As the GOP’s 100 Days wind down, “What good is government?” is a critical question, maybe THE critical question. Last week Newsweek Correspondents asked it of Clinton and Gingrich. Their replies (edited for clarity and space) follow:
One of my earliest political memories is from 1957, when I was 11 years old. Arkansas’ governor, Onval Faubus, had used the National Guard to stop the racial integration of the Little Rock public schools. President Eisenhower then federalized the Guard to make sure integration happened. I was in a distinct minority among my friends in school because I thought Eisenhower had done the right thing. At the time, the Southern states were using the doctrine of “states rights” to keep some people from having real opportunity
Even earlier, I saw this discrimination all the time at my grandfather’s grocery store in Hope. Most of his customers were black, and many of them lived either behind the store or behind the cemetery on roads that were not paved. I was aware as a little boy that the government treated some people differently from others. My grandfather thought his customers were entitled to paved roads since they paid taxes just like the white people did. That unfairness really didn’t change until the 1960s when the federal government stepped in with the Voting Rights Act, which enabled blacks to vote in large numbers. That forced elected officials to treat them with more respect.
My grandfather also taught me about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. He believed Roosevelt gave the American people a chance to work and then protected them when they were in trou or retired. Conditions in Arkansas during the Great Depression were just miserable. In this case, the lesson was that sometimes the free market did not work by itself
So I grew up with a sense that the absence of a strong federal government did not necessarily mean that people had more freedom and opportunity. In fact, the national government had to affirmatively step in to make sure everybody had a fair chance.
But I started to develop a slightly different view about government when I returned to Arkansas to serve in public office. There were many times when I thought the national government was doing things that didn’t make sense. When I was attorney general, for instance, I saw, that because of federal law, the appeals process in death penalty cases took, on average, eight years. That was crazy, cost a lot of money and didn’t serve the ends of justice'
It became clear to me that we had to constantly reform and “reinvent” government. A professor of mine at Georgetown Universitv, Carroll Quigley, used to say that you had to build institutions to make a civilization work-but that institutions tended to become “institutionalized.” In other words, they would abandon the original purpose for which they were established, and, instead, become more concerned about preserving themselves, their prerogatives, their position, their power.
At its worst, government can act just as a powerful monopoly does in the private sector unaccountable, abusive of power and immune to change. Examples include the welfare system, a lot of public housing, and some of our public schools. The schools that don’t work, for instance, have guaranteed revenues, guaranteed customers, and the shots are being called in the central office bureaucracy. That’s why some of the more promising school reforms involve giving parents a choice of public schools or letting groups of teachers set up new “charter schools.” These reforms instill a sense o competition, while preserving our historic commitment to public education.
Sometimes the government starts out fine but doesn’t adapt to changing conditions. The Environmental Protection Agency was set up under President Nixon. I believe if the government had not said there was a national interest in protecting the environment, we would not have made the great progress we have in cleaning up our air and water. But we don’t need to approach these issues today the same way we did in the 1970s. Why? Because now businesses have figured out that environmental protection is good economics. Entire industries have developed to design products and techniques to make factories cleaner and more efficient at the same time. Now, we have to look at more market-oriented solutions.
My EPA is cutting the paperwork burdens of compliance by 25 percent next year, and giving businesses that ask for help six months to fix their problems without being fined.
There are some things the government does quite well. One, of course, is national security. We have the finest military in the world. And with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the crime bill that we passed last year, the government can help make people feel safer in our streets and schools.
The government is also good at what is known in the policy world as “income transfers.” In other words, it’s good at taking in tax money from the population as a whole and redistributing it to people with special needs. The Social Security system has worked quite well, with a very low overhead. Some argue that people could get a better rate of return if they invested the money themselves, but Social Security has basically been stable, always made its payments and the administrative costs are low. Medicare has problems due to the general inflation in health care costs, but its overhead is low too and compares favorablv with any system in the world.
Government has successfully set up institutions that protect economic markets from their own worst excesses. The Federal Reserve System, which regulates banks, and the Securitieus and Exchange Commission, which oversees the stock markets, have been crucial in fostering economic growth in this country. Some of the countries in the former Soviet Union have asked for advice on how to get their markets to thrive, and one of the things they’ve looked at is how lo set up these institutions so their markets can flourish as ours have.
Carefully targeted government action can also work in other areas. Our family leave law, the Brady bill, the school lunch program, and the proposed minimum wage increase are good examples.
Finally, the government has done well when it set out to provide education to a broad base of Americans. Perhaps the single most important thing the government did to improve opportunity during my childhood was the GI Bill, which helped millions of young men go to college. Since then, other college loan programs, including our new direct loan program, have helped so many more students. And the Head Start program has helped disadvantaged kids become more prepared for school.
I’ve understood for nearly 20 years that big government is not the solution to every big problem. We have already eliminated or reduced 300 programs, and in my new budget I’ve asked Congress to eliminate or consolidate 400 more. The federal government now has 100,000 fewer people than when I became president. But it is equally wrong to say that government is the source of all our problems. The difference between the Republicans and me is that I still believe that the federal government has an affirmative responsibility to help people to make the most of their own lives.
Today, government’s job is to enable people to adjust to the changing economy. Technology and world-wide competition have depressed wages in the low-skill jobs. Middleclass pay is stagnating and people must work harder just to stay in place. I don’t mean to reduce everything to economics; we have deep problems of culture and of the spirit in this country. Still, many problems we face - the breakdown of family and community, the rise of crime and violence, anxiety about the future-are a direct result of economic changes. Parents have had longer work weeks, less sleep, less time for their children. We also have growing inequality of incomes based primarily on differences in education. We have to change that ifwe want to grow the middle class and shrink the underclass.
The most important thing government can do to achieve that goal is to help people raise their education and skill levels. We have to say to people, “We can’t solve your problems for you -You have to go out and make your way in the private sector–but we’re going to make sure you are empowered to make the most of your own lives.” That’s what I mean when I talk about the New Covenant: creating more opportunity but demanding more responsibility in return.
You can see this in our efforts to reform a welfare system that has worked very poorly for people who are not self-motivated. Roughly half the people who get on welfare do so because they hit a bump in the road of life, and they get off quickly. But for those in the permanently dependent class, government has not done a good job because it has not demanded much from the recipients. That’s why we want to require work and responsible parenting as we give people the help they need to get education and jobs. You can see it in our other efforts to give people the tools to make good lives for themselves: for example, making college loans available on good repayment terms or letting people earn college money by serving their communities in AmeriCorps.
I would love to go even further. We should collapse all the govermnent jobtraining programs into one and increase the funding. That way people would know that they could always go back to school and get new skills and have a chance to raise their incomes. I would expand this direct college loan program that we’ve started so that everyone would be able to benefit.
The role of government is not as simple and obvious as it was during the New Deal. At that time, the government helped working people directly by giving them jobs. The sorts of things we have to do now to create opportunity have major payoffs but you don’t see them until later. Sometimes, because the connection of the policy to the job payoff is indirect, you don’t see it all. For example, I believe with all my heart that our economic plan was in the best interests of America, bringing the deficit down, investing more in education and giving working families with incomes under $25,000 a tax break, to encourage work over welfare. But it’s hard for people to see the connection between these policies and economic growth. The same is true on trade. NAFTA opened up markets in Mexico and Canada, and the GATT treaty increased trade throughout the world. They contributed to the creation of 6.1 million new jobs and the lowest combined rate of unemployment and inflation in 25 years.
I think the American people are torn about what role government ought to play. They say they can’t stand big government and they want less of it-but they have huge aspirations for it. After so many years of stagnant income and rising social problems, they want immediate results. But the best solutions can take a long time to work because the problems developed over a long time, and because making progress on them depends not only on government but also on people taking more personal responsibility.
This debate about the role of government could be very important. The American people have to decide what they have a right to expect and, indeed, demand of us in public office - and what they still have to do on their own.
Political leaders in turn must state more clearly what government can and cannot do, what results the American people can expect, and when they can expect them. In this new era, a lot of people are angry and frustrated because prosperity and stability do not cover all who work hard and play by the rules, and because they feel that government is helping special interests and not holding everyone equally accountable. Instead of exploiting the public’s anger, we should seek to unify our people in a common mission to keep the American dream alive for ourselves and our children. in this effort, I believe the role of government is to help create good jobs; to increase our security at home and abroad; to reform government, making it smaller and less bureaucratic; to demand more personal responsibility from all our citizens; and most important, to expand education and training so that all our citizens have the chance to make the most of their own lives.
If we do these things our best days are still ahead.
