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Aug. 14, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:29
August 14, 2006, Monday, Hour #2
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Thank you, Johnny Donovan.
Welcome in as we continue, and uh you callers that are online there, we're gonna catch you on here because I know how frustrating it is to sit there and uh and wait to get on and then we uh change topic.
So if you're on there, if uh Kit H. R. Kit Carson has talked with you, our executive producer, that means you're going to come on and then we'll bring in our next guest.
Uh Mike Mamon, our engineer, Ed Robinson, the new assistant engineer running the controls today.
Uh we have Brian Morton and uh Rob Vlassick now uh helping out here in the Golden Tower of the Fisher Building.
I am Paul W. Smith, and I am merely a fellow student, like you, of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, where there is never a final exam, but we are tested every day.
And we are coming to you, as Johnny mentioned, from the Midwest campus of the Limbaugh Institute in Detroit, Michigan, the Motor City, the birthplace of Motown and the growing life sciences corridor, and we are happy and thrilled to be coming to you on this your favorite radio station, keeping you on top of what's happening every hour of every day, including these three hours of broadcast excellence with America's anchor man, Rush Limbaugh, who will be back where he belongs tomorrow on the program.
But uh meanwhile, it's uh my pleasure and privilege to be here with you and uh taking your calls at 1800-282-2882, 1-800-282-2882 Rush Limbaugh.com is another way to reach us.
And uh enjoyed our conversations this past hour.
I want to uh give you a chance to weigh in before we move to the next topic in our lesson planner today, uh, and that is uh Stephen Slavinsky coming up from the Cato Institute.
He's written a book called Buck Wild, How the Republicans broke the bank and became the party of big government.
A lot of us have been wondering about that and uh and stewing about that.
We're gonna talk about it in just a moment, but first let's talk to you.
And uh Steve, you've waited the longest there in Philadelphia.
I loved living in Philadelphia many years ago, over ten years ago.
Oh, yeah.
But six great years in Philadelphia.
How are things, Steve?
Good, Paul.
I uh I remember I remember your voice.
Uh you have a very distinctive voice.
I of course remember the name, but uh I remember listening to you uh fairly often when you're in Philadelphia.
Well, nice to hear that, and welcome now into the Rush Limbaugh program, and nice to have you here.
Yeah, well I wanted to to talk about the similarities uh between our our present day circumstance and really and the nineteen thirties, uh and specifically appeasement of of Germany.
Uh you know, after World War One, uh Germany uh as a nation was forlorn uh coming out of a depression.
They really didn't have very much to hang their hat on.
Uh and that's really German people worldwide, probably at that point.
But then you have Hitler uh, you know, rebuilding uh the German military and striking out against the West, uh at least Western Europe, and you have appeasement.
Uh and each time that he was appeased, you know, he the annex of Austria, the Sudaten land, he builds uh a pathology develops in the German people, not just in Germany, but all across the world.
Anyone observing it sort of says that it has a little, you know, a kindred German spirit says, yeah, yeah, way to go.
Well, the same thing is happening right now in the Arab world.
We the Arab culture is rather forlorn itself.
I mean, not much industry to speak of.
Uh they can barely produce a bicycle, I bet.
And yet here they are, taking on the West and winning.
Uh or at least being able to hang their hat on something.
And I think we have the same pathology developing, not just in your jihadist, but I'm talking about in your moderate, everyday Muslim.
He is looking at these events, and he's sort of going, Yeah, yeah.
You know, we're winning.
We're actually taking on the big bad West, and we're winning.
In this case, really what they're saying is wow, we didn't get wiped out.
Yeah, exactly.
And and we, you know, I mean, actually, I look at this this Lebanon situation, and they have won.
And what this is doing is it's bringing us to the same circumstance that we faced in the thirties.
We are going to I I believe this is what's what will occur is we are going to to uh have a devastating attack, either here or in Europe, and then we are going to totally smash the Arab culture.
And the way we're gonna do it is we're gonna have to, like the previous caller said, we're going to have to say to its citizens, we're going to kill ten million of you if you don't take care of this problem yourself.
