Big Government: The Failure of the Modern Republican Party

There is a big difference between Republicans and conservatives. Most people and almost all of the mainstream media in America believe that the terms are synonymous, but there are serious differences. That has become even more apparent due to the growth of the size of government ever since George W. Bush became president in 2001.

One of the central tenets of conservatism is its belief in small government. Conservatives believe that individuals, not elected politicians or career bureaucrats, are best at determining what is good for themselves and their families. Liberals, in contrast, believe that most parts of an individual’s life should be filtered through some kind of government program: i.e. retirement (Social Security), health care (Medicare), and education (Department of Education). In essence, liberals want the government to grow while conservative want it to shrink.

That is why it is disturbing that the size of government has grown so rapidly with Republicans, who call themselves conservatives, in control of large parts of the federal government. It took nearly 200 years for Congress to reach a $1 trillion budget (yes that’s trillion with a T), but in just the last ten years, the budget has expanded by another $1 trillion. America now runs deficits up to half a trillion dollars a year. Almost half of the budget is eaten up by entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In light of this you would think that the federal government would do what all individual Americans do when they spend more than they earn – they would cut costs. However, here you will see that instead of cutting costs, President Bush and a Republican Congress have increased spending by about 20% per year. That increase doesn’t even factor in the new prescription drug entitlement passed in 2003 that will cost the federal government an addition $1.2 trillion dollars over the next ten years.

President Bush and Republicans, on the campaign trail, insist that they are the party of and small government. In truth, those words are just that: words. Overall, the size of the federal government has grown so rapidly and the financial soundness of America has deteriorated so much under the leadership of President Bush that Republicans have lost any moral high ground when it comes to small government.

However, this problem does not mean Americans should fall prey to joining liberal calls to increase taxes to eliminate the deficit. When analyzing the deficit there are two numbers to consider: federal receipts and federal expenditures. Federal receipts are the money that flows into the government from the myriad of income, estate, corporate, and sales taxes it imposes on Americans, while federal expenditures are the checks the governments writes for all its costs. The difference between the two creates a yearly federal surplus or a yearly federal deficit. Since America is running a deficit, federal expenditures are outstripping federal receipts.

The perception is that the tax cuts passed in recent years have decreased the revenue coming into the government and, therefore, are the cause of the budget deficits. But if you look at the numbers, federal receipts have actually become significantly larger. That is, billions of more dollars are coming into the Treasury now than came in before the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Historically, tax cutting increases federal receipts because of the economic incentives and growth they create. More economic activity means the federal tax base grows larger and more revenue flows to the government. According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in the Ronald Reagan tax cutting years of 1980 to 1988, federal receipts grew from 517 billion dollars to 909 billion dollars: an increase of almost 100%. The tax cuts implemented by President Kennedy of the early 1960s also increased federal receipts significantly. The reason for the deficits we are experiencing now have nothing to do with tax cutting, but have everything to do with the large increases in spending.

Republicans have done a horrendous job of controlling spending. So should conservatives start looking to support Democrats instead of Republicans in elections? The short answer is no because Democratic budget proposals almost always entail even more expenditures than the proposals of their Republican counterparts. But establishment Republican politicians who insist on allowing the federal budget to swell should realize that spending increases are not only bad policy, but bad politics. In the long run, Americans will not accept the ever-increasing reach of the federal government that coincides with enormous governmental budgets and Republicans might find themselves in the political wilderness because of it.

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~ The Conservative Guy