Posted on 09/25/2005 10:56:29 AM PDT by Uncle Joe Cannon
September 25, 2005
The Sunday Times
Andrew Sullivan: Is Bush a socialist? He's spending like one
Finally, finally, finally. A few years back, your correspondent noticed something a little odd about George W Bush’s conservatism. If you take Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that a socialist is someone who is very good at spending other people’s money, then President Bush is, er, a socialist.
Sure, he has cut taxes, a not-too-difficult feat when your own party controls both houses of Congress. But spending? You really have to rub your eyes, smack yourself on the forehead and pour yourself a large gin and tonic. The man can’t help himself.
The first excuse was the war. After 9/11 and a wobbly world economy, that was a decent excuse. Nobody doubted that the United States needed to spend money to beef up homeland security, avert deflation, overhaul national preparedness for a disaster, and fight a war on terror. But when Katrina revealed that, after pouring money into both homeland security and Louisiana’s infrastructure, there was still no co-ordinated plan to deal with catastrophe, a few foreheads furrowed.
Then there was the big increase in agricultural subsidies. Then the explosion in pork barrel spending. Then the biggest new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson, the Medicare drug benefit. Then a trip to Mars. When you add it all up, you get the simple, devastating fact that Bush, in a mere five years, has added $1.5 trillion to the national debt. The interest on that debt will soon add up to the cost of two Katrinas a year.
Remember when conservatism meant fiscal responsibility? In a few years, few people will be able to. I used to write sentences that began with the phrase: “Not since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society spending binge. . .” I can’t write that any more. Johnson — the guns and butter president of liberalism’s high-water mark — was actually more fiscally conservative than the current inhabitant of the White House. LBJ boosted domestic discretionary spending in inflationadjusted dollars by a mere 33.4%.
In five years, Bush has increased it 35.1%. And that’s before the costs for Katrina and Rita and the Medicare benefit kick in. Worse, this comes at a time when everyone concedes that we were facing a fiscal crunch before Bush started handing out dollar bills like a drunk at a strip club. With the looming retirement of America’s baby-boomers, the US needed to start saving, not spending; cutting, not expanding its spending habits.
This was one reason I found myself forced to endorse John Kerry last November. He was easily the more fiscally conservative candidate. Under Clinton, the US actually ran a surplus for a while (thanks, in part, to the Gingrich-run Congress). But most conservatives bit their tongues. Bush promised fiscal tightening in his second term and some actually believed him.
They shouldn’t have. When Bush casually dismissed questions about funding the $200 billion Katrina reconstruction with a glib “It’s going to cost what it costs”, steam finally blew out of some loyal Republican ears. When the house majority leader Tom DeLay told the conservative Washington Times that there was no fat left to cut in the budget and that “after 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good”, a few conservatives lost it.
Here’s the chairman of the American Conservative Union: “Excluding military and homeland security, American taxpayers have witnessed the largest spending increase under any preceding president and Congress since the Great Depression.” That would be correct. When you have doubled spending on education in four years, launched two wars and a new mega-entitlement, that tends to happen.
Here’s Peggy Noonan, about as loyal a Republican as you’ll find, in a Wall Street Journal column last week: “George W Bush is a big spender. He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce?”
Here’s Ann Coulter, the Michael Moore of the far right, a pundit whose book on liberalism was titled Treason: “Bush has already fulfilled all his campaign promises to liberals and then some! He said he’d be a ‘compassionate conservative’, which liberals interpreted to mean that he would bend to their will, enact massive spending programmes, and be nice to liberals. When Bush won the election, that sealed the deal. It meant the Democrats won.
“Consequently, Bush has enacted massive new spending programmes, obstinately refused to deal with illegal immigration, opposed all conservative Republicans in their primary races, and invited Teddy Kennedy over for movie night. He’s even sent his own father to socialise with ageing porn star Bill Clinton.” Ouch.
Conservatives have been quietly frustrated with Bush for a long time now. Honest neoconservatives have long privately conceded that the war in Iraq has been grotesquely mishandled. But in deference to their own party, they spent last year arguing that John Kerry didn’t deserve his Vietnam war medals. Social conservatives have just watched as the president’s nominee for chief justice of the Supreme Court pronounced that the constitutional right to abortion on demand merited respect as a legal precedent. This hasn’t cheered them up. The nativist right, long enraged by illegal immigration, has been spluttering about foreigners for a while now. But since few want to question the war publicly, oppose the president’s nominees to the court, or lose the Latino vote, the spending issue has become the focus of everyone’s discontent.
