This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington .

Today, we're talking about big government--not so much as a philosophy of government but in terms of campaign rhetoric. Big government is a political issue and it cuts both ways. As far back as FDR and the New Deal, Democrats used deficit spending to create jobs during the Depression, stimulate economic growth and they painted the opposition as heartless. Republican arguments for balanced budgets bespoke their belief that the government that governs best governs least, and after decades of Democratic dominance, Republican President Ronald Reagan trumpeted a change in his first inaugural.

(Soundbite of inaugural speech)

President RONALD REAGAN: In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

CONAN: Republican efforts to tar the opposition as tax-and-spend liberals worked so well that Democratic President Bill Clinton raised a white flag of sorts in his 1996 State of the Union message.

(Soundbite of State of the Union message, 1996)

President BILL CLINTON: The era of big government is over.

CONAN: In this second installment of our occasional series Who Owns This Issue?, we take on big government. The discussion is not who's spending what and whether that's a good idea or not. Instead, we focus this hour on which party controls this issue and how they hope to use it in the upcoming general election.

[Interviews with other guests precede Mr. Bartlett’s appearance.]

Now we're going to cross the river to Great Falls , Virginia , to talk with Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a non-partisan think tank advocating smaller government. Thank you for joining us today.

Mr. BRUCE BARTLETT ( National Center for Policy Analysis) : Happy to be here.

CONAN: Your group advocates a shrinking role for government. Do you see much daylight between the Republicans and the Democrats right now?

Mr. BARTLETT: No. It's more an issue of how they would spend the money. They both want to spend more. They just want to spend it differently.

CONAN: And your advocacy would say, 'A pox on both their houses. We've got to get a balanced budget.'

Mr. BARTLETT: Well, I don't really particularly care about whether the budget is balanced or not, but I do care a lot about whether spending is going up. I think there's an enormous difference between a deficit resulting from lower revenues and one resulting from higher spending. I think higher spending is per se bad. I think lower revenues, it depends on how they came about. I think the current reduction in federal revenues is due almost entirely to the economic slowdown, and I think there's very little of it as of today that is a result of the tax cut, maybe 25 percent. And I think that if we had not taken the actions we've taken to cut taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, we would still be mired in a much, much deeper economic recession than we are. Actually, we're well into a recovery. And I think people would be complaining very, very bitterly that the administration did nothing.

CONAN: Well, recently, as you know, a number of conservative critics have appeared in the press grumbling about President Bush's fiscal policy. Is there anything in particular that sparked this dissent? We seemed to read about it coming out of the Medicare debate.

Mr. BARTLETT: Well, for me, I think the Medicare bill, the drug bill, was a major issue. It's one thing to waste money on, you know, pork barrel projects, building unnecessary roads and bridges and federal office buildings and such. Those are one-time expenditures, which may be unjustified, but they don't go on and on forever. But when you create new entitlement programs, I think history shows that they are very, very difficult to control, and I think it was just disastrous for the administration to do this. I think they have spent literally trillions and trillions of dollars to buy re-election next year when it was totally unnecessary. In fact, there was a poll out last week from The Washington Post that showed that the opinion of people towards Republicans on the drug issue has actually fallen since they passed the legislation. It was extremely unwise, both politically and economically, in my opinion.

CONAN: And is this politically going to hurt the Republican Party in the coming election?

Mr. BARTLETT: No. Because they were very clever about how they went about doing it. There's virtually no money spent on the Medicare, the drug bill, until 2006, and then it rises very rapidly. So this year, the Republicans or the administration--whoever--can go out and tell people about the great things that they've done for them without bearing any cost or responsibility. But when the money starts coming out of the federal Treasury very, very rapidly, which it will, then sooner or later, they're going to have to rein in those costs, and I think at that point, there's going to be a massive backlash, and I think that it was just very, very unwise.

CONAN: We're speaking with Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. We're talking about the issue of big government. Who owns this issue? It's part of an occasional series here on TALK OF THE NATION. And you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION, which is coming to you from NPR News.

And let's go now to Brian, and Brian joins us from Potsdam , New York .

BRIAN (Caller): Yes. Hello.

CONAN: Hello.

BRIAN: Yeah. How are you?

