And you callers that are online that we're going to get you on here because I know how frustrating it is to sit there and wait to get on and then we change topics.
So if you're on there, if 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 on our next guest, Mike Mamon, our engineer, Ed Robinson, the new assistant engineer running the controls today.
We have Brian Morton and Rob Vlasic now 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 anchorman, Rush Limbaugh, who will be back where he belongs tomorrow on the program.
But meanwhile, it's my pleasure and privilege to be here with you and taking your calls at 1-800-282-2882.
1-800-282-2882.
Rushlimbaugh.com is another way to reach us.
And enjoyed our conversations this past hour.
I want to give you a chance to weigh in before we move to the next topic in our lesson planner today.
And that is 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 stewing about that.
And we're going to talk about it in just a moment, but first let's talk to you.
And Steve, you've waited the longest there in Philadelphia.
I loved living in Philadelphia many years ago, over 10 years ago, but six great years in Philadelphia.
How are things, Steve?
Good, Paul.
I remember your voice.
You have a very distinctive voice.
Of course, remember the name, but I remember listening to you fairly often when you were in Philadelphia.
Well, nice to hear that.
And welcome now into the Rush Limbaugh program.
And nice to have you here.
Yeah, I wanted to talk about the similarities between our present-day circumstance and really in the 1930s and specifically appeasement of Germany.
You know, after World War I, Germany as a nation was forlorn coming out of the depression.
They really didn't have very much to hang their hat on.
And that's really German people worldwide, probably at that point.
But then you have Hitler, you know, rebuilding the German military and striking out against the West, at least Western Europe.
And you have appeasement.
And each time that he was appeased, you know, the annex of Austria, the Sudetenland, he builds 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.
The Arab culture is rather forlorn itself.
I mean, not much industry to speak of.
They can barely produce a bicycle, I bet.
And yet here they are taking on the West and winning.
Well, 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.
This case, really, what they're saying is, wow, we didn't get wiped out.
Yeah, exactly.
And we, you know, I mean, actually, I look at 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 30s.
We are going to, I believe this is what will occur is we are going to 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 going to do it is we're going to have to, like the previous caller said, we're going to have to say to its citizens, we're going to kill 10 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-52.
You know, Steve, 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 going to 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 some sort of nuclear device go off, downtown Philadelphia, I do believe that we will level a few Arab states.
And 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 just as we did in Germany.
You were going to have to crush these people.
You're going to have to because they are developing that pathology that says we can take them on.
Well, we have to make it crystal clear that no, you can't.
You know, I have to point something out historically, Steve, and I appreciate your well-thought-out comments and leave it open to our listeners to agree or disagree.
But I have to point something out.
Just so happens that it was August 14th, 1945, this very day in 1945, 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 II, 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, 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 going to go in and wipe out some entire country.
Steve is gone.
All right, let's go to 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.
I had a point to make relative to the ceasefire and the diplomacy that has been going on here.
And 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, for us, for Israel, for Lebanon, for everybody.
Let me explain what I'm talking about.
Please do.
I don't think there's any doubt that if Israel really wanted to, they could literally wipe Lebanon off the map.
It wouldn't be 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.
In taking the step that we've taken, and I think this is all due to Condolese Rice and John Bolton, we've put the onus back on Lebanon.
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 neither here nor there, really.
It's up to the people of Lebanon to determine what kind of democracy they're going to be.
And if over the coming months, maybe years, 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 going to argue this all the way, 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 very strong democracies in the Middle East backed by the United States.
That's pretty powerful, don't you think?
Very powerful.
And I appreciate your thoughts here on that, Tom.
Well thought out again.
And I'll tell you that for real change, there has to be regime change.
There has to be a complete change in Damascus, in Tehran.
There has to be a cutting off of the feeding of the Hezbollah terrorists.
And even, as I said earlier, even 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 poor, innocent people that would be killed, Hezbollah would just reformat itself with the help of Damascus and Tehran.
Hezbollah would just, believe me, there'll be no shortage of people to be restocked and rearmed and resupplied.
I do appreciate your call.
I think that HR, has that all of them?
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 change to a new topic with the Cato Institute, Stephen Slavinsky.
Buck Wild, 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, a question that many of us at the Limbaugh Institute of Conservative Studies have been styming by, and that is what has happened to the Republican Party?
Total federal government spending has grown by 45% in President Bush's first term.
So far, 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 Wild, 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.
By the way, as maybe you saw this weekend's Wall Street Journal, it's the 25th anniversary.
25 years ago this past weekend that Ronald Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act, really Reaganomics at 25 and all the good things that happened there.
But what happened since then?
Everyone likes to compare President Bush to President Reagan, but it doesn't appear that that comparison 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 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.
