Subject: piml] PIML:  A "BLEEDING HEART" CONSERVATIVE (fwd)
To: prj@mail.msen.com (prj mailing list)
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 96 13:57:00 EDT"
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                 A "BLEEDING HEART" CONSERVATIVE
                 -------------------------------
                         by Robert W. Lee

Jack Kemp once recalled, "My mama told me I was born to be
President of the United States." Prior to August 10th, when
Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole surprised conservatives
and liberals alike by announcing that he had selected the former
congressman, cabinet member, and pro football star as his running
mate, the odds that Kemp would ever achieve that lofty objective
seemed astronomical. Literally overnight, however, he became a top-
ranked contender for the GOP nomination in 2000.

Jack Kemp's resume includes 22 years of government service in
legislative and executive posts. For 18 years (1971-89) he
represented his New York district in the House of Representatives,
followed by a four-year stint (1989-93) as Secretary of Housing and
Urban Development.

During his years in the House, Kemp compiled a respectable
cumulative score of 82 percent in this magazine's "Conservative
Index" and earned a reputation as the leading congressional
advocate of "supply-side" economics. He was chief architect of the
Reagan Administration's 1981 tax-cut legislation which included a
25 percent (Kemp favored 30 percent) personal income tax reduction
over three years.

Unfortunately, supply-side theory ignores the spending side on the
assumption that enhanced economic growth resulting from lower tax
rates will generate sufficient new revenue to cover the costs of
existing federal programs and activities. When then-Senator Dole
proposed a $300 billion package of spending cuts to ease the
deficit in 1985, Kemp opposed it. President Reagan, who had
initially agreed to the cuts, reversed course and the bill died.

Kemp once asserted, "We don't worship at the altar of a balanced
budget." Neither, for that matter, do supply-siders pay much
attention to the Constitution as a litmus test for evaluating
federal programs. Their goal is to preserve the total tax take
needed for those programs, not to lower taxes through less
government.

There were a number of warning signs during his years in Congress
that Jack Kemp's commitment to conservative and constitutional
principles was distressingly flexible. He once told a conservative
audience that "attacking the New Deal is a mistake for us." And as
Michael Wines noted in the August 25th New York Times, Kemp
"favored a larger federal role than did most of his conservative
allies and fellow House Republicans in addressing social and
economic problems."

Kemp's metamorphosis into what some of his critics on the right
call a big-government conservative accelerated after President-
elect George Bush invited him to head the Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD) in December 1988. On January 18, 1989 he
told the U.S. Conference of Mayors that he henceforth wanted to be
known as "a big-L liberal" on race and poverty issues. Asking to be
called "a progressive conservative" (on other occasions he would
use the phrase "bleeding-heart conservative"), he said, "I'm going
to throw the labels out. We're going to throw out ideology."

Kemp would later credit his progressive, bleeding-heart outlook, in
part, to his tenure at HUD. The job entailed scrutiny of public
housing projects and inner-city areas where, in his words, "very
few Republicans, particularly Anglo-Saxon Republicans, had ever
been in their lives." Government programs properly administered by
conservatives such as himself could, he concluded, go far to solve
the problems.

While vowing to "make wholesale changes at HUD," he made it clear
that "we will not seek the termination of good and necessary
programs [even if unconstitutional] just because of past abuses."
He was not, he stressed, "trying to wage war on the goals that have
been set [to] help needy and low-income people." He vowed to pursue
public and private initiatives to combat what he termed "the
appalling tragedy of homelessness and joblessness."

Within two years, Cassandra Chrones Moore, an adjunct policy
analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, would lament in an
April 16, 1991 policy paper that while the "public was left with
the happy impression that Jack Kemp, would clean house at HUD and
kindle the flame of a new and rational housing policy," an
"examination of Kemp's role over the past few months suggests that
the flame is merely a flicker." One litmus test of a meaningful
effort to truly privatize public housing should have been a
reduced, rather than burgeoning, HUD budget. Yet by the time Kemp
left office, HUD's annual outlays had increased by 28 percent. For
fiscal 1989, pre-Kemp HUD spending had totaled $19.7 billion. In
fiscal 1990 it crept up to $20.2 billion, then to $22.7 billion in
1991, $24.5 billion in 1992, and $25.2 billion in 1993.

One of the programs which Secretary Kemp launched and
enthusiastically promoted was Housing Opportunity for People
Everywhere (HOPE). It was supposedly intended to help privatize
housing by having the federal government grant money to state and
local governments and nonprofit organizations to rehabilitate
public housing and to enable low-income families to purchase the
properties. In practice, the program became another expensive
subsidy program that fell far short of its stated objectives. The
few tenants who opted to run the red-tape gauntlet to final
purchase could only resell their homes to persons approved by the
federal housing bureaucracy. Also, each "privatized" unit had to be
matched by yet another publicly owned facility, thereby assuring
that the overall inventory of public housing would not decline.

The Kenilworth-Parkside public housing project in Washington, DC
was publicized as a HOPE showcase, but as the National Journal
reported in 1991, the cost (including federal and local payments,
subsidies, and tax incentives) of renovating the 464 apartments in
the complex (less than 30 percent of which were sold to tenants)
exceeded $130,000 per unit. At the time, an average apartment in
the nation's capital could be built from scratch for $50,000 to
$75,000.

Writing in the August 20th New York Times, Steven A. Holmes
recalled that during Kemp's four-year tenure "the agency succeeded
in selling only 135 units - all but three located in one apartment
house in Washington - out of a total public-housing inventory of
1.3 million apartments, town houses and single-family homes."

Kemp also proposed that the ceiling on assets which welfare
recipients could accumulate, while remaining on the dole, be raised
from $1,000 to $10,000. Writing in the July 1992 issue of the
Ludwig von Mises Institute newsletter FreeMarket, Jeffrey Tucker
observed that the proposal "fails to come to terms with the
inherent contradiction of the welfare state: it rewards behavior it
seeks to end." Under the existing system, Tucker pointed out, you
at least "have to be relatively poor. The Kemp proposal would make
the welfare 'lifestyle' more attractive. It would also make
millions of new people eligible for welfare."

Tucker summarized Kemp's view of the old, evil, welfare state as
giving "the poor a small room in a dilapidated project, a
government school, and some stamps for food," while "bureaucrats
watched their clients like hawks." But under Kemp's compassionate
"vision of the neo-welfare state, the poor get all the programs of
the old welfare system, plus a new home and free private-school
tuition for their kids - all courtesy of the taxpayers. Plus they
can open up a $10,000 money-market account while working in the
underground economy and cashing those welfare checks."

Tucker concluded: "If a politician had proposed this program in the
1950s, he would have been called a Red. Today, he's a neo-
conservative Republican."

The New American * September 30, 1996
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