"The point to remember is what the government gives, it must first take away."
- John S. Coleman
After writing about the Bush administration's spending habits the other night, I ran across an analysis of how much the promises being made by the Democratic presidential candidates will cost the American taxpayer. It was written by Drew Johnson, a policy analyst for the National Taxpayer's Union.
If you're interested in how much of your money our government spends, regardless of which party is in power, then you may want to take a look at Johnson's findings.
"Despite expressing concern over red ink in the federal budget, every one of the eight hopefuls would worsen the deficit by billions or even trillions of dollars."
What Mr. Johnson and his colleagues have done is take the agendas of the Democratic candidates, assigned costs to them, and arrived at a total outlay for the 200+ proposals they have made. The most conservative, Joe Lieberman, would raise current federal spending by $170 billion, and the least conservative, Al Sharpton, would drive it up by $1.33 trillion. Repeal of all the Bush tax cuts wouldn't provide enough to cover even Lieberman's minimalist proposals.
Johnson details each candidate's platform in another policy paper which you can find here, and cites sources for all the information he uses. It appears to be pretty accurate.
Anyone like me, who believes in conservative fiscal policy, will not find a candidate in either party who plans to cut spending. Despite the Democratic candidates' disparagement of the current federal deficits, none of them would offer any relief based on what they're promising in their campaign speeches. We already know where Bush stands, so where does that leave us?
2 comments:
When a candidate is running for office, it is so easy to criticize the incumbent becasue the candidate doesn't have to come up with the money for the proposed solutions. If, as a nation, we vote for people without nailing down the cost we will always be disappointed. A look at Russia is a case in point. Yeltzin looked like a hero until he had to confront the problems.
The NTU told a slight fib on their homepage. They claim that the spending proposed in the SOTU is the lowest in the last five years. Actually, the president proposed over $2 trillion dollars in spending...$1 trillion over the next 10 years is the reported cost of making the tax cuts permanent...$1 trillion is the reported cost of the transition in privatizing Social Security.
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