'Hello, Suckers!' | National Review Online
By Michael Walsh
The most depressing thing about having the GOP be, by default, the political party that ostensibly represents conservatives is its utter inability to actually do anything. For decades, conservatives have been working for and voting for candidates who promise to cut back the size of government, stand up to the Left, reform the Ponzi Scheme known as Social Security, simplify the tax code, etc., and yet how many of these things actually have been accomplished? Correct if you answered zero. True, he did reform the tax code (an improvement quickly undone by Clinton) but not even the sainted Ronnie himself made good on his promises to get rid of the departments of Energy and Education, or of checking and reversing the growth of the Leviathan state. As the von Mises Institute noted near the end of the Reagan years:
The budget for the Department of Education, which candidate Reagan promised to abolish along with the Department of Energy, has more than doubled to $22.7 billion, Social Security spending has risen from $179 billion in 1981 to $269 billion in 1986. The price of farm programs went from $21.4 billion in 1981 to $51.4 billion in 1987, a 140% increase. And this doesn’t count the recently signed $4 billion “drought-relief” measure. Medicare spending in 1981 was $43.5 billion; in 1987 it hit $80 billion. Federal entitlements cost $197.1 billion in 1981—and $477 billion in 1987.
Foreign aid has also risen, from $10 billion to $22 billion. Every year, Reagan asked for more foreign-aid money than the Congress was willing to spend. He also pushed through Congress an $8.4 billion increase in the U.S. “contribution” to the International Monetary Fund.
His budget cuts were actually cuts in projected spending, not absolute cuts in current spending levels. As Reagan put it, “We’re not attempting to cut either spending or taxing levels below that which we presently have.”
The result has been unprecedented government debt.
Ah, the good old days, when a billion was still a lot of money.
In short, the Republicans are mostly bark, and very little bite; even when they get the chance to do something, they don’t — blocked by their own political ineptitude, or by members of their own party, who owe more allegiance to their fellow club members in the House and, especially, the Senate than they do to the people who elected them in the first place. As Texas Guinan used to say to visitors to the speakeasy nightclubs she fronted for the great Irish-American gangster, Owney Madden: ”Hello, suckers!”
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