The Bush Bender

In a short article in Atlantic Monthly http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200606/tax-cuts (subscription required), Jonathan Rauch points out that the conservative “starve the beast” idea was doomed from the start. In sum, cutting taxes without cutting spending makes government seem less expensive; therefore, folks want more of it. It’s like weight loss, sort of, you can’t just diet; you have to exercise because your metabolism adjusts to the change in food intake. The electorate adjusts to the apparently decreased cost of government and develops a decidedly government friendly attitude. You have to tax at 19% or more of GDP to get folks to want to cut back on government.

I don’t think that conservatives ever really believed in “starve the beast”. It was just some simpleminded catch phrase to capture the imagination of the slack jawed yahoos in the new GOP base. I remember listening to Ronald Reagan’s radio show in the 1970s (my bus driver had it on, so it was not voluntary), and his insistence on balanced budgets seemed sensible to me. It was surprising, then, that he abandoned fiscal responsibility altogether when campaigning in 1980. He proposed to cut taxes without cutting spending and this was supposed to result in smaller government somehow. In fact, it resulted in bigger government than ever, and it took Democrats to restore any sense of fiscal sanity until the GOP could come in and break the bank again.

Maybe Reagan really believed the “starve the beast” line, but then again he was not the brightest star in the presidential sky. What is more likely is that conservatives have intended all along to cut taxes, whether responsibly or not, in a cynical ploy to get votes while using high levels of government spending to funnel money to supporters through patronage and contracts. They know that the trough will eventually be empty and that they will lose power, so they scarf up all they can while they have the chance. Then they leave the painful work of cleaning up their mess to the opposition party.

The clean up gets the treasury restocked and ripe for a new round of conservative plunder. The clean up involves sacrifice by people, and they eventually forget how crooked the conservatives were, in part because conservatives have been revising history to portray the last GOP president as great instead of as the corrupt and barely competent buffoon he really was. Reagan was apotheosized even though he was a failure, and you will see GW Bush portrayed positively come 2016 when the next round of conservative hacks arise from the ooze. “I’m a Bush conservative,” the candidate will proudly assert as if GW Bush had not screwed up everything he touched. And the yahoos will have forgotten what a disaster the Bush presidency really was.

It really is an ingenious racket that the conservatives have been running for the last 30 years. Each conservative bite at the apple leaves the country worse off than the last time, and the repair work of the opposition cannot get the country back to the level of health that it enjoyed before the last conservative assault. It’s as if the country had a kind of split personality where every few years it alternates between going to the gym and eating a healthier diet with periods of heavy binge drinking and whoring. It never gets back into shape entirely, and because it has blacked out the drunken years, it eventually falls back into its profligate ways.

America needs an intervention.