| May 2012 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||
The Washington Times shows that Kerry’s claims of fiscal conservativism are nonsense:
...despite the fact that federal education spending under Mr. Bush has increased more than 80 percent, rising from $35 billion in fiscal 2001 to a projected $64 billion in the current fiscal year, Mr. Kerry lamented that the president has “underfunded” education by at least $28 billion. His solution is to propose education “initiatives” costing an additional $207 billion over 10 years. Last year, Mr. Kerry opposed the Medicare prescription-drug plan, not because this self-styled budget hawk objected to the plan’s estimated $400 billion cost over 10 years. Having voted for a Democratic alternative the year before that would have cost 50 percent more, he wanted to spend more, much more.
In fact, Mr. Kerry’s presidential policy agenda just overflows with big-ticket spending items. Last week, for example, the deficit-fighting Concord Coalition released a report complaining that Mr. Kerry’s signature 10-year, $653 billion health-care proposal had so many “back-loaded costs” that it “grows by 50 percent between 2009 and 2014,” a period that conveniently follows his dubious pledge to cut the deficit in half by 2009. Even accepting at face value Mr. Kerry’s claim that his health-care plan would realize $300 billion in savings (a review by the American Enterprise Institute found that its net cost would actually exceed $1.5 trillion over a decade), the Concord Coalition concluded that the Kerry health plan “would assume significant budgetary risk.”
...Contrary to repeated assertions by Mr. Kerry, the Concord Coalition’s analysis concluded that Mr. Bush tax cuts “did not create the long-term [fiscal] problem and rolling them back would not provide a solution, especially if the revenues gained are redirected into costly new programs.”
...It is worth recalling that 10 years ago the Concord Coalition issued a report card criticizing Mr. Kerry’s budget votes, which earned him an “F.” Visibly angry (according to the Boston Globe), Mr. Kerry called the coalition’s scorecard “irresponsible” because it failed to reflect “my support for a 50-cent increase in the gas tax.” Mr. Kerry has since disavowed such a policy. But given his spending proposals and the well-earned recognition he has repeatedly received as the Senate’s most liberal member, how can voters reasonably believe that this tax-and-spend liberal will abandon the philosophy he has enthusiastically embraced for more than three decades?
