TJHairball said:
Now here's the funny thing. While it is worth giving some credit to the Republican congress for balancing the budget with Clinton, it was clearly an effect borne of the combination, rather than the Congress itself. Congress has changed practically not at all, and as soon as a Republican president dropped in, they went wild with the spending.
IMO, the most important thing you can have for shrinking the government is a President and Congress at odds with each other. Practically all of them have their pet projects, but if they're all trying their hardest to strangle each others' rather than exchange favors, it works nicely. If they're trying hard to make the other guy look bad and one of them decides to play "we're hardline with balancing the budget" as a political gambit, then spending actually gets cut.
I'd like to say that we can blame Presidents in at least some part for ramping up wars - LBJ for Vietnam and Bush for Iraq - which definitely does have impact on spending, as SSgt mentions. Hawks always end up making the gov't bigger.
Close, but no cigar. I do give you three quarters credit. The Congress did drastically overspend on the shake-up of the intel community, and on the setup of Homeland Security. Also of note, the Government had to put out close to a million dollars on the repair of the Pentagon. It may be a drop, but it's a drop that wouldn't have been there. And those drops in the bucket add up real quick.
Hawks do not increase the size of Government, as in the civilian government. They increase the size of the military, and the toys they play with do tend to eat up a lot of money just in day to day life. I'll give you an example:
During the cold war, the NATO forces would regularly conduct training exercises in Germany, presumably a front of interest in a war with the Soviet Union. During Vietnam, US forces were spread too thin to really participate, and this practice stopped. Once Vietnam ended, the US didn't resume the habit until Reagan. Reagan resumed training and field manuvers in Germany, as part of his efforts to crumble the "Evil Empire" This field ops training would destroy many farmers' fields, and other rural areas, with a DOD official following behind to discuss reparations to those land owners affected by the manuvers. In other words, some guy in a jeep with a checkbook, whose job it was to make the affected farmers happy. This made NATO training quite expensive.
Now, this kind of thing ran up the military budget, without new toys even being involved. And it didn't increase the size of the military, although it was said to be an incredible help for cross-training different troops from different countries. It was also the number four source (if I remember right) of NATO spending during Reagan's administration.
Military budgets are incorrectly (IMO) lumped into discretionary spending. I do believe a strong and well trained military is a must for our country. And if the best way to train with our European allies is to mess up some fields in Germany, then so be it. I'm rambling a bit here, so I'll bring it back to the core point where you almost got it right: Every one of these Presidents' alterations in size of discretionary spending can be directly tracked to the military and what they did with it during their time in office.
Bush I would have shrunk the government if not for the Gulf War. Instead, I believe it was a 5% increase in government spending, mostly to pay Guard and Reserve troops made active during the Gulf War. Bush II has had even more in the way of call-ups of reserve and guard, and for longer times, ignoring the 179 day rule. (Guard and Reserves called up for 179 days or less are entitled to no increase in benefits, just active pay. At the 180 day mark, they get full active duty status, including living expenses for family and an increase in health care benefits.) That alone could easily account for 90% of his increase in government spending. Find me a source willing to go on record about exactly how much of the increase in spending has nothing to do with the military, and we'll talk.
On Clinton Vs. Congress: The government shutdown that the Republicans basically forced by refusing to accept "Bubba's" demands is what caused the budget to balance a couple of years later, although no one caught it at the time.
The shutdown of the goverment in 1995 caused fiscal year 1995 to go into the books with only 9 1/2 months of actual spending. Now, the "baseline" budgeting method uses the last year's budget plus 4% to figure next year's budget. OMB did not account for the two and a half months of shutdown: they'd never had to think about that before. This resulted in an accidental large scale cut in the next years' budget that The White House didn't catch, and the Congress didn't notice until most of the Budget was already passed. The Republicans who finally figured out something seemed to be off and found out what had occured chose to keep their mouth shut until almost six months
after they figured it out, and Clinton's administration chose to keep it quiet once they were told because they were afraid of looking like idiots. Thus the budget balanced almost on accident. (Sad isn't it?)
I'll stop here, as I have gone on for a while at this point. Take the time to read this post twice and really think about the implications of what I am saying, and we can discuss any questions you have over the next couple of days.
