Tonight in his State of the Union (which I was quite pleased with, over all) made the point that the American People are spending their money better than the government would have. I agreed wholeheartedly. Of course, he also proposed a barrel of new spending initiatives. If there’s one thing that annoys me about Bush (aside from his naive view of the Israel-Palestine conflict), it’s all the freakin’ spending. The new marriage advertising bullshit? Yeah. No need for it. Trips to mars? Well… I can see that a little more… but still…
Anyway… to the point… the Democrats have not been very kind about this spending though, according to Dodd over at Ipse Dixit, the Dems would enact some spending increases of their own. He cites a press release by the National Taxpayers Union which says the following:
All [Democratic] candidates offer platforms that call for more spending than would be offset by repealing the Bush tax cuts (using even generous estimates of the tax cuts’ impact).
The eight candidates have proposed over 200 ideas to increase federal spending, and only two that would cut federal spending. Those two proposals have been offered by Dennis Kucinich (thus, the seven other candidates haven’t made a single proposal to cut any spending)…
So, at the end of the day, the Dems don’t want to cut spending, they just want the spending to go to socalist and entitlement programs.
Looks like we’ll be enduring at least four more years of spending sprees… although, truth be told, that spending might be offset a bit if the programs proposed by the President fell on deaf ears in congress… i.e., if we elect a Democrat to the Presidency and the Republicans keep control of congress… though I’m not suggesting for a minute that we do that.
It seems that Bush’s stance on domestic issues is to take the Democratic issues and claim them for himself, with Republican-based attributes (i.e. Medicare and education reform). This seems to be what he means by “compassionate conservative”. Unfortunetly this also costs money. And he needed to cut taxes to stimulate the economy. I guess what he thinks is that the tax cuts will in the long haul stimulate growth, which will increase tax revenues, which will pay for these programs. And, politically, he is dominating the foreign policy agenda, he is dominating the domestic agenda, so he is making the Democrats a non-factor.