THE PUBLIC MIND: AS SOCIALIST COUNTRIES COLLAPSE, AMERICA RUSHES TO BECOME THE ULTIMATE WELFARE STATE

To the Editor:

The Clinton watch:

As the Clinton administration and the Congress rush inexorably to pass the largest tax increases in American history voters, please note that every Democrat in the House and nearly every Democrat in the Senate voted in favor of the tax-and-spend package and the ultimate welfare state, other socialistic countries are rushing to dismantle, as much as possible, their welfare states.

In Britain, John Major's government has launched a "fundamental review" to find means to restructure the cornerstones of England's cradle-to-grave welfare state.

According to U.S. News & World Report, the welfare state is breaking the back of Britain's struggling economy, as most American conservatives could have predicted years ago. Britain must do something. Nothing is sacrosanct: State pensions, unemployment and child benefits, free university education and, of course, that prized procession of the anticapitalists who make up the top cadre surrounding President Clinton, universal health care.

Welfare spending already consumes more than half of the nation's annual budget. With the population aging and the number of workers shrinking, the cost of maintaining the system will be unsustainable even with higher taxes.

Britain's crisis paints a frightening picture of where our own nation is headed. Britain's budget deficit is equivalent to 8 percent of gross domestic product. The U.S. deficit already amounts to 5.2 percent of GDP. And it will continue growing under Clinton and the Democratic Congress. History shows that every new tax has produced massive new spending.

What Britain will be able to do remains to be seen. In 1991, Sweden, another great advocate of the welfare state for five decades, elected a conservative government intent on curbing public spending and soaring tax rates 50 percent and more.

The government slashed pensions, sick leave and vacations and boosted medical fees and was making some gains. Then recession set in. Now Sweden's budget deficit is 14 percent of GDP and the highest in Europe.

And it continues to soar out of control.

I won't bother to mention Russia. I will mention that the Democrats' obsession for new taxes and spending seems particularly odd in light of the fact that new taxes helped defeat George Bush last time around. And we have a bunch of new faces in Congress. Did all those Democrats run on platforms calling for new federal taxes? (Don't you have to wonder about the agenda of your representatives when they propose to put you in a higher tax bracket by figuring the "imputed" rental value of your home and your health insurance benefits?)

Of course the Clinton strategy is obvious. Enact new taxes this year, four years from now nobody will remember. Tax the beleaguered private business sector and the productive middleclass despite promises to the contrary and provide new benefits for the dependent, creating new dependencies.

The motor-voter act will add more numbers of governmental dependents to the Democrats' camp. Infrastructure work mostly unnecessary to be paid for by an unneeded $16 billion economic stimulus package will pay off the construction industry that voted overwhelmingly for Clinton.

Will construction hire many of the unemployed? Unlikely. The white-collar unemployed don't have the experience for middle-level management jobs, if any open up, in construction. What are they going to do, push wheelbarrows, carry cement blocks, lay brick?

The stimulus package calls for 50,000 new Head Start jobs, another obvious political payoff. Fifty thousand new Head Start jobs probably is the equivalent of 250,000 votes, including family and friends who will be appreciative.

Not that the Republicans have exactly clean hands in all this. Lately, with Clinton holding their feet to the fire, they've been rushing to center stage with deficit-cutting plans that call for no new taxes. So apparently it is possible. Why were they sitting on their hands when the Reagan and Bush administrations presented their unbalanced budgets that contributed to unparalleled national debt?

Will taxpayers forget those who wiped out their last raise or maybe their last two or three raises? (And that does not include the energy tax or what universal health care may cost us. And school officials wonder why taxpayers are opposed to new school taxes.)

It depends on whether new taxation inflicts another recession upon us. And how well we recover by the time Clinton seeks re-election. The middleclass might just vote against the Democrats and Clinton next time around or Ross Perot might upset the apple cart again.

But congressional elections are only two years away.

Bill Zellmer

Cape Girardeau