Democratic tribulations - On the Right - Column

National Review, Nov 21, 1994 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

The so-called Contract' read out by Congressman Gingrich on the steps of the Capitol has been the source of much amusement, a little of it contrived. The gravamen of the criticism has been to the effect that here we had 152 Republican congressmen theatrically assembled, together with more than 185 aspirant congressmen, to pledge themselves to square a circle. Everybody knows that you cannot square a circle, right? "Do not urge a triangle to break out of the prison of its three sides, else its life will come to a lamentable end," was how Chesterton put it. And critics are saying that you cannot have a balanced budget at the same time as you have a reduction in taxes, let alone an increase in defense expenditures.

What brought special delight to Democratic strategists was that they had finally been given something tangible to chew on. Up until the Contract, what they had had to do was to defend President Clinton, not something many Democrats wished to undertake, at least not those who don't make it a practice to scale Mt. Everest during their vacations, or bicycle across Niagara Falls. The exuberant feeling now was that they could change the subject, when the word Clinton came up, and turn instead to Republican hypocrisy. Hypocrisy because nobody can lower taxes and reduce the budget at the same time, hypocrisy because the Contract was ever-so-careful not to specify what reductions in federal outlays the Republicans would have to sponsor m order to reduce spending at all. Such things as Social Security and Medicare.

That tactic had a fatal accident over the weekend when someone revealed a working paper for the Clinton White House on how m the future federal expenditures might be trimmed. What ho! - among the recommendations are reductions in Social Security expenditures and in Medicare. Mr. Clinton rushed to the microphones to deny that he harbored any such intention, to insist that the working paper was the scribbling of some teenage staffer working in the attic of the White House, etc., etc. Certain things we do not talk about even if they are contemplated. By the year 2002, 50 per cent of the federal budget is going to be spent on babybooming senior citizens, as things are currently drafted. Manifestly, something has to be done, involving Social Security (e.g., indexation of senior-citizenship) and Medicare (e.g., larger deductibles).

Up against their own memo, the Democratic heavy thinkers decided that the thing to do was to invoke the nightmare of Reaganism. Do you want to go back to Reaganomics? To trickle-down economics? To rich get richer, poor get poorer? To ... the Grapes of Wrath?

There was one problem with this strategy, nicely summarized by one forlorn Democratic strategist quoted in The New Yorker by Michael Kelly: "They don't see the true scope of it. The President and his political people do not understand what has happened here. Not one of them ever comes out of that compound. They get in there at 7 A.M. and leave at 10 P.M., and never get out. They walk around the place, all pale and haggard, clutching their papers, running from meeting to meeting, and they don't have a clue what's going on out here. I mean, not a clue.... They think people hate Ronald Reagan, but I don't think people do."

In warning against Reaganism, the Democrats perforce stress the contrast between then and now. This is not an entirely encouraging enterprise. We had begun to climb out of the Bush recession well before Mr. Clinton was elected, and back in the Reagan days the GNP rose at a higher rate than today. Furthermore, the statistics for the first 11 months of fiscal 1994 reveal that whereas total federal revenues increased by 9.3 per cent, those that came in through personal income taxes increased by only 6.8 per cent.

How come? Reaganism in reverse is already here: Increase the marginal rate of taxation, decrease revenues. All in all an unhappy time for Democratic statisticians who are out there defending the circularity of the circle, against which the Contract of Messrs. Gingrich et al. is engaging the public imagination.