Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

No, I think Sully will aver that Krugman's shrillness made his message hard to understand, and that Krugman needs to apologize for having used confusing words like "liar", "deception", etc. in reference to Fearless Leader

Well, Peid as soon as Presidents are given the power to set interest rates I'm sure that will happen.

Sullivan relies on Joshua Clayborn:

Meet the Numbers
In a much-hyped television appearance on Meet the Press, President Bush discussed everything from the Iraq war to the looming 2004 election battle. Here's a subject that I thought stood out (surprise!):

If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined.
This is deceptive and false. Discretionary spending has not declined, and most definitely not "steadily" declined. Discretionary spending has increased by 15% during Bush's first two years in office, more than it did during Clinton's first four years. Total outlays fell under Mr. Clinton, from 22.2 percent of the GDP to 18.4 percent of the GDP in 2000. By 2002, the budget consumed 19.5 percent of the GDP. Here're the numbers presented graphically.

So not only has spending increased in a sheer dollar amount, but the rate of increase and the percentage of the GDP has increased as well. But then comes the standard excuse for all this spending, which one should get used to hearing from partisans, if you haven't gotten used to it already.

And the other thing that I think it's important for people who watch the expenditures side of the equation is to understand we are at war, Tim, and any time you commit your troops into harm's way, they must have the best equipment, the best training, and the best possible pay. That's where we owe it to their loved ones.
So is Bush suggesting that all of this spending is due to necessary military expenditures? If so, that's another false statement. Spending for education, job training, unemployment assistance, Medicare, Social Security, veterans benefits, food stamps and other "human resources" has risen from 11.5 percent of GDP to 12.7 percent. Indeed, most of the largest increases having nothing to do with national security. Here's another graphic.

Data is from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Treasury Department, and the White House Office of Management and Budget. Graphs, which use those numbers, are provided by the Cato institute.

Update: These numbers account for inflation according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Update 2: I had this excuse sent to me just recently:

What the President meant to say that President Clinton's last budget *grew* (key word, that) discretionary spending at 15%. Bush's first budget *grew* discretionary spending at 6%. His proposed budget this year *grows* discretionary spending at .55%.
Perhaps he "meant" to say that, but then what he meant to say is still not true. Clinton's last budget increased discretionary spending by 4.56%. Bush's first budget increased discretionary spending by 7.06%. His second budget increased discretionary spending by 10.1%. So Bush has actually steadily increased discretionary spending since Clinton.

Besides, all of this ignores the very important point that just because Clinton spent at a certain rate, it does not mean that Bush can justly do the same, especially when Bush is actually doing worse.

It hurts me to write such a thing, but I also believe it's more than time to get Greg Mankiw's resignation. How can we be simulatenously lecture developing countries about budget righteouness and simultaneously have eminent members of our profession bless what the Bushies are doing to America. Indeed, there are days on which I understand calls to strip our profession from our "Nobel Prize". Surely, some of us do not have the intellectual honesty that should be a sine qua non to be considered a scientist, to put it midly. And I say this as a person who would like to be able to go on assignining Mankiw's writings to his students without feeling like he is brainwashing them.

Why do you guys always have to bust on sully? look, i love krugman and i do hate the way andy insists on beating him up all the time. krugman can be annoying and holier than thou, but there is obviously a lot of substance in what he has to say, and andy's constant dissing of him reflects the weaker, "kausian" side of his thinking. frankly, i disagree with andy far more often then i agree with him, but there's no denying that among conservative bloggers (and among liberal ones for that matter), he is one of the more searching and honest. unlike so many on both sides, he's a smart guy trying to stake out a difficult and original position. i personally think he's misguided a lot of the time, although nothing on the order of a george will, a david brooks (the conservative's ellsworth toohey)or even a supposed moderate like mickey kaus (silly, silly man), let alone any of the fox news types.

rather than taking sully's post this morning as a chance to humiliate him by demanding an apology he's never going to give, why not take the opportunity to note the common ground and build on it. a lot of people in this country are beginning to come around to the realization that bush and co. are seriously off the map both intellectually and ethically. rather than scaring them off with "told you so"'s and demands for apologies, bloggers like yourself should take the opportunity to develop this new dialogue. i personally welcome the chance to have this conversation with a guy as smart as andrew sullivan.

Slightly off-subject, but y'all should read Kevin Phillips' demolition of Bush, based on his new book, which we Angelenos read in this morning's Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-op-phillips8feb08,1,4377350.story?coll=la-home-politics

Phillips has been trying for nearly two decades to get voters to pay attention to the plutocracy in command of the U.S. Maybe this time it will stick?

mtwill: if Andy had spent any time trying to find common ground over the last three years instead of calling opponents of the war "fifth columnists" and "objectively pro-Saddam" maybe he'd be deserving of a measure of goodwill. He isn't.

And I, for one, am getting some guilty pleasure out of his realization that his hero, our boy king, isn't as heroic as Andy thought he was.