Go into your mosques, kill these people, or we're going to bring you hell on earth.
Our B fifty two.
You know, Steve Steve, uh, you aren't alone.
I'm sure there are a lot of people saying, Yeah, it's about time somebody said that.
I think that's what we're gonna have to do.
But do you really think we'll ever do that?
Do you really think that we'll ever do it?
Paul, if the city of Philadelphia has a uh uh some sort of nuclear device go off, downtown Philadelphia, I do believe that we will level a few Arab states.
And I I'll be the first one cheering it on.
And I don't even think we should have to wait for that.
If these folks do not reel themselves in real soon, I think we're uh just just as we did in Germany, you were gonna have to crush these people, you're gonna have to because they are developing that that pathology that says we can take them on.
Well we have to make it crystal clear that no you can't.
Uh the only Well, yeah, yeah, I have to point something out historically, Steve, and I appreciate uh your well thought out uh comments uh and uh leave it open to our listeners to agree or disagree, but I have to I have to point something out.
Just so happens that it was August fourteenth, nineteen forty five.
This very day in nineteen forty-five, when the church bells rang, whistles at fire stations and mill factories sounded, people poured into the streets waving flags and honking car horns.
You know why?
It was the day Americans learned that Japan had surrendered, ending the costliest conflict in human history.
Do you know that now today only Rhode Island will observe the end of World War Two, the only state still celebrating Victory Day, commonly referred to as victory over Japan or VJ Day, because critics say it's discriminatory, they want to eliminate this holiday, uh remove the reference to Japan, they want to forget what happened and what we had to do to end the war.
So bear that in mind when you say we're gonna go in and wipe out some entire country.
Steve is gone.
All right, let's go to uh Tom in Lincoln, Nebraska on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith Tom, welcome to the program.
Hi, Paul, how are you?
I'm good, I hope you're well.
Uh I had a point to make uh relative to the uh uh the ceased fire and the diplomacy that has been going on here, and uh quite honestly, over the last couple of days, I have come to realize in my own non-academic way that this is a brilliant move, an absolutely brilliant move.
For everybody, uh for us, for Israel, for Lebanon, uh uh for for everybody.
Right.
Uh let me only explain what I'm talking about.
Please do.
Uh I don't think there's any doubt that if Israel really wanted to, they could literally wipe Lebanon off the map.
Uh th it wouldn't be in a contest.
Now, there'd be a lot of civilian deaths and a lot of destruction and all kinds of stuff.
But it could happen.
I think most people agree with me there.
Uh in taking the step that's if that we've taken, and I think this is all due to uh to Condoleez' Rice and John Bolton, uh uh we've put the onus back on Lebanon.
Okay.
Lebanon, in recent years, has made a valiant effort to become a democratic society in the Middle East.
They sure have, but they're not very strong.
Unfortunately, you know, Hezbollah got in there and screwed things up a little bit.
Okay, but that's that's neither here nor there, really.
Uh it's up to the people of Lebanon to determine what kind of democracy they're gonna be.
And if over the coming months, maybe years, uh Lebanon finds itself in a position where they can be a real true democracy, they will have the support of Israel and the United States.
Now, let's just suppose, and I know that people are gonna argue this all the way, uh, but let's just suppose that we are successful in Iraq.
I'm not talking tomorrow.
I'm talking two, three, four years down the road.
Let's just suppose that Iraq finds itself as a true strong democracy.
If that is the case, what do you now have in the Middle East?
You have three strong democracies in the Middle East, backed by the United States.
That's pretty powerful, don't you think?
Very powerful.
Uh, and I appreciate your thoughts here uh on that, Tom, well thought out again, and uh and and I'll tell you that uh for real change there has to be a regime change.
There has to be a complete change uh in Damascus, uh in Tehran, uh there has to be a cutting off of the feeding of the Hezbollah terrorists, and uh even as I said earlier, even uh i if you killed them all, if Israel was really successful and killed all of Hezbollah in Lebanon by flattening Lebanon,
God forbid, for all those uh poor innocent people that would be killed, uh Hezbollah would just uh reformat itself with the help of of uh Damascus and uh Tehran.
