More and more fiscal conservatives are coming to realize the fiscal policies of George W. Bush are anything but conservative. A search of Google will provide many articles about the problems fiscal conservatives are having with President Bush. Some fiscal conservatives like the Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan and former Secretary of the Treasury , Paul O'Neill have always counseled fiscal conservatism and a balanced budget even if it meant ending tax cuts. Other more dogmatic Republicans have tried to find excuses for the enormous deficit by blaming it on the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism and economic slowdown at the end of the Clinton administration. The truth is none defense spending has increased by about 6% per year during the Bush administration and so we have the worst of both worlds - a huge increase in military and defense expenditures coupled with a large increases in other spending.
For the true fiscal conservative the current situation brings the realization that deficit is so large that it cannot be solved without major increases in federal revenue. Thus, for the fiscal conservatives to achieve a balance between expenditures and revenues they will be forced to accept tax increases no matter how many cuts are made to deal with the huge deficit. If you exclude the Social Security and Medicare surpluses and look simply at the federal expenditures compared with the federal revenue, the imbalance is $675 billion in FY 2005. Even when the Iraq war has come to an end, we are looking at as much as $600 billion imbalance between the federal expenditures and the federal revenues. Solving the fiscal morass that has been created over the last five years is going to be painful and especially for those who believe in fiscal conservatism.