The Republican Party has betrayed its promise of being the party of smaller government and capitalism. In the 2003 fiscal year the federal budget grew by more than $150 billion -- more than twice as much as any year that Bill Clinton was in the White House -- and deficit spending eclipsed $300 billion, a 10-year high. And while conservative favorite Reagan used the veto very often in his first three years as President, Bush hasn't used this Presidential power once. We have a Republican Congress and a Republican President, but the largest increases in federal spending in recent history. What is going on here?
Cross Posted from Libertarians for Dean:
http://libertariansfordean.blogspot.com
Neoconservatives in the party leadership have forged an alliance with religious fundamentalists to focus the Republican Party on a specific foreign policy agenda of imperialism and unilateralism, while fighting with equal vigor and force a culture war at home. This new alliance will maintain its power through any means necessary, as shown with their disregard toward freedoms of speech and their attempts to paint opponents of their policy as traitors who are somehow endangering our troops abroad. More importantly the new coalition has adopted big government in the economy as a way to maintain its power by buying votes. The steel and timber tariffs, the pork-packed agricultural bill, and the massive subsidies given to energy, logging, mining, and ranching interests are simply ways to maintain the Republican grip on power in Washington. The abolishment of government departments that was as recently as 1994 a focus of the Republican Party has been replaced with Clintonian big government policies.
No, wait. As Cato says, it's unfair to compare Clinton and Bush. Why? Because, adjusted for inflation, Clinton had overseen a total spending increase of only 3.5 percent at the same point in his administration. More importantly, after his first three years in office, non-defense discretionary spending actually went down by 0.7 percent. This is contrasted by Bush's three-year total spending increase of 15.6 percent and a 20.8 percent explosion in non-defense discretionary spending.
This is the new economic policy of the GOP:
Pass a Farm Bill to increase agricultural subsidies by about $74 billion over 10 years to add to the $20 billion a year that's already been spent in order to secure the support of rural farmers, particularly in the Great Plains.
Pass an Energy Bill that gives $20 billion in tax breaks and production subsidies to nuclear power, domestic oil producers, and other Bush allies in the energy industry to secure their financial support in 2004 and win over states dependent on the energy sector such as Wyoming and Oklahoma.
Manipulate trade policy to win over voters in swing states, such as the steel tariffs for the Mid-West and the timber tariffs for the Northwest, while protecting industries that are already in the inner circle by refusing to end the subsidies or importation bans that harm the consumer, such as sugar farmers in Florida and Louisiana being protected from any type of free trade deals that come out of the FTAA talks.
Libertarians must realize that the old alliance with conservatives is dead. During the 1980s libertarians could support conservatives because of common economic agendas and still feel safe that their basic civil liberties would be respected. The revolt on the right was against the establishment in Washington that was building a big government welfare state on the model of Sweden. Today the Republican party is that establishment, and they are doing nothing to slow down the growth of big government. In fact, they are speeding it up. At the same time they are pushing an extremist foreign and social agenda that should force libertarians to seriously question if a tax cut without decreases in spending is really worth an imperialist foreign policy trying to build democracy in the Middle East by force, a social agenda that is trying to create a theocracy in America by forcing 'Judeo-Christian' values onto others, and a Big Brother surveillance system run by John Ashcroft.