Never let it be said ? OK, let it not be said so much ? that Washington conservatives have been lackeys of the Bush administration and the national Republican Party.
Case in point is the budgetary insights of Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. In a Christian Science Monitor article last week reporting that the federal budget had grown such much since Bush’s tenure began that spending per person was the highest since WWII, Riedl made this stark criticism: “The Republican Party is simply not interested in small government now. They’re worse than the Democrats they replaced.”
Pow! Bop!
On a related point, a Riedl piece out this week from Heritage challenges the claim that Bush officials and GOP leaders in Congress have been making about their latest budget. While they claim that discretionary spending will grow only 3 percent, Riedl says the real number is closer to 9 percent and that the discrepancy is due to a statistical manipulation.
Crunch! Smash!