Hezbollah w would just they believe me, there'll be no shortage of people to be restocked and rearmed and resupplied.
Uh I I do appreciate uh your call.
I think that uh uh H.R. is that all of them?
Did we took care of business?
I wanted to make sure that the folks because I know what it's like to sit there and stand by and wait to talk and then never get your chance.
So we wanted you to have your chance as we uh change to a new topic with uh the Cato Institute Steven Slavinsky.
Buck Wilde, how the Republicans broke the bank and became the party of big government.
As we continue on the Rush Limbaugh program, I'm Paul W. Smith.
Getting to the heart of matters that cause you indigestion and heartburn.
Uh question that many of us at the Limbaugh Institute of Conservative Studies have been stymied by, and that is what has happened to the Republican Party total federal government spending has grown by forty-five percent in President Bush's first term.
So far, uh George W. is the biggest spending full term president since LBJ.
Well, we want to get some answers about this in the Cato Institute's director of budget studies and author of the book, Buck Wilde, How Republicans broke the bank and became the party of big government spending, as I've often said, like drunken Democrats, Stephen Slavinsky is joining us on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Stephen, I'm Paul W. Smith.
Well, thanks for having me on, Paul.
I appreciate it.
It is our pleasure.
Help us understand what's going on here.
It by the way, as maybe you saw this weekend's Wall Street Journal, it's the twenty-fifth anniversary.
Twenty-five years ago this past weekend that Ronald Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act, really Reaganomics at twenty-five and all the good things that happened there.
But what happened since then?
Everyone likes to compare President Bush to uh to President Reagan, but it doesn't appear that that comparison uh is fair.
Well, I think the Reagan tax cuts really is, I think, one of the greatest victories of the conservative movement generally.
The problem is, unfortunately, Republicans have, I think, lately, at least over the past six to ten years, sort of turned their back on what we know works, and that is the idea of smaller government and lower taxes.
They've gotten very good at re defending tax cuts.
The problem is they haven't been very good at defending spending cuts.
And I think part of it is what I call sort of the curse of incumbency.
Uh reminds me of a story Ronald Reagan used to tell, used to put this fable into some of his speeches.
He would say, when conservatives look at Washington, D.C., they see a cesspool riddled with just disgusting awful special interest programs.
So they try to get elected to try to change it, and sometimes they succeed and they get up to D.C. But soon they're seduced by big government.
The cesspool no longer seems like a cesspool, it seems a lot more like a hot tub.
So the book I've written, in a sense, is trying to uh figure out over the past twenty-five years what happened to the Republican Party and uh being sort of assimilated by Washington, D.C., and so it feels a lot more to them like a hot tub.
Hence the book, Buck Wilde, How Republicans broke the bank and became the party of big government out there at your favorite bookstore as we speak or online.
Now, uh couldn't it be argued, and I I think I'll do it just as the devil's advocate here, uh couldn't it be argued that the increase in the size of government is a result of uh fighting the war, the war on terror, the war on Iraq, etcetera.
Well that has been argued by congressional leaders as well as the White House.
The problem is it doesn't hold up under scrutiny.
I analyze the numbers in my book and point out that less than one third of the overall increase we've seen in government since 2001, since George W. Bush took office with a with a Republican congressional majority.
Only less than one third, as I said, had anything to do with the war on terrorism.
And by that I mean broadly defined.
That means the war on terror in Al Qaeda, that means the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.
So again, even if you take a very broad definition of this, it's not the one that then that's not the thing that's really driving the budget blow.
What is driving the budget blow, unfortunately, is I think this general understanding or I should say this new approach among Republican leaders, and that is sort of this idea of kind of building a big government machine to help Republicans get elected and not fighting big government in and of itself.
In a sense that it's it's a reversal of the Reagan strategy.
The Reagan strategy was let's go ahead and once we get elected we're going to go ahead and go after big government, consequences be damned, although they do check their punches from time to time, but more effectively than now I think.
