Responses to My Wingnut Correspondent- Liberal Spending Edition

So I do have a little addiction problem.  I have this conservative correspondent whom I've never met- well, it might be more accurate to call him a Reactionary than a conservative.  I don't get a chance to talk much with people like Ron, a true Tea Party guy and caricature of the movement, right down to the "covering my ears, don't bother me with facts" method of debate.  He's not a Christian fundamentalist, so I guess in that sense he's not quite the face of the far Right, but he's the closest I've come to.

Anyway, Ron bombards me with the Wingnut emails that ping around his circle, and I spent a lot of energy a while ago refuting them in turn.  Last year the group we were engaged in broke up, which has been a great blessing, as we were just going around in circles in our debates.

But I mentioned my addiction problem: although our larger group is finished, I emailed him a few articles when I just couldn't resist, and now I'm back on his list, receiving a half dozen emails a day with the same old stuff.  I'm getting better at ignoring most of them and shortening my responses to the ones I do answer (this is the Harm Reduction Model, for those of us in the addiction field- I should really be abstinent, but I'm trying to just lower the intensity first).  But this got me thinking: since I want to answer these same old memes as they come across, maybe I could compose some comprehensive blog posts, keep them bookmarked, and just send them back to him every time he sends me the same old point. 

So here's my first attempt.  I received this note today:

When is it enough?

When does an alcoholic get enough alcohol?

When does a drug addict get enough Cocaine?

When does an obese person get enough Food?

When do Democrats get enough of our Dollars?

NEVER!

They are all hooked! When you're hooked it is

NEVER ENOUGH!

The only way to stop the abuse is for US to

TAKE the Alcohol, Drugs, Donuts and Dollars AWAY!

We can do the Dollar part in November,

If we don't they'll take every Dollar,,they can't help it!

(This guy is fond of large font, bold letters, and the color red, though curiously this one wasn't in red)

So I guess the point here is that Democrats specialize in spending tax money, and can't help themselves.  Let's look at the numbers a bit.  Here's a graph of total US federal spending since 1970:

Now it looks to me like there's a pretty steady increase in spending for the most part, with an increase in the trend line during the mid-2000s.  When Republicans were in control of congress and the presidency. 
But that graph is hard to read.  So here's something I had saved from a previous blog post, which lays out the change in government spending during the first terms of the last five presidents:



Now to be fair, presidents shouldn't get all the credit or blame for budgets passed by congress on their watches.  But they ought to get some of the credit/blame, right?  This graph shows that all three Republicans presided over much greater spending growth than the Democrats during their first terms.

But what about the exploding deficits under Obama, you ask? Well, that's not really about government spending- it's about revenue. Here's recent tax receipts:

The Great Recession murdered tax receipts- that's why the deficit is so big. On top of that, taxes have been slashed as part of the stimulus packages that have been passed.

So recent history shows that Democratic presidents sign budgets that grow spending much slower than Republicans do.  In the current environment, Democrats have proposed no big new spending outside of the Affordable Care Act, which is fully paid for through various increased taxes.

So when you look at the evidence, if you want a party that will be more likely to reduce the deficit, it looks like a Democratic president is the way to go.

Now maybe the Republican party has changed.  But keep in mind that Mitt Romney's campaign and Paul Ryan's budget proposals aren't at all specific about the spending cuts they have in mind, outside of slashing programs for the poor.  But to make up for all their very specific and enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, there isn't enough money in social spending to make the math work.  Until their plan has some meat on them, we shouldn't be buying.