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Last on the list, and first on the chopping block, came domestic
discretionary spending - in other words, "government." According to
OMB data, domestic discretionary spending has fallen from 21.3 percent
of all federal spending in 1974, to just 16.1 percent today. Under the
Budget Control Act of 2011 domestic discretionary spending will suffer
disproportionate cuts due to sequestration in 2012.
Of the four categories, Nixon prioritized interest payments to
investors first, subsidy payments to individuals second, the military third
and government last. The only major change to this formula came with
election of Ronald Reagan, who moved the military up from third place to
second. Subsequent presidents have followed Reagan's lead.
Now that domestic discretionary spending has been eviscerated, antigovernment
forces have turned their attention to entitlement programs.
Conservative doomsters claim that growth in entitlement spending is
swallowing the federal budget and swamping the American economy. On
September 17 conservative commentator David Brooks wrote in The New
York Times that "the entitlement state is growing at an unsustainable rate
and will bankrupt the country."
A December 1 article in the Wall Street Journal quoted conservative
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield calling entitlements "an attack on the
common good.
"Entitlements say that 'I get mine no matter what the state of the
country is when I get it.'"
Mansfield goes on to lay out a strategy for getting rid of entitlements:
"If Republicans can get entitlements to be understood no longer as
irrevocable, but as open to negotiation and to political dispute and to
reform, then I think they can accomplish something."
Runaway growth in entitlement spending has long been a bugbear of
American conservatives. The New York Times, then as now, slightly to the
right of Richard Nixon on economic issues, concluded back in 1974 that
growth in government spending "is the problem much more than this
year's final total. And getting a handle on growth means getting a handle
on entitlement programs."