But the point was to get elected for the purpose of restraining government.
Now I think the the thinking is they're getting elected just to get reelected and as a result they've sort of been become assimilated by the big government growth machine.
And I think that's what you see now if you think about the Jack Abramos scandal and the Bob Nay scandals and the Duke Cunningham scandals.
This is all sort of a natural byproduct of that the idea of earmarking more and more government programs and passing out more and more pork projects to people is sort of a symptom of this overall thinking and it's starting to to bite them in the behind I think and unfortunately it's starting to turn off I think a lot of very important members of the Republican coalition, those who like the Reaganess smaller government and that could have consequences for two thousand six and two thousand eight.
Well I can tell you that it is of great importance to the listeners to the Rush Limbaugh program and that's why I'm going to open the phone lines up right now so that they can speak directly with you at 1 800 28282.
That's 1 800 2828 two to speak directly with Steven Slavinsky, the Cato Institute's Director of Budget Studies, what has happened to the Republican Party and and and the other question you you come up with some of your questions and we'll field them with you in just a moment but when you look at the Republicans in Congress that have been so willing to sell out the are they not at all concerned about the conservative voters?
Have they have they changed their philosophy?
What's the story here?
Well I think they have been sort of co-opted by big government I think they really want to be liked by the mainstream media.
They want to be liked by the folks here in Washington DC.
I mean if you think about it living in DC, I don't know if you've had a chance to do this Paul I don't recommend it incidentally, but I've lived up here for about ten years now and you start to notice there's sort of this echo chamber of special interests and you sort of just get bombarded with this message and if you're not careful you'll start believing the propaganda.
You'll start believing that well maybe government programs do work efficiently and well and maybe we should have more of them.
And too many Republicans I think have fallen prey to that.
And so this sort of this what I call the curse of incumbency or sort of this w echo chamber of of bad thinking I think that that's been what's happening.
If you look at the govern excuse me the congressmen like Jeff Flake and uh Mike Pence of of Indiana if you look at Tom Coburn of the Senate, these are the guys who actually never really bought into that logic because frankly they don't spend a lot of time here.
They love going back to their districts and being among their constituents.
In fact even Tom Coburn has term limited himself to only two terms in the Senate.
Those are the guys who haven't bought into this thinking they're the ones that have been at this point I think the most effective foot soldiers for the Reagan view of smaller government.
But but conservatives uh should be worried about uh whether Republicans lose the congressional majority wouldn't the loss of the congressional majority be a bad thing?
Actually I'm not necessarily concerned uh not sure that sure that's true or not.
In fact I think uh Republicans have been learning all the wrong lessons from their victories up to this point.
I think they've discovered that they can hold the co or so far at least call the coalition together on things like security issues and that certainly is going to be a big issue.
But I think you're starting to see that the cracks in the coalition and for good reason because conservatives are concerned about the size of government but I think if you actually had a loss of Republican seats you might actually finally have them fighting harder for limited government, finally realizing what got them to power in the first place.
If you look at the sort of the history of the Republican Party and its interaction with the conservative movement.
These are two distinct entities that I'm sure you're aware of Paul.
But the truth is it's only after uh Republican uh losses in some ways that the Republicans uh are able to resurrect the idea of limited government.
That's what you saw in nineteen ninety two in George H. W. Bush lost after breaking his new new taxes pledge.
That's what opened the door for the ninety four Republican revolution.
Maybe it's time for another Republican revolution.
The problem is it has to be preceded by losses.
And so I'm not so sure it would be a bad thing for conservatives if Republicans lose started losing elections.
Well, we s we saw it when uh when they turned on Newt's contract with America.
We saw people not showing up at the polls, people being uh disheartened and uh and conservatives stayed away.
And uh we may be working toward that again.
Here's what I want to work toward.
I want people to be able to speak directly with you, and then we're lining up the calls right now as we continue with the Cato Institute Steven Slavinsky uh at 1800-282-2882, 1-800-282-2882.
As we continue the Rush Limbaugh program, I'm Paul W. Smith.
