On Sunday the New York Times profiled Diane McLeod, a 47-year-old single mother working two jobs, who by her own admission acknowledges she spent too much money shopping to make herself feel better without reflecting on how it would impact her future. Commenting on reader reaction to the article, former Weekly Standard senior editor David Brooks wrote: “Individuals don’t build their lives from scratch. They absorb the patterns and norms of the world around them. … [W]hat happened to McLeod, and the nation’s financial system, is part of a larger …
Last week The Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson posted a chart at The Corner that he said could “only be termed, alas, Republican overspending—that is, the enormous increase in domestic spending during this administration, most of which, of course, took place while the GOP held not only the White House but both chambers of Congress.” Rising to defend President Bush’s record on spending, The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat responded: “[W]hen Bush took office, discretionary domestic spending accounted for 3.1 percent of GDP, and in 2007 it accounted for … 3.3 percent of …
A Daily Kos diarist has stumbled upon our Federal Revenue and Spending Book of Charts and approvingly links writing: Under democratic leadership, spending went down while still installing programs to help those in need. … Republicans on the other hand have actually spent more money not just on defense spending, but also on social programs. … I have no idea why the heritage foundation promotes these graphs, they just prove that conservatives and Republicans are ineffective and just plane [sic] wrong about money. The diarist does not link to any …
Unable to summon the courage to end funding for the Iraq war, liberals are now trying to blame Iraq for the current economic turmoil. We’ve already detailed why this argument is so specious, but sometimes visuals communicate better than words. Here is how little the U.S government is spending on Iraq compared to other outlays: Spending on the Iraq war, in fact, amounts to a mere 1 percent of the economy:
