The Los Angeles Times has an excellent story on George "Big Government" Bush's latest budget. Their headline gets the essential point across in six words:
President Putting 'Big' Back in Government
From the article:
Bush's $2.57-trillion budget for 2006, if approved by Congress, would be more than a third bigger than the 2001 budget he inherited four years ago. It is a monument to how much Republicans' guiding fiscal philosophy has changed over the 10 years since the GOP's Contract With America called for a balanced budget and abolition of entire Cabinet agencies.
...But many analysts view [Bush's spending-restraint] promises with skepticism because, they say, Bush in his first term had a disappointing record of confronting Congress on popular spending programs. He has never vetoed a bill, making him the first president so restrained since James Garfield, who was shot to death after less than a year in office.
"This is a promise in which his position so far is not credible," said William A. Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, and a former economic advisor to President Reagan. "President Bush also promised to reduce the deficit in half last year, but it went up $15 billion."
...Republicans' commitment to eliminating the deficit, a cornerstone of the Contract With America, also seems a thing of the past. Party members now argue that the deficit — although it is a record in absolute numbers — is manageable because, when measured as a share of the economy, it is not as large as Reagan's 1983 deficit.
But Stanley E. Collender, a budget analyst with Financial Dynamics, a business communications firm in Washington, said that amounted to "using the budget failure of one Republican to make the large deficits of another appear to be less troubling.
"President Bush would never admit this, but he has transformed the party into the party of permanent big deficits," he said.
Actually, perhaps an even better headline for this story would have been: "GOP: The Party of Permanent Big Deficits."
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