Where were you when budgetary restraint was called for before our debt reached 19 trillion?
I blame an entrenched establishment.
This is fair, but let me make some humble suggestions.
Reagan tripled Carter's debt, and Bush 43 doubled Clinton's. Your party only calls for budgetary restraint when the Democrats are in charge. However, when Bush 43 was in charge, he didn't veto one piece of Republican Pork. He didn't stop one bridge to nowhere. And Republican voters were largely silent about his unprecedented spending until he became a lame duck and it was safe to criticize him. We didn't hear a peep from your side when he and his Republican controlled house/senate raised the debt ceiling 4 times. This is why its hard for us to take your budgetary concerns seriously.
Here is the problem.
Ronald Reagan promised to shrink government and control spending. He gave birth to the current hysteria over deficit spending and debt (which hysteria your side seems to use as a weapon against the democrats rather than a genuine governing model).
Point is: for every dollar Reagan shaved from school lunch programs, he added $100 to defense, including weapons-contract give-aways like Star Wars. He tripled the national debt in his efforts to become the military defender of a global economy that required bases on all continents and, eventually, nation building in the Middle East.
If you truly want a cheaper, less powerful Washington, you have to stop the shell game, one that I don't think you are aware of. It goes like this:
You tell us that Washington doesn't have the competence to run a laundromat while at the same time you give it the money and power to rebuild whole foreign nations. (Obviously the Democrats will go along with nation building because they believe that Washington can save the world)
My point is this. At the same time that Reagan was preaching about small government, he was using the Cold War to build a Washington that was not only in charge of the 50 states, but the entire globe, that is, he was building a defense apparatus that could and did intervene in the economies and politics of over 30 nations across several continents. Do you understand the real expense of this, or how effectively it was hidden and spread across different agency budgets so that it would be impossible to unearth in total? This is not to mention the "Golden Triangle", compromised of special interests and bureaucrats who formed around the taxpayer's teat, as big government pumped out an endless sequence of inflated no-bid contracts.
We can debate whether or not it makes sense for Washington to become so large and powerful that it can create/influence/stabilize markets across the globe, and we can debate whether or not it has the competence to do these things without making the globe worse and bankrupting us, and we can debate whether or not Vietnam and Iraq are proof of Washington's inability to save the world, and we can debate whether or not the surveillance state created by the war on terrorism places too much faith in the hands of flawed human bureaucrats, but there is one thing that isn't really debatable: when you consume over 25% of the world's resource but you have under 5% of its population, there is a huge military cost. You get this right? Once the oil runs out in Texas, your Middle-East-Military-Cost goes way up? Our lifestyle is expensive. This is why I'm begging you not to repeat tired cliches about spending until you consider all the drivers of national debt.
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