Christine Hall, CNSNews.com
Wednesday, July 30, 2003

"It is inconceivable that in just two years, President George W. Bush has taken the nation from historic budget surpluses to the deepest deficits in history," railed Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Bob Graham of Florida.

Criticizing President Bush's tax cuts last week, Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., chairman of the Senate Democrat campaign committee, said last week, "The people's money, translated into the people's debt, is going to take money out of the people's pockets."

House Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi of California also lambasted Bush for deficit spending. "Three million jobs have been lost since President Bush took office, and our country is $3 trillion deeper in debt," she said.

But although the GOP controls both houses of Congress and the presidency, Republicans continue to bristle at Democrat denunciations of deficit spending.

"It was only [the week before the Democrat amendments were offered] that these neo-budget hawks described the projected FY 2004 budget shortfall of $475 billion as 'deficits as far as the eye can see,'" said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

"But less than a week later," Cornyn said, "in a span of just two days, they attempted to add more than $246 billion to the already sizable deficit over the next 10 years."

"These [Democrat] amendments would have increased spending in this bill by more than 60 percent," said Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate budget committee. "This is unrealistic to the point of being ridiculous."

But a critic of big government spending says neither party has earned good marks.

"It's clear from the budget numbers that both parties have been on a spending orgy for about four or five years now," said Chris Edwards of the libertarian Cato Institute.

"Ever since they balanced the budget in 1998 and we got a surplus for a few years, that sort of set the green light for Congress to start spending much faster than they did during President Clinton's first term in the 1990s," said Edwards.

"Both parties and just about everyone else in Congress supports adding $400 billion in taxpayer costs over the next decade with a new prescription drug bill ... even though Congress knows that the Medicare program, even without this new added benefit, is going to be heading into a huge fiscal crisis in coming years."

However, it's the GOP and congressional appropriators who deserve most of the blame, Edwards said.

"Ultimately, because Republicans have the majority, they're the ones that have the upper hand" in spending policies, said Edwards.

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