A while back, I blogged about a Heritage Foundation paper eviscerating the Bush administration for its profligate domestic spending. Now the debate has taken a strange new turn as a liberal counterweight organization in D.C., the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, has responded with a paper that essentially defends the Bush administration on this score ? arguing, for example, that expressed as a percentage of GDP, Bush’s budgets are still lower than any federal budget enacted between 1975 and 1996.
Of course, CBPP isn’t defending the Bush administration’s domestic policies. They think the president’s budget is too restrained. Moreover, their analysis tries to suggest that Bush shouldn’t be blamed for the part of the domestic-spending budget that is on autopilot, such as unemployment insurance, because these often are countercyclical by nature and grow when the economy doesn’t. So what? I would ask. If spending “must” grow there then a fiscal conservative ? i.e. non-Keynesian ? should reduce it elsewhere to compensate.
