Rich Perry on Who is the Real Fiscal Conservative

The current Texas governor seems to have one thing right:

“Rudy is a real fiscal conservative. He’s a bonafide Reagan Republican. George Bush isn’t and he never was,” Perry said on the videotape. The Governor extolled Giuliani’s conservative credentials. But at the expense of President Bush, who Perry characterized as too big a spender – even during his days in Texas. “George Bush was spending money,” Perry told the gathering. “George has never ever been a fiscal conservative.”

George W. Bush has not cut spending, which means he only pretended to cut taxes. Yes – we did get the 2001 and 2003 tax deferrals. Tom Redburn explains why Governor Perry’s claim that Reagan was a fiscal conservative and how Rudy Giuliani’s pledges to keep taxes low are not based in reality:

Even without taking on any additional tasks, merely meeting the government’s existing obligations – mostly to pay for the military and to keep up with the health care and retirement needs of the elderly – would send the budget deficit soaring, pushing overall federal debt held by the public from under 50 percent of the size of the nation’s economy today to over 300 percent by 2050. “The combination of roughly constant revenues and significantly rising expenditures would quickly create an unstable fiscal situation,” the budget office report notes alarmingly, but in its characteristically dry and understated manner. How would the Republican candidates deal with this problem? Most say they would try to hold down spending – and cut taxes even more. Indeed, without providing many specifics about his proposed spending cuts, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in a recent op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, wrote that he was “committed to making the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, while aiming at still-lower marginal rates. We’ll give the death tax the death penalty, index the Alternative Minimum Tax for inflation as a step toward eliminating it entirely, expand tax-free savings accounts, and expand health-care choice through tax reform. We also need to reduce the corporate tax rate.”

RUDY – like George W. Bush – seems to believe in the Tax Fairy. Governor Perry seems to think there is some difference between these two fiscal buffoons. Funny – he never really explained what the difference was.