of wage and price controls, socialism is in vogue among young people, crime is rampant, taxes are painfully high and government is growing ever bigger. For conservatives, libertarians and other advocates of limited government, the present is grim and the future looks worse.
Suppose back then, a visitor from the future had arrived to report on the state of America in the year 2000: Communism is dead, the United States is the world’s only superpower, socialism has been discredited, inflation has been vanquished, the free market reigns, crime is ebbing, the federal budget enjoys a fat surplus, tax rates are down and federal spending is declining. And all this under a Democratic president!
What would anti-government types have said then if they’d known what lay ahead? They’d have rejoiced: “We don’t have to die to go to heaven; we just have to wait till the turn of the millennium.”
But here we are 25 years later, and liberals are the only people who feel they’ve reached the promised land. A few decades from now, history may remember Bill Clinton as one of the most successful Republicans ever to occupy the White House.
For the moment, though, Clinton’s critics persist in feeling deeply dissatisfied, not because the world is still going to hell in a handbasket, but because Democrats are still in power, pushing many liberal ideas and getting all sorts of credit they don’t deserve.
Some of their complaints are understandable. It was the tight money policy of Alan Greenspan, a disciple of “Atlas Shrugged” author Ayn Rand, that laid the foundation for the longest economic expansion in American history. It was a Republican president who carried out much of the tax-cutting and deregulation now powering the engine of growth. It was a GOP-controlled Congress that forced Clinton to agree to a plan that produced the current budget surplus.
While taking credit for policies that he had nothing to do with, didn’t originate or adopted only under duress, Clinton also continues to press for new spending programs — $126 billion worth in last week’s State of the Union address, which came only five years after he declared the end of the era of big government.
But no one expects him to get most of the goodies he wants to pass out. And whatever his budget fantasies may be, the era of big government really is pretty much over. Even with swelling surpluses, the Congressional Budget Office projects that federal taxes will take a slightly smaller share of our income in coming years than it takes now.
On the expenditure side, the CBO says that even if federal discretionary spending grows as fast as the rate of inflation after this year (which is more than it would under existing policies), federal spending will drop from 18.5 percent of national income today to just 16.5 percent in 2010. The last time federal outlays were that low was 1958. Ronald Reagan never got spending below 21.5 percent of gross domestic product.
No one could have ever predicted that a Democratic president someday would boast about his plan to completely pay off the national debt — something not done since 1835. Until Reagan came along, liberals laughed at anyone who worried about such matters. But years of opposing tax cuts have conditioned Democrats to extol fiscal discipline as the highest possible virtue. Al Gore promises to continue running surpluses even if the economy stalls — a shift on the order of the pope endorsing premarital sex.
Some liberals have noticed the reversal and don’t like it one bit. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich castigates Clinton and other Democrats for “sounding like Coolidge Republicans” because they are “spooked by the possibility that voters will be attracted to ambitious Republican tax-cutting plans in the fall, and they haven’t the confidence to build public support for an equally ambitious program centered on education and health care.”
He’s right. Democrats may propose small programs, but they are leery of big ones. Why? Because the party learned the hard way that Americans are skeptical of expansive government and don’t trust Washington to spend their money wisely. They would rather see taxes go to retiring the debt, a project that may do some good and can hardly do any harm, than fund a federal spending spree that may be useless or worse.
Judging against where the nation was a quarter-century ago, opponents of leviathan have largely carried the day. Instead of lamenting Clinton’s success, they might take it for what it is: their victory.
And now, fans, here are the Arena Football results: Anaheim beat Toronto 16-10, Chicago
High scores should give offense to baseball fans
Something needs to be done to rescue the game
Thursday, May 11, 2000
And now, fans, here are the Arena Football results: Anaheim beat Toronto 16-10, Chicago topped Seattle 18-11, San Francisco edged Cincinnati 13-9, Florida got by Pittsburgh 12-5, and . . . What’s that? I’m sorry. Those scores are not from the Arena Football League. They’re from the Arena Baseball League.
Of course, Major League Baseball hasn’t adopted the name yet, but the handwriting is on — make that over — the wall. The thinking is that you can never have too much offense. Home runs have been flying like airliners out of O’Hare: in large numbers and at a nonstop pace.
Monday night, Oakland’s Jason and Jeremy Giambi both cleared the fences, making them the first brothers to homer in the same game since — well, since last October, when Vladimir and Wilton Guerrero did it for Montreal. In the entire history of Major League Baseball, how many pairs of brothers had previously attained that distinction? Three.
What the headlines suggest, the box scores confirm. In April, a total of 931 balls reached the seats — breaking the record for the month and exceeding last April’s total by 140.
In the first five weeks of the 2000 season, teams played 457 games, during which they averaged nearly 11 runs a game and 2.59 home runs. In the first 457 games of the 1992 season, by contrast, teams managed just 8.39 runs and 1.45 homers per game. In eight brief years, total scoring has risen by 28 percent and long-distance connections are up by a whopping 79 percent. And we’re not even into warm weather, when hitters really get cooking.
Some of the reasons for the offensive surge are obvious, and some are in dispute. Hitters claim they are just bigger, stronger and better than hitters of old, thanks to advanced nutrition and hundreds of off-season hours spent lifting weights, instead of fishing or selling insurance as their forebears did.
There is something to this argument: Joe DiMaggio, who won two home run titles, was a willowy 6 feet 2 inches and 193 pounds, which these days is a good size for a patent lawyer. Mark McGwire goes 6 feet 5 inches and 250 and is large enough to moonlight in rodeo bull-riding — as the bull.
Expansion has made life easier for McGwire and other hitters by letting them face undertalented pitchers who otherwise would be riding buses in the minors. In the struggle to fill pitching staffs, major league teams have become about as selective as a 1st-grade talent show. Baltimore currently has four pitchers with an earned run average of 9.00 or more. Toronto has three with ERAs above 11. In the old days, an ERA of 9.00 would get you a job driving a truck.
New fields have also been kind to hitters. The cavernous Houston Astrodome, where home runs went to die, has been replaced with Enron Field, which measures just 315 feet down the right field foul line and 326 feet in left — reasonable dimensions for a high school stadium.
Hitting a baseball 315 feet used to be good for a single, if you were lucky. Letting a team put the fences that close makes about as much sense as letting a team put the pitcher’s rubber 55 feet from the plate.
And let’s not even talk about Colorado’s
