"We are in danger of becoming the party of big government."
So said GOP Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee in the House, at this weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference. To a large extent, Pence is correct in his description of the Republican Party. But Pence is only half of the way there.
The Republican Party under George W. Bush is actually the party of ineffective big government. The Bush administration creates a massive new entitlement program -- the Medicare prescription drug program -- that costs hundreds of billions of dollars but doesn't actually do much. And the implementation of the program is completely ineffective. The Bush administration fails to respond in a prompt or robust way to Hurricane Katrina, and when it finally tries to help some of those displaced by the storm, a significant portion of the money (more than $2 billion) falls prey to fraud. The same can be said for the Bush administration's rebuilding efforts in Iraq. The Bush administration creates a massive new federal education program, which it greatly underfunds, and a principal aspect of which isn't utilized. The Bush administration spies on the American people and then seems to expend more effort in finding out who blew the whistle on the program than it does going after crooks inside the White House. The list can go on and on.
Has every program the Democrats have created over the last century been effective? Surely not. But the philosophy of Democrats is to create programs, however large or small, that positively impact the lives of Americans. The same cannot be said for the Republican Party, which is ideologically opposed to the use of government for such ends. It is no wonder, then, that when the GOP tries to create a program that in theory could help people they are woefully unsuccessful, creating burdonsome intiatives that ineffectively deliver that which they seek to deliver. In order to overcome this intellectual deficit, the Republican Party -- particularly during the George W. Bush era -- has bought into the premise that the size of a government program is more important that its capacity for good. Clearly, as the past few years have repeatedly shown, bigger is not necessarily better.
So what are we stuck with under complete Republican control of Washington: ineffective big government. Republicans believe that this will cajole more Americans into believing that the only solution is to limit government. But the Democrats can and must mount a strong retort to this theory by showing that government can have a capacity for good -- just not under incompetent Republican leadership. If the Dems can indeed do this, then an end might be in sight for the Republican era of ineffective big government.
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