MORE BILL AND W, LESS UR:

Make It Stop! : How Obama can get behind the idea of limited government. (Jacob Weisberg, March 6, 2010, Slate)

Amid the right's hysterical repudiation of everything President Obama has done or wants to do, one legitimate concern stands out: that Washington will grow without limits. The federal government's size, scope, and power have historically taken big leaps in reaction to war and financial crisis. It's not unreasonable to worry that, in responding to the biggest economic slump since the Great Depression while fighting two wars, the United States will find itself with a more expensive, more intrusive public sector and a less free and dynamic private one. [...]

Our last Democratic president was a reformist, lean-government liberal who favored federal activism in a context of personal and fiscal responsibility. But because of his initial fumble with health care and a deficit reduction plan wrongly portrayed as an expansion of government, Bill Clinton was miscast by the right as a conventional, tax-and-spend liberal. Only after losing the Congress in 1994 did Clinton declare that "the era of big government is over," sign welfare reform, and explicitly embrace balanced budgets. [...]

How, at this late stage, might a Democratic president go about establishing himself as a limited-government liberal? As a younger, more idealistic journalist, I wrote a book trying to square my belief in federal activism with a commitment to limited government. In the 15 years since, my advice hasn't much changed (or been taken). New Democrats and Blue Dogs aside, the party's congressional leadership has never really recognized that the problem of government excess and failure is grounded in reality as well as in the other side's distortions and misperceptions.

At this point, Obama and the Democrats may be destined to learn the old lesson once again. But if they hope to avoid a repeat of Clinton's 1994 fate in 2010, the president and his party might think about fixing a long-term upper limit on the size of government. Because of the bank bailouts and stimulus, federal spending will exceed 25 percent of GDP this year, and public spending at all levels will exceed 44 percent. But if liberals were clear that, in normal times, federal spending shouldn't be more than 22 percent and that the public sector as a whole shouldn't exceed a third of GDP—the level during Clinton's second term—the fear of Democrats covertly foisting a social-democratic model on America would begin to melt away. This kind of ceiling would mean that government couldn't grow at the expense of the economy, because it couldn't grow faster than the economy as a whole. To substantiate his commitment, Obama should unilaterally propose large, specific cuts in programs and subsidies to be phased in as the need for stimulus spending recedes. Raising the retirement age, privatizing space exploration, and eliminating agriculture subsidies would make a decent start.

It's at least progress for Mr. Weisberg so we'll not chide him for the anti-factual notion that stimulus spending works.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 6, 2010 10:15 AM