Spending: Democrats Still Don't Get It

August 31, 2006
Spending: Dems Still Don't Get It​

by David Boaz
David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of Libertarianism: A Primer.​

Connecticut Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont is calling himself "a fiscal conservative."

With out-of-control federal spending, special-in terest earmarks and deficits projected at nearly $2 trillion over the next decade, it's no surprise why. But what kind of fiscal conservative is Lamont? He accuses the Bush administration of fiscal profligacy and attacks it for "starving needed social investment" in the same breath.

In his campaign materials, Lamont promises to spend more money on national health insurance, universal preschool, all-day schools, "an overarching plan for clean energy and energy independence" and "a serious, long-range infrastructure plan to upgrade our schools, public transportation, highways, our sewage treatment and our levees in below sea-level areas [and] a transportation strategy which interconnects cities and suburbs, inner cities and jobs and affordable housing, and ports and airports." Sounds pretty expensive.

Yes, Lamont has declared his opposition to budget earmarks, but earmarks - while notorious, like the "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska - are only a tiny part of the federal budget. Nowhere does he promise a balanced budget, much less a spending cut.

Now, Democrats are quite right to mock the Republican claim to fiscal responsibility. As my colleague Stephen Slivinski writes in his new book Buck Wild, President Bush and the GOP Congress are spending the taxpayers' money faster than Bill Clinton - indeed, even faster than Lyndon Johnson in the heyday of the Great Society. Slivinski shows that federal spending has soared by 45 percent in just five years of Republican government.

Some seem to think that this means Democrats have changed. As Peter Beinart of The New Republic put it in a recent column, "The struggle that initially roiled the Clinton administration - between deficit hawks and deficit spenders - is basically over; today, even the most liberal Democrats are fiscal conservatives."

If only.

- rest at www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6642