The state was trying to be helpful. Eggs have been implicated nationally in many cases of salmonella. But New Jersey’s vox populi hollered: Don’t be so helpful. The governor promptly ordered a review of the state’s role as autocrat of the breakfast table. An official delicately acknowledged “the freedom of choice issue, which has been made clear in the past few days.” New Jerseyites prefer a health hazard to any more helpfulness from government.
The most interesting news these days comes from state capitals like Trenton. AH is quiet along the Potomac, where resides a president whose life’s ambition was to conduct our side of the Cold War. But that war and the nation’s prosperity went away simultaneously. In his bewilderment he has become even more antic than usual, as when he was asked in New Hampshire about the possibility of another extension of unemployment benefits. Bush answered: “If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t hit his tail on the ground. Too hypothetical.” He seems manic and groggy-who but he could be both at once?–yet he also may be lucky. Reagan’s legacy may make Bush safer than he seems or deserves to be.
The sweep and depth of that legacy is just now becoming apparent in the polities of many states. Reagan wanted less growth of government at all levels. His subtle, multistage strategy was to begin by shrinking the federal government’s revenue base. By cutting income taxes, he forced congressional spenders into increased use-abuse, really–of the “surplus” (currently more than $1 billion a week) generated by the regressive , unpopular social security tax. Reagan’s rhetoric fomented skepticism about government, and hence taxophobia. Congress responds to revenue shortages in ways that provoke tax revolts in the states. In the political climate Reagan created, Congress tries to achieve its ends (social change; re-election) less by federal expenditures than by mandating expenditures by private enterprises and state governments. Reagan assumed that at the state level, where borrowing is politically difficult and budgets must be balanced, the issue of spending would be a polarizing issue favoring the frugal.
Reagan was being proved right even before the recession shrank state revenues and increased welfare expenditures. Fearful voters, all sense of security gone, are practicing the politics of bitter vigilance, assuming that government is a zero-sum game: Any addition to anyone else’s welfare must be a subtraction from mine.
This not a healthy climate for Democrats. Arkansas’s Gov. Bill Clinton, currently kneedeep in New Hampshire, understands that his party is handicapped by the perception that it wants to take people’s money and give it to “public employees or poor people who won’t spend it right.” But Clinton is winning the support of groups like AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), the public education lobby and others whose Political Philosophy is a four-letter word: More. So there is a growing incongruity between the political base he needs for the nomination and the philosophic stance he needs for the national electorate in November.
Tension defines our time. Two weeks ago in Annapolis, Maryland’s heavily Democratic General Assembly, facing a large budget gap, looked out on its lawn and saw the biggest demonstration in a decade. More than 18,000 people were demanding a tax increase. “We are tired of being told there is no money. We say, ‘Raise it’.” So said the president of the Maryland State Teachers Association. Her sentiments were seconded by the state AFL-CIO, NAACP and others with a large stake in state spending.
Democrats cannot win the White House without winning California’s 54 electoral votes. Lest year Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, closed a gargantuan budget gap with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. His strategy for closing this year’s gap involves a ballot initiative asking voters to approve emergency budget-cutting powers for the governor and cuts of up to 25 percent in welfare payments. And he wants a 5 percent pay cut for date employees. Is the Democratic presidential nominee going to oppose all that?
Wilson has on his side the temper of the times and a lot of numbers. California, with 12 percent of the nation’s population, has 16 percent of the caseload of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). And because the state’s stipends are the nation’s most generous, California has 26 percent of the nation’s AFDC costs. Even if Wilson’s cuts are made, California’s benefits will still be 60 percent higher than the average of the 10 largest states. Last year’s $7 billion tax increase has California close to causing a flight of businesses out of the state. And higher taxes, reinforcing the recession, are depressing revenues, which last year, for the first time since the Depression, were less than the year before.
Wilson is forcing-actually, reality is–choices that probably will polarize California to the advantage of conservatives. Taxes can be raised but only at the risk of further suffocating employment and revenues. Or the budget can be cut. Wilson wants to cut welfare and bureaucrats rather than schools and prisons. On which side of that argument does a Democratic presidential nominee want to be?
This, then, is how the 1980s control the 1990s. A Republican president’s recession can produce fiscal and political reactions in post-Reagan America that
