For decades, the Republican Party’s strategy on federal spending has been simple: Overpromise and underdeliver.
Disagree? Come along for a journey into disappointment.
Ronald Reagan ran for president arguing that Big Government wasn’t the solution to America’s problems, but their source. The Gipper succeeded in restraining the growth of Swamp expenditures, but actual cuts? Ambitious plans, scant results. Zilch was done to control the soaring bill for entitlements, and full or partial privatization of the U.S. Postal Service, Bonneville Power Administration, Amtrak, Tennessee Valley Authority, and Federal Housing Administration faded away. Reagan ran deficits every year he was in office, and more than doubled, adjusted for inflation, D.C.’s debt.
Newt Gingrich and his “revolutionaries” captured both chambers of Congress for the GOP in 1994, and promises of austerity returned. Yet once again, outlays grew. Farm subsidies weren’t killed, a balanced-budget amendment failed to be added to the Constitution, and by 1997, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page lamented that the “Republican revolution” was “moribund.” (As early as September 1995, The American Spectator wondered “just how serious Republicans are about changing the way Washington works.”)
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