EIB excellence in broadcasting, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, fellow student Paul W. Smith here, uh broadcasting from the heart of the Midwest uh in Detroit, Michigan.
Rush will be back tomorrow.
We're glad you're here with us today at 1 800 282 2882, 1800-282-2882, our guest, Steven Slavinsky, the Cato Institute's Director of Budget Studies.
He's written the book called Buck Wilde, How Republicans broke the bank and became the party of big government.
Today our guest feels the GOP is so closely aligned with the mechanisms of big government that if they find themselves unable and unwilling to shut this contraption down.
They become cogs in the federal government's growth machine.
And I'd be very interested to hear what uh some of our listeners have to say about this.
You ready to take some calls here, Stephen?
Certainly, Paul.
All right, let's do that at 1 800 282 2882.
First up from Austintown, Ohio.
Bob, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith.
Say hi to Steven Slavinsky.
Good afternoon, Paul, and good afternoon, Stephen.
Good afternoon.
Uh what amazes me, I I'm sixty-three years old.
I live through both Bush and Reaganomics, and they're both the same.
I'll make some quick points and I'll get off.
Uh Davis Stockman called Reaganomics trickle down theory.
The first George Bush called it voodoo economics.
Now I remember people I knew in the service.
It was Ronald Reagan who gave us the seven hundred dollar hammer in a twelve hundred dollar coffee pots for the C 141s.
He bloated government.
Oh, he may have lowered taxes for the rich, but it was passed on to the states.
Our state taxes are are some of the highest in the nation.
How can you answer that?
That Ronald Reaganomics was so great.
Okay, well, just uh to address your point specifically, looking at the actual statistics of what occurred during Reagan.
Yes, he did wasn't able to shut down very many programs of any substantial worth, really only about four.
And he actually gave us a new uh cabinet agency, the Department of Veteran Affairs.
So in some elements, yes, Reagan was a big spender.
The pro or the difference is here, though, that he actually found offsetting cuts in other parts of the budget and in fact was able to decline, or rather strip away non defense spending in in actual terms.
By the end of his term government excuse me, at the end of his presidency, government was smaller than it was when he took office as a percent of GDP, and also in terms of growth rates.
He got it down to uh a slow growth rate that we hadn't seen since the nineteen fifties.
You're seeing the exact opposite now under George W. Bush.
You do see tax cuts, but you also do not see spending cuts.
And the thing is you actually see a direct opposite effect, in the sense you see government going up as a percent of GDP.
You see spending going up in rates we haven't seen since Lyndon Johnson.
So I think there are really two different types of uh approaches here.
Reagan was always making the case that you know government's not the solution, it's the problem.
Uh Bush is actually pretty much poo-pooed that idea.
He's actually said quite publicly and in print that uh he thinks that idea is sort of outmoded.
I don't think a lot of people believe that, and I think you're seeing the consequences uh the dramatic uh fiscal consequences really, at least for future generations, of the George W. Bush sort of philosophy.
Let's go to Keith in I think it's Osage Beach, Missouri.
Keith, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith along with Steven Slavinsky.
Keith.
Yeah, thanks for taking my call.
Um for me personally, the single most profound disappointment in the Republicans finally taking back over control of our government if they're like you said, spending like drunken democrats.
That's a fantastic thing to say.
My question to you is I firmly believe that Newt is positioning himself to run.
I would love to see President Newt, and he is the real deal as far as uh being the contract author of the contract um with America.
And I'm wondering if you feel that um these very issues you bring up in bringing up about fiscal responsibility that would uh give Newt um the leg up on his other competitors if in fact he does run.
What do you think, Stephen?
Well, I think it might, and I think it needs to be seen what exactly he's going to say on these things uh as as this as uh as the excuse me as the primary campaigns advance.
One thing I do in my book though is I do explain what happened during the Republican Revolution, specifically during the early years.
Unfortunately, uh Newt Gingrich is actually one of the key players and I think sort of slowly uh de-evolving the GOP away from this kind of Reaganesque idea.
He was effective with the contract with America in those two years, you got welfare reform, uh, you ended up getting capital gains cuts eventually, you got a smaller government as a result of Newt's leadership.
