Hey, Big Spender...

"Tax and Spend." We all know that when someone uses that phrase, they are usually talking about Democrats.

Not any more. The chart below, comes from an article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) and shows just why some "paleo-conservatives" are not too happy with BushCo. It also puts to rest that damned quote above - at least as far as it applies to Democrats.



Here's the arch-conservative WSJ on the matter of Shrubby's spending spree:

But if the gap between revenues and outlays is of small concern in any single year -- and especially during recession and war -- it does not follow that there should be no worry over rapidly rising levels of federal spending. The much delayed omnibus appropriations bill for 2004, scheduled for a vote in the Senate this afternoon, looks set to cap the first term of the most profligate Administration since the 1960s.

[snip]

GOP leaders would have us believe this all adds up to one of the leanest spending plans in years -- an increase in federal discretionary spending of only 3%, compared with 13% and 12% in each of the previous two years. But Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation points out that it's really more like a 9% increase, and that's assuming there will be no supplemental appropriations as in previous years.

The 3% vs. 9% discrepancy results from the difference between budget authority and actual outlays. The increase in budget authority looks smaller only because a lot of money that will actually be spent in 2004 was assigned to 2003. That's true most importantly of the Iraq war supplemental. But the drive for the appearance of fiscal sanity has also reduced our representatives to gimmicks such as moving the authority for $2.2 billion in education spending back into 2003, after previously voting to push it forward to 2004. When corporations tried accounting like this, Congress gave us Sarbanes-Oxley.

[snip]

Amazing as it may sound, the ostensibly small-government GOP seems totally oblivious to the fact that all this spending puts its future economic agenda in jeopardy. Appropriations do mean taxes after all, even if they're deferred taxes.

All emphasis is mine.

So, does all this mean that the so-called paleo-conservatives will vote for the Democratic nominee? Probably not. But it might mean that some of them will vote for somebody other than Shrubby; some independent. And that could be enough for the Democrat to clinch the election.