Posted by Stuart Benjamin:
The Cato Institute on "the Grand Old Spending Party":
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_05_01-2005_05_07.shtml#1115513690
I just noticed a new Cato study entitled "[1]The Grand Old Spending
Party: How Republicans Became Big Spenders."
Here's the guts of the Executive Summary:
President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in
inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even
after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is
still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget
doesn�t cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.
Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush�s first
term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5
percent of GDP on Clinton�s last day in office to 20.3 percent by
the end of Bush�s first term.
The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget
bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the
101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by
27 percent.
The GOP was once effective at controlling nondefense spending. The
final nondefense budgets under Clinton were a combined $57 billion
smaller than what he proposed from 1996 to 2001. Under Bush,
Congress passed budgets that spent a total of $91 billion more than
the president requested for domestic programs. Bush signed every
one of those bills during his first term. Even if Congress passes
Bush�s new budget exactly as proposed, not a single cabinet-level
agency will be smaller than when Bush assumed office.
The study is worth a read -- in part for the useful charts (see, e.g.,
figures 1-6 of the study) graphically displaying some of the many
different matrices by which spending (even non-defense and
non-homeland security spending) has increased dramatically in the
George W. Bush Administration.
The study suggests that united government is at least partly
responsible. It notes (p. 13) that "[s]pending growth picked up steam
much more quickly once Republicans gained control of the White House
as well as Congress." I am sympathetic to this argument. As I noted
last year, Cato President William Niskanen has written a paper
demonstrating that divided government yields lower spending (and,
perhaps more depressingly, that [2]reductions in taxation produce
increases in spending).
But this still leaves me with a nagging question: why aren't more
small-government advocates resisting spending increases? Cato has been
sounding the alarm for a while (back in March 2003, Cato published an
article about Bush's spending entitled "[3]Hey, Big Spender"), but
many others have been relatively silent. Why?
References
1. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3750
2. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_14.shtml#1085086959
3. http://www.cato.org/research/articles/dehaven-030326.html
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