The big binge.

A FEW weeks ago, President Bush invited a group of conservative economists to the White House. The president and his men wanted advice on what steps should be taken next to help the economy grow. The response was nearly unanimous among the dozen attendees: start cutting government spending. Not long after, Treasury secretary John Snow announced that a top economic priority for the Bush administration in 2004--and, we hope, in a second term--will be "fiscal restraint." It's about time.

Until recently, the White House has been in a state of denial on the spending problem in Washington. In fact, the Bush team has been prickly about criticism from conservatives about the return of big government under this president. Uncle Sam's waistline has grown by more than a half-trillion dollars in just three years, despite a Republican House, Senate, and White House. The Office of Management and Budget has finagled data to make it appear that the only reason the budget is expanding is the War on Terror. Wrong. It is certainly correct that the budget has grown substantially in the vital areas of national defense and homeland security, but the unappealing truth is that under this president, the budget has expanded in almost every agency--no matter how wasteful, redundant, or counterproductive.

The table above shows that inflation-adjusted domestic discretionary spending under President Bush has grown faster than under any other president in 40 years.

Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation has been examining how much of the budget growth in recent years is due to national-security spending. Riedl finds that when you tease out all the anti-terrorism spending, it's still true that "domestic non-security programs are growing at their fastest rate in a decade." Even obsolete agencies that Republicans have long wanted to disconnect from life support are thriving in the hands of Republican appropriators. Says John Berthoud, president of the National Taxpayers Union: "For the first time in many years we are seeing that Republicans are outspending the Democrats."

The original Contract with America budget in 1995 slated more than 200 programs for termination. They are as useless today as ever, and yet in almost all cases, their budgets are bigger, not smaller. Many of these programs are little more than political slush funds for left-leaning special-interest constituencies: the Legal Services Corporation, bilingual-education funds, the National Endowment for the Arts, Bill Clinton's army of $12-per-hour Americorps "volunteers" ...

Even more outrageous are programs like the TVA and the Rural Electrification Administration, which are so antiquated that Barry Goldwater pledged to shut them down 40 years ago when he ran for president. The price tags and the cobwebs are much bigger now. The Republicans have even given beefy increases to the most reviled of all federal agencies: the IRS, whose budget is up 67 percent since 1995.

Many preposterous spending programs receive funding by becoming stowaways on antiterrorism bills. In recent years, national-security bills have included billions in add-on pork, including money for skating rinks, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and locust eradication. Nowadays if you want funding for a favored program, you wrap the flag around it.

A few years ago, John Kasich, Budget Committee chairman in the 1990s (and the best there ever was), dejectedly declared: "We Republicans fought a war against big government, and big government won." Ah, yes, but at least back then they fought. It's time for George W. Bush to take his chainsaw and fell some nonsensical federal programs. Not only would that make restless fiscal conservatives like me mighty happy, it would do the U.S. economy a world of good.

Who's the Biggest Spender of Them All?

                             % INCREASE IN
                               DOMESTIC
                   FISCAL    DISCRETIONARY
                    YEARS      SPENDING

Lyndon Johnson     1965-69       4.3%
Richard Nixon      1970-75       6.8%
Gerald Ford        1976-77       8.0%
Jimmy Carter       1978-81       2.0%
Ronald Reagan      1982-89      -1.3%
George Bush, Sr.   1990-93       4.0%
Bill Clinton       1994-01       2.5%
George W. Bush     2002-04       8.2%

SOURCE: U.S. OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET,
HISTORICAL TABLES, 2004.