Commentary Section, The Washington Times

by Stephen Moore

Monday, August 1, 1994

Late last week the U.S. Congress pole-vaulted to new heights of fiscal incompetence. Democratic House and Senate conferees managed to craft a crime bill that will cost taxpayers $32 billion but will do virtually nothing to fight crime.

That this 1,100-page plus crime bill is irrelevant to the growing scourge of crime in America should not be too surprising. From Day One, the chief motivation for this legislation has not been to get muggers, thugs and violent gangs off the streets.

Rather, it has been to serve as a back-door method of channeling billions of federal tax dollars to states, the mayors and big cities, and a grab bag of special-interest groups. The bill triumphantly succeeds in achieving that goal. One has to go back at least 20 years and five presidents, to the days when Richard Nixon invented revenue sharing and started passing out free money to states and cities, to find a more expensive federal slush fund.

Yes, Virginia, California, New York and Ohio, there is a Santa Claus.

Many commentators have noted for months that the crime bill is crammed with political pork--huge dripping carvings of it. In the final version of the bill, roughly $10 billion in new social welfare spending has been earmarked for crime "prevention." Here is a brief list of what Congress thinks will "prevent" crime:

The crime bill, says Bob Dole correctly, looks like it was constructed by a panel of university sociologists. What congressional liberals have accomplished here is a brilliant marketing coup. They have taken their lengthy wish list of failed social welfare initiatives --not one of which would pass muster on its own-- tied them with the bow of crime prevention, and now have a package that is likely to pass. We can only be thankful that Bill Clinton didn't have the foresight to put his health care reform in the crime bill, or no doubt that would sail through Congress this week.

Probably the most objectional pork in the entire legislation is the $1.8 billion earmarked for Sen. Joe Biden's "Violence Against Women Act." That act sets up gender sensitivity programs for judges and police; classifies assaults against women as "hate crimes" or civil rights offenses, and passes out millions of dollars to women's groups for "rape education" and a smorgasbord of other programs. The act would be more efficient if Congress cut out the federal middlemen and simply required every American household to write a $20 check to the radical feminist group of its choice.

How can I say with certainty that the proposed social spending won't prevent crime? We've spent the past 25 years pouring funds into similar initiatives with meager results. We are not talking here about a bold new federal direction in the war against crime. In 1992, government at all levels devoted $1.01 trillion to fighting the crime problem via the "prevention" route. Yet despite this increased spending, inner-city lawlessness has soared.

Even the bill's roughly $22 billion in federal spending on police and prisons is of dubious merit. It is a frontal assault on our system of federalism. Why does the federal government need to be in business of building prisons for the states and paying for cops in cities? The states spent upward of $600 billion in 1993. Since 1980 most states have seen their budgets double and even triple-- ditto for almost all major cities.

A case might be made that states need more prison cells and cities need more cops, but no principled or fiscal case can be made that the federal government should pay for them. After all, the money that Congress seems so eager to dole out to the residents of states and cities came from the taxpayers of states and cities in the first place.

The purpose of an effective crime bill is to teach criminals tat crime doesn't pay. George Mitchell, Joe Biden, Charles Schumer, and the big-city mayors are laughing all the way to the bank.

[Stephen Moore is director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute.]