Republican revolution (Part 2)
• Environment
• Health care
• Education and Welfare
• Defense
• Voters will decide
Environment
The GOP has a Jeckyl-and-Hyde split on the environment. The EPA was born under Richard Nixon, but Mr. Bush is of the Ronald Reagan-James Watt school. He is rapidly unraveling 30 years of regulation in the name of balancing environmental and economic concerns. Mr. Bush has opened several hundred thousand acres of protected land to road-building. The Clean Air Act has been re-interpreted so coal-fired power plants don’t have to meet strict pollution rules. More than 50 suits against big polluters have been dropped. Global warming was officially edited out of existence.
The Interior Department has disavowed proposed bans on snowmobiles and ATVs in national parks and allowed mining companies to make bigger waste piles on public land. And it allowed timber companies to cut more trees in protected forests.
Behind closed doors, the Bush administration wrote the new energy bill that Congress will take up early next year. Vice President Dick Cheney may have held the pen, but the handwriting is unmistakably that of the energy industry with $23.5 billion in tax breaks, primarily for oil, coal and gas producers.
Health care
The addition of a prescription drug entitlement might seem like an extension of the Great Society. But the new law wrought big changes to Medicare that emphasize private enterprise.
For nearly 40 years, Medicare and Medicaid have anchored health policy. They have been built on the premise that people who qualify would get the covered services they need regardless of who they are, where they live or what it costs.
The prescription drug entitlement is a step toward changing that. It calls for private companies to provide drug benefits and, in some cases, complete health coverage for the elderly. Seniors could have different benefits, depending on where they live, and could pay substantially more. Seniors with more money will pay higher premiums.
Down the road, Mr. Bush wants to provide a set amount for health care and let someone else – state governments, in the case of Medicaid, private insurance companies and patients in the case of Medicare – worry about paying the rest. Under his Medicaid plan, states would get block grants to provide health care for the poor. If the economy soured and more people qualified, or if prices climbed too high, states would have to cut benefits, raise taxes or both.
Education and Welfare
Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act gives the federal government a bigger role in changing curricula, testing and teacher qualifications, though there’s not enough money for the states to pay for the changes. In return for their support, conservatives insisted on bringing “free market” forces to bear on schools, too. Parents and students can bail out of failing schools for other public schools, or private schools under an experimental voucher program.
On welfare, Mr. Bush built on the welfare reform of the Gingrich phase of the Republican revolution. The traditional conservative view is that tax cuts for businesses will create more jobs, and that jobs, in the long-run, are a better way to help the poor than welfare. But in the current jobless recovery, as they wait for the jobs to trickle down to them, the poor have to pay for most job training and child care themselves.
Defense
Mr. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld set out to “transform” the military for “the battlefields of the 21st century,” while staying true to GOP support for the armed forces. Mr. Rumsfeld’s theories include lighter and more mobile forces, bolstered by high-tech weapons. The administration has begun work on a national missile defense system, a dream of conservatives since President Reagan’s “Star Wars” vision.
But the U.S. incursion in Iraq stretched military manpower and changed conservative opposition to “nation building.” Meanwhile, many Republicans in Congress oppose transformation if it means giving up defense bases or contracts in home districts.
Mr. Bush’s solution: Transformation-plus-pork. The $401 billion defense appropriations bill signed last week is the largest in history. It adds missile defense but not more troops. It cuts almost nothing (except environmental standards) and shifts work rules for civilian defense workers, taking power away from public employee unions.
Voters will decide
A referendum on the great Republican experiment comes in a little less than a year. If Democrats can’t mount a counter-revolution – and so far, they haven’t – Mr. Bush and his allies will have transformed government in the most profound way since the Great Society. The government of the New Deal and Great Society believed in a great social safety net. Out of that belief came welfare, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.
The Reagan-Gingrich-Bush revolution believes that the best way government can help people is by getting out of the way. Through tax cuts and other incentives, the genius of capitalism will create new wealth.
If the Republicans are right, America will be cultivating democracies and new markets around the world. At home, unfettered market forces will reap a new harvest of prosperity. If they’re wrong, America will be a long time paying for it.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
