Bush Brings Back Big Government

I wonder how many conservative Republican voters appreciate the irony of this:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The era of big government, if it ever went away, has returned full-throttle under President Bush, who came to office championing “conservative ideas” as an alternative.

A report released on Friday by the Brookings Institution think tank and New York University said the “true size” of the federal work force — which includes employees for federal contractors and grant recipients — grew by more than one million, to 12.1 million, from October 1999 to October 2002.

The increase was linked to the war on terrorism that Bush launched after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, as well as to growth at the Department of Health and Human Services and other domestic agencies, the report said.

The growth represents a roughly 75 percent rebound from federal work force declines linked to the post-Cold War “peace dividend,” which helped enable former President Bill Clinton to declare in 1996 that “the era of big government is over.”

I can hear some die-hard Texas Republicans saying “Damn, I hated those liberals and their small governments. I’m glad we’ve got a good old-fashioned big-government conservative running things.”

Kash