The Politics of Payoff

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27059-2003Dec1.html

washingtonpost.com
The Politics of Payoff


By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, December 2, 2003; Page A27


President Bush likes to talk about the need for "fiscal sanity in
Washington." His decision to run up the national debt is entirely sane -- as
long as you understand his real purpose. Bush doesn't care a whit about
deficits. That's because he is not a fiscal conservative. He is a political
conservative out to buy himself a majority in 2004 and spending the next
generation's money to do it.

Some act mystified, as if conservatives are always more responsible with the
people's money than liberals. But it's possible to be generous toward social
needs and pay as you go. That's what liberals have usually done. Paul Gigot,
the Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page editor, once called
this approach "balanced-budget liberalism." It's conservatives, not
liberals, who twice over the past quarter-century have created extravagant
deficits.

It's also forgotten that redistribution to the poor is not the only way to
shift money around. The government's coffers can also be run down by
redistribution to the wealthy and to favored interest groups. And when it
comes to the politics of payoff, the president and his allies are nothing
short of brilliant. Disgorging public money to your friends makes political
sense. By recycling a small fraction of the cash back to Bush and his party
in the form of campaign contributions, those friends are financing the
construction of a mighty political machine. It's a weird form of public
financing of campaigns -- confined to one party.

Bush's first tax cut distributed just enough to middle-class families to
give cover for a plan that largely helped the best-off Americans. Next came
the dividends tax cut, an even more naked transfer of cash to the wealthy.
At least a fifth of the benefits of this year's tax package went to a mere
four-tenths of 1 percent of taxpayers, those making more than $500,000 a
year. One-third of Americans got nothing, and half got less than $100 a
year.

But it doesn't stop there. Public spending per person is higher under Bush
than it was under Bill Clinton. Where is it going? A share of it is for big
increases in defense spending. Assume all that spending is justified. It
still helps build a Republican majority. The people at Boeing, Lockheed
Martin, Northrop Grumman and the like give the bulk of their campaign
contributions to the Republicans.

The Medicare drug bill seeks to expand Bush's reach to senior citizens. But
many of its provisions help core Republican constituencies, including
private health plans that get billions to compete with Medicare. Another $25
billion goes to rural hospitals. Troubled urban hospitals don't get similar
help, but urban areas didn't vote for Bush. Another $6 billion in the bill
for health savings accounts also helps Republican contributors.

The pharmaceutical companies are so generous to Republicans that they might
start giving out free Viagra and Lipitor at fundraisers. Drug company
executives love it that the drug bill forbids Medicare from using its
bargaining power to bring down the cost of drugs. Fiscal conservatives might
want to contain taxpayer outlays to the drug manufacturers. Political
conservatives prefer to protect their industry friends. Then there is that
amazing $31 billion energy bill, blocked so far by genuine fiscal
conservatives such as Sen. John McCain. Bush and most Republicans had been
fighting hard for the bill's extravagant subsidies to all sorts of special
interests, beginning with the oil and gas industry.

And why not? As The Post's Tom Edsall reported, the bill provides benefits
to at least 22 executives and their spouses who have qualified in Bush's two
top categories of fundraisers. At least 15 lobbyists for interests helped by
the bill and their spouses achieved similar Bush MVP fundraising status.
Back in the Clinton days, self-styled "deficit hawks" decried efforts to
pass universal health coverage on the grounds that doing so might deepen the
deficit. Now many of the same supposed deficit hawks happily vote for
budget-busting giveaways that benefit their party's ideological and business
allies. Politicians who can't say 10 words without praising "free markets"
back big subsidies that will tilt the market toward their contributors. Few
challenge their capitalist credentials.

Building transit, roads and schools, and helping the young and the poor buy
health insurance and get a better education -- these might justify deficits
to finance investments for the next generation. Sending us into a hole to
buy an election and to help well-connected interest groups just doesn't seem
worth it.

The New Big Spenders are very different from the old ones. How long will it
take us to understand that?

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© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator." - GW Bush 12/18/2000.

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that
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and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
---Theodore Roosevelt

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Iraq."
-- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,