The problem is I think he did sort of toward the end want to be more liked than anything else by the mainstream media and by the the folks here in in DC.
And as a result, for instance, when he accepted uh the speakership after being re uh re-elected as speaker uh after the nineteen ninety-six uh midterm elections, excuse me, nineteen ninety-six elections uh that you know kept the Republican congressional majority intact.
He basically said, you know, now we're going to go after the things that should be the the interests of Republican voters, and that is uh and he actually said this alleviating uh uh racism and intolerance in the inner cities and things like that.
It's it didn't sound very much like the old Newt Gingrich, and in fact it caused Paul Jigot, the Wall Street Journal to say, well, what is Newt trying to embark upon now?
A contract with ambivalence?
There seems to be something uh i in the water out here in DC, and unfortunately I think uh Gingrich was sort of part of that early shifting away.
Now, luckily we had folks like John Kasich and a lot of the freshman congressmen uh who are battling him on trying to sell out the conservative voters.
I think Newt Gingrich is gonna have to answer for some of those sorts of things, but of course he does have the contract with America uh to show for it, and I think that's certainly a a potent thing, and unfortunately we don't have that sort of uh rhetoric coming out of Congress now.
Maybe he's more grounded.
Maybe he has matured past that.
I think it's gonna be fun to watch Newt Gingrich, uh, that's for sure.
Lee is in Indio, California.
Lee, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program, and it's your turn.
Thank you very much.
One of the big problems as I see it is the lack of the line item veto plus the earmarks.
So it's impossible for a president to really make any way through this.
For example, if there's a bill to let us say to have bulletproof vests for the armed forces, and uh then it is an earmark for a bridge to nowhere t added to that.
The president cannot just with a line item veto cut out one of the things.
He has to veto the entire bill.
And there's so many American pie, apple pie bills like this, and can you imagine what the media would say if he vetoed it?
President Bush will no longer allow our troops to have bulletproof vest.
And so it's almost impossible for it to happen.
Am I making sense?
Oh, you're right making absolute sense, and in fact, that's why I focus most of my attention on Congress in my book, because it really is uh most uh I say largely their fault because they do control the purse strings.
And the president in a sense is sort of backed into a corner in a lot of ways.
I do think Bush has been proposing very large, very big budgets, and he shouldn't be.
But Congress has been giving him even bigger budgets in return.
A lot of them are filled with earmarks.
I think if you had some kind of institutional barrier to that sort of thing, like a line item veto, I think budget reform is a very important thing.
In fact, I'd go one step further and say, let's go ahead and have a constitutional amendment to actually say government cannot grow faster than population plus inflation.
What that would do is it would put an upper limit on spending.
That's something that's not there right now.
It would force those trade-offs between the mom and apple pie issues and the bulletproof vests for for the soldiers.
That's not a discussion that we're having in DC right now, and incidentally, Ronald Reagan had actually thought about uh promoting this idea during his last few years in office.
It just never really got off the ground.
I think you're starting to see a groundswell for this sort of support for sorts of things on the legislative level uh at the state level.
Uh that kind of thing could bubble up, and I think it could be a good thing for the conservative movement generally.
The book is Buck Wild, how Republicans broke the bank and became the party of big government.
We're going to ray in Orlando, Florida.
It's your turn, Ray.
You're with Steven Slavinsky on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Gentlemen.
Um Stephen, I think what a lot of people um what you're missing, I believe, personally, and I'm a conservative.
I I believe you don't understand that people like pork.
People from twenty years ago, during economics, during that era, we're still a different kind of people.
You don't give people what they want.
They will throw you out of office, or the media will make sure that you have such a black eye that you give people, the needy, what they need, that you will um you you'll be out of office.
It's an unfortunate comment on our society.
We have a lot of welfare mentality.
I certainly think there is a lot of that, and I don't think that can be minimized.
I do think, however, if you reason with people and you explain to them that there's better ways of doing things, they're a little less likely to actually want to, you know, tax children or or the grandmas or whatever for the purposes of providing these sorts of pork handouts.
