During the Clinton era growth was reduced and the budget deficit temporarily halted. So when you say we "learned" that this kind of thing is impossible because it didn't happen under Reagan, you are looking through ideologically skewed lenses.

It is possible to reduce budget as a percentage of gnp. Or has been. Actually general fund percentages have fallen over time. Medicare and social security have risen. But it went from nearly 25% under Reagan to 20% under Clinton.

It has increased again not only due to a strange Medicare drug bill no body can support, but pork rich packages such as the recent transportation bill that would not make it under recent president and also the delayed taxes with interest marketed as cuts.

One of the problems is that the political chatterers are not able to distinguish between varoous blends of concervative and also capitalist. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are all "crony capitalists." Bush got his money because he was a front man for a group that had a city raise funds to build them a baseball park, he felt no qualms when the court rule that the condemned land had been bought at one third value. Cheney and Rumsfeld sold government contacts and became rich.

The same attitude that this is the highest form of capitalism informed the building of Iraq. Naturally it is going to be reflected in government spending and budgets. A liberal who had been engaged in competitive enterprise would very likely bring another state of mind.

In the meantime, I guess we'll have to live with the 290 or so Republicans we sent to Washington. We learned long ago, during Ronald Reagan's administration, that no dramatic progress against big government was politically possible. When Reagan took office, the Deparment of Education was only 2 years old. That was the time to strangle the bastard.

I don't worry about the $331 billion deficit. I'm far more disturbed by the $2.5 trillion budget. But I also realize we lost that war, decades ago.

Also, this zero savings rate business is just a little bogus. When economists talk about savings, they're talking about a passbook account. When non-economists talk about savings, they're talking about their 401k.

It disturbs me that this is presented as some sort of major success and proof of the tax cuts. If these people were arguing that the Bush policies had prevented a very serious decline and that this so so situation was the alternative, then there would be a honesty to their approach. But Kudlow and others literally talk of the "Bush economic miracle."

Zero savings? Growth based on spending borrowed money? Possible speculative imbalances (including a stock market still overvalued by historical standards) and very risky behaviors (read some hedge funds) possibly fueled by releasing too much money at the top?

It's just comical, in a grim way, to hear people criticizing the Dems for "not standing for anything." Other than the executive's inalienable right to suspend prohibitions against torture, I haven't seen that this White House stands for anything ... am I missing something?