Posted on 10/10/2006 11:08:32 AM PDT by Small-L
When The Washington Monthly reached me at my office recently, a voice on the other side of the line meekly asked if I would ever consider writing an article supporting the radical proposition that Republicans should get their brains beaten in this fall.
“Count me in!” was my chipper response. I also seem to remember muttering something about preferring an assortment of Bourbon Street hookers running the Southern Baptist Convention to having this lot of Republicans controlling America’s checkbook for the next two years.
Maybe that’s because right-wing, knuckle-dragging Republicans like myself took over Congress in 1994 promising to balance the budget and limit Washington’s power. We were a nasty breed and had no problem blaming Bill and Hillary Clinton for everything from the exploding federal deficit to male pattern baldness. I suspected then, as I do now, that Hillary Clinton herself had something to do with “Love, American Style” and “Joanie Loves Chachi.” And why not blame her? Back then, Newt Gingrich felt comfortable blaming the drowning of two little children on Democratic values. Hell. It was 1994. It just seemed like the thing to do.
The terminally rumpled Dick Armey (R-Whiskey Gulch) even went so far as to suggest that the Clintons might be Marxists, drawing an angry personal rebuke from Bubba himself. But 12 years later, it is Armey’s fellow Republicans who should be sobered by the short and ugly history of Republican Supremacy.
Under Bill Clinton’s presidency, discretionary spending grew at a modest rate of 3.4 percent. Not too bad for a Marxist, even considering that his worst instincts were tempered by a Republican Congress. (Well, his worst fiscal instincts.)
But compare Clinton’s 3.4 percent growth rate to the spending orgy that has dominated Washington since Bush moved into town. With Republicans in charge of both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, spending growth has averaged 10.4 percent per year. And the GOP’s reckless record goes well beyond runaway defense costs. The federal education bureaucracy has exploded by 101 percent since Republicans started running Congress. Spending in the Justice Department over the same period has shot up 131 percent, the Commerce Department 82 percent, the Department of Health and Human Services 81 percent, the State Department 80 percent, the Department of Transportation 65 percent, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development 59 percent. Incredibly, the four bureaucracies once targeted for elimination by the GOP Congress—Commerce, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development—have enjoyed spending increases of an average of 85 percent.
It’s enough to make economic conservatives long for the day when Marxists were running the White House.
This must all be shocking to my Republican friends who still believe our country would be a better place if our party controlled every branch of government as well as every news network, movie studio, and mid-American pulpit. But evidence suggests that divided government may be what Washington needs the most.
During the 1990s, conservative Republicans and the Clinton White House somehow managed to balance the budget while winning two wars, reforming welfare, and conducting an awesome impeachment trial focused on oral sex and a stained Gap dress.
The fact that both parties hated each another was healthy for our republic’s bottom line. A Democratic president who hates a Republican appropriations chairman is less likely to sign off on funding for the Midland Maggot Festival being held in the chairman’s home district. Soon, budget negotiations become nasty, brutish, and short and devolve into the legislative equivalent of Detroit, where only the strong survive.
But in Bush’s Washington, the capital is a much clubbier place where everyone in the White House knows someone on the Hill who worked with the Old Man, summered in Maine, or pledged DKE at Yale. The result? Chummy relationships, no vetoes, and record-breaking debts.
As a political junkie who wept bitter tears the night Jimmy Carter got elected and shouted with uncontrolled joy when Ronald Reagan whipped his sorry ass four years later, I find myself ambivalent for the first time over a national election. After six years of Republican recklessness at home and abroad, I seriously doubt Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or the aforementioned Bourbon Street hookers could spend this country any deeper into debt than my Republican Party. With any luck, Democrats will launch destructive investigations, a new era of bad feelings will break out, and George W. Bush will stop using his veto pen to fill in Rangers’ box scores and instead start using it like a conservative president should.
Why look at only at discretionary spending? It's "entitlements" that form the bulk of the growth in federal spending. Discretionary spending includes all those things the federal government is either explicitly supposed to do, like raise and support Armies and a Navy, or things that seems reasonable for the national government to be doing, like building Interstate highways, since they help in regulating Interstate Commerce, just as canals such did in an earlier era.
I don't see anything about any individual entitlements in the Constitution.
I don't remember us winning any wars in the Clinton portion of the 1990s? Unless he means against Serbia, where we likely were on the wrong side. What would the other war be? Desert Shield/Storm was in the 1990s but under Bush.
Of course most of that budget balancing was at the expense of the military, the only thing Clinton ever really cut.
Who told you those lies?
Why are you trying to pass them off at Free Republic?
I though it was since Bush was president.
Really sorry about that.
for comparison:
Federal outlays
1965 118 trillion
1975 332 trillion
1985 946 trillion
1995 1,515 trillion
2005 2,472 trillion
Republicans have done better than the average congress in holding down budget growth.
Sure, it'd be nice if they did better...
I'm as much a fan of Reagan as of GW, but cut and run started in Lebanon when 240 Marines did not get a proper force action for their murder. We did not make it right till after 9/11.
80% of the people in prison can't read at 8th grade level. Do we reduce the prison population if they can read? I think so - someone ask Chuck Colson. NCLB is a conservative program. Your highlight of the medical savingss and choic program is another GREAT Conservate win - to heck with NRO and George Will. Cleaning up the EPA is a preetty good start too. /my rant is off and again I THANK YOU.
What about Homeland Insecurity. The brand new agency designed to protect the country and its citizens.
I thought that was fedgov.coms main job all these years.
How little I know.
A dep of education that does not educate.
A dep of energy that produces zero energy..
Commerce is just a excuse to subvert the Constitution.
Justice has become a joke. One law for the elite.
Health and human services? Must be where they disburse the wages they stole from honest hard working men and women.
Dep of housing and urban dev. lol Yeah they have done a wonderful job.
Dep of transportation? The only transporting being done there is when star trek reruns are on the tube.
Fact is, I used to care, but I don't any more. The Republican controlled congress has been spending like drunken sailors for 6 years. With very few exceptions, they have not earned my vote.
Unfortunately, we don't have one of those for the next 2 years. Bush has veto'd what, 1 bill in 6 years ? He worked with the Swimmer to give us a bloated Education spending bill.
No, I think conservatives will be in a world of hurt if the Dems take over this fall, which is why I plan to vote Republican. I'm not happy about the RINOS, but it's better than having the Dems in power.
President Bush has shown he will not veto GOP legislation. Hopefully, he will dim legislation
Republicans get a free pass from me. In 1998 Demonrats screamed for war. In 2003 they screamed NO WAR for OIL.
This guy also gets a free pass:
Islam is a vile religion - Gene Simmons.
"Taking a set of numbers out of context to validate preconceived notions is propaganda, not intellectual inquiry."
This describes you excellently. I have yet to see any intellectual inquiry from you on the state of the federal budget which actually uses numbers showing spending increases in non-defense items the last 5 years.
Good Compilation.
strengthen=straighten
Good list .
Not the Republicans! It's being blocked by a Republican Senator.
man I'm glad I say your post...saves me a zillion posts....simply, yep, great job
and it is either the FBI files or Condit
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