Goverment Spending

One of my Facebook friends posted this graph on his wall illustrating the truth that while Republicans have talked a big game over reining in spending and the size of goverment, they have been huge failures at it over the last 30 years.

It goes ever further back than that graph. I was reminded of a great article called Republicans and Big Goverment by James Ostrowski that I’ve had saved in Evernote.

Every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government’s size, scope, or power–and usually all three. Over the last one hundred years, of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans.

As Andrew Napolitano is fond of pointing out, we live under a 1 party government system. There is a Republican branch that likes war, deficits, taxation through inflation and assaulting civil liberties. There is a Democratic branch that likes welfare and taxes and assaulting commercial liberties, and here lately, they seem to not mind the wars much either.

Obama is the equivalent of George W. Bush on the right. He may have given some convervatives a couple of items they wanted, but he has been an absymal failure on civil liberties and ending the wars.

Putting a stop to all of this is going to be a painful experience. We are repeating the same mistakes that caused the Depression because we’re not willing to make the hard choices.

If we allow this to keep going, the status quo will continue. Forcing a balanced budget and ending the Federal Reserve system will force the government to begin the process of ending our empire and the endless wars.

Are Increased Taxes the Solution?

All of this stimulus spending and war spending over the last 10 years is nothing but a ghost tax increase on all of us. We are able to absorb it, but for folks who were already living at the poverty level or the middle class who is living paycheck to paycheck, taxation through inflation is hitting them hard. They are making the the same amount of money, but that money increasingly buys less and less.