And cutting spending by 0.4% of GDP should hardly be considered impressive during an era when conservatives will tell you GDP was climbing through the roof.

Brad,

Larry Kudlow only *knows* what the White House tells him he knows. Every economic policy and trial balloon from the West Wing is economic ambrosia handed down from Saint George and his prophet Karl Rove to us mere mortals, and anyone who disagress is a fifth column effette communist And a SpongeBob Lover.

P.S. Where does James Dobson get his sexy sponges?

Not to defend Kudlow here, but is he right if he's only talking about government services outside of national defense? I know that a lot of Reagan's additional spending, at least at first, came from pumped up defense spending.

Of course, if Kudlow is wrong in the end--a perfectly reasonable possibility--it's all the more pathetic since he had a job in the Reagan administration.

I suspect Larry does know that Reagan failed to slash Federal spending. I suspect he also knows that Federal spending has risen faster than GDP over the past 4 years and Bush's only plans are to put out more smoke and mirrors. But if Larry wrote what any sane person knows, Rich Lowry would refuse to publish his oped.

Kudlow alert. His latest at NRO is claiming the stock market is booming because we caught one terrorist. Read on and he attributes the increase in the current account to rising imports in a strong economy. Odd, I guess the decline in exports had nothing to do with the current account deficit.

Kudlow "knows" things like Glassman "knows" things, like Gigot "knows" things, like Norquist "knows" things, etc.

When will we "know" that they are as dangerous to our government and our country as Al Qaeda?

What I know of Kudlow, I know second hand, having worked with one of his staffers. I am told he was never big on numbers. He'd get an idea, then tell his staff to crank out some numbers. He understood salesmanship. He knew the chart he wanted to present even if he didn't know what data series to use or what to divide by what. He'd tell his staffer what the picture should look like - the line has to trend down, or up, depending on what snake oil he was selling - and it was up to them to find the data to make the graph work. He is big on rhetoric - a charming, likable fraud. If he doesn't know that Reagan did nothing to reduce nominal federal spending, and almost nothing to reduce spending as a share of GDP, how can he not know that Shrub has pumped up the size of spending at a tremendous pace? It is, after all, a commonplace. Even his own supporters grouse about it.

Brian, it's a waste of time to try and defend Kudlow. Notice that he doesn't merely suggest that spending was cut; he suggests that Reagan "reduce(d) the demand for government services through supply-side, market-oriented incentives and a renewed emphasis on personal choice and accountability."

Can you think of a single example?

Kudlow is an idiot, whom you should disregard

Kudlow is a small cog in the right wingnut thinktank conspiracy to destroy the American economy. Consider this offering from the Iowa GOP. In a front page article in the D.M. Register and Tribune Don't tax anybody under 30.

Iowa is going to stop the "brain drain" of Iowa young people by giving them an average of $600 tax cut. It will cost Iowa about $200 million per year and 47 brain damaged Iowans will decide $600 is enough to change their career plans.

I don't know if this is tragedy or farce, but the Democrats probably don't have a clue how to stop the madness. Extending Bush's tax cuts are fiscal insanity and probably inevitable. Lawrence Kudlow is considered a tax maven and D.C. wants to spend billions on a new ball park. Trillion dollar plus current account deficits don't matter and Democrats are engaging in class warfare. Damn, where did I put my tin-foil thinking cap?

I would be ok with merely regiggering federal spending so that much more if it is spent on military spending.

Isn't Kudlow the first guy to coin "The Bush Boom?" He is still pushed that idea hard and you have to wonder how isolated is he, because it's not just a lie, it's a far-fetched lie.

LK is and has always been an ill-informed hack. Why do you even bother wondering about anything the man has to say?

Brad, on economics, generally

Did you see the piece in FT today. It has the numbers on what I pointed out last week. We have closed so many factories that we have destroyed our capital stock.

We have so few factories, now, that regardless how far the dollar drops we can not dig our way out of the trade deficit.

And, people like you are for free trade

Please rethink

What about off-budget items? Did these increase, decrease or remain the same during the 1980s? Then there are those financial gimmicks that governments use. For example, New York State sold the Attica prison to a private party and then leased it back. So NYS can book the sale and it looks like revenues increased. I suspect the private party never even put up any money, but sold a bond on the basis of the future cash flows. Government spending a such a complex creature it’s hard to know what’s going on without careful study and accounting knowledge.

It's worse that that. Here's average spending by presidential cycle:

Carter: 20.8

Reagan 1: 22.7

Reagan 2: 22.0

Bush: 21.9

Clinton 1: 20.4

Clinton 2: 18.7

Bush 43: 19.85

Reagan spent a bigger chunk of GDP than any other president, outside of the big war years. 1988 spending was lower not because Reagan cut spending, but because unemployment, for the first time during the Reagan years, was finally under six percent.

Clinton actually DID cut spending steadily through both of his terms in office. Maybe that's why Democrats have a hard time winning elections; it's a lot easier to win when you can get away with spending a lot without bringing in much revenue.

Yes, I agree with ChasHeath about the difficulty of actually cutting spending. All, most of the right-wingy talk is all hat and no cattle. We should start referring to the Bush voting states as the Free Loader states or the socialist practicing states as all of them suck in more federal dollars than they pay in. Ultimately the right wingy revolution is just politics as usual. Future generations are the ultimate guy behind the tree to tax.

For many conseratives, Reagan is larger than life, more on the order of a Washington or Lincoln. Thus there is often a disconnect between what Reagan the president did and what Reagan the ideal is said to have done.

bakho wrote, "Thus there is often a disconnect between what Reagan the president did and what Reagan the ideal is said to have done." Right, though it also applies to the press, with whom Reagan was far more popular than with the public.

ChasHeath wrote, "Here's average spending by presidential cycle:..."

I don't disagree with what you wrote, but it would be interesting/more accurate to get cyclicly adjusted numbers.

"Reagan-style" "restructur[ing] of the American economy"

Defined by Larry Kudlow, and Republicans in general, as more federal spending going to large defense contractors, who vote Republican, and less federal spending going to the disadvantaged and children, who don't vote or vote Dem.

He used to know, but he's a perfect example of what too much blow will do to you.

You can review broad federal spending and revenue numbers, as a fraction of GDP, here:

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy05/sheets/hist01z3.xls

Surplus/Deficit by % of GDP:

Reagan (1982-89): -4.1%

GHWB (1990-1993): -4.3%

Clinton (1994-2001): -0.5%

GWB (2002-2005): -3.1% (2004 and 2005 est.)

GWB (2002-2009): -2.0% (using Budget estimates)

Clearly, to be a good president, one must spend Other People's Money.

It appears that Bush has followed the Reagan playbook closely: huge deficits accumulated in the context of 'national defense', tax cuts to placate the much-abused wealthy among us, and using the resulting budget problems to crowd out social welfare spending.

Add a generous helping of insincere but sentimental verbiage about 'compassion' and 'caring' and 'the truly deserving poor', mix with plenty of reference to 'God' and 'country', and you've got all the Gipper needed to damn near drive this country into the same wall the Soviets supposedly hit, fiscally.

Did I forget the inability of the intelligence community (well, at least the CIA part of it) to bolster the GOP pretensions about Soviet strength, which were not supported by real intelligence until Team B was put in place?

This, too, was a Bush hallmark, since Poppy was up to his eyeballs in this bit of deception.

George has done nothing original in his life, it seems, even his first and second terms look like Reagan redux, substituting Iraq for Nicaragua and a gutless Congress for one that imposed SOME restraints on the executive branch bloodlust.