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Spending Under President George W. Bush
...Republicans often claim to be the party of smaller government. Many Republicans would express support for Ronald Reagan’s observation: “Growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down.”2 Unfortunately, once Republicans are elected to political office, they tend to fall into the Washington trap of assuming that more federal spending will solve the nation’s problems. Certainly, President Bush appears to have fallen into this trap. So did the Republicans in Congress.

Harvard economist Jeffrey Frankel argues that we should not be surprised by the discrepancy between the rhetoric and the actual policies of Republicans. Frankel even argues that “the Republicans have become the party of fiscal irresponsibility, trade restriction, big government, and bad microeconomics.”3 Frankel is incorrect about the microeconomics—Republicans generally pursue sounder tax policies than Democrats, for example—but when it comes to big government spending, the Bush Administration seems to have gone out of its way to confirm Frankel’s point.