When President Bush unveiled his annual budget proposal on Monday, the Democrats responded with a predictable progressive rebuttal.
However, it is quite discouraging that conservative lawmakers and citizens did not raise a similar fuss.
They should: The new budget is rife with irrational logic that undermines the tenants of conservative ideology.
For starters, his request to institute permanent tax cuts is accompanied by a massive increase in military and domestic spending.
The original tax cut innovator, Ronald Reagan, logically linked tax relief to reduced government spending. As he argued, slashing taxes required the government to spend less.
Although Bush simply adores Reagan, this historical lesson has been lost on him.
If the president wants to follow his conservative roots to provide tax relief for industry and citizens, then he cannot also argue for a big increase in government spending.
Minimizing the federal government and rolling back the New Deal by slashing $70 billion from Medicare and Medicaid are perfectly logical conservative goals.
In fact, Reagan drafted a budget proposal in 1981 that reduced government funding.
As he was fond of saying, “Government does not solve problems, it subsidizes them.”
In this sense, the glitch with Bush’s latest budget plan is not that he wants to minimize the government. Rather, he wants to selectively marginalize unwanted bureaucracies while increasing the size of more favorable departments.
If Bush wants to decrease funding to the national institutions responsible for social justice and public health care, he cannot logically turn around and ask for an increase in the already bloated defense budget.
Since this budget paradox runs so counter to the conservative notion of minimal government, Bush should take a tip from Joe Lieberman and defect as an independent.
Ronald Reagan relied on the works of Milton Friedman to advance his economic budget plan. Friedman advocated a minimized government with a free market economy and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Although Reagan proposed a logical budget in 1981 based on these influential ideas, he still ended up undermining his own conservative tenets.
After eight years in office, Reagan increased government spending beyond $1 trillion and raised the budget deficit to an all time high.
Unlike Reagan, President Bush is not even trying to follow a coherent strand of economic thought. Considering Reagan’s failure, conservatives should demand greater accountability from their executive leader.
He is currently failing them.
Volpe is a fourth-year political science student.