Some Liberals -- call them the "budget hawks" -- spent most of the 2004 election season trying to drive a wedge between President Bush and his own party. For months, Democrats (the once-powerful political party now owned by Liberals) constantly harped upon government spending and the rising deficit. Most Liberals believe that the essence of Conservatism is greed and tight-fisted miserliness. They figured that they could hurt the Bush administration by complaining about overspending, causing the money-grubbing Conservatives to abandon Bush. As Liberal author Frank Wallis wrote, "Conservatives have no use for such liberal concepts as progress, equality, social justice, or democracy. It is a curious piggish greed which prompts them to take actions and invent ideologies to preserve the power status quo and maintain authority for themselves at any cost." Too many Hollywood movie stereotypes running through the Liberal brain must have caused people like that to lose all touch with reality. Many of them probably keep confusing the icy-hearted Old Man Potter from Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life" with Dick Cheney. 

Fortunately, few people were fooled by the sudden concern for government expenditures. The only spending the Left consistently wanted to cut before was military spending. This newly-hawkish posture on the budget was seen for what it is: just another way to undermine support for the War on Terror. After all, I didn't hear them crying about spending when President Bush pledged $15 billion to curb AIDS in Africa. Remember the screams of Liberal outrage when they felt not enough money was spent quickly enough on tsunami relief, even before an assessment of the damage was begun? The only Liberal complaints about Bush's Medicare and No Child Left Behind bills were that not enough money was allocated to them. No, the Left certainly doesn't mind spending our money, except on our own defense.

Government overspending is an issue, but not because Conservatives and Republicans simply hate to spend money. The point of spending tax revenue, supposedly, is to get the best value for it. The Conservative aim is to stop throwing it away on frivolous pork-barrel projects, or using it to increase the already bloated government bureaucracy in lieu of actually fixing problems. Unfortunately, although Republicans hold a majority in Congress, Conservatives don't. In general, the Liberal answer to any problem you can name is to simply spend more money on it. After all, there's a bottomless well of taxpayer funding -- they can always raise taxes on the rich and successful, right?

Well, that's not the way it's supposed to work. Congress has been spending more money that it should, but most of that was needed to prime the pump of the economy and to engage in a war whose immediacy was brought home to us -- literally -- out of a clear blue sky. However, that can't be explained to the Liberal budget hawks. They think they found a way to attack the President, so they continued to scream about overspending even after losing the election. Didn't they ever hear the old adage "be careful what you wish for... you may get it?"

Now that the economy has come back from the Clinton/dot-com recession, it's time to start work on reducing that deficit. Deficits are not, contrary to Liberal opinion, caused by lowering taxes -- they're caused by spending money the government doesn't have. President Bush's proposed 2006 budget will call for keeping spending increases to a bare minimum. It will also cut funding for about 150 duplicated or discontinued government programs, or those that have performed poorly. Cutting waste -- now that's music to Conservative ears. The only thing that will sound sweeter will be the sounds of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Left, as the posturing budget hawks see the government going on a long-overdue diet.

Non-defense, non-homeland security Federal spending increases will be kept to less than 1% (except for No Child Left Behind and a few others). Be prepared to hear the Left caterwauling about "cuts" in their favorite government programs. The fact is that no cuts will actually take place, just a tight rein on spending increases. The way government agencies calculate their budget is to simply take last year's budget as a baseline, and increase every item in it by approximately 8% to 12%. Unlike businesses, government agencies don't have to justify their spending requests to a board of directors or the stockholders -- that would be us, the taxpayers. They don't even check to see whether all the money allocated last year was spent before requesting the increase. The government is a huge black hole into which far more money vanishes than ever, ever comes out.

The predictions indicate that keeping unnecessary spending down while encouraging economic growth will reduce the deficit by half in five years. So when the Liberal budget hawks begin to cry about the "cuts" in the 2005 budget, they're really just getting what they said they wanted, aren't they?