It is in the area of spending that the Republican Party’s performance, in its seven years of power, has been most disappointing.
In the Summer of 1952, shortly after the Republican Convention, the two men who had battled for the Presidential nomination met at Morningside Heights, New York, to discuss the problem of taxes and spending. After the conference, Senator Taft announced: “General Eisenhower emphatically agrees with me in the proposal to reduce drastically overall expenses. Our goal is about $70 billion in fiscal 1954 (President Truman had proposed $81 billion) and $60 billion in fiscal 1955 … Of course, I hope we may do better than that and that the reduction can steadily continue.” Thereafter, the idea of a $60 billion budget in 1955, plus the promise of further reductions later on, became an integral part of the Republican campaign.
Now it would be bad enough if we had simply failed to redeem our promise to reduce spending; the fact, however, is that federal spending has greatly increased during the Republican years. Instead of a $60 billion budget, we are confronted, in fiscal 1961, with a budget of approximately $80 billion. If we add to the formal budget figure disbursements from the so-called trust funds for Social Security and the Federal Highway Program—as we must if we are to obtain a realistic picture of federal expenditures—total federal spending will be in the neighborhood of $95 billion.
We are often told that increased federal spending is simply a reflection of the increased cost of national defense. This is untrue. In the last ten years purely domestic expenditures have increased from $15.2 billion, in fiscal 1951, to a proposed $37.0 billion in fiscal 19612—an increase of 143%! Here are the figures measured by a slightly different yardstick: during the last five years of the Truman Administration the average annual federal expenditure for domestic purposes was $17.7 billion; during the last five years of the Eisenhower Administration it was $33.6 billion, an increase of 89%.
Some allowance must be made, of course, for the increase in population; obviously the same welfare program will cost more if there are more people to be cared for. But the increase in population does not begin to account for the increase in spending. During the ten-year period in which federal spending will have increased by 143%, our population will have increased by roughly 18%. Nor does inflation account for the difference. In the past ten years the value of the dollar has decreased less than 20%. Finally, we are often told that the government’s share of total spending in the country is what is important and consequently we must take into account the increase in gross national product. Again, however, the increase in G.N.P., which was roughly 40% over the past ten years, is not comparable to a 143% increase in federal spending. The conclusion here is inescapable—that far from arresting federal spending and the trend toward Statism we Republicans have kept the trend moving forward.
I do not mean to suggest, of course, that things would have been different under a Democratic Administration. Every year the Democratic national leadership demands that the federal government spend more than it is spending, and that Republicans propose to spend. And this year, several weeks before President Eisenhower submitted his 1961 budget, The Democratic National Advisory Council issued a manifesto calling for profligate spending increases in nearly every department of the federal government; the demands for increases in domestic spending alone could hardly cost less than $20 billion a year.
I do mean to say, however, that neither of our political parties has seriously faced up to the problem of government spending. The recommendations of the Hoover Commission which could save the taxpayer in the neighborhood of $7 billion a year have been largely ignored. Yet even these recommendations, dealing as they do for the most part with extravagance and waste, do not go to the heart of the problem. The root evil is that the government is engaged in activities in which it has no legitimate business. As long as the federal government acknowledges responsibility in a given social or economic field, its spending in that field cannot be substantially reduced. As long as the federal government acknowledges responsibility for education, for example, the amount of federal aid is bound to increase, at the very least, in direct proportion to the cost of supporting the nation’s schools. The only way to curtail spending substantially, is to eliminate the programs on which excess spending is consumed.
The government must begin to withdraw from a whole series of programs that are outside its constitutional mandate—from social welfare programs, education, public power, agriculture, public housing, urban renewal and all the other activities that can be better performed by lower levels of government or by private institutions or by individuals. I do not suggest that the federal government drop all of these programs overnight. But I do suggest that we establish, by law, a rigid timetable for a staged withdrawal. We might provide, for example, for a 10% spending reduction each year in all of the fields in which federal participation is undesirable. It is only through this kind of determined assault on the principle of unlimited government that American people will obtain relief from high taxes, and will start making progress toward regaining their freedom.
And let us, by all means, remember the nation’s interest in reducing taxes and spending. The need for “economic growth” that we hear so much about these days will be achieved, not by the government harnessing the nation’s economic forces, but by emancipating them. By reducing taxes and spending we will not only return to the individual the means with which he can assert his freedom and dignity, but also guarantee to the nation
