PATIENCE:

Government shrinkage goal (Grover Norquist, August 3, 2006, Washington Times)

The modern conservative movement's goal is to cut the cost of government as a percentage of the economy in half over the next 25 years -- one generation. [...]

The solution to the spending problem is to replace politically suicidal, or at best difficult, efforts to "cut" spending with politically profitable "reforms" of programs that will reduce their long-term costs.

The best example of this is "privatizing" or "personalizing" Social Security, moving the system from the pay-as-you-go, unfunded, Ponzi scheme to a fully funded, independently held personal savings account system. When fully phased in every American will be required to save, say, 10 percent of their income and accumulate real resources to buy an annuity at retirement that will keep one out of poverty and allow one to keep all savings beyond that minimum to be spent as one wishes. Social Security can be reformed to cost not its present 20 percent of the federal budget but rather remove it from the budget.

Medicare can be similarly financed through allowing Americans to save their Medicare tax payments. Health savings accounts can give Medicare and Medicaid programs real competitive pressures to reduce costs without voting for any "cuts."

On education, the only reform worth enacting is real parental school choice. With private schools costing half of what government schools cost, public schools over time will have to become as cost-efficient and effective as private schools.

Pipe dream? No. We are on track to make all three key reforms a reality in the next decade. The case for Social Security reform is politically strengthened as more and more Americans own shares of stock directly through mutual funds, individual retirement accounts and 401(k)s. When Ronald Reagan was elected, only 17 percent of adults owned stock directly. Today more than 50 percent of households and 2 out of 3 voters in the 2004 election do so. That number grows as all new companies use defined contribution retirement systems rather than defined benefit plans. And the old-line defined-benefit plans are ebbing in the airline, auto and steel industries. Even government pensions are moving to defined contribution plans in a number of states. Eight of the last 10 changes to state pension plans over the last decade have been toward defined contribution.

Health Savings Accounts have jumped from 1 million in 2004 to 3 million in 2005 and Forrester Research predicts 24 percent of all Americans will be covered by a consumer health plan by 2010.

Education choice is within spitting distance in New Hampshire, Florida, Texas, Wisconsin and steps have been made in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Minnesota. A breakthrough in one or two states is the breach of the dam we need. Scare tactics against school choice (they will sell your kids to the Arabs or harvest their organs) will fall apart with a major state's experience for all to see.

Of course, none of these will reduce government spending in at least the short and medium term--especially because we'll fully fund all three for the poor. But add in means testing and after a generation or two of folks passing down the savings they've accrued in these accounts government spending would shrink radically. For conservatives a set of reforms that pay off a couple generations down the road instead of now is entirely worthwhile.

MORE:
The End Of the Right? (E. J. Dionne Jr., August 4, 2006, Washington Post)

Conservatism is an honorable disposition that, in its modern form, is inspired by the philosophy developed by Edmund Burke in the 18th century. But as a contemporary American movement, conservatism is rooted intellectually in the 1950s and the circles around William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review magazine. It rose politically with Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964.

Conservatism was always a delicate balancing act between small-government economic libertarians and social traditionalists who revered family, faith and old values. The two wings were often held together by a common enemy, modern liberalism certainly, but even more so by communism until the early 1990s, and now by what some conservatives call "Islamofascism."

President Bush, his defenders say, has pioneered a new philosophical approach, sometimes known as "big-government conservatism." The most articulate defender of this position, the journalist Fred Barnes, argues that Bush's view is "Hamiltonian" as in Alexander, Thomas Jefferson's rival in the early republic. Bush's strategy, Barnes says, "is to use government as a means to achieve conservative ends."

Kudos to Barnes for trying bravely to make sense of what to so many others -- including some in conservative ranks -- seems an incoherent enterprise. But I would argue that this is the week in which conservatism, Hamiltonian or not, reached the point of collapse.

It requires a staggering degree of self-absorption to sit in the midst of an epoch where the entire Anglosphere has turned or is turning towards the Third Way/New Democrat/compassionate conservative governing philosophy of Pinochet/Thatcher/Clinton/Gingrich/Blair/Howard/Bush and imagine that a non-vote in the US Senate means a lick.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2006 9:35 AM