Addicted to Spending

Robert Novak today reports on the growing discontent among conservatives over the spending spree in Washington. The Republican leadership seem to have given themselves entirely over to the notion that they must spend like drunken Democrats in order to maintain power. In so doing, I expect they will manage to alienate just about everyone. The Republicans have presided over a plethora of vote-buying schemes, but without actually buying any votes or gaining any popular support. If the purpose of enacting new entitlement programs is to curry public favor (and it almost always is), then what is the point of breaking the bank to pay for unpopular programs? After five years of an unprecedented spending spree, Republicans find themselves in a precarious position: vote-buying spending without vote-buying results to show for it. Now that's quite a feat in politics.

The bloated Medicare prescription drug benefit is a prime example. A few courageous Republicans, such as Mike Pence of Indiana, have called on the biggest entitlement increase in history to be scaled back, but Republican leaders and the White House will not allow the program to be altered in any way. My question: Why not? Is there any person on the planet who bases his support of President Bush on the prescription drug plan? Were any Democrats swayed? Were any seniors appreciative? Were any conservatives happy?

The answer to all these questions is a resounding no, and yet the Republican leadership cling to the plan as if their political lives depended on it. They may be right, but not in the way they think.

But the Republicans are not solely to blame for the huge federal deficits. Often times politicians are merely responding to the wishes of those who voted for them. Voters decry the government's free-spending ways, until they are asked to give up federally-funded projects in their home districts. As any freshman congressman knows, woe be unto the politician who fails to lavish his constituents with federal dollars. If the American people were serious about deficit reduction, they would reward representatives who refuse to send pork home, instead of punishing them.

And then there is the astounding sophistry of the Democrats. The mark of an unserious party is its willingness to attack its opponents no matter what they do. Democrats have fiercely criticized the Bush administration for its loose fiscal policies, but when the administration proposed some rather puny budget cuts earlier this year, the same people who criticize Bush for spending too much then criticized him for spending too little. These blatantly opportunistic and hypocritcal attacks offer a disconcerting reminder that for all the Republicans' faults, one need only look to the Democrats to see what a party that is truly bereft of ideas looks like.

What a tragedy it is that in these tumultuous times, America has only two choices: A party that is all too eager to abandon its principles in a misguided effort to maintain power, and a party that never had any principles to begin with.