For quite some time, fiscal conservatism has been a plank of the Republican party. However, George W. Bush's proposed budgets have not reflected that ideal in any way. His newly proposed budget has a deficit of over half a trillion dollars.

A few times in the past hundred and fifty years or so, since the two major politcal parties in the US have been the Democrats and the Republicans, the two parties have swapped sides on an issue, but those changes are usually a result of a schism in one of the parties. (Democrats and Dixiecrats comes to mind, as does the Neoconservative exodus.)

Does the President's new budget proposal, along with his past budget proposals, mark a sea change in the platform of the Republican party, or is it just hypocritical? If the former, will the Democratic party respond by becoming more fiscally conservative? Some of the stances of the Democratic presidential candidates, and, really, the Clinton administration's budgets, already seem to reflect a possible change.

The Republican party was never fiscally conservative. Think about Reagan he lowered taxes and kept spending billions on defense. How is Bush different? It's true the Republicans managed to typecast Democrats into "tax-and-spend liberals" for a while- but now people are realizing the GOP is the "spend and borrow" party. So in short their will not be a schism- those Republicans represntatives touting themselves as fiscal conservatives will get probably get a lot of pork in their districts to keep them from complaining too much and the GOP will keep going on it's merry spending spree with no thought of responsibility or the future.

Maybe I just fell into the Republican rhetoric (even if it had the opposite effect on me).

Another bit of rhetoric is that the republicans are for small government and the democrats are for large government.

It seems to me that both parties are for HUGE government, but of different types. The democrats want the US to become Sweden, the republicans want 1930's Germany.

Jim