That good man severely criticized the 51st Congress, derided as the Billion-Dollar Congress, for its free-spending ways and rode a wave of anti-spending dissent to re-election to the White House in 1892, despite having been defeated by Republican Benjamin Harrison in the 1888 election. The government's obscene billion-dollar budget would be approximately 6.1% of the nominal $16.4 billion GDP in 1892; the budget (hat tip: Michelle Malkin) released by President Bush today is approximately 22% of our 2007 GDP.
And now that President Bush has kept his promise to be a "compassionate" (read: extravagant with your money) conservative and Congressional Republicans so skillfully entrenched themselves by allying with K Street, a whole generation of my own personal friends thinks that the Republicans are traditionally bigger spenders than Democrats. (Despite, of course, the fact the the Republican presidential candidates are all talking about cutting spending, while the Dems are all discussing ways of increasing it. Unfortunately, for the Republicans, "all talking" is right.) And most of these guys think that the biggest budgetary problem is national defense spending!
From the article MM links to:
The 6 percent overall increase in spending for 2009 reflects a continued surge in spending on the government's huge benefit programs for the elderly - Social Security and Medicare, even with the projected five-year savings of $196 billion over five years. Those savings are achieved by freezing payments to hospitals and other health care providers. A much-smaller effort by Bush in this area last year went nowhere in Congress.No one wants to be the person who cut benefits; that's political suicide. But continually punting it to the next administration until it simply can't be solved without disastrously painful measures? That's national suicide.
How did Mr. Cleveland try to cut spending? He "vetoed hundreds of private pension bills for American Civil War veterans." We all have things we want to spend money on, and some of them seem noble. But that's not what government is for.
This November, Cleveland won't be on the ballot, nor anyone like him. Like Reagan, his party left him; but now, so has the other party.
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