Blake Ashby, author of the new book, “Socialism and the Democratic Party: The Case for a Return to Moderated Capitalism,” makes the case as a former Republican that Democrats are now the more fiscally conservative party – saying Reagan broke the old GOP and Clinton was the best Republican president in terms of balancing the budget. My view of Republicanism was that we viewed deficit spending as stealing from our children,” he told the RCP podcast on Friday. “If you go back to the 1960s and 1970s, the Republican Party was based on this idea that we could only spend the money we raised in taxes.” “Like it or not, Ronald Reagan blew that up,” he said. “So, Bill Clinton, in some ways, was a better Republican than Ronald Reagan because he got us back to pay-as-you-go. When we went back to pay-as-you-go, my version of Republicanism had won. We had finally achieved a balanced budget.” “The reality, though, is that every Democratic president since Jimmy Carter has reduced the annual budget deficit, and every Republican president other than the first George Bush has increased it.” “So we can say that it’s both parties, but realistically, Obama actually decreased the annual budget deficit and had us on a trajectory back to a balanced budget. Clinton decreased the budget deficit and actually achieved a surplus. It is the Republican Party that keeps trashing fiscal prudence and keeps putting us back on the path to increasing debt.” “And this president right now will go down as the worst president in history for accumulation of debt because he just doesn’t care what he spends on. He just doesn’t care about the tax cuts. So, to your point, the goal of fiscal prudence is battered in both parties right now. But at least from my perspective, it seems like the Democrats are much more interested in living within their means, and the Republican Party is just kind of going willy-nilly, and, to borrow a phrase, they’re spending like drunken sailors. Ronald Reagan didn’t cut spending. George Bush didn’t cut spending. Donald Trump has certainly not cut spending. You’re suggesting that it’s the Democrats that want to raise spending. No, the Democrats just want to raise enough taxes to pay for the government we’re actually using. The largest non-defense sector in our category is interest. We’re spending almost $ 1 trillion of interest for our previous debt. And so, one of the reasons young people are frustrated with capitalism is, back in my day, a tiny portion of the government spending went to interest. Now, it is a giant portion. So people today have to not only pay for the government services they use, they have to pay for the government services that were used in the 1980s and the 1990s. The Republican Party has trashed fiscal prudence. It’s going to take us a while to get back from that. It’s not a matter of we need to raise taxes so we can do more. We need to raise taxes so we can pay for what we’re doing right now and what we’ve been doing since 1980. Again, Ronald Reagan did not reduce spending.”
RealClearPolitics Videos