Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - Bush Puts The "Big" Back in Big Government

So much for all that Bush talk of budget cuts. When you look at the whole picture, it's just more of the same old, same old GOP spending that's been completely out of control for a damn-long time. Nice to see that at least some GOP Congressmen see his budget proposal for the whopper it is.

Quote:

Even as President Bush proposes significant cuts in healthcare, farm subsidies and other domestic programs, his new budget makes one thing clear about the legacy of his first term in the White House: The era of big government is back.

Bush's $2.57-trillion budget for 2006, if approved by Congress, would be more than a third bigger than the 2001 budget he inherited four years ago. It is a monument to how much Republicans' guiding fiscal philosophy has changed over the 10 years since the GOP's Contract With America called for a balanced budget and abolition of entire Cabinet agencies.

No longer are Republicans arguing with Democrats about whether government should be big or small. Instead, they are at odds over what kind of big government the U.S. should have.

"This Republican Party is much less fiscally conservative than the one that took Congress 10 years ago," said Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research and policy center in Washington. "That Congress believed in eliminating entire departments that weren't justified. You don't hear that these days. I wish we did."

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"This is a promise in which his position so far is not credible," said William A. Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, and a former economic advisor to President Reagan. "President Bush also promised to reduce the deficit in half last year, but it went up $15 billion."

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Republicans' commitment to eliminating the deficit, a cornerstone of the Contract With America, also seems a thing of the past. Party members now argue that the deficit — although it is a record in absolute numbers — is manageable because, when measured as a share of the economy, it is not as large as Reagan's 1983 deficit.

But Stanley E. Collender, a budget analyst with Financial Dynamics, a business communications firm in Washington, said that amounted to "using the budget failure of one Republican to make the large deficits of another appear to be less troubling.

"President Bush would never admit this, but he has transformed the party into the party of permanent big deficits," he said.

A key question is whether that prospect spooks Republicans into taking more aggressive steps to reduce the deficit and curb spending.

Ironically, the initiatives that might suffer are the cornerstones of Bush's second-term agenda. Some Republicans already are balking at his Social Security overhaul because of its high transition costs. And even some Bush loyalists — including Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), former chairman of the Senate Budget Committee — are having second thoughts about Bush's proposal to make his tax cuts permanent.

Said Steve Bell, Domenici's chief of staff: "These deficits are serious business."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...ck=1&cset=true