GOP Failure to Control Spending

Jacob Weisberg has an interesting discussion of how the GOP has failed to live up to its 1995 promise to downsize the Federal government. He points to a Cato paper documenting that inflation-adjusted spending for the 101 largest programs that the Republicans proposed to eliminate as unnecessary in 1995 has risen by 27%. Cato should be congratulated on two counts: (1) one for noting that the GOP is not really “giving us our money back”, and (2) using real increases as opposed to nominal increases to make this particular point. Alas, the Executive Summary starts off with the statement that total government spending increased by 33% during Bush’s first term, which has to reflect the nominal increase in spending.