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Jewish World Review August 5, 2005 / 29 Tammuz, 5765 With regards to Big Government, the GOP is almost hand in hand with Dems By Robert Robb
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Before leaving for its August recess, Congress provided strong reminders
that fiscal conservatives have little to cheer about Republican rule.
The transportation bill demonstrated spending indiscipline. The energy bill
demonstrated market interventionism run amuck.
The federal government got into the transportation business in a big way to
build a federal highway system. Knitting the country together with a
smoothly flowing road system was a justifiable federal activity.
Maintaining that system would be a justifiable federal activity today.
But the transportation bill these days consists primarily of subventions to
state and local governments for local transportation projects. As such, it
violates one of the fundamental principles of federalism: a higher level of
government shouldn't usurp what a lower level of government can do.
Right now, the transportation bill is a political shell game. The federal
government collects far more in gas taxes than it needs for truly federal
activities. Local governments get funding for projects without having to
raise the money for them. And federal politicians get credit for bringing
home the bacon.
Lately, the politics have become increasingly transparent and shameless.
There's an increasingly large number of earmarks, in which members of
Congress designate money for specific projects in their state or districts.
The bill just passed has some 6,000 of them.
There's a tradition of pointing to the earmarks in other states as pork.
But the real issue isn't pork. It's the federal government doing something
that should be a state or local responsibility. And you don't have to look
beyond the borders of Arizona for a multitude of examples.
Why, pray tell, is it a federal responsibility to build a
bicycle-pedestrian bridge at McDowell and 35th Avenue in Phoenix, or a foot
bridge to connect trails across the western bank of Tempe Town Lake?
Now Democrats participate just as enthusiastically in this spendingfest.
But Republicans are supposed to believe in spending discipline and the
principles of federalism. Moreover, the practice of earmarks has rapidly
escalated under Republican rule.
Americans spend over $700 billion a year on energy. That's a big enough
market to provide all the incentives necessary to produce it or to find
cheaper or more reliable ways to make and deliver it.
And market mechanisms are working. In part as a protection against market
volatility, U.S. businesses have retooled and now use less energy per unit
of economic output. As a result of rising gas prices, consumer preferences
have shifted from large SUVs to more fuel-efficient vehicles.
Moreover, the experience of the federal government attempting to shape fuel
mixes is not encouraging. For example, it dumped billions into the dry hole
of synthetic fuels.
It might be a useful exercise for the federal government to identify
barriers it has created to energy production and consider whether to ease
or modify them. But there is very little of that in this energy bill.
Instead, it offers subsidies for every form of energy known to man or his
imagination: oil, natural gas, ethanol, nuclear, solar, hydroelectric,
hydrogen, clean coal, wind, biomass and geothermal.
These measures are intended to increase energy supplies, which would reduce
prices and encourage consumption. Yet the bill also tries to stimulate
conservation through regulation and incentives.
But, as a general proposition, the national Republican Party is
increasingly a lost cause. Federal spending under consolidated Republican
rule with President Bush continues to grow more than twice as fast as it
did under divided government with President Clinton.
There remains an important difference between the parties regarding taxes.
Republicans want to cut them and Democrats want to raise them.
But with respect to spending and market interventionism, there's not enough
of a difference between them to be worth fighting over.
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JWR contributor Robert Robb is a columnist for The Arizona Republic. Comment by clicking here.
© 2005, The Arizona Republic |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||
