Old-style conservatives, bad as they were, had a consistent position that was at least worthy of debate—government should be smaller and less intrusive. While this had the enormous downside of providing fewer essential government services such as food for hungry children, keeping dry-cleaning solvent out of river water and smog out of the air we breathe, small government should mean lower taxes in theory.
However under both Reagan-Bush and Bush II, neo-conservatives have grown government while lowering taxes only for the rich. Bush II has increased government spending by 35 percent, ten percent more than Lyndon Johnson who was fighting the Vietnam War and creating the second wave of New Deal policies called the Great Society. Bill Clinton, by contrast, cut government spending eight percent in the same time period while raising taxes.
The results speak for themselves—Bush II, like his Republican predecessors, runs massive deficits, raises national debt to historical highs, and actually grows government. Without all the new government positions created in Bush’s first term, he would have been the most recent president since Hoover to have lost jobs.
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html Consider the graph above: after falling to a historic low under Carter, the national debt grew to 57 percent of GDP under “borrow and spend” Reagan, 64 percent under recession-prone Bush I, and has climbed nearly back to his daddy’s level under W.’s fiscal irresponsibility.
Bizarrely, even though government is bigger and more costly than ever, it serves America less and less. The FEMA non-response in New Orleans showed Americans that the only thing big enough to fight a category four hurricane is the federal government. The military budget continues to climb both in billions of dollars spent and as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP). After a historic low of 3 percent during Clinton’s term, military spending has increased to a projected 4.3 in 2007. Compare that to Canada with 1.1 percent, Japan with 1.0, the U.K. with 2.4, Germany with 1.5, and South Korea with a hostile enemy on its border and thousands of US troops stationed there, 2.8 percent. We spend roughly two to three times more as a percentage of GDP than our allies.
The 2007 proposed budget spends more on our military than all the other nations in the world combined. With no serious security threat like the old Soviet Union, the US will spend over 50 percent of its tax revenues on the military.
Noam Chomsky has pointed out that military spending, including items like “star wars” missile defense amounts to welfare-for-the-rich, as federal tax dollars are siphoned off to huge multinational corporations.
Enough is enough. It’s time to reduce our military spending to a comparable level with other mature industrialized economies – one to two percent of GDP.
The resulting savings of trillions can be shifted into renewable and alternative energy industries, mass-transit, parks, education, paying down the national debt, and middle-class tax cuts.
But as long as Bush remains in office and his power remains unchecked, we will continue to have big government that doesn't benefit its citizenry--the worst of both worlds.
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