Quite simply, the battle to reduce the size and limit the reach of the national government is, fundamentally, the same as the battle to contain and then cut the federal budget. The Borrow and Spend Party

President George W. Bush unveiled his $2.4 trillion dollar budget for the 2005 fiscal year on Tuesday with few surprises. It accounts for sizeable increases in defense and homeland security spending, makes the tax cuts passed during his Administration permanent, and suggests more tax cuts in the future, not to mention holding the growth of other federal discretionary spending (outside of Medicare and Social Security) to one-half of one percent. But what this budget and, for that matter, President Bush’s previous three budgets do not squarely address is the bottom line for the federal government — because it remains boldly printed in red ink.

To be specific, if our 535 duly elected representatives up on Capitol Hill pass the President’s budget without altering a single line item, the White House itself predicts the federal government will run up a more than $363 billion dollar deficit in the 2005 fiscal year alone — and that’s down from the previous year’s projected $521 billion shortfall, but still twelve figures in the red. Quite simply, while the Democrats may be the "tax and spend" party, the Republicans are not much better, having corrected only one-half of the economic equation by limiting government greed while allowing federal frittering to run rampant. The choice, as exhibited by the fiscal distinctions between the Democratic Presidential Candidates and President Bush, is nothing more than the difference between no financial responsibility whatsoever and financial responsibility only when it’s popular.

For those of us who believe the government should not be seeping into every nook and cranny of our lives, that’s quite an unenviable decision. But that’s what’s being sold to us by our two-party system.

The truth of the matter is that, no matter who runs the country, our government — and its spending — grows, and has been growing, at an extraordinary rate, especially in the latter part of the last century and the dawn of the current one. Today, the federal government annually spends roughly three times the amount of money it cost to fight World War II or more than it did combined from the year the Constitution was written (1787) up to the beginning of the 20th Century (1900) — and that’s even adjusting for inflation. As stated by Stephen Moore, President of the Club for Growth and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, another way of thinking about such massive spending is to imagine if the government took all its yearly spending and "divided it evenly among all families of four in America, each family would be more than $50,000 richer."

Government spending has doubled since 1960, and, while it did, the Oval Office has been more often occupied by an elephant than a donkey. Thus, while recent Republican occupants of the White House have done a good job of holding the line on taxes, letting us decide how to spend a bit more of our present earnings, their spending decisions have done nothing to reduce the other side of the balance sheet, spending like they had a no-limit credit card, for which we all will receive the bill in the future. This lack of fiscal discipline not only mortgages our individual and collective futures, but it also permits and fuels the unlimited reach of the government — which the Republican Party says it wants to limit, by the way.

While there is no doubt that the public sector operates on a different set of rules than its co-existing private counterpart, one economic truth applies equally to both — neither gets anything for free. Quite simply, the battle to reduce the size and limit the reach of the national government is, fundamentally, the same as the battle to contain and then cut the federal budget. If the Republican Party is to stand for one, it must stand for the other.

In other words, Vice President Dick Cheney got it completely wrong when he told former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that "deficits don’t matter" and that the Republicans’ midterm Congressional election wins meant that bloated federal spending was the Party’s "due." It was just the opposite. The American people ended divided government so that the Republicans could finally fulfill their promise to stop not only the taxing but the spending, too.

But that message has fallen on deaf ears because, while the Republicans promise to wrest the federal government from our backs, they continue to borrow and spend to do the job.

February 5, 2004
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