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Both Parties Are Proven Big Spenders

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JOSEPH H. BROWN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 28, 2008

It's only September and I'm already sick of the political ads on TV. If you listen to any of them, no one running for office is worthy of the position they seek.

I blow most of them off, but one ad by the McCain campaign really got to me. It said that Barack Obama and the Democrats would raise our taxes and increase government spending. That might happen, but they would have to go a long way to top what Republicans did when they controlled both the White House and Congress between 2001 and 2007.

After winning the White House and Congress in the 2000 election, Republicans did follow President Bush's lead and aggressively slashed taxes. John McCain supported most of these cuts but opposed many others.

But I digress. While Republicans ranted against big-government liberal Democrats to get elected, once they gained power they abandoned their role as the party of limited government and fiscal restraint.

Big Government Conservatism

Between 2001 and 2007 - the year Republicans lost their congressional majority after being trounced in the 2006 election - federal discretionary spending swelled 40 percent after inflation, from $762 billion to $1.067 trillion. Even subtracting defense and homeland security, spending accelerated 27 percent.

Bush and most Congressional Republicans enacted the 2002 farm bill (cost: $190 billion), the 2003 Medicare drug entitlement ($783 billion through 2018; $8.4 trillion through 2082), and 2005's highway bill ($286 billion).

Meanwhile, Citizens Against Government Waste, a government watchdog group, calculates pork barrel projects ballooned from 4,326 earmarks worth $17.7 billion in 2000, under Democrats, to 9,963 worth $29 billion in 2006, under Republicans. (Earmarks peaked at 13,997 in 2005.)

George W. Bush could have shown some leadership as the budget deficits mounted, but during his first term he became the first president since John Quincy Adams, in the 1820s, to go a full term without a veto.

We Need Spending Cuts Too

After his tax cuts passed, Bush spoke of being "good stewards of taxpayers' dollars" and predicted the federal budget deficit would be cut in half in five years because of the economic growth the cuts would generate. But if government spending isn't reined in, that's just wishful thinking.

Milton Friedman, the conservative Nobel laureate in economics, said years ago, a tax cut isn't a tax cut unless it's accompanied by a spending reduction. It's simply a deferred tax increase.

Back in July, the White House reported a projection for a $482 billion budget deficit for the budget year ending in September 2009, a number that would be the highest number recorded. That was before the $700 billion financial bailout package the president and Treasury secretary requested. The Democrats haven't helped, but Republicans didn't either when they were in power.

Now is not the time for finger-pointing; it's time for solutions, not party-bashing for votes.

Because as this decade has shown, an appetite for pork is a bipartisan disorder.

Joseph H. Brown is a Tribune editorial writer.

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