Democrats are more economically responsible than Republicans.

Looking at the stats on this forum I can tell we have a lot of liberals. So it will be especially hard for me to make the case that Republicans are more fiscally responsible than democrats. I would first like everyone to take a look at a couple links showing that both government spending and revenue have risen consistently in the last 100 years as a percent of the GDP (1,2). The Spend Tax Spiral Effect The democrats tend to see the government as a tool to solve problems and don't generally like to make major cuts to spending. They often propose government solutions to problems such as healthcare, poverty, pollution, etc that often involve increasing spending. Eventually what happens is that spending starts to vastly outpace revenue. That is when the left and the right begins making demands to balance the budget. Republicans usually support more spending cuts than tax increases and democrats support the opposite. So a compromise is reached like the compromise in the 1990s where spending is cut slightly and taxes are increased. However the result is that spending is still higher than when the spending hike started, and taxes are higher. After the compromise, spending is again increased gradually and the deficits widens again, and the process repeats. This is why we see this rise in both spending and taxes over time. This is also a reason why some European countries have total taxes of 50% of the economy. We can agree that this cycle is unhealthy. While government spending is beneficial, people should be able to keep most of their incomes to keep a strong free market. Republicans tend to resist this Tax Spend spiral because they tend to propose spending cuts as a solution. That is the logical solution. The root reason deficits are so large is because spending keeps growing. Competition and Free Market The free market thrives on competition which drives economic and technological growth. These things are fostered in a competitive environment. Problems begin when democrats start weighing companies down with libraries of regulations making it hard for small businesses to do well decreasing competition. When companies and owners are losing 50% of their incomes to taxes, there is less money for innovation and technological progress and the economy stagnates. Also there is less incentive to become successful and it is harder to get rich. Taxes kill competition and business. Democrats tend to support taxes more than Republicans and tend to support higher corporate taxes than Republicans. Now that we have gotten the basics out of the way, lets go over the arguments from my opponent. Democrats are more likely to support welfare ---------------------------------------------------------------- Welfare is great in small amounts and can be beneficial to people at the bottom. However, these programs have gotten so large that they are taking a large chunk of our paychecks to support. This hurts the middle class and discourages success by taking money away from the successful and giving it to the unsuccessful. Republicans support more Military spending -------------------------------------------------------------- That is a problem for republicans. However military spending is far smaller than the democrat-supported welfare spending (3). The democrats have the bigger problem. Clinton Tax Cuts ------------------------------------------ As I mentioned before, this is part of the Tax Spend Spiral and after this deal was reached, social spending only increased. Today, Obama proposes a 3.9 trillion dollar spending budget, the largest ever. He supports adding more taxes on top of what Clinton did to pay for new spending. We cannot let this cycle continue. Plus, many of the spending cuts only happened because of Republican pressure. Republicans had to fight to see the spending cuts that happened (5). Bush ----------------------------------------- Bush oversaw massive increases in spending and these spending increases were built in because of the increasing number of Social Security recipients and welfare costs. He wanted to cut this spending but did not have the political support to do so. He was also a lot more moderate than many of the Tea Party republicans today who right a lot harder for spending cuts. He did enter a lot of wars and most of that money was sunk into Iraq which was a military blunder much like Vietnam. This is another reason for his spending increases. Reagan and Bush Sr. did not make the same mistakes he did. They oversaw spending increases but also could not muster the support to get deeper cuts. Spending is hard to cut. Roosevelt --------------------------------------- The level of government spending of Roosevelt according to (1) was about 10-20% of the economy during the depression much lower than today which is more like 40%. I have no problem with some government. I wonder how well we would have done if 50% of our money went to the government? 1: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com... 2: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com... 3: http://en.wikipedia.org... 4: http://news.xinhuanet.com... 5: http://www.cato.org...