Joining the pork parade

     Partly in a cynical attempt to deflect attention from President Clinton's personal troubles, we hear a lot these days about what the Clinton administration has achieved on the "pocketbook" issues, the "reining in" of federal spending.
      In a field of discourse where evasion and euphemism are the rule, pardon some blunt talk: It's a lie.
      The fact is, the latest White House press release brags that federal expenditures will rise "only" $70 billion in 1998.
      But as Stephen Moore, director of fiscal policy studies for the Cato Institute, explains: "There are 14 states with combined personal incomes of less than $70 billion. And that's just the increase in spending in 1998. The total federal budget now exceeds the combined family budgets of every household in America living West of Colorado."
      Who's at fault for this ongoing hemorrhage of America's wealth through the pulsing, slashed artery of the federal budget?
      Republicans "are co-conspirators in this year's budget build-up," Mr. Moore found. Somehow, the final budget OK'd by Congress managed to exceed the president's request by $4 billion to $5 billion.
      As it turns out, this isn't even a matter of Republicans putting money back into military readiness accounts which they might argue have been drawn down too far. Nope. Although Michael Prowse of the Financial Times recently noted that America would do more to spread prosperity if it simply dumped copies of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" out of airplanes passing over Third World nations, than has ever been accomplished by the Agency for International Development, the Republican Congress ended up allocating $200 million more for this foreign-aid boondoggle than the White House requested.
      Bill Clinton sought $630 million this year for that bread line for corporate welfare queens, the Export-Import Bank. The Republican Congress bumped the sum by a round $50 million, to $680 million.
      The White House sought $165 million for the Appalachian Regional Commission, but Congress insisted the Great Society leftover take $170 million. Among the recent poverty-fighting achievements of the ARC? Helping fund a practice football field for the NFL's Carolina Panthers.
      Head Start? NASA? The Agricultural Extension Service? The GOP toked them all.
      But wackiest of all -- given the way Republicans claim to stand for private property rights, and to oppose the endless spread of government rangers and regulators -- "The 105th Congress seems intent on proving it's as green as the Sierra Club by outspending Clinton and Gore on environmental programs," Mr. Moore reports. Even though the federal government already owns more than one-third of the land area of the United States, "GOP appropriators approved $206 million for Interior Department land acquisitions -- almost twice what Clinton and Gore wanted."
      Republicans scored better than they had in ages, in the 1994 off-year elections, by finding a set of smaller-government principles they could enunciate, and sticking to them.
      But after three years of Republican control, Mr. Moore concludes, "Congress has reverted to what it was for 40 years under the Democrats: a fiscal swamp where parochial pork-barrel concerns override the national interest and the constitutional constraints on spending are routinely subverted. An R or a D next to an appropriator's name has become essentially irrelevant."
      A dire warning ... if anyone is listening.