I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. - Thomas Jefferson

Where Is Zombie Goldwater?

by Lee

My mother just forwarded over the following email making the rounds.  It came from a friend of my father’s who works in the oil industry, and one presumes is a Republican Conservative of some nature.

Well, this will really make you think…..thought that you should see this information.  Check the site below as well.

Taxes...Whether Democrat or a Republican you will find these statistics enlightening and amazing.

www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.html

Taxes under Clinton 1999 Taxes under Bush 2008
Single making 30K - tax $8,400 Single making 30K - tax $4,500
Single making 50K - tax $14,000 Single making 50K - tax $12,500
Single making 75K - tax $23,250 Single making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 60K - tax $16,800 Married making 60K- tax $9,000
Married making 75K - tax $21,000 Married making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 125K - tax $38,750 Married making 125K - tax $31,250

It is amazing how many people that fall into the categories above think Bush is screwing them and Bill Clinton was the greatest President ever. If Obama or Hillary are elected, they both say they will repeal the Bush tax cuts and a good portion of the people that fall into the categories above can’t wait for it to happen. This is like the movie ‘The Sting with Paul Newman’; you scam somebody out of some money and they don’t even know what happened.

I normally just ignore this sort of thing, but I was so angry I couldn’t let this one go.  My response is posted below.  Please feel free to pike it for your own use if you like.

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Friends,

I normally don’t respond “en masse” to these types of things when I receive them, but I think this is such a vitally important issue, especially in an election year, that I have decided to respond, solely out of a sense of “telling the whole story.” I have been a registered Republican my whole life, but earlier this year I became a Libertarian, and it is precisely over this issue.

Yes, the Clintons taxed us more. But, believe it or not, they also spent less than Bush has.  Much, much less.  Here’s one report from the Libertarian Cato Institute.  (I recommend you all click the links below and read the articles in full, as many of them contain numerous graphs easily showing the unholy spending increases under Bush II versus Clinton.)

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3750

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.

Next, we have a report from the conservative Heritage Foundation.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/tst021606a.cfm

Conventional wisdom holds that non-defense discretionary spending has been cut to make room for defense spending increases. Conventional wisdom is wrong. According to OMB Historical Table 8.2, non-defense discretionary outlays – adjusted for inflation –surged by 34 percent between 1999 and 2005. That is the largest six-year expansion since the 1970s.

One way to compare current discretionary spending trends is by presidential administration:

Overall discretionary outlays rose 2.3 percent annually under President Clinton, compared to 9.7 percent annually under President Bush. Defense was virtually frozen in nominal dollars under President Clinton, and has averaged 12 percent annual growth under President Bush. Non-defense discretionary outlays rose 4 percent annually under President Clinton, versus 8 percent annually under President Bush.

Let me re-emphasize that last point: Non-defense discretionary spending has grown twice as fast under President Bush as under President Clinton. Examples of discretionary spending increases between 2001 and 2006 include the following:

Education is up 62 percent, or 10 percent annually; International affairs is up 74 percent, or 12 percent annually; Health research and regulation is up 57 percent, or 9 percent annually; Veterans’ benefits are up 46 percent, or 8 percent annually; Science and basic research is up 40 percent, or 7 percent annually. and Overall non-defense discretionary outlays are up 46 percent, or 7.8 percent annually.

Here’s another Heritage report.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/wm398.cfm

Federal spending’s drag on the economy is now over $20,000 per household—its highest level since World War II—and growing. Mandatory spending reached 11 percent of GDP for the first time ever. The recent Medicare drug bill represents a huge long-term burden on the fiscal health of this country. It was a massive entitlement expansion passed with no financing program to pay for it and is estimated by CBO to cost well over $2 trillion dollars over a 20-year period. The final check for this program will come due just when Social Security and Medicare run out of money.

Spending has increased twice as fast under President Bush as it did under President Clinton. From 2001 to 2003 total spending grew by 16 percent. Certainly the terror attacks of 9/11 placed additional demands on spending for homeland security, a strong defense, and rebuilding New York. However, this accounts for less than half of the new spending that has occurred since 9/11. What was so sorely lacking during this time was self-discipline required to balance fiscal priorities.

Presidents Roosevelt and Truman signed budgets during World War II and the Korean War which actually decreased non-defense spending. However, we saw no such balancing of our fiscal checkbook after 9/11. Instead we saw a spending spree in Washington where budgets written by Congress and signed by the President during the War on Terror actually grew non-defense spending by 11 percent during this period.

