Jackson Free Press

Attend, if you will, to these numbers on discretionary spending in the first five years of two-term presidents.

Lyndon Johnson doubled-down with his wars against poverty and Vietnam. "Milhous", as Nixon called himself on the street, shrank the government by ditching Vietnam, but apart from the war, the government grew by more than 20 percent. It was Nixon who created the DEA, the EPA, the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act. He was practically a Communist.

Reagan pumped up the military and dumped on everything else, though his Voodoo failed to balance the budget. Although conservatives have pushed for even the moon to be renamed after Reagan, he tripled the national debt to more than $3 trillion.

Clinton cut military spending, but despite his ambitions, he restrained the rest of government, giving us our first balanced budgets since Eisenhower.

And then there is our current president. This conservative, however compassionate, has grown the government more than any other president since FDR, by more than 35 percent. In non-defense spending alone, that puts him ahead of Lyndon Johnson, and LBJ never ran deficits anywhere close to current levels, because he raised taxes. He was, after all, a tax-and-spend liberal. Bush isn't tax and spend—he's just spend. By the time Bush leaves office, he will have added $5 trillion to the federal debt, nearly doubling it, to more than $10 trillion.

So tell me. Who are the conservatives?

There was great hoopla during the 2000 campaign about the fact that George W. Bush would be the first president to hold an MBA, and he has been called the "CEO President." Yet, if he were really a CEO, he would have been fired long ago. On Oct. 4, 2004, 169 professors of economics sent Bush a letter expressing their concerns about the deficit. In August 2004, 10 Nobel-prize winners in economics endorsed presidential candidate John Kerry for the same reason.

Almost every prediction Bush has made about the economy has proved false, year after year, chief among them the prospects for a balanced budget. Once again, the Voodoo has failed. Rising receipts have not replaced trillions of dollars in tax cuts, which account for more of the deficit than any downturn in the economy, whatever its cause.

When Bush said he would run the government like a business, we should have understood that he meant he would run like one of his businesses, all of which he ran into the ground. Bush survived those calamities because political friends always bailed him out. Bush, in turn, has been good to his friends. Bush did nothing to stop Enron's plunder of California during the energy crisis. Then there are all the "Brownies" who abound in this administration, lest we forget the failed equestrian judge Bush put in charge of FEMA. Yet, gross inefficiency and incompetence are not conservative values.

Bush is not the only Republican who values government only to the extent that he can sack it for spoils. Former Majority Leader Tom DeLay has just announced his resignation from the House. With the recent announcement that another former DeLay aide, Tony Rudy, is cooperating with the prosecution, it seems increasingly likely that DeLay will be convicted of at least some of the charges against him. We'll see if he has the same cocksure smile standing at the gates of Lamesa Penitentiary.

Yet, corruption and cronyism aside, the truth is that the Republican Congress has added pork to virtually every bill it has passed, and Bush has vetoed none of them. With Republicans in control of every branch of government, who can they blame for their betrayal of conservative principals?

And let us not forget that weapons of mass destruction were not the only false promise made about Iraq. In September 2002, White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey projected that the "upper bound" of Iraqi war costs would total between $100 and $200 billion. In January 2003, Donald Rumsfeld claimed that the war might cost under $50 billion. It is now evident that the war will cost upward of $1 trillion, even discounting long-term costs like health care for veterans.

Conservatives need to reconsider their love of military spending, or we will never balance the budget. In late February, the Army announced it would not contest $263 million in payments to Halliburton that its own auditors found questionable. The military, and the hundreds of companies which subsist off of it like lampreys, is by far the largest source of waste in the government.

Although I am not a Democrat, a true conservative must acknowledge that the Democrats are now the party of fiscal responsibility, as presidential spending reveals. If Hillary Clinton is elected in 2008, is there any good reason to doubt that she will balance the budget? That is, after all, what Clintons do. How then can a true conservative refuse to vote for her, though he might despise her as much as liberals do?

Previous Comments

ID

72015

Comment

Good article, Brian. I'm even conservative on some things, like most blacks folks are. But I don't desire to be called one because of my distaste and disagreements with so many people who will quickly claim they're arch-conservatives. And those conservatives are not conservative on everything. Some of them don't even know what a conservative is, and their actions prove it. The present bunch of conservatives running our government certainly aren't conservative about spending our money, lying, or their unusual likings of little boys and girls. Clinton and his boys wanted a woman. This alone is reason enough to become a Democrat. Come on over to the right side Adam. We need you. Can you say Homeland Security?

Author

Ray Carter

Date

2006-04-07T17:11:08-06:00

ID

72016

Comment

I meant come on over Brian. Things are quickly becoming worse on that side. Soon we Democrat are going to find the courage to stand up and fight back.

Author

Ray Carter

Date

2006-04-07T17:16:56-06:00

ID

72017

Comment

I guess I don't really care who the conservatives are, or which label fits who. I'd love to see the day when who you run with matters less than who you are.

Author

Prospero

Date

2006-04-26T19:03:21-06:00