Back to Work - Bill Clinton [13]
That’s really why no comprehensive long-term agreement came out of the 2011 budget negotiations. The central tenet of antigovernment ideology is that all tax hikes, even when coupled with much larger spending cuts, are bad. The evidence is irrelevant.
It hasn’t always been that way. Previous Republican presidents did not hesitate to invest tax money and use the power of government when the evidence supported doing so. Abraham Lincoln, a self-made man who said society needs wealthy people to encourage industry and enterprise in others, got Congress to fund the transcontinental railroad and, in the heat of the Civil War, signed the Morrill Act, which set aside land in each state on which to establish public universities. Theodore Roosevelt used the power of the federal government to manage our transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, limiting monopolies’ power to fix prices and to abuse women and children in the workplace and protecting vast tracts of western lands from private development. Dwight Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System with tax dollars and sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision on school integration. Richard Nixon signed legislation establishing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the EPA, signed an executive order strengthening the federal affirmative action program, and for the first time since World War II imposed wage and price controls to fend off inflation.
Even after the dawn of the antigovernment era, President Reagan signed budgets that restored a sizable portion of the revenues lost to his big tax cuts, including a bill that stabilized the Social Security system for twenty-five years by adjusting benefits and raising taxes. President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act; strong amendments to the Clean Air Act to limit smog, acid rain, and emissions of toxic chemicals; and the budget reforms of 1991, which restrained spending, established the PAYGO rule, and modestly raised taxes.6 And President George W. Bush supported the No Child Left Behind law; the senior citizens’ drug benefit; President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which provided unprecedented American support for the global fight against AIDS and malaria; and large investments in nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In fact, the first three decades of the antigovernment movement have been more antitax and antiregulation than antispending. The lone exception, before 2011, is the yearlong budget battle I waged with the pre–Tea Party antigovernment Congress in 1995 over their plan to dramatically cut education, health, and environmental spending. In a failed effort to force those of us who disagreed with them to give in to their demands, they shut the government down, twice. After public opinion moved clearly toward my position, we finally got down to the people’s business, agreeing on a reasonable budget, then the Balanced Budget Act, which produced the first of four surplus budgets in a row for the first time in seventy years.
President Obama faces a different challenge. Because of the deep recession, he didn’t repeal the Bush tax cuts when the Democrats were in the majority in 2009 and 2010. Instead, to shore up a suffering economy, he enacted both more tax cuts and more spending. Now he’s trying to convince Republicans to agree to a long-term deficit-reduction plan that includes both spending cuts and new tax revenues. I didn’t have to do that. Even in 1993 with a Democratic Congress, the budget with its spending cuts and tax increases passed by just one vote in the House and one in the Senate, with Vice President Gore breaking a tie.
President Reagan’s budget director David Stockman has explained how the era of large permanent deficits began in 1981. At first, the Reagan administration thought that by cutting taxes, they could force big cuts in domestic spending. But when it turned out that the White House and both parties in Congress wanted to keep