Four more years!?!?! 7 high hopes and 7 big fears for Bush's second term

Reason, Feb, 2005

Nadine Strossen is president of the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu. org) and a professor at New York Law School.

I Hope ... Regulations Will Be Restrained

Virginia Postrel

NEW REGULATIONS COME from two places: new legislation, often in response to some sort of momentary panic (think Sarbanes-Oxley, the extraordinarily costly response to turn-of-the-century corporate scandals), and continuous bureaucratic rule making. In its first term, the Bush administration exercised unusual restraint in producing new regulations.

"Since the younger Bush took office, federal agencies have begun roughly one-quarter fewer rules than Clinton and 13 percent fewer than Bush's father during comparable periods," The Washington Post reported in mid-August. Around the same time, The New York Times ran a remarkable chart showing that the Bush administration had imposed new regulations costing an average of $1.6 billion annually, compared to $6.2 billion for the Clinton administration, $8.5 billion for Bush 41, and $8.1 billion for the last two years of the Reagan administration.

The newspapers framed their reports as criticisms. Journalists and legislators tend to treat regulation as feel-good symbolism, a cheap way to demonstrate right-thinking attitudes. Its costs, in both out-of-pocket expense and foregone benefits (including never-explored innovations), get far less scrutiny than the taxes and spending that constitute the usual view of "economic policy."

Less new regulation isn't deregulation, but the Bush administration's low-profile focus on regulatory costs represents a real challenge to bureaucracy as usual. My hope for a second term is to see this approach continue--and to push back against the current drive for tighter Food and Drug Administration restrictions. My fear is of new legislative panics, leading to new regulatory laws, particularly in biomedicine.

Virginia Postrel (dynamist.com) is the author of The Substance of Style, recently published in paperback by Perennial, and The Future and Its Enemies (Free Press).

I Fear ... Spending Won't Be Restrained

John Berthoud

BY THE TIME the books are closed on the current fiscal year, federal spending will have risen by roughly 20 percent in real terms since the last budget signed into law by Bill Clinton. This four-year spending explosion has not been limited to the areas of defense and homeland security. Spending at the Department of Agriculture will have risen in real terms by an estimated 19 percent, at the Department of Labor by 40 percent, and at the Department of Education by 74 percent.

The entire eight years of the Bush administration are thus unlikely ever to be seen as a landmark in the fight for smaller government. At best, a concerted effort at spending restraint in the second term will make a difference between a so-so record and a historically disastrous one.

The Bush administration has spent no political capital in the fight against big government in the first term. Instead, it has opted to focus on spin (talking about how Washington has ratcheted down spending growth to 1 percent--true only if you exclude 82 percent of the budget). Bush may have no greater desire to use political capital on this important fight in a second term. But continuing to turn a blind eye to congressional spending will jeopardize the president's tax agenda. Given that taxes were one area of substantial domestic policy differentiation between Republicans and Democrats in 2004, if that distinction evaporates much of the Republican voting base may find better things to do when the next election rolls around.