Republicans Are Fiscal Conservatives No More

From the AP:

President Bush unveiled a $3.1 trillion budget on Monday that supports sizable increases in military spending to fight the war on terrorism and protects his signature tax cuts.

The spending proposal, which shows the government spending $3 trillion in a 12-month period for the first time in history, squeezes most of government outside of national security, and also seeks $196 billion in savings over the next five years in the government's giant health care programs -- Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.

Even with those savings, Bush projects that the deficits, which had been declining, will soar to near-record levels, hitting $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009. The all-time high deficit in dollar terms was $413 billion in 2004.

For the last 7 years I have watched as the financial press has generally done an incredibly poor job of reporting on the nation's fiscal situation.  They have been blinded by a classic Washington hoodwink.  

Let's attack the problem this way.  If you balanced your budget every year, would you need to borrow money?  The answer to that is no.  

Then why is Washington borrowing boatloads of money?  Because that is exactly what Washington has been doing for the last 7 years.  Here is the total amount of Federal debt outstanding at the end of the government's fiscal year for each of the last 7 years.,

09/30/2007   $9,007,653,372,262.48
09/30/2006 $8,506,973,899,215.23
09/30/2005 $7,932,709,661,723.50
09/30/2004 $7,379,052,696,330.32
09/30/2003 $6,783,231,062,743.62
09/30/2002 $6,228,235,965,597.16
09/30/2001 $5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2000 $5,674,178,209,886.86

The current total is $9,238,008,288,942.11.

Does anybody see a pattern?  Does anybody notice the huge yearly increase in total federal debt?

For those of you who are numerically challenged, here's a graph of total federal debt outstanding from the St. Louis Federal Reserve.  (The graph only goes to October 2005).

So -- during a time of "declining deficits" the US government is borrowing a ton of money on a yearly basis.  As a result, the total federal debt/GDP ratio has increased from about 57% to 63% during the Bush administration.

And now Bush wants to run up the deficit again.  Yes -- I am well aware the US economy is in terrible shape right now.  I write on the economy, remember?  But at some point, all of this debt is going to kill the economy if we don't start doing something about it.  And the Republicans clearly have absolutely no inclination to do that.  Instead, they want to run up the nation's credit card one last time and leave the Democrats with a huge bill.  

Once again, the party of "personal responsibility" and "fiscal conservatism" has demonstrated through its actions that it is neither.