Compared to the President’s record of a discretionary spending increase of 27 percent over the past two years, holding discretionary spending to 4 percent growth might seem like quite an accomplishment to some. However it is hardly a prescription for long term fiscal health when taken in the overall context of growth in the budget, its burden on taxpayers, businesses, and families, and the burgeoning deficits looming in the future in Medicare, Social Security, and other programs like the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation.

The President has laid out visions for other priorities such as education and a mission to Mars. Education spending has increased by 65 percent over the past two years, and still the President’s proposals will likely contain additional spending. This comes at a time when cash is piling up in Washington because states cannot spend it quickly enough.

Cost estimates for the President’s space initiatives range from $500 billion to $1 trillion. But the fact is we just do not know how much it will cost for a mission to Mars, complete with a pit stop on the moon. The President has a vision of new technology to explore this new frontier and would be engaging the country on a long-range project. Past experience tells us that such grand undertakings are plagued with cost overruns, delays, and technical difficulties. The start up costs identified by the President are just a minimum down payment on the ultimate costs of this initiative, and he has presented no long-range plan to finance such costs. The full costs will most likely come into play just as the bitter fiscal reality of the Social Security and Medicare problems confront the nation.

And here’s how the indispensable FactCheck.org covers the subject.

http://www.factcheck.org/defending_spending_bushs_blooper.html

Discretionary spending—meaning spending that is subject to annual legislative appropriations, as opposed to spending for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare—actually grew only 5.6% in Clinton ‘s last budget year (fiscal year 2001, which began October 1, 2000).

Since then discretionary spending has not “steadily declined” as the President said, but has gone up. In fact, the growth has been much faster than under Clinton . In the first year for which President Bush signed the spending bills discretionary spending growth soared to 13.1%, and annual growth remained in double digits through the current fiscal year.

You will never meet a more pro-market, low-tax capitalist whore than me.  I find the thought of another Clinton presidency to be absolutely nauseating.  I became a Republican 20 years ago (I’m 38) because I fundamentally disagreed with the tax-and-spend policies of the Democrats.  The problem, however, is that in the last decade we’ve seen the Republican Congress literally writing itself blank checks to increase domestic spending on all sorts of issues that have traditionally been the purview of the Democrats.

The fact of the matter is, tax increases—big ones—are now inevitable, because society has grown used to suckling at the government teat, and neither party wants to be the one to tighten the belt at the expense of fabulous cash and prizes doled out as government freebies.  Clinton was significantly more fiscally sound than Bush has been.  Whether taxes are raised under the next president or not, the indisputable fact is that the current president has been spending the money of your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  I hope that you find this idea as obscene as I do.  I am going to spend the rest of my life paying higher taxes because of the spending spree undertaken over the last decade or so by Bush and the GOP Congress.

Think of your own household budget.  Could you spend money like this and remain fiscally solvent?

Obviously there are many people concerned with paying higher taxes.  I certainly am one of them.  But if you don’t want to pay higher taxes, then stop voting for the party who keeps spending money it doesn’t have.  It’s a shame that in this election cycle the only candidate talking seriously about these issues was the kooky weirdo Ron Paul, a man with no possible chance of ever being elected.

I have voted in every election since 1988. I am seriously considering not voting this year, for the simple reason that I see very little difference between the parties.  Both of them are strict believers in the transformationalist nature of government.  The only difference is that the Democrats will raise your taxes *now* to pay for their spending, while the Republicans will write an IOU so that someone else (i.e. your kids) can pay for it *later*.

It’s time for Republicans to stop this “compassionate conservative” nonsense.  It’s not like people didn’t see this coming.  In the preeminent conservative magazine “National Review,” Jonah Goldberg wrote the following in 2003.

“Bush spends too much money. Period. This is one of the downsides of so-called compassionate conservatism, because inherent to the very concept is that the governmemt should do something to prove its “compassion.” Combine this wih the Rovian desire to expand the Republican base to constituencies who want more—rather than less—from government and you have recipe for vast expansions in government spending.”

As you participate in the political process, keep this issue in mind.  As far as I am concerned, government spending is the single greatest threat to the future of the United States, a hell of a lot greater than terrorism.  Your chances of being the victim of a terrorist attack are about 10 times *less* than your chances of being struck by lightning, but your chances of a grim financial future are all but guaranteed due to this country’s spendthrift nature.

As long as we keep electing politicians who promise to “do something,” we can’t complain when the bill for what they have done comes due.  All the best to everyone.

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