Bush's bloat.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side

Sometimes it's hard to tell left from right. As I write this, the Republicans, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Democrats, are scrapping internally over everything from abortion to Iraq, stem cells to immigration. But the most confusing blurring of political differences has to do with the size of government.

Traditionally, or at least according to time-honored cliche, liberals stood for "big government," and conservatives stood against it. Reagan's men wanted to "kill the beast" of government (not noticing how much Carter's budget cuts had already starved it), and Gingrich's gang eventually forced Clinton to declare the "era of big government" over. It was Clinton--not Reagan or Bush I--who shrank welfare into a program of limited wage supplementation for severely underpaid single mothers.

So how are we to understand the fact that under Bush II--surely the most rightwing President ever--the government has swollen to a condition of morbid obesity?

Clinton left the federal government with a budget surplus of $237 billion. We now face a deficit of over $400 billion. And it's not all accounted for by Bush's lavish tax cuts for the wealthy. The federal government is piling on the pounds as we speak.

What's expanded, of course, is not the "nanny state" that Gingrich once mocked. Welfare as we knew it is gone; Medicaid is under steady assault; we have no guaranteed access to health care; student loans and grants are facing massive cuts. The only nanny-ish or "compassionate" move the Bush Administration has made is toward partial Medicare coverage of prescription drugs, but that policy coddles the pharmaceutical companies and forces the elderly into an Olympic hoop jump.

The part of government that s been swelling nonstop is the part that, generally speaking, deals with violence or, to put it in more conventional terms, "national security." Since 9/11, the military has ballooned. Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, puts the total cost of the Iraq War at $1 trillion to $2 trillion. We now have not only the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the Pentagon but also the Department of Homeland Security, a director of National Intelligence, and a National Counterterrorism Center, along with a few more that may have escaped my own feeble surveillance efforts.

As the fight has long claimed, government agencies tend to suffer from a bureaucratic imperative to expand, and our national security agencies are no exception. They jostle for tax...