SPENDING YOUR WAY OUT OF TROUBLE

I think it’s pretty clear that’s the Bush administration’s fundamental response to Katrina. The key test of their responsibility will be if they cut spending elsewhere to come up with $200 billion. But they won’t. Guns and butter – borrowed from us, the next generation and the Chinese government. I really didn’t believe that the president would actually spend more of other people’s money in his second term than in the first. But he looks set to pull it off. Peggy Noonan says we need a debate about conservatism. Here’s a starter: fiscal conservatism as we have known it is over. No liberal Democrat would ever have managed to spend as much and as incompetently as this administration. Even in opposition, the GOP would have mounted a defense of the country’s fiscal standing against such reckless big government liberalism. But in power, the only difference between the GOP and, say, a Ted Kennedy administration is that the Republican free spending goes to different interest groups, has no restraint or domestic opposition, and rests on borrowing rather than taxing. Yes, Katrina reconstruction is inevitable and important. But $200 billion doesn’t grow on trees. Where is it going to come from? Part of the point of fiscal responsiblity, after all, is that disasters do happen and the government should have fiscal lee-way to respond to them. But we have no lee-way at all, thanks to this president and his party. Tonight, the president will try and rescue himself politically by spending money he doesn’t have. As Margaret Thatcher once remarked, the only thing socialists are good at is spending other people’s money. That’s the one thing this president has known how to do – whether it was daddy’s money or yours.