But on a policy level, the whole thing represents an early setback to Bush’s efforts to carve out a memorable domestic record for his presidency. To understand why, it helps to think back to last year’s campaign.
Going into the 2000 race, Al Gore was supposed to be the big thinker and Bush the policy lightweight. But it didn’t quite work out that way. Gore never fully articulated what a post-Clinton era would look like. While he offered plenty of policy prescriptions, none caught the imagination of the wonkish analysts on the lookout for new ideas-much less the public.
By contrast, Bush’s ideas did catch on in policy circles. With the help of an imaginative issues director, Josh Bolton, he engaged in fresher thinking. Whatever one thinks of the merits of partially privatizing Social Security, establishing “faith-based initiatives” and overhauling Head Start, they were big, intellectually meaty ideas.
The question now is whether these ideas were just for show-a way to graft some gravitas onto a candidate who needed it. That’s because the Bush budget leaves no room to seriously test any of those ideas.
Partially privatizing Social Security is looking like it’s DOA, and not just because the stock market tumbled. Remember how Social Security works: today’s workers pay the benefits of today’s retirees. Bush’s idea, which understandably has a lot of support among younger Americans, is to move to a system where today’s workers can put one sixth of the money they pay in Social Security payroll taxes away in a 401(k)-style account of their own.
The problem is the “transition costs.” Who will make up the difference so that today’s retirees and those retiring during the next decade don’t lose benefits? The transition price tag is $1 trillion dollars. With the tax cut, we simply don’t have the dough for it. So much for Big Idea One.
Big Idea Two is to address social problems through churches, synagogues and mosques. Actually, the law allowing federal money to go to “faith-based” organizations passed quietly in 1996; it is already moving toward such groups. All of the yelling and screaming about church-state issues and the like is moot. It’s a done deal.
But a small deal. Just today, Bush gave a speech pushing faith-based solutions to drug abuse. Worth trying. But the only way Bush could make this idea meaningful would be to put new money into these faith-based programs and give them a real chance to put a dent in drug addiction, teen pregnancy and other social problems. Otherwise, he’ll have to rob Peter to pay Paul-make deep cuts in the relatively small amounts of federal money currently going to other such nonprofit organizations, many of which are quite successful.
For all of the compassionate talk, the Bush budget, thanks to the tax cut, includes no increases for any faith-based programs. While such programs may grab a slightly larger share of the existing pie from nonreligious initiatives, it won’t be enough to make any meaningful difference. Bush has a terrific person running the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, John DiIulio, but without new resources, he’s playing at the margins.
Big Idea Three was to make Head Start a reading program. For any one who follows the early-childhood education debate, this Bush proposal makes plenty of sense. And this week it got a big boost from the most comprehensive study in a generation. (The endlessly quoted Ypsilanti, Mich., study of the 1960s was getting a little long in the tooth). Researchers at the University of Wisconsin followed 1,500 at-risk Chicago children from age 5 until age 20. They found that with the intensive educational preschool favored by Bush (as well as the heavy parental involvement he does not stress) the kids who had attended such preschools were much less likely to be arrested for juvenile crime than those kids who did not (16.9 percent versus 25.1 percent).
This is a huge finding. It means that if we give every at-risk child intensive preschool, we could dramatically cut juvenile crime. There’s only one problem. Having figured out exactly what we need to do-and having, finally, a study to back it-the U.S. government is not going to tackle the problem. The Bush budget provides some modest increases in early-childhood education funding but nothing even close to addressing the scale of the problem. Even if Head Start were totally transformed, it would still help only a fraction of the eligible population.
Why? Because we’re choosing to spend the money elsewhere. Of course, we’ll pay through the nose eventually in the costs of jailing those kids who go on the wrong path, but that takes a kind of long-term thinking that barely exists in Washington.
Actually, there is one area where the time horizons are long-tax cuts. The new one will phase in over 11 years. In other words, we’re locking ourselves into something big here-so big, in fact, that it will be hard, domestically speaking, for President Bush to be remembered for much else.
