It's telling what makes front

page news these days. Recently, this headline appeared on the front page

of the Washington Post: "GOP Eyes Tax Cuts as Annual Events."

The Post story reports that

the Bush administration may actually be considering pushing for a tax

cut each year, big news in the nation's capital.

Why? To put it in perspective,

it wouldn't be a story at all, much less a front page story, if the Bush

administration announced it was going to make spending increases on any

particular government program an annual event.

After all, in Washington and

in state capitals and city halls around the country, that's just the way

it's done. And in the minds of many, that's the way it always has been

and always will be, and to suggest anything to the contrary is something

both irresponsible and radical. It's the paradigm we're in, and anyone

who dares think outside that box is truly a heretic in modern political

culture.

The gospel of ever-increasing

government spending is being practiced with the fervor of a tent revival.

As detailed in a recent SBSC report on state spending authored by our

chief economist, Raymond Keating, state and local spending alone nationally

increased from 1992-2000 by almost 40 percent, some two and half times

the rate of inflation.

As result, spending was $1000

per person or some $271 billion more in 2000 than if spending increases

had been held to inflation. Federal spending has also been increasing

along the same lines.

State spending has increased

so fast, state governments can't even catch up. Forty-seven states entered

the year facing budget deficits, and the shortfall is so great that the

U.S. Senate voted to borrow $20 billion (which we'll all be paying interest

on for decades) to help bail them out.

In most of these states, the

idea of even slowing down spending, much less rolling it back, is regarded

as a dangerous heresy.

In Minnesota, which spends

more per person than just three other states, new Governor Tim Pawlenty

is standing by his no-new-taxes campaign pledge and is shrinking the growth

of state spending to 5 percent to keep that pledge. This seemingly modest

move has been blasted as a "radical departure from Minnesota's values

and traditions" by the state's largest newspaper.

The Pawlenty plan also drew

fire from a bipartisan group of four former Minnesota governors who actually

argued that a tax increase was the only way to keep the state's economy

growing.

Former Republican Governor

Arne Carlson, himself a tax raiser, argued, "You have to protect

the infrastructure that allows you to drive economic growth." Of

course, if Minnesota state spending returned to the levels of the last

year of the Carlson administration in 1998, it would be roughly a third

less than it is now, which he would consider to be irresponsibly low today.

In New York, which spends more

per person on state and local government than all but one state, a Republican

Senate and Democrat-controlled Assembly teamed up to override Gov. Patacki's

veto of a tax increase. If the veto had been sustained, New York state

spending would have been "radically" reduced by less than 1

percent.

The good news is this nation

is moving towards a new way of thinking at least when it comes to the

level of taxation.

Around the country, voters

in even the traditionally highest taxed states such as Minnesota, New

Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Hawaii and Maryland have elected new leadership

which is publicly committed to, and for the most part is, keeping commitments

to keep the lid on taxes in the face of the cries and lamentations of

old guard politicians, newspaper editorial boards, lobbyists and flogging

ad campaigns from various labor unions.

In Oregon, where state and

local spending per person is the seventh highest in the country, state

lawmakers who were afraid to raise taxes themselves put a tax increase

on a statewide ballot and loaded the deck by legislating automatic cuts

in popular programs such as police protection and nursing homes should

it fail. It did.

And for the most part, politicians

who are sticking to their no-new-taxes pledges are faring better in the

polls than tax-hiking governors, such as California's Gray Davis, who

is pushing an $8 billion tax hike, and finds his public approval has slipped

to a lowly 24 percent.

The bad news is that real,

long-term tax reduction requires actual reductions in spending, and seemingly

no one, even the Bush administration, is publicly thinking that far out

of the box.

Those who do make that argument

are now regarded as crazy, kind of like those radicals who once argued

that we should try to roll back communism, or end welfare as we know it.

Minnesota's Pawlenty, for example,

is staunchly standing his ground in defense of his no-new-taxes pledge,

but offers the consolation that he doesn't actually see deep tax cuts

or a move to cut spending in the future.

In the Washington Post story,

NFIB Vice President Dan Danner dismissed the idea of annual tax cuts during

the Bush years as "not very realistic."

But in reality, a political

shift on spending may not be as far off with the public. The dramatic

growth in support for politicians who pledge not to raise taxes, a once

radical notion initiated by Americans for Tax Reforms' Grover Norquist

less than 20 years ago, has spread like wildfire and has fundamentally

transformed the debate in Washington where most of the highest profile

critics of the 2001 Bush tax won't speak of repealing it. And, it's quickly

taking hold in state capitols as well.

It's taken hold for two reasons.

First, more and more people

simply don't see any marginal benefit in additional spending. In some

states, they've seen state budgets double without any noticeable improvement

in schools, roads, police protection or other fundamental services. And

in cases such as welfare spending, they've seen increased spending lead

to real harm.

Second, there is a growing

reawakening among the public that government is not the sole benefactor

of the public good. There is an increasing recognition that other institutions

such as the family, businesses, churches and charities also play key roles,

and that government spending competes for dollars with these institutions.

It is this second reason that

holds the key to arguing for actual reductions in the size of government.

Politicians and reformers need to learn to frame the debate on these terms.

They need to understand and point out that small businesses are the first

department of economic development. The family car is the first department

of transportation. That families, churches, and charities are key providers

of health, education, and welfare.

When the public and the politicians

begin to see government as a competitor, rather than the only source,

for funding, the spending debate will change.

When politicians begin to articulate

that every additional dollar spent by government comes at the expense

of the rest of the social infrastructure, that the choice is not one of

spending more or doing nothing, then perhaps they can start sticking their

heads outside the current spending box.

Now that would be front page

news.

[Darrell McKigney is president

of the Small Business Survival Committee, a national nonpartisan small

business advocacy organization. Find out more at www.sbsc.org.]