Let's play "Find the Conservative Spending Trendline."
Is it the postwar trendline of the 1940s? Can you imagine such a small government today, spending just barely $400 billion by 2015?
Or how about The Great Society trendline of the 1960s, spending $800 billion by 2015? Unfortunately its little Vietnam-guns and Medicare-butter time bombs had time delay detonators.
They went off and set the trendline established in the wake of the mid-1970s recession, oil embargoes and Iranian hostage crisis which took us all the way through Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton. Does $2.5 trillion by 2015 sound conservative to you? All assisted by a dollar finally unglued from gold in 1971.
It certainly couldn't be George W. Bush's trendline, could it? It was an even more radical departure from the past because of added spending on drugs for seniors and two more wars. And don't even think of calling that policy "tax and spend." It was all spend.
For an encore to that sorry enterprise, Obama has taken it practically vertical, but it can't reach escape velocity and looks doomed to crash. Which is why the man who eight months ago signed the extension of the Bush tax rate regime now suddenly wants to raise taxes as part of a debt ceiling deal this summer.
Some people define conservatism as maintaining the status quo. Some as measured, gradual change. Cutting current spending back toward the 1970s trendline, which is where Rep. Paul Ryan is trying to go, is viewed as radical by the likes of Newt Gingrich and the left. In reality, though, it's just a return to a status quo ante which for its time was anything but conservative. What this means is that so-called conservatives today find themselves reduced to defending the liberalism of the still recent past.
