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Politics : Moderate Forum

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To: Sun Tzu who wrote (19782)	10/5/2005 9:40:32 AM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (2) of 20773

Is there any accounting of how much debt the republicans have added to the pile over the past 25 years? I am curious as to just how conservative they have been. There are different ways of approaching that question. But generally speaking the answer is yes. "Precision" is a bit problematic. How does one handle the transitional years? Was FY2001 a Clinton year or a Bush yr. Clinton submitted the budget request, Congress approved it during the Clinton Administration. But Bush/Congress had the oppotunity to make recissions/supplementals and actually spent the money. How you account for that is somewhat arbitrary. I think the traditional approach is to give the accounting to the President that submitted the original request. But you probably wanted a link. Heritage has done a fabulous job putting together that data and charts. heritage.org The whole index of charts starts here: heritage.org Often times you'll see the conservatives ramble about Congressional control having something to do with it...Often used phrase: The President's budget request is DOA, but the facts are that it doesn't make any difference who controls Congress. In terms of the overall budget, Congressional tweaking of the budget submission is very small. You should be able to come to that conclusion by looking at the charts and you'll notice that Heritage to a great degree presents by Administration rather than Congressional control. One place to start is: heritage.org There was another link that illustrated the point by comparing the budget battle between Clinton and Gingrich. Big battle over small change. At the moment, I can't find it in my bookmarks but I'll see if I mis-filed it or can google for it. A metric that I like which I've only ever seen presented at Heritage is Federal Spending per household. Federal spending as a % of GDP and Federal spending adjusted for inflation are standard fare but neither really accounts for population growth. One could get more sophisticated in the analysis of this area. e.g., it makes sense that with a larger population you process more passports. Does it make sense that with a larger population that Defense spending should increase? I don't think so. Defense requirements are derived from external considerations, not population growth. heritage.org

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