By Jay Ackroyd

For years, Republicans have portrayed themselves as the party of smaller government. But over those same years they have presented budget proposals that totaled about the same as Democratic ones. This was true when Republicans had the presidency, under Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and it was true when they had the Congress, under Newt Gingrich. Now, analysts say, they're in a quandary: Republicans have pumped out the usual "cut taxes" message, but the public is not responding.

Why isn't anybody rallying around the tax reduction cause?

The short answer is, people have come to understand that you can't really reduce taxes in the long run without reducing spending. Since Republican budgets spend no less than Democratic ones, the promise of lower taxes amounts to a lie: if the Government really does reduce taxes, and yet doesn't reduce spending, we'll see the deficit return and future taxpayers will have to foot the bill.

If you believe the polls, the (supposedly ignorant and shortsighted) citizenry recognizes that we ought to decrease the national debt that cost us $247 billion dollars to service in 1997, just so long as that reduction doesn’t damage the solvency of necessities like Social Security and Medicare. This kind of sentiment should present a gaping door of opportunity for supposedly fiscally-conservative Republicans. Since Americans appear to be saying they would applaud an across-the-board tax cut that reflected a real reduction in spending, Republicans ought to be able to safely propose using the current surplus to pay down the debt, and then pay for tax reductions with spending cuts. How strange then, that instead of leaping upon a golden opportunity to shrink the state, the GOP is silent. The surplus, they say—not spending reductions—should be used to pay for tax cuts. Why?

Because Republicans aren’t advocates of smaller government at all. They’re advocates of larger government. The disagreement they have with Democrats is not over how big the government should be, but how to allocate the pork.

Republicans support a state that provided Linda Tripp a year-long, no-show job. They favor the ongoing farce of an anti-ballistic-missile system that,  after nearly fifteen years of development, has yet to successfully pass a single test. They support funding a CIA that didn't notice the Shah of Iran was about to fall, didn't notice India's plans to join the nuclear bomb club, overstated the size of the Soviet economy and the strength of its military, allowed Aldrich Ames to hand over our entire counter-espionage program to the Russians for close to a decade, and cannot even be relied on to supply maps distinguishing foreign embassies from enemy bomb targets despite the fact that the location of embassies is public knowledge. The Republicans support maintenance of three separate, duplicative armed forces that claim to be prepared to fight two major conflicts simultaneously, but in the event must call up reserves to support the bombing of a minor Balkan state. They support corporate welfare, bloated congressional staffs, and ample travel expense budgets.

None of this strikes voters as much of an alternative to "tax and spend liberalism."

As the recent presidential impeachment hearings came to a close, House Chairman Henry Hyde, dumbfounded at Republicans’ utter failure to sell impeachment to a cynical and skeptical nation, blamed the Clinton camp for tearing down politicians in general—for portraying them all as "corrupt" and "venal." That, he explained, was how they had managed to convince honorable Americans that Clinton's own corruption and venality weren’t especially important issues. But Americans hardly needed the President’s supporters to convince them of what they already know. The trouble is that politicians today really are corrupt and venal. And political corruption is nowhere better illustrated than in the practice of accepting money in return for extra spending on behalf of contributors. Max Frankel, writing in the New York Times Magazine, baldly refers to such contributions as "bribes." In fact, the practice of "bribery" has become so transparent that a Republican leader can demand matching money from contributors who supported losing Democrats, and not suffer for it politically.

One purpose of this series of essays is to explore why simple solutions to public policy problems are not often readily adopted. One of the reasons we have so many complex and unsuccessful approaches to public policy in this country is that politicians gravitate toward power. Big budgets mean more power. Paying off political contributors through increasing expenditures necessitates bigger budgets. Ever greater contributions from wealthier sources are required for politicians to get themselves re-elected, propose more big budgets, and consolidate more power. On top of that, spending tends to self-perpetuate: once you've built a naval base, you'll always have a naval base.

The great Republican promise of smaller government surely sounds reasonable to citizens who don’t want their tax dollars wasted on unnecessary bureaucracy and programs of dubious value. But if government is made smaller, politicians become less important and less powerful. Republicans are politicians like any others: that’s why you’ll see them paying lip service to reducing government's burden, but you won't see them actually doing anything about it.

Now that there’s a surplus to work with, this country has a chance to try to get its fiscal house in order. But no surplus can offset the impact of unchecked government growth. If now is not the time to cut spending, when will that time come?

The short answer is, it won't—until we start trumping the power of the lobbyist dollar with the power of the vote.

Jay Ackroyd is the president of DBSI, Inc., a custom software development company based in New York City.