"Can you believe this spending with a REPUBLICAN in the White House????"

 

I've heard it my entire adult life, staring during the Reagan years. I'm not sure how many times Republicans have to increase spending twice as fast as their Democratic predecessors before people get used to the idea that this is what Republican presidents do, regardless of which party controls Congress.

 

This shouldn't be a surprise. The Republican Party was born out of the ashes of the Whigs, whose stated goal was to expand the range of things the federal government spent money on. Before the Civil War, most roads were privately owned. Not just privately built; privately owned. Taxpayers didn't contribute a cent towards them.

 

Not only did the Republican Party Sovietize the road system, they did the same with railroads and all sorts of other areas of life. Before the awful FDR, it was Republicans who established most new federal departments.

 

Now, the government seems to be the sole supplier of Covid-19 vaccines, a precedent established under the last Republican president.

 

When you consider the actual records of Republican presidents from Lincoln through Trump, it turns out that Harding and Coolidge were really the "RINOs." 

 

In the post-WWII era, spending almost always goes up (not counting the obvious decrease right after the war - which led to an economic boom, btw). But I decided to take a look at how fast it went up during the various presidential administrations starting with JFK/LBJ. In order to control for inflation, I used the following methodology:

 

Measure the increase in yearly federal spending for each president as a percentage of the spending in the last year of his predecessor. For example, spending was $590 billion in the last year of the Carter Administration. It was $1.06 trillion in the last year of the Reagan administration, an increase of $473.4 billion or 80.1%. That comes in at just over 10% per year on average.

 

You'll never guess who grew spending the least. Find out on today's episode of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom. I review the profligacy of every president during my lifetime, starting with LBJ.

 

I provide documentation of the outlays and receipts on the show notes page.

 

Regardless of how quickly or slowly a president increases it, federal spending is always destructive. It's important to remember the government has failed at every major spending initiative it has undertaken in our lifetimes, whether it is military or domestic policy. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Department of Education, the War on Drugs, Covid - it's always all pain and no gain and the price just keeps going up.

 

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