Everyone’s Entitled

Doug Bandow says:

For years Republicans promised revolutionary change in Washington. But after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, they complained that the GOP needed to run Congress. After Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, they said they needed the presidency as well. Now, with both the White House and Capitol Hill under firm GOP control, Republicans have no more excuses.

Unfortunately, the budget results have been ugly, and the future looks even worse. Notes Peter Ferrara of the Free Enterprise Fund, “under current law Federal spending as a percent of GDP will rise from 20 percent today to 34 percent by 2030.” That is higher than at any other point since World War II. Toss in state and local spending, and half the economy will be in government hands. And these estimates ignore the natural tendency of government outlays to climb far faster than projected.

President George W. Bush submitted a $2.57 trillion budget for 2006. Under Republican stewardship, a $236 billion surplus in 2000 turned into a deficit exceeding $400 billion last year. Only higher than projected revenues will push the deficit down to an expected $333 billion this year.

The administration’s future fiscal projections are about as accurate as its WMD claims for Iraq. For instance, writes Stephen Slivinski of the Cato Institute, “the new budget estimates assume that non-entitlement spending will be cut by $36 billion between 2006 and 2009. Yet there has never been a period over the past 40 years in which such spending has dropped more than $12.2 billion.”

Big government.