The Lewinsky Budget
One of the great moments from the Starr Report is when Monica Lewinsky earnestly offers the American President her thoughts on education. But that was mere prelude to the federal budget President Clinton unveiled yesterday. Monica may yet be remembered as the face that launched a thousand new federal programs.</br></br>Congress should call it the Lewinsky budget. The President's proposals for fiscal year 2000 represent a grab-bag bonanza that can only be explained as an attempt to repay the liberal Democrats in Congress who've stood by Mr. Clinton through scandal and impeachment.</br></br>And what a reward it is: $1.833 trillion in revenue, which adds up to the greatest Beltway tax windfall in American peacetime history -- and all of it to be divvied up and passed around by politicians! The only losers are taxpayers, who under Mr. Clinton's proposal will have to ante up 20.7% of the whole economy to the feds. The era of big government is not over; the President has been born again as a tax-and-spend liberal.</br></br>Just for reference: Only once this century has the U.S. government sucked up this much tax money, in 1944, when it took in 20.9% of the economy to fight Hitler and Tojo. But just one year later, in 1945, the tax take had fallen to 20.4% of GDP. Mr. Clinton now wants federal taxation to claim more of the economy than it did during the height of the Korean War (19% in 1952), Vietnam (19.7% in 1969) and the Cold War (19.7% of 1981). He is presiding, and intentionally so, over the only peacetime era in American history when taxes have gone up.</br></br>It's this fabulous rush of revenues -- and not spending cuts -- that is mainly responsible for federal surpluses as far as the eye can see. From 1997 to 1998 alone, revenues climbed by $143 billion, or 9%, triple the rate of inflation. That followed a jackpot increase of $126.2 billion, or 8.7%, from 1996 to 1997.