New at Reason: Steve Chapman on Runaway Government Spending

February 1, 2010

President Barack Obama’s claim of stern fiscal discipline—“we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years”—collapsed into comical irrelevance as soon as he listed all the programs that won’t be included: national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Yet as Steve Chapman notes, it's odd to hear complaints about excessive spending from the same Republicans who brought us the bloated budgets of the Bush years. Runaway spending, in other words, is a bipartisan problem.

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