Posted on 11/20/2004 1:56:32 PM PST by nanak
I wonder what kind of response you'd get from Dr. Paul if you asked him to look into reducing subsidies that benefit domestic producers of his own district? Crickets?
Scratch that remark about Dr. Paul. I checked the Cato document that he talks about on his website (Congressman Paul's website that someone else linked to). Turns out that he does (or at least did when the document was written) vote against subsidies and protectionism.
The war is costing somewhere in the vicinity of $130-150B a year. This number is arrived at considering the $320B peacetime DOD budget has increased to $400B, with the congressional supplementals added to that. This new spending amounts to 6-7% of total federal spending, and less than 2% of the GDP.
The national debt has increased 1.5 trillion dollars in the past 3 years. ~400B of new defense spending certainly contributed to that, but to blame the whole of a disastrous debt on the one area of increased spending that conservatives would actually approve of is disingenuous.
To see where the bulk of these finance problems come from, look no further than the unprecedented pork and industry handouts that have gone on during the past 3 years. Largest farm subsidy bill ever. Largest education bill ever, written by Ted Kennedy himself. Largest AIDS spending bill ever. Largest energy bill ever. Largest entitlement expansion since 1965. It goes on and on.
Every penny of this mortgaging of our financial futures has been passed by the Republican House and signed by our Republican President. We had the Senate for 3 of the past 4 years too. We finally took Washington - and now that we have it our guys are growing the government and wasting our money at least as well as the Dems ever did.
At the most optimistic, this is something for conservatives to grudgingly accept as the price of getting elected and we can take some consolation that a few of the new programs are sort of right headed and run by decent people. That we should cheer the largest federal government in history and the lunatic fiscal irresponsiblity that it is growing off of as somehow patriotic defies all logic.
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