It reminds me of a story Ronald Reagan used to tell.
He 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, has tried to figure out over the past 25 years what happened to the Republican Party and 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 Wild, How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government out there at your favorite bookstore as we speak or online.
Now, couldn't it be argued, and I think I'll do it just as the devil's advocate here, couldn't it be argued that the increase in the size of government is a result of fighting the war, the war on terror, the war on Iraq, et cetera?
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 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, that's not the thing that's really driving the budget bloat.
What is driving the budget bloat, 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, 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 did 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 thinking is they're getting elected just to get re-elected.
And as a result, they've sort of become assimilated by the big government growth machine.
And I think that's what you see now if you think about the Jack Abramoff scandal and the Bob Ney 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 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 Reagan smaller government, and that could have consequences for 2006 and 2008.
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 1-800-282-2882.
That's 1-800-282-2882 to speak directly with Steven Slavinsky, the Cato Institute's Director of Budget Studies.
What has happened to the Republican Party?
And the other question, you come up with some of your questions and will field them with you in just a moment.
When you look at the Republicans in Congress that have been so willing to sell out, are they not at all concerned about the conservative voters?
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, D.C.
And if you think about it, living in D.C., 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 10 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 what I call the curse of incumbency or sort of this echo chamber of bad thinking, I think that that's been what's happening.
If you look at the government, excuse me, the congressmen like Jeff Flake and Mike Pence 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, his 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 conservatives should be worried about whether Republicans lose the congressional majority.
Wouldn't the loss of the congressional majority be a bad thing?
Actually, I'm not necessarily concerned.
Not sure that's true or not.
In fact, I think 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 error, 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 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 Republican losses in some ways that the Republicans are able to resurrect the idea of limited government.
That's what you saw in 1992 when George H.W. Bush lost after breaking his new taxes pledge.
That's what opened the door for the 94 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 started losing elections.
Well, we saw it when they turned on Newt's contract with America.
We saw people not showing up at the polls, people being disheartened, and conservatives stayed away.
And 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, Stephen Slavinsky, at 1-800-282-2882.
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, broadcasting from the heart of the Midwest in Detroit, Michigan.
Rush will be back tomorrow.
We're glad you're here with us today at 1-800-282-2882.
1-800-282-2882.
Our guest, Stephen Slavinsky, the Cato Institute's Director of Budget Studies.
He's written a book called Buck Wild: 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 they find themselves unable and unwilling to shut this contraption down.
They've become cogs in the federal government's growth machine.
And I'd be very interested to hear what 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 Austin Town, Ohio.
Bob, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith.
Say hi to Stephen Slavinsky.
Good afternoon, Paul.
Good afternoon, Stephen.
Good afternoon.
What amazes me, I'm 63 years old.
I lived through both Bush and Reaganomics, and they're both the same.
I'll make some quick points and I'll get off.
David 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 $700 hammer and a $1,200 coffee pots for the C-141s.
He bloated government.
He may have lowered taxes for the rich, but it was passed on to the states.
Our state taxes are some of the highest in the nation.
How can you answer that, that Reaganomics was so great?
Okay, well, just to address your point specifically, looking at the actual statistics of what occurred during Reagan, yes, he wasn't able to shut down very many programs of any substantial worth, really only about four.
And he actually gave us a new cabinet agency, the Department of Veteran Affairs.
So in some elements, yes, Reagan was a big spender.
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 actual terms.
By the end of his term, government, excuse me, by 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 a slow growth rate that we hadn't seen since the 1950s.
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 approaches here.
Reagan was always making the case that government is not the solution.
It's the problem.
Bush has actually pretty much poo-pooed that idea.
He's actually said quite publicly and in print that he thinks that idea is sort of out-moded.
I don't think a lot of people believe that.
And I think you're seeing the consequences, the dramatic 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 Stephen Slavinsky.
Keith.
Yeah, thanks for taking my call.
For me, personally, the single most profound disappointment in the Republicans finally taking back over control of our government is 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 being the contract author of the contract with America.
And I'm wondering if you feel that these very issues you've been bringing up about fiscal responsibility that would give Newt 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 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, Newt Gingrich was actually one of the key players in, I think, sort of slowly de-evolving the GOP away from this kind of Reagan-esque idea.
He was effective with the contract with America in those two years.
You got welfare reform.
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 folks here in D.C.
And as a result, for instance, when he accepted the speakership after being re-elected as speaker after the 1996 midterm elections, 1996 elections that kept the Republican congressional majority intact, he basically said, you know, now we're going to go after the things that should be the interests of Republican voters, and that is, and he actually said this, alleviating racism and intolerance in the inner cities and things like that.
