Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 127, No. 129, Ed. 1 Tuesday, February 28, 2017 Page: 4 of 10
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4 - TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2017
GAINESVILLE DAILY REGISTER
Opinion
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The great disrupter
George Will's email address is georgewill@washpost.com.
Fax: 202-225-3486 http://thornberry.
house.gov
ONE
TINO
Gainesville Mayor
Jim Goldsworthy
Gainesville City Hall, 200 S. Rusk,
Gainesville, TX 76240, 940-665-7777
YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS
President
Donald Trump
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500
www.whitehouse.gov/contact
U.S. Senator
John Cornyn
517 Hart Senate Office Bldg.,
Texas Governor
Greg Abbott
P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX 78711
512-463-2000, http://gov.texas.gov
State Representative
Drew Springer
On the surface, Trump, with his Ivy League degree and
his real estate and casino fortune, is a classic member of
the American elite; he’s not Andrew Jackson, fatherless
at birth with his chances seemingly determined by a six-
month apprenticeship to a saddlemaker. But everything from
Trump’s manner to his manners, his speaking style to his
style of dress, is at odds with the American elite.
That is the least of it. In selecting his issues and his
advisers, Trump rejects the established order and embraces
the new and insurrectionist. His dismissal of former Gov.
Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, first for his credibility as a
presidential candidate and then as a potential secretary of
state, was not an impulse but a statement.
American politics has its established order and its
establishment figures — the men to see, in one locution, or
the wise men, in another. None of these are in the presidential
inner circle, as they were in the Reagan years, when the
outsider president chose two Princeton graduates, James A.
Baker III (a veteran of George H.W. Bush and Richard Nixon
campaigns, undersecretary of commerce for President Gerald
R. Ford and chief of Ford’s 1976 campaign) and George P.
Shultz (a former labor secretary and treasury secretary
It in the Nixon era), as top aides.
• What value does the Trump team place on
>. continuity?
Great powers, from the Holy Roman Empire to the
British Empire and, in more recent times, the United
States, place great value on stability and its handmaiden,
continuity. The last outsider Republican president,
Vice President
Mike Pence
Executive Office Building, Washington,
D.C. 20501
vice_president@ whitehouse, gov
Washington, D.C. 20510,
Main: 202-224-2934
Fax: 202-228-2856
www.cornyn.senate.gov
U.S. Senator
Ted Cruz
404 Russell, Washington,
D.C. 20510, Main: 202-224-5922
Fax: 202-228-3398 www.cruz.senate.gov
U.S. Representative
Mac M. Thornberry
2525 Kell Blvd., Wichita Falls, TX, 76308
Main: 202-225-3706
State Senator
Craig Estes
P.O. Box 12068 , Capitol Station
Austin, TX 78711, (512) 463-0124
Cooke County Judge
Jason Brinkley
Cooke County Courthouse, Gainesville,
TX, 76240, 940-668-5435,
jason.brinkley@co.cooke.tx.us
P.O. Box 2910, Austin, TX 78769
512-463-0526,
Gainesville: 940-580-1770
www.house.state.tx.us/ members/
1
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If the early controversies of the Reagan administration
are any indication — the contretemps over whether the
Agriculture Department should count ketchup as a vegetable
in school lunches and whether Interior Secretary James
Watt’s view that Americans should “occupy the land until
Jesus returns” was national policy — the current furors
swirling around the Trump administration are mere
distractions.
It will not matter a decade from now whether Education
Secretary Betsy DeVos believes pupils need guns to protect
them from grizzly bears at school or whether Donald J.
Trump believes his 304 electoral-vote majority is bigger than
Barack Obama’s 365 in 2008. Far more important issues are at
stake, vital questions of national philosophy and governance
that will shape the profile of the nation for the remainder of
the first quarter of the 21st century, perhaps beyond.
Here are some of them:
• Are domestic politics and issues affecting the economy
and lifestyle the principal focus of the United States — or
does the country have a role, and a stake, in world affairs?
The United States has answered that question in
different ways at different times in its history. For
most of its early years, when the country’s name
took a plural verb (“the United States are...”) the
focus was inward; the country was still a work in
progress — economically, culturally — and had
a fast-changing national identity. Later, with the
issues of slavery and secession settled, the country
took a singular verb (“the United States is...”)
and, with the advent of a quixotic foreign policy
under Woodrow Wilson, the country began to look
outward.
There were, to be sure, diversions. The nation sought
“normalcy” under Warren G. Harding following World War
I and again after Vietnam, and strains of isolation thus
returned to American politics. But generally, the nation, a
superpower first preoccupied with containing communism
and then with imposing order on a disorderly world, has
looked outward, often but not always in an idealistic and
selfless way.
Now Trump speaks of “America First,” an unfortunate
phrase given its provenance in the effort to keep the nation
out of World War II, and his inaugural address made his
vision clear: “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total
allegiance to the United States of America.” There arguably
were times in the past three-quarters of a century when
American presidents did not put America first — even the
early days of the Vietnam War may qualify in this category,
along with the Suez Crisis and countless examples of
humanitarian intervention. Is that era over?
In an important essay in the latest edition of Foreign
Affairs, Bard College scholar Walter Russell Mead examines
the populist-nationalist presidency of Andrew Jackson
(1829-1837) and in this context argues, “For Jacksonians —
who formed the core of Trump’s passionately supportive
base — the United States is not a political entity created
and defined by a set of intellectual propositions rooted in
the Enlightenment and oriented toward the fulfillment
of a universal mission. Rather, it is the nation-state of the
American people, and its chief business lies at home.”
• What is the place of the American elite and of the
conventions of American domestic and foreign policy?
million, there are only about 2 million federal
bureaucrats.