Andy's apology will be published just as soon as they get done printing O'Rielly's apology that he promised last year if there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Sully has been a hypocrite long before Krugman got his column.

Those of us whose politics at the moment are ABB should welcome Sullivan to the club. I just don't want to be the one to do it. He did a lot of harsh, creepy stuff after 9/11 and I took it personally. So I nominate mtwill as chairman of the welcoming committee.

Terrye: rewrite, please.

It's what Slacktivist calls 'Reagan's bind'.

Bad news: Bush gets to choose the public face he presents to the world.

Good news: His two choices are a.) 'corrupt', and b.)'incompetent'.

While asking for apologies, you could help spread this meme in a post; I'd like to see people take it up until it's ubiquitious enough we start to get at least a few significant results. Wouldn't you? Lend your megaphone, Brad.

Sigh. Referring to this: http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_amygdalagf_archive.html#107592035121092144

Whoa, you mean The [Boy] Emperor is buck naked? Whoa.

"i love krugman and i do hate the way andy insists on beating him up all the time..."

"A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse, and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still." (Dr Johnson)

Krugman is the real thing; a genuine horse.

Krugman played to idiot lefty Times readers and said in the very beginning that Bush had this super-duper anti-government plan with his tax cuts and deficit creation, and now Krugman himself admits that the real problem is that Bush has both cut taxes too much AND raised spending. Krugman said Bush was bad thing B (secret anti-government plotter), when Bush was bad thing C (irresonsible political panderer to all constituencies). Krugman has corrected his analysis, but never admitted his initial error. That was why he failed to gain traction. Had he simply made a reasonable case from the beginning, he would have gained a lot more support. In short, Krugman has joined my team and admitted I was right (since I was making the critique of Bush's combination of big tax cuts AND spending binges before Krugman was) instead of vice versa. I'll be happy to give Paul the t-shirt.

Shorter K: Krugman should grovel because he underestimated the success George W. Bush would have doling out money to cronies while starving the "beast."

There's a tendency in blogopolis to evolve so that one appeals to ever-narrowing circles-- and Sullivan is a prime example. An old political lesson (hang together/hang separately) needs to be relearned here, I'd say.

One of the many things that makes this site so enjoyable is that Brad yields a swift hammer on trolls.

I wish TalkLeft would follow your lead and rid her comments of her resident trolls.

Sullivan has come close to snapping before and pulled back at the last minute. He may yet turn as the cognitive dissonance becomes too much to bear but I wouldn't count on it--as a gay Catholic he's had some pretty impressive training in maintaining mutually contradictory ideas as part of his professed self-identity.

I also suspect that his income depends pretty heavily on the satisfaction of some fairly wealthy conservatives (the man claims to have made about 80K off donations to his website). On top of that, his reputation is built on the image of being a "gay Republican" and changing sides, to the point of actually supporting a Democrat, would rob him of that uniqueness. So he has a great deal of incentive to Not Get It.

I suspect his internal conflicts are genuine--if he was truly just a "media whore" we wouldn't be hearing any of this stuff, because he'd just be writing to please his donors. My point is that it is pretty obviously in his self-interest not to abandon Bush even now. My bet is that he'll come back to the fold, arguing that flawed as he is, Bush is still better than Kerry or Edwards or...

I think Sully has just realized that a pitching change is in the air, and like every good switch hitter, he is about to change sides of the plate.

The announcement of of allowing the Dollar to free fall is going to turn a large section of the elite against Bush, since even with the tax cuts, they will be behind, and many of them hold dollar denominated debt.

K, if you're going to make silly complaints about krugman, you might at least try to make them accurate.

Actually, what Krugman said at the beginning - meaning when Bush was campaigning in 2000 - was that his numbers made no sense and didn't add up.

Kevin writes: "Sullivan has come close to snapping before and pulled back at the last minute."

It's because he keeps hanging around with a bad crowd.

Speaking of silly comments about Krugman what do you think of this from Brian Nottage's Feb 9th column at Economy.com:

"When a significant portion of the electorate agrees with economist Paul Krugman that the president has repealed democracy, is starting wars to help his oil buddies, and is turning the U.S. into a third world country, a few good months of good payroll employment gains probably won’t sway them to the president’s side."

http://www.economy.com/dismal/pro/article.asp?aid=2634

mtwill wrote, "i personally think he's misguided a lot of the time, although nothing on the order of a george will, a david brooks (the conservative's ellsworth toohey)or even a supposed moderate like mickey kaus (silly, silly man), let alone any of the fox news types."

Riiiiight. Like his decision while at _The New Republic_ to give lots of free press to the newly released _The Bell Curve_, which not only gave comfort to racists everywhere, but was statistically illiterate.

"i personally welcome the chance to have this conversation with a guy as smart as andrew sullivan."

What's your metric for "smart"?

Newness is relative.

People are exponentially funnier when they're in rant mode.

Just as a solid rock is not shaken by the storm, even so the wise are not affected by praise or blame.

Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.