If you actually look at what happened, for instance, in the uh the ninety six election, after the government shutdown that the convention of wisdom says only gave Republicans a black eye, a lot of the spending reformers, the the hardcore budget cutters in the freshman class, they actually won by greater margins uh than they did in nineteen ninety-four.
And in fact, in some cases where like Tom Cobran, for instance, uh in Oklahoma, he actually won uh his district by six more I'm sorry, by ten percentage points.
That was above and beyond where he won in ninety four.
Clinton only got six percentage points in this specific district, and so you had labor unions running against Republicans uh with millions of dollars uh saying that they're just they're awful, they want to kick people out in the streets and to starve the poor, and yet you found the same budget cutters the ones that were getting reelected by by greater margins.
And so again, I think uh if you really sit down and explain to people, as a lot of Republicans try to do sometimes, uh you'll you'll be rewarded for your efforts politically, but not all Republicans want to actually take the time to explain it to voters.
No, and and and Stephen, and thanks Ray for that.
People do like pork, but people really do like fairness as well.
And uh there are a lot of people out there who honestly believe what they're fed that uh the rich aren't paying taxes.
And uh thank goodness that Rush and others, but Rush especially on his website at Rush Limbaugh.com, always makes it very clear the percentages of taxes paid by the so-called rich.
And uh and if people understand that there is a shared burden out there, they're looking for fairness, and uh there is a lot more fairness uh than you might imagine.
We're gonna uh continue to take your calls at 1800-282-2882.
Stephen Slavinski here is uh the Cato Institute's Director of Budget Studies, author of Buck Wilde, How Republicans broke the bank and became the party of big government.
And by the way, in our final hour, we'll actually talk about a government program that's really working well.
Uh I know, I know.
But stand by and we'll prove it as we continue on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith.
1800-282-2882, 1800-282-2882 Rush Limbaugh.com.
I'm Paul W. Smith in for Rush Rush back with you tomorrow.
And we're talking with Steven Slavinsky, uh, who is the Cato Institute's Director of Budget Studies, and uh he says Republicans have developed a taste for tax cuts, but not a taste for spending cuts.
Therein lies the problem, and we're hearing what you have to say about all of that.
It's your turn, Tom, in Flint, Michigan, just up the road from where we are in the golden tower of the Fisher Building.
Hello, Tom.
Hey, Paul W, how are you doing today?
I'm well.
Hope you're well.
Thank you for taking my call.
My my question to Steve is this.
My main concern is this, and that is, you know, with with so many moderates in the Republican Party up in the especially up in the Senate, and the Democrats so weak on defense and so weak on national security, what is the solution?
Uh uh I mean, are we looking at possibly a new uh American conservative political party?
You know, that's interesting.
I I generally don't like to prognosticate on the future of political parties in terms of whether they're going to crack up at any time soon or something.
I think I do see fissures here among conservatives, and I think it's the kind of thing that motivated, for instance, Pat Buchanan to go to the reform party to try to see if that would kick off any steam.
It turns out it really didn't work for whatever reason, and so I I'm hesitant to say that the Republican Party is going to, in a sense, break up and it's going to have this new sort of wig-like party or something uh in the absence of that.
But but I do think that there's there's a lot of concern among the base.
And I think the fact is they're probably less likely, or I should say, less eager to enthusiastically embrace Republican candidates in either this midterm election Or possibly in two thousand eight.
And that's something Republicans are going to have to deal with on a national level.
I mean, I think about the fact that now that Republicans are in office, and as you said, Paul, they they don't seem willing or able to shut this contraption down known as big government.
It's because big governments become their friend.
When you have Republicans in the majority on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, they're not willing to throw a punch at big government because they're afraid they might hit their teammates.
And so I think maybe part of it is, as I said, if you look at what you see during the nineteen nineties, and this is one of the chapters of my book talks about what I call divided government.
It's probably one of the more controversial chapters.
The point I'm making there is that Republicans have have better been able to restrain spending when they're in the sort of the beleaguered minority, or more specifically when they're in control only of Congress or only of the White House.
