-marketer and a servant of business is how he behaves when the interests of the two diverge. And all the evidence, including the Medicare and energy bills, points to the conclusion that Bush is happy to throw free-market conservatism out the window when business interests so desire.

Consider, for instance, the $180 billion farm bill signed by Bush in 2002. The notion that taxpayers should subsidize farmers rather than, say, butchers or t- shirt salesmen represents the most archaic and unjustifiable kind of government intervention. But farmers have lots of clout in Washington, in part because they're relatively affluent (farm households earn more on average than non-farm households) but mainly due to the disproportionate representation of rural states in the Senate and electoral college. In the course of showering federal largesse upon farmers a year ago, some senators tried to mitigate their shame slightly by limiting payments to $275,000 per farmer. Republicans removed this modest measure. Bush also capitulated to the textile and steel industries by imposing tariffs on competing imports, overruling the advice of his economic advisers. (Only after steel-consuming industries complained and the World Trade Organization ruled the tariffs illegal did Bush finally relent.)

A cornerstone of Bush's domestic policy is his aptitude for economic giveaways that are supported by neither liberals nor true conservatives--indeed, that are supported only by those who profit from them monetarily or politically. Take the energy bill, which lavished subsidies upon favored industries. Not only did environmentalists and mainstream liberal economists denounce it, so did conservative scholars at think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. Everything you need to know about the politics and policy of the energy bill is contained within one sentence that appeared in The Washington Post last month: "The assembled lobbyists--representing farm, corn, soybean, wind, geothermal, coal, oil and gas interests that benefit from provisions in the 1,100 page bill-- gave [GOP Senator and energy-bill champion Pete] Domenici a standing ovation, and he thanked them for helping to push the legislation to the brink of passage, according to one person present."

Similarly, the Medicare bill, supposedly evidence of Bush's moderation, is in fact typical of his domestic agenda, which revolves around granting favors to powerful interest groups. Again, most of the major liberal and conservative think tanks opposed the bill. But the pharmaceutical companies were ecstatic with it: Not only does it subsidize drug purchases, it specifically prohibits the federal government from using its negotiating power to hold down the cost of the drugs it purchases. (Got that? Those who spend your tax dollars are forbidden from striking a good bargain with the drug companies.) The American Medical Association was brought on board with a promise to boost Medicare reimbursements. And employers received federal subsidies--more than twice what they requested--to help cover the cost of their retirees' health care. As Thomas Scully, the Bush appointee who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, put it, businesses received "way beyond their wildest requests" and "should be having a giant ticker-tape parade." Perhaps deeming a ticker-tape parade unseemly, the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce instead launched a lobbying campaign on the bill's behalf.

Source:The New Republic