It’s become cliche and tired to complain of Bush’s out of control spending habits, but Andrew Sullivan argues that such antics my be on the way out:

The Bush administration finally got serious about domestic discretionary spending. The proposed increase in spending outside defense and homeland security was a relatively small one percent. Since I’ve banged on about this administration’s fiscal recklessness before, it behooves me to congratulate them on this needed, small step back toward sanity.

The President has indeed frozen nondefense discretionary programs, but we’re still a far cry from traditional conservative values. Brian Riedl, chief budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, notes that this year’s appropriations are 4.5 percent higher than last year. This is not including “money for Iraq and Afghanistan, billions for hurricane relief and other spending classified as emergencies to evade budget caps.” Indeed, overall discretionary spending still increased by an unnecessary 4 percent in FY 2005. Don’t break out the champagne just yet.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 29th, 2004 at 10:36 pm by Mystery Man and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.