@okie,
This will be long, but is necessary to address Blatham's highly selective sound bites and the numbnuts who cannot distinguish between political labels and definitions of conservatism and liberalism.
Jimmy Carter, liberal Democrat, had a Democratic congress for four years and inherited a growing economy emerging from a mild recession under Ford. After four years, the people resoundingly voted him out of office and he left office with a deficit that had more than doubled the deficit, double digit inflation, double digit interest rates, and almost 8% average unemployment across the nation--double digit unemployment in some industrialized states--and long gas lines as the gas pumps because of an energy shortage.
The thing is, the President can set the tone and recommend policy, and it is true (and sometimes unfortunate) that his own party members will follow his lead. The President, however, cannot do a whole lot about spending and the economy without the consent of Congress.
Reagan had a mostly Democratic Congress authorizing every penny that was spent those eight years. He rebuilt a military that had been incredibly decimated in the previous Carter administration and the Congress was perfectly happy to help him do it because he then didn't veto the budgets they put together. So we had deficits yes, but the economic warfare waged brought the USSR to its knees, freed tens of millions of people from totalitarian rule, and removed the nuclear threat hanging over us all.
Was it worth it? Yes, every penny. Would it have been better if Congress had ratcheted back non essential spending? Of course. But the fact that a conservative principle--peace through strength--was implemented alongside non-conservative principles did not make the conservative principle any less valid.
The Clinton administration accomplished nothing in the way of sound economic policy or deficit reduction in the first two years of his administration. He and Hillary's attempt to take over the U.S. health industry--a full 13% of the economy--failed then because it was too extreme even for a Democratically controlled Congress. His first couple of budgets were so bad they threw them out and started over. When the GOP took over in 1994 and held that power for the next six years, Clinton was dragged--literally dragged into welfare reform and a much more balanced budget. Prior to it happening he didn't see that it could be done. He went along, however, because both things were popular with the public and he wanted to be loved and praised more than he wanted anything else.
Now enter the Bush administration who inherited a developing mild recession at the end of the Clinton term. One of his early initiatives was the prescription medicine bill for seniors, something even the majority of seniors didn't want, and which immediately inflated the budget. Not a conservative principle at all. But the GOP congress of 2001 was not the conservative Republicans of the freshman class of 1994 and was heavily influenced by neocons and RINOs who really liked pork barrel spending. Not a conservative concept.
It wouldn't have gotten so out of hand, however, except for two events. 9/11 that deepened what would have been a mild recession followed by invasion of Iraq and Katrina. In order to have Congress authorize funding for those two things, the President allowed a lot of pork barrel spending that he otherwise wouldn't have authorized. Partly his own fault and partly Congress' fault, the GOP abandoned all conservative principles and spent money like drunken sailors. It would have been far worse, however, without those much criticized Bush tax cuts that helped stimulate a booming economy for most of those years and even with the heavier expenses, the deficits were coming down though not enough to pacify the conservative electorate who resented the excesses and the liberals who resented the war.
In January 2007 the Democrats took over Congress. Despite a few poorly publicized pleas from a few conservative Republicans and the administration, liberal notions of redistribution of wealth kicked into high gear and nothing was done to head off the developing crisis of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that could have made the crash a whole lot less severe. No conservative principles at play there at all.
The intellectually honest won't go looking for sound bites taken out of context and say "see?" and won't confuse politics and political parties with definitions of liberal and conservative. But take each issue and examine it with an eye of 'yes this is the way it should be' or 'no, it should not be this way because. . . .' and the intellectually honest will begin to understand.
I suppose there are honest liberals out there who, like Karl Marx, think a flat society is the moral choice. Conservatives, however, think freedom to be all that one can be is the moral choice and that includes freedom in how we use our own property and resources toward that end. I don't know whether we will ever be able to agree on that.
