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It didn't have to be this way. As David Frum noted in Dead Right, had federal spending grown no faster than inflation in the decade between 1979 and 1989, the Reagan tax cuts and defense build-up still would have left over a budget surplus large enough to abolish the corporate income tax or slash Social Security taxes by one-third. By letting spending rise on auto pilot, Bush risks endangering his own tax cuts—especially if new broad-based taxes are needed to prop up bankrupt entitlement programs.

Second, Bush’s lack of philosophical commitment to limited government has set the tone in Washington, where the GOP was losing its will on spending before Clinton left town. Rhetoric matters, and there the divide between Reagan and Bush becomes a yawning chasm. Bush has for the most part carefully distanced himself from the conservative anti-statism of Reagan and Goldwater. It’s hard to imagine Reagan ever saying, as Bush did in 2003, that government has got to move whenever somebody hurts. It was a recent Democratic president who was interested in feeling our pain.