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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (10695)	2/2/2006 9:47:16 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541791

I'm saying that we are spending more than we used to spend. Is that what you need evidence for? I could look up the budget figures if you really don't trust me. Or you could look them up. Just doing a quick SI search resulted in "... Education: $627. Primarily a state and local function, 9 percent of education spending comes from Washington. Federal education spending has surged 100 percent since the 2001 enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act..." nationalreview.com and a post with this chart for Pell Grants whitehouse.gov which I posted earlier on this thread. I could find similar evidence that other social programs have increased, and that the entire amount of federal spending on social programs has increased in both real an nominal terms every year under Bush. Is it really necessary to do so? Or is a semantic issue about the meaning of the term "spending cuts"? I'm not sure what sort of evidence you could accept on a semantic issue. On a specific word you might use a dictionary, but for terms that use more than one word that is more problematic. If it is a semantic issue we could at least understand what we mean if we make explicit our definitions of spending cuts. A spending cut to me is when less money is spent than had been spent before the cut. This is most clear when it is a cut in the actual amount of dollars spent, but if there is an increase of less than the inflation rate I wouldn't complain if you called that a spending cut. If spending goes up from X to 5X over 4 years, and then the next year the amount of the increase is dropped so that instead of 6X you only have 5.5X I don't consider that to be a cut. I'm not sure how the idea of evidence is even relevant to this type of point, but that doesn't mean I am simply stating disagreement. I am defining terms. If you don't agree with the terms than at least we should find that out. We might agree on the actual reality without agreeing on the appropriate labels for the reality. Tim