Conservative

By Russ Wung

---

On the surface, it is hard to find fault with the recent and often repeated claim that the size of government, big or small, is irrelevant as long as that government works. Yet recent events — and Congress’s behavior dating back all the way to 2005 — suggest that this claim is fatally flawed in presupposing that big government can ever possibly be effective.

The “compromise” stimulus bill is just the latest in the story of governmental incompetence. By stretching the notion that deficit spending can be used to help the economy into the incredibly glib assertion that “spending is stimulus,” politicians have created the perfect blank check for themselves.

Otto von Bismarck was perhaps speaking for legislators everywhere when he suggested that “laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made.” Thankfully, we do see laws being made in this country. Is it bipartisanship or a conspiracy against the taxpayer? As far as the stimulus bill goes, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

In January, many commentators made the plausible argument that massive infrastructure spending could be a win-win proposition. Yet barely any of the stimulus funds are actually destined for such purposes. Instead, what we have is an atrocious mish-mash of decidedly unstimulating special interest appropriations and bureaucratic expansion.

So the size of government does matter — an incompetent big government is far more damaging than an incompetent small government. Furthermore, it is quite possible to have a competent small government but essentially impossible to have a competent big government.

Take the private sector. Corporations exist to earn profits. To do so, they must be lean, agile and efficient no matter their absolute size. Yet empirical observation suggests that staying this way is nearly impossible over the long term. Big corporations seldom remain market leaders for more than a few decades unless propped up by the government; many of the companies that were near the top of the Fortune 500 in 1955 no longer exist today.

U.S. Steel, founded in 1901, is one exception — by streamlining itself, it has become much smaller but remained competitive. Its contemporary rivals failed to do so and eventually faded away.

With a more nebulous mandate (providing public goods) than the profit motive and the ability to borrow indefinitely, big governments are even more at risk of becoming bloated and ineffectual over time than big companies. Furthermore, governments must aspire to function well for centuries rather than decades.

The only sort of organization, public or private, that can get fairly large without becoming increasingly impotent is the military, which cannot serve as a model for civilian purposes. In all other respects, big governments are never efficient ones; small government is a necessary means to an end.

One mistake George Bush could have easily avoided in 2005 and 2006 was failing to stand up to his own party’s fiscal wastefulness by vetoing bloated budgets. The stimulus bill of 2009 constitutes the biggest waste of taxpayer funds since the New Deal.

There is much inane carrying-on about how historic the new administration is. But it will be doomed to repeat history — a decades-long, disgraceful history of government bloat going back to FDR — if it goes down the same spendthrift path that the congressional Democrats have paved for it.

Reach columnist Russ Wung at opinion@dailyuw.com.

Liberal

By Chris Jordan

---

The Great Stimulus Battle of 2009 has — at least temporarily — come to an end. The final “compromise” version of the bill that emerged from negotiations between House and Senate leaders totaled roughly $796 billion, curiously smaller than both the original House and Senate versions.

So what was cut? In order to please the Republicans — who didn’t vote for the bill anyway — what kinds of horrible, wasteful, liberal, socialist spending programs were not included in the final version?

For one, President Obama’s middle-class tax cut was scaled back. Everyone knows that “middle-class tax cut” or “tax cut for 95 percent of Americans” is really code for “communism” or “redistribution,” while “corporate tax cut” or “tax cut for ExxonMobil” is simply good old conservative, free-market Reaganomics, right?

Billions of dollars for shovel-ready school construction and modernization projects were gutted, and thank God for that. Apparently, Republican fears that federal spending on school construction during these extraordinary times would somehow lead to a federal takeover of education curriculum were considered more important than actually creating jobs in the short term.

Finally, a $15,000 tax credit for home buyers purchasing a primary residence, which many experts agreed would have had a major impact on kick-starting the housing market, was removed.

While it is a great victory for the new president that the stimulus bill passed and contained basically what he originally said it should, Barack Obama would do well to take away a few lessons from this showdown.

Despite putting in more tax cuts than he wanted to, putting in less school construction money than he wanted to, less money for health care than he wanted to, less middle-class tax relief than he wanted to and more time and effort trying to win over Republicans than he probably wanted to, Obama was only able to persuade three out of the 219 GOP lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to vote with him. For all the president’s effort, that’s only a measly 1.4 percent of Republicans. He failed to convince the other 98.6 percent.

Let me put it this way: In order to make three Republican politicians happy, the president and congressional Democrats were forced to make the stimulus bill substantially less stimulating.

I’m all for bipartisanship and tackling big challenges together. I would love to see the two parties work together on issues like energy and climate change, where there is some agreement.

In this case, however, President Obama extended the olive branch to Republicans in Congress and sacrificed a lot. He got almost nothing in return. His administration wanted to be able to get close to 80 votes in the Senate and claim that its first major legislative victory was a grand, bipartisan effort. Early on in the process, it should have been clear that this was all a pipe dream. What Obama got was a weaker stimulus bill and a national narrative about how the votes were almost exactly on party lines. Despite the Democrats’ concessions, Republicans wanted it their way or the highway. They haven’t yet gotten used to what it means to be defeated handily in two straight elections. When you lose, you’re supposed to take what you can get, not demand everything you want.

Sometimes when you have such a strong majority in Congress, you simply have to go for what you think is the absolute best bill possible for the good of the country, even if it means winning zero percent of the Republicans instead of 1.4 percent. I would have much rather seen a stronger, trillion dollar bill with zero Republican votes than a somewhat stripped-down $800 billion bill with only three Republican votes.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

1 Comments

---

13 Comments

---