Washington -- Working-class and middle-class families are leaving Washington for places with friendlier tax policies, lower crime rates and better schools. The city's tax base has declined because people have been driven away by its incompetent and bloated government bureaucracy (which former and probably future Mayor Marion Barry helped to create).
It is no coincidence that the exodus from Washington began in 1965, precisely when the Great Society social welfare programs, and higher taxes to pay for them, began to kick in. The population 30 years ago was 800,000. This year it is 577,000. The city's financial profile is even grimmer. The number of employed residents has dropped from a high of 347,000 in 1971 to 280,000 this year.
Liberals don't get it. They think people are selfish when they don't want to hand over increasing amounts of their money to dysfunctional, unappreciative (to the working person) government.
And if you disagree with socialism, you are a racist, according to Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who claimed in a speech to some of his Harlem constituents that those who want to cut taxes are ideologicalbrothers of the Ku Klux Klan.
The choice in this election is about change -- real change, not the phony kind offered by President Clinton. It is a choice between more of the same tax-and-spend policies of the past three decades or smaller, less costly and more efficient government. So arrogant are the taxers-and-spenders that Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., publicly boasted that he is a "tax-and-spend Democrat, and let my opponents make of that what they will," a sound bite his Republican challenger has been using in radio commercials.
Government desperately needs a shake-up of earthquake proportions. The Republicans should be given the chance to implement their "Contract with America." They have promised to cut the size of government, reduce congressional committees and limit their own terms. They have promised tax reductions, allowing citizens to decide where to spend and invest the money they work for so that more private-sector jobs will be created.
Whether change comes dramatically Tuesday, or more incrementally, change is coming. Great social and political movements take time, but it is abundantly clear that the policies of the '60s that put faith in the power of government to redeem humankind have not worked. The power of a free and unencumbered individual, living up to his personal potential and corporate responsibilities; the power of "we the people," not "us the government," is what needs to be reclaimed by citizens who have become strangers in their own land.
Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan saw seductive liberalism for what it was and issued a warning in a nationally broadcast address for GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Said Mr. Reagan: "The idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government, or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."
That was the choice in 1964. It remains the choice in 1994. The Republicans should be given a chance to change the system by acquiring control of the House and Senate.
5) Cal Thomas is a syndicated columnist.