Friday, August 04, 2006

Whatever he is, a fiscal Conservative he is not.

None of this would happen if the Federal Government couldn't just print money out of thin air

WASHINGTON – Federal spending under the Bush administration has grown five times larger than that during the second term of the Clinton administration, charges a conservative Republican activist in a new book that paints the president as a traitor to his party.
In "
Conservatives Betrayed," Richard Viguerie, credited with being one of the architects of the Reagan Revolution, says George W. Bush has set the stage for the punishment of his party by voters.
Viguerie compares spending by the federal government, adjusted for inflation, during the Clinton years vs. the Bush years. In Clinton's first term, federal expenditures rose 4.7 percent. In his second term, they rose 3.7 percent. In the first term of the Bush administration, however, spending rose 19.2 percent.
"If ever there was a case for divided government, here it is," writes Viguerie. "The lesson for many Americans is that today's Republicans cannot be trusted with the keys to both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government."
No matter how you slice it, Viguerie says, Bush makes Clinton look like a spending piker by comparison. For instance, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University in New York keeps records that show how much the federal government spends on average each year for each person in the country. When this standard of measurement is used, the comparison between the two administrations is even more pronounced............


Yet another formula for measuring presidential fiscal responsibility, according to Viguerie, is rescissions. Reagan used rescission power to rescind funds authorized by Congress. Ford rescinded $7.9 billion in spending. Carter rescinded $4.6 billion, Reagan $43.4 billion, Bush I $13.1 billion, Clinton $6.6 billion.
But George W. Bush has not rescinded even $1 in congressional spending.
"The best illustration of the corrupting influence of power on the Republicans is the explosion of pork-barrel spending projects since 2000," says Viguerie.
Viguerie points to a 121 percent increase in pork-barrel earmarks in the first five years of the Bush administration.
"The size of the federal government is the single most important barometer of the health of the American republic," writes Viguerie. "When domestic federal spending goes up, it's a surefire indicator that something is wrong. And the way spending has been increasing under the Bush administration and the Republican Congress shows that things are seriously wrong."


That just about sums it up.

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