< PREVIOUS ] [ 1989 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Sometimes justice has a chance of prevailing, and this
is one of those times. George Herbert Walker See no
evil, hear no evil, speak no evil
Bush is sitting in
the White House as the bills for the Reagan Regime start
coming due.
All manner of bill collectors and process servers will soon be knocking at the door, and he won't be able to stall them indefinitely with vague explanations about having been out of town or that he's sure he mailed a check.
Though some of those due bills are financial, such as the $1.5 trillion deficit, the major unpaid obligations from the Reagan years are a rich legacy of sleaze. Some of it is lethal, as with the accumulated lies from the Department of Energy at Rocky Flats, and some of it is only money, as with the HUD scandal that gets juicier by the day.
The irony in all this is that we supposedly launched a
Conservative Revolution
in 1980. If we had elected
conservatives who practiced what they preached, we couldn't
have had a corrupt government.
Traditional American conservatism believes in a very
limited federal government, as exemplified with slogans
like A government big enough to give you everything you
need is big enough to take away everything you have
and
The government that governs best, governs least.
Assume that the Reaganites had been able to reduce the federal role to the minimal level that hard-core conservatives have long advocated: No Amtrak, no TVA, no pork-barrel dams, no food stamps, no ADC, no housing programs.
With a national government of such minuscule
proportions, we wouldn't have much scandalous behavior,
because it wouldn't pay. Not even the Metropolitan Water
Providers would be so pigheaded as to spend $150,000 a
month in Washington to lobby for Two Forks when the federal
government had no say in the matter. The S&L's wouldn't
be throwing money into PACs to buy congressmen if the
thrift institutions
were truly deregulated and had
to attract deposits through the open market from hard-nosed
and sharp-eyed investors. A few telephone calls from James
Gaius Watt, the honorable Secretary of the Interior, to
Samuel Pierce, the honorable Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development, would hardly be worth $400,000, since there
wouldn't be any HUD or HUD money waiting to be
diverted.
Back in 1980, Reagan and Bush promised to prune the federal government. What went wrong?
The clue might lie in the works of David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget. As he explained it, most wasteful federal programs enjoy considerable congressional support, so a frontal assault would never work.
Instead, they took a roundabout approach to demolishing the federal government. They reduced taxes, thereby cutting federal income. With the money supply choked off, congress would be forced to reduce the size of the government.
What happened instead was a huge deficit. In eight years of relative peace and prosperity, they tripled the deficit that had been run up through two centuries that included a revolution, a civil war, two world wars and several depressions.
But the way things are going, maybe they'll succeed after all. They wanted to reduce the federal government to an insignificant domestic role. Thanks to those eight years of Reagan and Bush and their supporting cast of bagmen and influence peddlers, our federal government is approaching financial and moral bankruptcy.
And while Reagan collects millions for delivering a few homilies in Japan, Bush is going to get caught holding the bag. The best that can be said for the situation is that justice will be served.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1989 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >