Dude Where's the Party

Other St. Louis Democrats say they wonder if Kansas City leaders forget what happened to African-American communities the last time Republicans were in control and combined tax cuts with deficit spending.

Between 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected, and 1992, when George H.W. Bush was voted out (a period in which taxes were at their lowest levels since World War II), the number of blacks living below the poverty line increased 26 percent. After Bill Clinton's eight years in office, however -- during which the country experienced some marginal tax increases -- that number decreased by 26 percent. The number has been growing again since George W. Bush became president.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, African-Americans -- who, on average, earn 64 percent of what whites make -- saw their average incomes rise 10 percent while whites' incomes rose 12 percent. During the Clinton years, however, blacks' incomes rose 27 percent (compared with a 21 percent increase for whites).

"That's why Bill Clinton is so beloved by African-Americans," says David Bositis of the Washington, D.C.-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, an African-American think tank. "That had never happened before."

Bositis warns that the current Republican spending spree -- "Right now, they're spending money like water" -- is about to run out. And he adds that it's no accident.

This mission is most clearly articulated by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist is widely touted as one of the nation's most influential and well-connected conservatives. He's a close friend and associate of Karl Rove, Bush's chief political advisor. Some say he's the mastermind of Bush's economic plan.

The goals Norquist has laid out in his writing, speeches and numerous encounters with the press fit perfectly with the policies that have been coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- though they aren't expressed in quite the same way.

"I don't want to abolish government," Norquist has said. "I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

He wants to reduce by half government spending as a percentage of the gross national product. What that would entail, of course, is a severe reduction of the entitlement funds Bond brings to Kansas City, for which he's so loved by local Democrats.

During the early Clinton years, conservatives such as Norquist pointed to the federal deficit, which mushroomed during the Reagan and Bush administrations, as a reason to cut government spending. With the help of a resurgent economy, Clinton and the Democrats not only eliminated the deficit but also created a budget surplus.

So conservatives switched tactics. A massive federal deficit suddenly became a good thing. "If we had a little teeny government and a big deficit, I wouldn't care," Norquist recently told The New York Times.

It's called a "starve the beast" philosophy: Cut the funds coming in until the deficit reaches a crisis. Once that happens, "the appropriators," as Bush likes to call Democrats, will be forced to choose between raising taxes (political suicide), allowing Social Security to go bankrupt just as baby boomers start retiring in 2008 (political suicide) or cutting programs for the poor.

Publicly, Bush puts a different spin on the tax cuts, calling them a way to kick-start the ailing economy. Once things improve, according to his model, plenty of money will be flowing into the U.S. Treasury, and no drastic cuts will be necessary.

Bond shares this point of view. His staffers deny that his support of tax cuts is for the cynical reasons Norquist endorses.

"He voted for the tax cuts to leave more money in people's hands," Van Eaton says. "And now we're seeing the economy bounce back. You'd be hard-pressed to find an economist who doesn't say the tax cuts had a lot to do with that."

But Peter Peterson, former commerce secretary under President Richard Nixon, recently told The New York Times Magazine, "Since 2001, the fiscal strategizing of the [Republican] party has ascended to a new level of irresponsibility."

Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has warned that the spiraling deficit, which will reach $400 billion this year, will most assuredly lead to higher interest rates, which would hurt the economy more than tax cuts can help it.

If Bush and his fellow Republicans are successful in their campaign to keep the tax cuts in effect long into the future (Norquist has repeatedly said the administration intends to add more tax cuts every year Bush is in office), the deficit will become a crisis in the very near future. That's because baby boomers will begin to retire and draw on Social Security in 2008. To pay them the money they're owed, Congress will have little choice but to cut from elsewhere.

Local Democrats, however, believe that Bond will do everything he can to keep that from happening. "I think he's the type of guy who will go down fighting for the things he believes in," Smith says. "I don't think anybody can predict what's going to happen years down the road. Four years ago, you never heard the words homeland security."

Bond has already begun to fight. When he felt the budget begin to tighten this past summer, threatening the urban-development funds he hoped to deliver to Kansas City, he complained to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the numbers were too small. "We face a very tough crunch in the [HUD] allocation we've had," he told the paper. "It's the toughest situation we've faced."