It didn't sound very much like the old Newt Gingrich, and in fact, it caused Paul Jugo, the Wall Street Journal, to say, well, what is Newt trying to embark upon now, a contract with ambivalence?
There seems to be something in the water out here in D.C.
And unfortunately, I think 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 who were battling him on trying to sell out the conservative voters.
I think Newt Gingrich is going to have to answer for some of those sorts of things.
But of course, he does have the contract with America to show for it.
And I think that's certainly a potent thing.
And unfortunately, we don't have that sort of rhetoric coming out of Congress now.
Maybe he's more grounded.
Maybe he has matured past that.
I think it's going to be fun to watch Newt Gingrich, 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 then it is an earmark for a bridge to nowhere 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 are 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 mostly, I should 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 vest for the soldiers.
That's not a discussion that we're having in D.C. right now.
And incidentally, Ronald Reagan had actually thought about 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 at the state level.
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 Stephen Slavinski on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Ladies and gentlemen.
Stephen, I think what a lot of people, what you're missing, I believe personally, and I'm a conservative, I believe you don't understand that people like pork, people from 20 years ago, during Reaganomics and during that era, were 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 get 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 tax children 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 96 election after the government shutdown that the Convention of Wisdom says only gave Republicans a black eye, a lot of the spending reformers, the hardcore budget cutters in the freshman class, they actually won by greater margins than they did in 1994.
And in fact, in some cases, where, like Tom Coburn, for instance, in Oklahoma, he actually won his district by six more, I'm sorry, by 10 percentage points.
That was above and beyond where he won in 94.
Clinton only got six percentage points in this specific district.
And so you had labor unions running against Republicans with millions of dollars saying that they're just awful and they want to kick people out in the streets and starve the poor.
And yet, you found these same budget cutters, the ones that were getting re-elected by greater margins.
And so, again, I think if you really sit down and explain to people, as a lot of Republicans try to do sometimes, 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 Stephen, and thanks, Sir Ray, for that.
People do like pork, but people really do like fairness as well.
And there are a lot of people out there who honestly believe what they're fed, that the rich aren't paying taxes.
And thank goodness that Rush and others, but Rush especially on his website at rushlimbaugh.com, always makes it very clear the percentages of taxes paid by the so-called rich.
And if people understand that there is a shared burden out there, they're looking for fairness.
And there is a lot more fairness than you might imagine.
We're going to continue to take your calls at 1-800-282-2882.
Steven Slavinski here is the Cato Institute's Director of Budget Studies, author of Buck Wild, 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.
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.
1-800-282-2882.
1-800-282-2882.
RushLimbaugh.com.
I'm Paul W. Smith in for Rush Rush, back with you tomorrow.
And we're talking with Steven Slavinski, who is the Cato Institute's Director of Budget Studies.
And 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 question to Steve is this: My main concern is this, and that is, you know, with so many moderates in the Republican Party, especially up in the Senate, and the Democrats so weak on defense and so weak on national security, what is the solution?
I mean, are we looking at possibly a new American conservative political party?
You know, that's interesting.
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'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 Whig-like party or something in the absence of that.
But I do think that 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 2008.
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 don't seem willing or able to shut this contraption down known as big government.
It's because big government's 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 1990s, and this is one of the chapters in my book, talks about what I call divided government.
This is probably one of the more controversial chapters.
The point I'm making there is that Republicans 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, 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 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.
And in fact, what that does is it leaves folks who prefer a third option, in this case, the party of smaller government, out in the cold.
I mean, if you look at what's happening to poll numbers generally, I mean, just look at polls even going back to the 1970s, the number of likely voters who say they prefer smaller government has gone from around 50 percent back in the 1980s to about 64 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 36 percent, for instance, as recently as 2006 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, there's very little that they can do.
They know 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 going to 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.
I hear a lot of people today in a team that continually talk in nominal terms.
For example, we're fighting a war on terror, lots of homeland security expense.
And in 206, our deficit, the GDP, is going to be 2.3%.
This is going to be lower than 21 of the last 25 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.
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 2.5 percent or so.
And that is a decline from previous years.
My concern, though, is that actual government, the size of overall government, is close to 21 percent or so of GDP in that range.
Under the Republicans Congress and Clinton, by the time he got out of office in 2000, it was around 17 or 18 percent.
We were on sort of a glide path to 15 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 20% of GDP when they could have a balanced budget that consumes only 17 or 15 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.?
And of course, it is going to 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 word on that.
We better take the break.
And in fact, I'm going to say to you, Stephen Slavinsky, thank you for joining us very, very much.
People can read some of the things you've said at Cato.org, but they should pick up your new book, Buck Wild, 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 10 years ago.