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The Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar Mistake: How the U.S. Bungled Its National Priorities from the New Deal to the Present. BY BRUCE S. JANSSON. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Cloth, $27.50. 496 pages.

The effect of Bruce S. Jansson's The Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar Mistake is to implement a charge he himself does not make but is made ever more aptly nowadays--that the real priority of the new Bush administration's tax cutting is to deprive the national government of revenue, so as to diminish its role. President Reagan was an early champion of this effort, demonizing the federal government as the people's enemy, to the delight of conservatives. Jansson's book details how the national budget tax policies have deprived the American people of programs such as health care, job training, public education, and urban renewal, from the eleven presidencies from the Depression to the present, even from FDR and the New Deal on. What Jansson has done required years of multidisciplinary research on economic policy, tax policy, budget policy, social policy, foreign policy, and military policy--in short, it is a highly readable account of twentieth-century political history. It is, of course, highly provocative, bound to antagonize market-prone economists as "socialistic" and the guessing" of a Monday morning quarterback. Hindsight second-guessing, however, appears to be the essential methodology for achieving superior perspectives on social policy, and Jansson has done his homework.

How well he has brought this off is the proper question. Let's see. His opening charge is specific: "From 1931 through 2004 the federal government will have spent roughly $56 trillion in constant 1992 dollars," and we Americans made fiscal and tax "errors" totaling roughly $16 trillion through this period. His premise is that choices about budget priorities are the most important made by the federal government since they shape "the well-being of citizens, the nation's security and the national economy."

This seems a plausible if daunting premise. A fundamental exercise in Jansson's argumentation throughout his examination of each presidency is what percentage of the GDP the national government spent from its tax revenues. Throughout his threescore-plus-years' history, "excessively low tax rates" established by the president and Congress are the crux of the problem, writes Jansson, depleting the resources available for all domestic (the so-called discretionary budget) and military programs. Jansson often observes that the United States has devoted a smaller percentage of its gross domestic product (GDP) than most advanced European nations on its programs. He never denies that a proportion of the citizenry might choose to use their tax moneys for private indulgences. The record is clear that that is precisely what happens in the give-and-take of American politics. He simply avers that democratically elected public authority is the best, if imperfect, guarantor of equitable distribution in the general public's interest.

As for "errors," Jansson is not stressing pork-barrel excesses or fraud or corruption here, but just plain goofs in bungling national priorities that have left the side (America) down--and not just through inadequate tax rates but also sometimes by absurd military expenses (like the veterans benefits for men signing up after the Armistice!); failure to properly estimate the magnitude of interest payments from deficit spending, drastically affecting percentages taken from future budgets; and "ill-advised military engagements such as the Vietnam War." These words of Jansson's, of course, reveal the degree of personal judgment inherent in his thesis. He would not deny this; his book is a thesis book. I think sometimes his shots fail-for instance, his criticizing Truman on the Korean War, when it was Douglas Mac-Arthur who erred in invading the North, inciting China's s intervention. Obviously, Vietnam War advocates would jump on Jansson and charge that he wages his argument of national "mistakes" not so much fr om tax and budget policy errors but from his political "prejudices," so, they would say, disregard his book. It ain't "pure economics," to be sure.

But to disregard Jansson would be irresponsible. Jansson is compelling in stressing the negative impact on the domestic agenda from manifest tax and fiscal misjudgments. And ill-advised military expenditures have often already bungled up our public life, claims Jansson. The result, he writes, is that "The so-called discretionary budget, which is determined annually in the push-and-pull of budgetary politics, has been especially devastated since the early 1930s in such pivotal periods as the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society, and the Clinton administration." (He properly notes here that so-called entitlement programs such as social security, Medicare, and Medicaid are relatively immune to annual budget battles since they are automatically funded to the level of benefits claimed during a specific year.)

His critics may choose to chastise Jansson for trusting government to carry out the programs we so sorely miss. What is their alternative? The abstraction of "compassionate conservatism"? Baloney. But what Jansson contends--I use this word advisedly--deserves airing.

Had the $16 trillion in squandered resources been diverted to the domestic agenda, American society would have been dramatically transformed. For roughly $2.15 trillion (in 1992 dollars), for example, the United States could have funded, from 1945 to 1996, free child care for women with the smallest annual in-comes, substantially subsidized child care for women in the next two income quintiles, and funded one thousand primary-care health clinics to serve 25 million Americans in medically understaffed urban and rural areas. It could have increased funding for entitlements--such as food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit--designed to assist (mostly working) people in the two lowest quintiles of annual income. The United States could have increased funding for social investment programs, here defined as certain education, social service, employment, and training programs, mostly funded by the discretionary budget. (These programs averaged less than 1 percent of the f ederal budget from 1944 to 1966, 3.7 percent in the 1970s, and 2.7 percent from 1980 to 1994.) It could have lowered taxes of low-and moderate-income people or granted them major tax concessions to help them buy houses, set up businesses, and further their education. Or it could have vastly increased the amounts spent on public transportation, environmental cleanup and protection, and programs to repair the nation's fraying infrastructure. The squandered resources would have provided $15.78 trillion--more than sixty times the entire domestic discretionary budget of 2000-to more than double the U.S. discretionary budget each year since 1933. Or the United States could have substantially increased some of its entitlements, such as expanding Medicaid to cover everyone or almost everyone without health insurance, from 1965 through 2004.

After all, Jansson has undertaken a daunting project, an interdisciplinary analysis of American national priorities from the 1930s through 2004. Each presidency was distinct in its successes and failures. But Jansson faults them all for insufficient federal taxation and various wasteful national budget priorities. Reagan is the prizewinner in producing record deficits that burdened the country with huge interest payments into the 1990s.

Jansson's book was published just before the announcement of George W. Bush's proposed budget, but his critique would be an onslaught, no doubt, given Bush's avowed goals to cut domestic programs by 4.7 percent in real per capita terms, foretelling a budget with domestic discretionary programs reduced to their lowest levels as a percentage of American GDP in history, not to mention the actual deceit in Bush's numbers.

What Jansson achieves is an opinionated account of how postwar America has badly shortchanged itself, depriving itself of necessities and amenities such as health care, child care, cleaner environments, and adequate public transportation. Jansson's book, for all its criticism, is not some diatribe against mankind's self-destructive deviltry, but rather a sobering disclosure of human fallibility. In this respect, it can be judged as hopeful, for it points the way to constructive change.

Not surprisingly, Jansson is best known for his expertise in the fields of social welfare and policy. He holds a doctorate in public policy from the University of Chicago and a graduate degree in American history from Harvard. He is the author of eight previous books.