The numbers game

When Republicans are praised in D.C.

“Government expenditures have not been cut as promised. They have accelerated at a faster pace than at any time in 30 years. Since the budget deal, the domestic budget has grown by $118 billion, or almost 20 percent above inflation. This year alone, real domestic expenditures will climb by 11 percent.”

—The Cato Institute, October 1992

NANCY PELOSI finally said something nice about a Republican. He’s a dead Republican. But take the happy news where you can find it.

Frank Lockwood, of this paper and Washington D.C., sat through a budget summit meeting this week, and we can only speculate from here that caffeine was selling at a premium.

His article noted that speaker of the House Pelosi showed up for a public interview with the emcee at the event. Unfortunately, the interviewer on stage spent most of his time asking Madam Pelosi about President Trump’s constant insults. But eventually the questioning came around to the topic.

And that’s when Speaker Pelosi talked budget issues—and praised former President Bush the First, who backed away from his “no new taxes” pledge in 1990 to sign a deal with Congress on the budget that year.

Nancy Pelosi called that leadership on fiscal matters.

Believe it or not, Nancy Pelosi has been in Washington long enough to remember the budget deal of 1990. She was already a member of Congress then and saw the thing unfold firsthand: The government shut down as the two parties went back and forth, Republicans resisting tax increases and Democrats resisting spending cuts.

The president decided to raise taxes

on the promise of spending cuts later, ostensibly on the basis that compromise means both sides don’t get everything they want. The conservatives in the GOP revolted (led by a representative named Newt Gingrich), George H.W. Bush got primaried for his troubles, and then lost his re-election bid two years later.

The man went from 89 percent in the polls to losing to a largely unknown Southern governor named Bill Clinton. So George Bush gets Nancy Pelosi’s seal of approval these days. Anything that causes mutiny among conservatives is a cause for celebration.

There are those who, even this day, will tell you that the spending cuts actually happened after the 1990 deal. Sure. Lies, damned lies, statistics and all that. As a percentage of GDP, some charts will show a dip right after 1990 (only to go up again). But even the government will tell you that real spending went up every year in the 1990s, even when the Clinton administration was able to cobble together a future surplus.

Because even as money going out kept rising, money coming in rose faster in the late 1990s. (See table 1.1 here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/historical-tables/)

Some folks say this modern enmity between the two major political parties might have started in 1990 with this budget deal, which was great for taxand-spenders and rotten for those of a more conservative political bent. Who can blame Republicans for now thinking that every offer from the other side is a trap, and every offer at compromise a fabrication?

Moral of the story: Beware Nancy Pelosi offering compliments. The year 1990 is not something Republicans want to repeat.