"Bush must, and has, cut taxes and increase spending. To do otherwise courts economic collapse."
Running up enormous deficits and giving goodies to people who don't need them is a much bigger contributor to economic collapse. Building our government foundation on the basis of giving away free stuff to everyone with other people's taxes threatens economic collapse. What kind of conservative are you?
May I ask... how old are you? My generation is the one that will have to foot the bill for Dubya's drunken-sailor spending spree.
Deficits and, indeed, the national debt have always been more a rhetorical concern than a real one. One can eliminate the debt by doing nothing more than eliminating the deficit (which only occurs with economic growth) and thereby stop adding to the debt. Inflation then serves to inexorably erode the value of the debt. At 3%/year inflation, the debt is cut in half in about 23 years, without allocating a penny to reduce it. It happens by itself.
But one can't do that without growth. Growth may not derive from tax cuts and spending increases, but an absence of growth can be amplified by cutting spending and raising taxes.
The imperative to stimulate economic growth trumps the desire to shrink government, again, to prevent a Democrat from stacking the Supreme Court.