SOTU
Even before President Bush gave his State of the Union address on Tuesday, he was being criticized by conservatives for his free-spending ways. Jonah Goldberg:
"Read Tuesday's lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal, and you'll find that this is the spendiest (yes, that's right, 'spendiest') president in American history, second only to LBJ.
"Maybe there's something about presidents from Texas--they like everything big down there, including their government."
The SOTU itself contained goodies like helping ex-convicts get jobs, support for community colleges, and a weird pronouncement about steroid us by professional athletes. Then, of course, there is a new space program.
Update: I forgot the $1.5 billion to promote healthy marriages. One might guess: space-age research to develop a vehicle that converts very easily from a mini-van to a little red sports car? Like a Honda CRV, only better?
Of course not. The President wants to pay for counselling, primarily aimed at low-income couples, to emphasize that marriage is generally a help to achieving financial security and even overall well-being.
There seems to some observers to be a disconnect between making the immigration of unskilled workers easier, on the one hand, and paying to help ex-convicts get jobs, on the other. Employers will be more willing to hire ex-cons, and pay a decent wage, if there is not a vast pool of recent immigrants, legal and illegal, to draw on.
What about the comparison to LBJ, of all people? It is interesting to compare this election-year SOTU with Johnson's in 1964. Of course memories of JFK's assassination were very fresh, and LBJ referred to that in various ways. And he launched the "War on Poverty," which has come to represent, on the domestic front, much that conservatives and neo-conservatives are opposed to.
But consider some other passages:
- plans to enact "the most far-reaching tax cut of our time"
- no overall increase in spending, and in fact all that he proposed could supposedly be done "with an actual reduction in Federal expenditures and Federal employment"
- cut in the deficit "in half--from $10 billion to $4,900 million. It will be, in proportion to our national output, the smallest budget since 1951"
- "by closing down obsolete installations, by curtailing less urgent programs, by cutting back where cutting back seems to be wise, by insisting on a dollar's worth for a dollar spent, I am able to recommend in this reduced budget the most Federal support in history for education, for health, for retraining the unemployed, and for helping the economically and the physically handicapped."
Bush is now promising a similar miracle--an increase in spending on homeland security of close to 10%, with sufficient reductions in other areas to keep spending growth at 1% overall.
Of course, national security was a big issue in the 60s as well, but in early 1964 Johnson simply wanted to give the impression that everything was under control:
"First, we must maintain-and our reduced defense budget will maintain-that margin of military safety and superiority obtained through 3 years of steadily increasing both the quality and the quantity of our strategic, our conventional, and our antiguerrilla forces. In 1964 we will be better prepared than ever before to defend the cause of freedom, whether it is threatened by outright aggression or by the infiltration practiced by those in Hanoi and Havana, who ship arms and men across international borders to foment insurrection. And we must continue to use that strength as John Kennedy used it in the Cuban crisis and for the test ban treaty-to demonstrate both the futility of nuclear war and the possibilities of lasting peace."
Johnson is remembered much more for out-of-control spending--both on domestic programs, some of which were wasteful pie-in-the-sky at the expense of the middle class, and on defence, particularly the Vietnam war. It may be true that he somehow meant the domestic spending stuff more than the tax-cutting, the need for government to be frugal, etc. Still, many conservative themes are there. Things just didn't turn out the way LBJ predicted or hoped.
Who knows which way Bush will go? He simply doesn't seem uncomfortable at big spending programs or deficits. He has never said, like Reagan, that government is the problem. And of course the new war is a justification for who knows what spending, just as "aggression" and "infiltration" were in the 60s.
Bush may be achieving a re-alignment such that Republicans can favour practically everthing--spending, tax cuts, lots of patriotic defence and security spending--because the deficit is somehow not a problem. What are the Democrats supposed to say? Balance the budget, as conservative Republicans used to say? Then you sound like the only sober person at a fraternity party. Spend more on something that's not a priority for the president, like the environment? The public is likely to say: that's being done. Some conservatives are grudgingly admitting that the President's approach is popular, and hoping there will be a "real conservative" party again some day.
In the 1964 campaign, LBJ rode very high, and beat Barry Goldwater overwhelmingly. My favourite line of his from that campaign: "We are in favour of a great many things, and opposed to very few."
Update: For a recent argument by David Greenberg in Slate as to whether the JFK tax cut (partially implemented by LBJ) was of the supply-side, Reaganite type or not, see here. (Democrats say no, JFK was Democrat, trying to re-distribute wealth as well as create it. There's a comment somewhere in the threat on this article that says something like: let's face it, JFK was a conservative). For a reminder that Governor Reagan pushed through the biggest tax increase in California history, see here.
Update: The many spending commitments in Johnson's SOTU are not a surprise today. But what about the hymns to tax cuts?
"Above all, we must release $11 billion of tax reduction into the private spending stream to create new jobs and new markets in every area of this land.
"...every individual American taxpayer and every corporate taxpayer will benefit from the earliest possible passage of the pending tax bill from both the new investment it will bring and the new jobs that it will create.
"That tax bill has been thoroughly discussed for a year. Now we need action. The new budget clearly allows it. Our taxpayers surely deserve it. Our economy strongly demands it. And every month of delay dilutes its benefits in 1964 for consumption, for investment, and for employment."
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