CONAN: Very well, thanks.

BRIAN: Well, I've just got a couple of comments to make. As far as like large government goes and as far as the Democrats and the Republicans go, I mean, how do you start cutting down big government when it comes to all of the things that we are (technical difficulties) as far as the government, with AIDS and the war in Iraq, with homelessness, with everything? I mean, where do you start? That's my (technical difficulties).

CONAN: We're having trouble with Brian's phone, but, Bruce Bartlett, he asked a good question. People seem to like all these government programs.

Mr. BARTLETT: Well, that's always been the fundamental dilemma, is everybody wants lower spending and a small government and a balanced budget, but they're opposed to cutting any particular program. There's not one single program, with the possible exception of foreign aid, that you could get any significant number of people to say, 'Yes, this should be lower.' And that's why you shouldn't get started on these programs because they are very, very difficult, if not close to impossible, to cut once you've started them, and that's why we have this ratchet effect of government just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and I think we're slowly traveling down the road of Europe, where they have massive government benefits. Everybody is on the dole, and they pay a price for this in terms of very high unemployment, slow economic growth, but they don't care.

CONAN: They also, some would argue, have a pretty good social net and, you know, everybody has health insurance.

Mr. BARTLETT: Well, that's right. I mean, you can make your choices. I just think that Americans have historically tended to be more individualistic than Europeans. The people who founded this country came here to get away from that kind of thing, and as I said, we're going down the same path. We're just traveling it a little slower.

CONAN: Let's get another caller in, and this is Nester, who's with us from Raleigh , North Carolina .

NESTER (Caller): Wow. Hi. How you doing?

CONAN: OK.

NESTER: I was calling to address something that I'd not really ever heard on the radio before, and that is half of our money from annual taxations goes straight into paying the interest on our overall debt, not our deficit, our annual deficit, but debt that we've compiled since the 1874--what can we do about that?

Mr. BARTLETT: Well, I don't think that number is quite right. I mean, interest on the debt is a large number, but a vast bulk of that goes into trust funds. The government is just paying the money to itself. What economists pay attention to is debt held by the public and interest on that is the second or third largest item in the budget, but it's certainly not anywhere near half. I think the main problem--I mean, there's a lot of things you can do to reduce that burden. You can do the same thing that homeowners do. You can refinance your debt. We've done a lot to make the burden of the debt much less than it used to be. But it's certainly a problem, and it's worth noting that almost all or a big chunk of the decline in government spending during the Clinton years that gave rise to the large surpluses we had resulted from a decline in interest on the debt. So it wasn't like any programs were being cut. It was just interest.

CONAN: We just have about a minute or so with you before we have to go to a break, but is fiscal policy, do you think, a make-or-break issue for voters, even those who describe themselves as fiscally conservative?

Mr. BARTLETT : This year, no. And the main reason for that is because national security trumps all these other issues. There's a lot of grumbling among conservatives, but they will all vote for Mr. Bush in November.

CONAN: Thank you very much.

Mr. BARTLETT: Thank you.

CONAN: Bruce Bartlett is senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, and he spoke with us from his home in Great Falls, Virginia.

When we come back from a short break, we'll be talking with Grover Norquist, who will be talking about how he thinks the Bush administration has got it about right. So we'll continue our discussion of this.

Here's a few of the stories that NPR is working on this afternoon. The Democratic presidential hopefuls criss-cross New Hampshire today, doing last-minute campaigning. Polls released today show that Senator John Kerry leads the pack. And a special Connecticut House inquiry committee will recommend whether Governor John G. Rowland should be impeached for lying about accepting gifts for his summer house. You can hear more on those stories coming up later today on "All Things Considered" from NPR News.

We'll be back on TALK OF THE NATION in just a couple of minutes. If you'd like to join us, our phone number is (800) 989-8255, (800) 989-TALK. The e-mail address is totn@npr.org. I'm Neal Conan. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

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CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington .

Tomorrow, it's been three decades since the women's movement started in a big way. More women are in business school and in managerial positions than ever before, but relatively few make it to the top. Is the problem a persistent glass ceiling or that women themselves are opting out of the game, or do the rules of the game need to be changed? Women at the top is tomorrow's TALK OF THE NATION.