All I can say is: about time. I believe in lower taxes. But I also believe in basic fiscal responsibility. If you do not cut spending to align with lower taxes, you are merely borrowing from the next generation. And if a Republican president has legitimised irresponsible spending, what chance is there that a Democrat will get tough?
This may, in fact, be Bush’s real domestic legacy. All a Democratic successor has to do is raise taxes to pay for his splurge, and we will have had the biggest expansion of government power, size and responsibility since the 1930s. What would Reagan say? What would Thatcher? But those glory days are long gone now — and it was a Republican president and Congress that finally buried them.
And where does that money come from?
Perhaps, keeping our country strong and bound together takes precedence.
Gosh, the next thing to happen will be a government official threatening the POTUS with "punching" him.
Nah, that would never happen....
"Bush is spending like a socialist, and his successor will be a socialist. Our country is going downhill fast.
"As President Richard Nixon observed in 1971, “We are all Keynesians now...."
It's just been renamed, "Compassionate Conservatism".
Me and my children.
Ultimately from taxes.
Some from taxes and some from shifting the burden of funding some programs to states and local communities.
Good point, but the burdens that are shifted to the states, "unfunded mandates", must be paid for by taxes from the residents of the states affected.
One wouldn't think that money would be available with the way that it is conveyed as to how government, VIA the doings of Dubya', is making it unavailable.
Gosh, you have money?
Give me some!
One just can't make it in a choice filled "free Enterprise based" economy where one also has the freedom to vote to change government.
How did you find access to FR?
I know, you are at the library for government is the only option to allow you access the the Internet since you are so financially strapped. Right?
Life in the USA just stinks doesn't it?
Of course I am looking forward to your input as to how it can be made better.
Please reply and enlighten me.
Where does it go from there?
...and the states will push as much as they can down to the local level. Property taxes may rise in some instances and in other cases programs will not be funded.
It's going to get very interesting in the next five or six years.
So you had no problem when Clinton raised taxes right?
There you go with that "forest for the trees" thinking again.
No I didn't vote for Clinton and won't vote for her in '08. ; )
The wealth confiscated through taxation is redistributed.
If you're trying to say that it stimulates the economy then I really have to wonder what you are doing on a conservative website.
Where does the money go when a person mugs you and takes your wallet? Does it not stimulate the economy too?
"it takes money to make money."
If that is the case, then why not turn over all of our money to the government?
LOL - good point. I was not aware that the purpose of the federal government was to make money.
My brother e-mailed me a story by this giant douche Sullivan this morning. He wanted my opinion. My opinion was, in Sullivans' world, America=bad, World=good.
We wound up having a nice heated political debate after that.
Bush is trying to cut Medicare, Bush's budget had a lot of cuts it was the dems and rino's that stopped those cuts.
Do you think Kerry would have proposed Medicare Cuts.
Bush has no power without Congress and the republicans don't have a majority proof without the rino's. The problem isn't Bush it is the rino's.
Kathleen Blanco is your typical dem spending wise and John Kerry would have been just like her. Blanco wants more beuracracy and more bilions with her new agency. That is how dems think.
If you're trying to say that it stimulates the economy then I really have to wonder what you are doing on a conservative website.
Where does the money go when a person mugs you and takes your wallet? Does it not stimulate the economy too?
Alas, another anarchist with a single point mind set.
Redistribution of taxation is not a relevant statement when it comes to economic stimulation.
Taxation via how the money is used is.
If we were to keep our money and not pay taxes then we as a country would have been lost long ago.
Paying taxes is a part of the economy and the way tax monies are spent is a factor as to the health of our economy.
The way tax dollars are spent is what turns the crank of dissension when it comes to paying.
Would you prefer paying your tax dollars to the Fed's to take care of and control your health care completely or would you be more complacent in spending it on national defense and use it only when needed.
Let me guess you would disagree with both scenario's.
I have always wondered how "Conservatives" could support continuous deficit spending.
You were right the first time. Bush is no conservative. Sullivan is indeed a whining, drama-queen crybaby, but that doesn't change the fact that Bush is spending and regulating us into socialism.
Oh yea...he also has shown that he will nominate and STAND BY his conservative judical appointments.
If you're talking about Roberts, it has yet to be demostrated that he is a conservative or a liberal or anything in between. If you're talking about the appeals court nominees, Bush had nothing to do with standing behind them. They were confirmed via a back-room deal between Democrats and a group of spineless Republicans.
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