Worried about political gridlock in Washington? Anxious over the constant hissy-fight between the Clinton White House and the Republican Congress over budget appropriations?
Well, don’t be.
It just so happens that political paralysis has overtaken our body politic at a very opportune moment.
Daily there are new indications that the great American slot machine–the most successful free-market democracy in human experience–has gotten itself stuck on triple cherries.
Last week came word that the economy is expanding at a sizzling 4.8 percent annual rate. Inflationary? Another government report said wages and benefits are growing at just above 3 percent, well within a non-inflationary range. The Treasury Department, meanwhile, reported that for the second year in a row Uncle Sam ran a surplus in fiscal 1999. So many people are working that Social Security took in $124 billion more than it paid in benefits. That means the government needs to issue less debt and that means our debt outstanding, now $3.6 trillion, has begun to shrink. If this keeps up, the nation could be, for all practical purposes, debt-free by the end of the next decade. Interest rates would plummet, business investment would rise and today’s “virtuous” cycle would roll on and on.
In other words, this is no time to hit the reset button. It’s a jackpot. Get the extra buckets.
Maybe this is why things are getting so testy inside the Beltway. With the presidency in play next year and the GOP hanging onto a razor-thin majority in the House, and with so little fundamental change needed, it has become necessary to manufacture issues to get indignant over.
How else to explain President Clinton vetoing a Justice Department appropriations bill because Republicans trimmed out a few million for cities and towns to hire a more cops? Or threatening to veto the Education budget because it doesn’t earmark money for the hiring of more unionized teachers, and instead lets local districts decide how to spend the dough?
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For this Clinton is willing to shut down the federal government? Tilt!
Then there’s the Republican congressional leadership, trolling high and low for some issue–any issue–that will score political points against that unimpeachable guy in the White House.
The GOP’s strategy is to jimmy the various appropriation bills so it looks like they’re not dipping into the Social Security surplus to pay for government programs. So the decennial census was recategorized as an “emergency” and the National Institutes of Health are being told not to spend their budget increase until the very end of next year. All this so Republicans can hold themselves up as defenders of Social Security against tax-and-spend Democrats. (Anybody who thinks Republicans are the party of Social Security needs a quick history lesson. See the chapter titled: “Republican opposition to the New Deal.”)
And that’s just the budget stuff. Elsewhere in Congress, the Bible-thump wing of the GOP has passed bills outlawing late-term “partial birth” abortions, even though the procedure is so rare as to be statistically non-existent. Last week the House passed a kindred bill that would make it a federal crime for doctors to deliver lethal doses of pain-killers so as to hasten death for the terminally ill. This, too, is an ultrarare circumstance, though Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) insists a law is necessary to prevent doctors from becoming “social engineers, messengers of death.”
Clinton likely will veto any such mercy-killing criminalization if it reaches his desk, just as he has vetoed unconstitutional abortion bans. He’ll probably also veto any Republican-sponsored HMO bill of rights . . . unless it allows patients to sue their managed-care insurance plans for medical malpractice.
This is good. Indeed, the entire Washington stalemate is good.
People don’t need Henry Hyde making decisions for them about what to do with a deformed fetus or excruciating, end-of-life pain. Nor do they need Bill Clinton’s right to sue their HMO, which would not make them any healthier but might cause millions to lose their insurance. And while it would be good to have a few more cops on the street and more teachers in the schools, the best thing that could happen to public safety and education just now is nothing at all.
Fact is, crime rates are falling and education levels are rising. A strong economy will do that. You could double what the government spends on welfare and job training and not achieve as much as what’s being accomplished by keeping the unemployment rate below 5 percent. A good job is still the best social uplift program ever invented.
So switch your televisions away from C-SPAN and stop listening to politicians biting each other’s heads off on the weekend talk shows. Now that the Cold War is over and there’s no nuclear threat, the only guy in Washington worth worrying about is Alan Greenspan. And the chairman of the Federal Reserve seems to be doing just fine, whether we worry about him or not.
As for next year’s elections, what we really need is four more years.
Of gridlock, that is.