So, since 1960, federal spending,
adjusted for inflation, has quintupled and
federal undertakings have multiplied
like dandelions, but the federal civilian
workforce has expanded only negligibly, to
approximately what it was when Dwight d
Eisenhower was elected in 1952. Does
this mean that “big government” is not
really big? And that by doing much
more with not many more employees it has accomplished
prodigies of per-worker productivity? John J. Dilulio
Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania and the Brookings
Institution, says: Hardly.
In his 2014 book “Bring Back the Bureaucrats,” he
argued that because the public is, at least philosophically,
against “big government,” government has prudently
become stealthy about how it becomes ever bigger. In a new
Brookings paper, he demonstrates that government expands
by indirection, using three kinds of “administrative proxies”
— state and local government, for-profit businesses, and
nonprofit organizations.
Since 1960, the number of state and local government
employees has tripled to more than 18 million, a growth
driven by federal money: Between the early 1960s and early
2010s, the inflation-adjusted value of federal grants for the
states increased more than tenfold. For example, the EPA
has fewer than 20,000 employees, but 90 percent of EPA
programs are completely administered by thousands of
state government employees, largely funded by Washington.
A quarter of the federal budget is administered by the
fewer than 5,000 employees of the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services (CMS) — and by the states, at
least half of whose administrative costs are paid by CMS.
Various federal crime and homeland security bills help
fund local police departments. “By conservative estimates/
Dilulio writes, “there are about 3 million state and local
government workers” — about 50 percent more than the
number of federal workers — “funded via federal grants and
contracts.”
Then there are for-profit contractors, used, Dilulio
says, “by every federal department, bureau and agency.”
For almost a decade, the Defense Department’s full-time
equivalent of 700,000 to 800,000 civilian workers were
supplemented by the full-time equivalent of 620,000 to
770,000 for-profit contract employees. “During the first Gulf
War in 1991,” Dilulio says, “American soldiers outnumbered
private contractors in the region by about 60-to-l; but, by
2006, there were nearly as many private contractors as
soldiers in Iraq — about 100,000 contract employees, not
counting subcontractor employees, versus 140,000 troops.”
Today, the government spends more (about $350 billion) on
defense contractors than on all official federal bureaucrats
($250 billion).
Finally, “employment in the tax-exempt or independent
sector more than doubled between 1977 and 2012 to more
than 11 million.” Approximately a third of the revenues to
nonprofits (e.g., Planned Parenthood) flow in one way or
another from government. “If,” Dilulio calculates, “only one-
fifth of the 11 million nonprofit sector employees owe their
jobs to federal or intergovernmental grant, contract or fee
funding, that’s 2.2 million workers” — slightly more than the
official federal workforce.
To which add the estimated 7.5 million for-profit
contractors. Plus the conservative estimate of 3 million
federally funded employees of state and local governments.
To this total of more than 12 million, add the approximately
2 million actual federal employees. This 14 million is
about 10 million more than the estimated 4 million federal
employees and contractors during the Eisenhower
administration.
So, today’s government is indeed big (3.5 times bigger
than five and a half decades ago), but dispersed to disguise
its size. This government is, Dilulio says, “both debt-
financed and proxy-administered.” It spends more just
on Medicare benefits than on the official federal civilian
workforce, and this is just a fraction of the de facto federal
workforce.
Many Americans are rhetorically conservative but
behaviorally liberal. So, they are given government that is
not limited but overleveraged — debt-financed, meaning
partially paid for by future generations — and administered
by proxies. The government/for-profit contractor/non-profit
complex consumes 40 percent of GDP. Just don’t upset
anyone by calling it “big government.”
]
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A ■ e
u
David Shribman Reagan, made great efforts to blend into the parade
of presidents by paying fealty to the established
buoys of American policy. Bill Clinton, who ran as an outsider,
was a devout student of presidential precedent and a careful
cultivator of traditional American customs and alliances.
This is not Trump’s style, nor his inclination.
Every president since Harry Truman has regarded
NATO as the foundation stone of U.S. foreign policy. Trump
has questioned its value. Every president since Franklin
Roosevelt sought, and prized, fast-track approval for trade
deals, first for tariffs, then for broader trade deals that most
presidents have wanted as part of their White House legacies.
Trump opposes these sorts of pacts.
At the center of Trump’s skepticism of continuity is his
conviction that prior policies were the province, and the
product, of a cabal of elitists who saw their own interests as
congruent with the national interest.
Traces of this argument can be found in the Trump
inaugural. “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital
has reaped the rewards of government while the people
have borne the cost,” he said. “Washington flourished — but
the people did not share in its wealth.... The establishment
protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their
victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have
not been your triumphs.”
The answer to these questions, not the events of the day,
will determine the lasting significance of the Trump era —
four or eight years that have the potential for being not the
conservative era that its liberal critics fear but something
far more disruptive: a radical departure in American history,
welcomed by some, reviled by others.
David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Post-Gazette (dshribman@post-
gazette.com, 412 263-1890). Follow him on Twitter at ShribmanPG.
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'Big government'
is ever growing,
on the sly
WASHINGTON — In 1960, when John Kennedy was
elected president, America’s population was 180 million
and it had approximately 1.8 million federal bureaucrats
(not counting uniformed military personnel and postal
workers). Fifty-seven years later, with seven new Cabinet
agencies, and myriad new sub-Cabinet agencies (e.g., the
Environmental Protection Agency), and a slew of matters
on the federal policy agenda that were virtually absent in
1960 (health care insurance, primary and secondary school
quality, crime, drug abuse, campaign finance, gun control,
occupational safety, etc.), and with a population of 324
J
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George Will
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Armstrong, Mark J. Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 127, No. 129, Ed. 1 Tuesday, February 28, 2017, newspaper, February 28, 2017; Gainesville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1323918/m1/4/?rotate=90: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Cooke County Library.