Tax n' Spend: Today's Realities

Kudo's to The Utah Amicus on the compliation of this material. Go there. The stuff below represents about 20% of what is posted there.

“According to the Citizens Against Government Waste, a watchdog group, there has been more pork-barrel spending during the Bush years than at any time in American history. By their calculations, the Clinton years were fairly typical, with the amount of identifiable pork barrel spending varying between $10 billion and $17.7 billion in 2000. The number of projects went from a low of 958 to a high of 4326 in 2000. But the Bush years are in a class by themselves. Both the amount of money and the number of pork barrel projects have risen every year, from $18.5 billion and 6333 projects in 2001 to $27.3 billion and an amazing 13,999 projects in 2005.” [emphasis added]

“(Bush is) the biggest spending president we’ve had in a generation.”
Steven Moore, Club for Growth

“(Bush’s) fiscal record is appalling.”
Ed Crane, Cato Institute

“The final tallies show that overall spending grew by almost 9 percent for the 2003 fiscal year ending September 30, and by 21 percent over the past two years. This is before the $400 billion (yeah, right) Medicare prescription drug benefit and this year’s energy and omnibus spending bills. If Bill Clinton had tolerated this, Republicans would be shouting from the rooftops…..This is astonishing when you recall that only a few years ago ‘revolutionary’ Republicans were proposing to eliminate actual federal programs. Instead, the GOP is now slowly restoring or adding to programs that it once took the political heat for killing or shrinking.”
The Wall Street Journal

“Mr. Bush has few peers among American Presidents in his willingness to let Congress spend as freely as it always wants to do. And the Republican Congress has few peers in history in its willingness to take advantage of the president’s generosity.”
George Melloan, The Wall Street Journal

I've decided that this place and the lovely neighbor directly to the north simply follow along, doing what they are told, without any thought to the actual facts, having no memory or sense of holding someone accountable at all. A few years ago, there were impeachment hearings against a sitting President (literally) whose moral indiscretions caused a veritable uproar, which I lovingly call the "Smoking Cigar Incident", or "The Devil In A Blue Dress", but which had no real effect on the world in general (unless you misunderstand what the meaning of "is" is), and yet, when federal laws have been broken, bent, ignored, and generally flaunted in the face of the nation's citizens, as they have been in very recent times, nobody says anything.

I. Don't. Get. It.