{"id":1960,"date":"2004-06-17T11:27:22","date_gmt":"2004-06-17T16:27:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1960.html"},"modified":"2004-06-17T11:27:22","modified_gmt":"2004-06-17T16:27:22","slug":"some-helpful-numbers-about-fiscal-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/some-helpful-numbers-about-fiscal-conservatism\/","title":{"rendered":"Some helpful numbers about fiscal conservatism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Certain myths take longer to debunk. Most of us know, for example, that Reagan ran for president promising to dramatically curtail federal spending. In reality, this didn&#8217;t happen. Likewise, when Clinton ran for president, his critics insisted that federal spending would reach unprecedented heights. This, we now know, was the opposite of the truth.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, Prof. DeLong <a href=\"http:\/\/www.j-bradford-delong.net\/movable_type\/2004_archives\/001014.html\">put together some numbers<\/a> for his readers that help spell this out in a simple and persuasive way.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Federal Spending as a Share of GDP: <\/p>\n<p>21.6%: Last Carter budget (FY 1981)<br \/>\n20.7%: Last Reagan budget (FY 1989)<\/p>\n<p>-0.9%: Change over Reagan terms<\/p>\n<p>21.0%: Last Bush I budget (FY 1993)<br \/>\n18.3%: Last Clinton budget (FY 2001)<\/p>\n<p>-2.7%: Change over Clinton terms<\/p>\n<p>20.4%: Forecast FY 2005 budget<\/p>\n<p>+2.1%: Change over Bush term*<\/p>\n<p>*Note that less than 40% of the increase in the Bush share is due to increases in the defense spending share, and that much of that increase (SDI anyone?) is unrelated to the War on Terror.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So, to review, Clinton&#8217;s reductions to federal spending were <i>triple<\/i> Reagan&#8217;s, while Bush&#8217;s budgets ignore fiscal sanity altogether. Good to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Certain myths take longer to debunk. Most of us know, for example, that Reagan ran for president promising to dramatically curtail federal spending. In reality, this didn&#8217;t happen. Likewise, when Clinton ran for president, his critics insisted that federal spending would reach unprecedented heights. This, we now know, was the opposite of the truth. Fortunately, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}