WASHINGTON — Cheap tax bills and tight spending generally characterize fiscal conservatism. Naturally, many Americans see our $4.3 trillion in defense and international spending between fiscal 2002 and 2009 — Republican President George W. Bush’s reign over the War on Terror — as ideologically hypocritical.
But the assessment turns out not to be accurate or fair when spending figures are shown in proper historical and budgetary context, according to a conservative researcher.
“It creates this caricature that conservatives are war mongers,” said James Carafano, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank. “That’s just kind of a head-scratcher. We’ve had wars under Democrats and progressives, like Woodrow Wilson. We’ve had liberals start wars like Johnson and Truman, and conservatives bring them to conclusion, like Nixon.”
More Democrats than Republicans have held office during the following conflicts: World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the War on Terror.
Government spending is often viewed as a zero-sum game, directed either toward defense or public assistance, Carafano said.
“It is guns versus butter. You can’t afford to defend yourself and give everybody everything,” Carafano said. “We’re now in a situation where the government can’t afford everything it wants to spend money on. We’ll just cut wasteful defense spending. We can’t fund a welfare state and defend ourselves.”
But funding to public-assistance programs was a greater percentage of total spending under Bush than President Barack Obama. And Obama spends more on defense than Bush did.
“Just as many Democrats voted for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan as Republicans,” Carafano added. “If you read the Constitution, one of the primary functions is providing for the common defense.”
Bush launched the War on Terror in late 2001 by sending the CIA, and then troops, to Afghanistan. The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.
Less than two years later, Social Security and Medicare accounted for 25 percent of the U.S. fiscal 2005 budget, or 8.5 percent of GDP. Defense and international spending represented just 14 percent of all spending, or 4.7 percent of GDP, according to the U.S. Government Printing Office.
Under President Barack Obama in fiscal 2012, Social Security and Medicare spending dropped to 22 percent of the budget, or 6.9 percent of GDP. Defense and international expenses remained at 14 percent of all spending, or 4.3 percent of GDP.
The government spent an inflation-adjusted $1.01 trillion on Social Security and Medicare in 2005 and a raw $1.32 trillion in 2012. Defense and international spending went from an inflation-adjusted $625.3 billion in 2005 to a raw $725 billion in 2012.
“It’s only exorbitant because we take it out of context,” Carafano said of defense spending. “It’s a manufactured product of pop culture in the last decade.”
A February 2006 article in online Marxist publication Political Affairs highlights the tension between defense and domestic spending.
“For almost half a century, Americans looked forward to the day when the country would be at peace and federal spending could be redirected away from the military buildup and toward health care, housing, education and other programs that raise the quality of life for working people and their families,” the article said.
“That day finally came during the last year of the Clinton administration in 2000, when domestic spending finally outpaced military spending as a percentage of GDP for the first time since 1940, before the U.S. entered World War II,” the article said.
Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg wrote in a June 2011 article that spending in Afghanistan increased to “$6.2 billion per month in April from $4.3 billion in the first two months of fiscal 2011 that began Oct. 1. Afghanistan spending in fiscal 2009, as Barack Obama became president, averaged $3.9 billion per month.”
Carafano said it’s not fair to blame a liberal bias among the media for America’s view of Bush and conservatives as prodigal “war mongers.”
“Media tends to follow public opinion rather than lead it,” he said.
