Eight years ago, President Obama fought for an economic stimulus package in the hopes that it would jump-start an economy in crisis. At that time, the prevailing assumption was that a country which had seen its national debt double during the previous administration would take a Keynesian approach to recovery in the short-term, before a period of federal fiscal responsibility and (hopefully) robust private sector growth.
Obviously, many of those expectations went unrealized. Among the many faults conservatives found with the Obama administration, its profligate spending habits were one of the first and most consistent criticisms. In the 2010, 2012 and 2014 election cycles, GOP candidates across the board campaigned heavily on the promise of reigning in and reversing government growth.
Although President Trump won the election in 2016 running as a Republican, conservative skepticism about his policies emerged early in the primary campaign and persisted well into the general election, long after right-leaning voters had any other viable options for winning back the White House.
With the president’s release of his 2018 “America First” budget (or at least the portion of it which covers discretionary spending), it’s safe to conclude that a Republican Party which votes for such a proposal was not sincere in its complaints throughout the Obama years.
Media and Democratic hysteria aside, Trump’s budget damningly achieves no meaningful reduction in discretionary government spending from 2017 to 2018, and maintains the same freakishly high level of federal outlays that has marked nearly every federal budget in the 21st century.
With overall federal spending due to come in above $4 trillion and the president’s repeated statements against touching entitlements (the well-established main driver of the federal debt), it’s difficult to claim that this budget has any great foundation in the principles of limited government.
As Reason.com Editor-In-Chief Nick Gillespie put it, Trump’s mere reallocating of federal dollars spent is the antithesis of everything he ran on and has pushed for since in office. “Many of Donald Trump’s supporters evinced an interest in ‘burning it down,’ in razing Washington figuratively as the British did during the War of 1812,” Gillespie wrote. “In his first budget blueprint, their champion has not only failed to do that, he hasn’t even really thrown a good first punch.”
While conservative lawmakers are currently staking out positions regarding the American Health Care Act, the president’s budget and the broader Trump agenda, a time for choosing appears to be coming. If the Republican Party truly becomes defined by populist, nationalist aims, its former small government standard-bearers may increasingly find themselves on the outside looking in.
Though the price tag of Making America Great Again is understandably significant, the cost of conviction may be too great for conservatives who have long contended that Uncle Sam is already oversized.
Tamer Abouras (@iamtamerabouras) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a writer and editor from Williamstown, N.J.
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