As a result, they're much more eager to fight against the big spenders in the other party or on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
So maybe that's what it might come down to, at least structurally.
But again, it this is something Republicans are going to have to really pay attention to in their coalition, the fact that there's a lot of people who are very disgruntled with the fact that they've uh grown government faster in some cases than Lyndon B. Johnson.
Stephen Slavinsky with us, are you saying then maybe now the Republican Party is the party of big government, but we would say for the Democrats, even bigger government.
Well, that's right.
In fact, what that does is it leaves folks who prefer a third option, in those in this case the party of smaller government, out in the cold.
I mean, if you look at what what's happening to poll numbers generally, I mean just look at uh polls even going back to the nineteen seventies.
The number of p uh likely voters who say they prefer smaller government has gone from around fifty percent uh back in the nineteen eighties to about sixty-four percent now.
It's a pretty big chunk of people.
And even self-proclaimed and self-identified independents and fiscal conservatives say these sorts of things about Republicans.
Only thirty-six percent, for instance, as recently as two thousand six thought the Republicans would be better at controlling spending.
This is a much bigger issue than just Republican or Democrat.
It really comes down to folks on the Democrat and Republican side who don't like the fact that government's growing like topsy, and as a result, they and there's there's very little that they can do.
They know if they if they vote for a Democrat, they'll get even bigger government.
They know if they vote for a Republican, they'll get the status quo, big Lyndon Johnson type growth rates.
What's a small government conservative to do?
And that's really gonna be the question.
They might just stay home, and that might jeopardize I think the GOP's congressional majority.
Harry, your turn from Potsdown PA on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Harry?
Thank you for taking my call.
Uh I hear a lot of people today in a theme that continue to continually talk uh in nominal terms.
For example, we're we're fighting a war on terror, lots of homeland uh security expense, and in two oh six, our deficit, the GDP is going to be two point three percent.
This is going to be lower than twenty-one of the last twenty-five years.
So this concept of big government is only provided in terms of a nominal nature.
And it is not deflated and is not put in real terms.
So I would like to hear what your guest has to say about that.
I I I Harry, I hear a bunch of birds in the background, and before you say he's for the birds, why don't we hear what you have to say, what Harry is talking about?
Well, as a matter of fact, I give a guarantee to all the listeners here, all my numbers are adjusted for inflation in the book, and as a result, I also put them in terms of as a percent of GDP, as the caller did in terms of how big the deficit is as a percent of GDP.
It's only around two or two and a half percent or so.
And that is a decline from previous years.
My concern, though, is that actual government, the size of overall government is uh is uh close to twenty twenty-one percent or so of GDP in that range.
Uh under the Republicans' Congress and Clinton, uh, by the time he got out of office in two thousand, it was around uh seventeen or eighteen percent.
We were on sort of a glide path to fifteen percent of GDP, except now it went the other direction.
My concern is not so much that the budget is balanced or unbalanced, although it's important to balance the budgets.
My concern is why should conservatives prefer a balanced budget that consumes twenty percent of GDP when they could have a balanced budget that consumes only seventeen or fifteen percent of GDP, and I think that's the root of the overall issue is what kind of government do we want to have in a free society like the U.S. Uh and of course it is gonna be costly to fight the war on terror, but there are ways of offsetting cuts in silly little pork projects and other non-essential spending to pay for it all, and the Republicans just don't seem that willing to have that kind of argument anymore.
HR, I think we're out of time.
I don't believe we can go to one more caller, but I'm waiting for your uh word on that.
We better uh take the break.
And in fact, I'm gonna say to you, uh Stephen Slavinsky, thank you for joining us very very much.
People can read uh some of the things you've said at Cato.org, but they should pick up your new book, Buck Wilde: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government.
Thanks for spending time with us, Stephen.
Thanks for having me on, Paul.
As we continue on the Rush Limbaugh program, I'm Paul W. Smith.
Something good President Bill Clinton did ten years ago.
No, no, no.
This is the Rush Limbaugh program, really.
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