Karl Rove, the architect of Republican victories in 2000 and 2004 and Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008, denounces President Obama’s “spending binge” and “liberal activism” as described in the State of the Union address. The Wall Street Journal’s tagline on the column is, “On Tuesday, Republicans offered an alternative to the president’s big-government vision.” What Rove omits is that he and President Bush started the spending binge, delivered big government, and indeed came into office with a big-government vision, as Ed Crane pointed out in 1999.

Just take a look at the analysis in Rove’s Wall Street Journal column:

Most of his hour-long speech was a paean to liberal activism, as the president called for redoubling outlays on high-speed rail and “countless” green energy jobs.

Liberal boondogglery indeed. But Rove’s former colleague, White House speechwriter Michael Gerson, wrote on the same day in his Washington Post column:

 In his 2006 State of the Union address, which I helped write, President George W. Bush proposed a 22 percent increase in clean-energy research at the Energy Department, a doubling of basic research in the physical sciences and the training of 70,000 high school teachers to instruct Advanced Placement courses in math and science. I have no idea if these “investments” passed or made much difference. I doubt anyone knows.

Green nonsense is rampant in Washington.

Rove criticizes Obama for

a federal budget that’s increased 25% in two years, raising government’s share of GDP to 25% from roughly 20%.

Obama is a world-class spender. But spending increased 83 percent during Bush’s presidency, from $1.863 trillion to $3.414 trillion. He increased federal spending faster than any president since Lyndon Johnson. And yes, Obama is pushing the government’s share of GDP up; but Bush increased the federal government’s share of GDP by 2.2 percentage points, before the financial crisis, the bailouts, and TARP.

Rove writes:

The challenge is about more than budgets and debt. It is about government’s basic purposes and its role in our lives. If we don’t act soon, the nature of American society will change in deep, lasting ways.

Yes, that is the real problem. I have written critically of Obama’s “sweeping statist agenda.” But the Bush administration gave us stepped-up federal intrusions into our local schools, the biggest expansion of entitlements in 40 years, a proposed constitutional amendment to nationalize marriage law, unconstitutional restrictions on core political speech, intrusion of the federal government into Terri Schiavo’s hospital room, and, in the words of Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch,

a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech — and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;  a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;  a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as “enemy combatants,” strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror — in other words, perhaps forever; and  a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.

Bush and Rove, too, changed American society in deep and lasting ways.

Rove writes that Paul Ryan, the new Republican chair of the House Budget Committee, “knows that reforming these programs, especially Medicare, is the only path to fiscal sanity and economic growth.” Too bad the Bush administration made the Medicare problem $18 trillion worse.

Rove writes that

the debate about the role and purpose of government has been joined in a way America hasn’t seen in three decades.

Let’s hope so. We at Cato have been trying to have that debate for years, including Ed Crane’s 1999 critique of the Bush-Rove big-government vision and Michael Tanner’s 2007 book, Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution. And certainly Rove’s comrade-in-arms Gerson has been vigorously arguing against the limited-government libertarian vision that opposes Bush-Obama statism.

Finally, Rove reminds us:

The total debt was $10.6 trillion before [Obama’s] inaugural and $14.2 trillion today.

True. President Obama is increasing deficits and debt even faster than President Bush, under whom the national debt rose by $4.9 trillion. But it takes a lot of chutzpah for the architect of the biggest debt increase ever to criticize the guy who comes along and tops the record.

Surely the Wall Street Journal can find more credible critics of President Obama’s big-government vision than people who ran the “big government disaster” that was the Bush administration.

Jim Harper noted yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security (after lengthy review) has decided to scrap its color-coded alert system. The change is long overdue–the alerts implied, absurdly, that danger was equally distributed across the nation. The fact that the Department never used the blue and green threat levels (general and low risk), which most accurately describe the true danger most Americans face from terrorism, showed the systems’ inherent threat inflation. Eventually, everyone started ignoring the threat level, officials stopped changing it, and system became a charade.

Jim argues that, in place of the colors, the Department should inform “the public fully about threats and risks known to the U.S. government,” treating us like adults with a shared responsibility for protecting ourselves. According to a report from the National Journal’s Chris Storm, DHS agrees, sort of.  Storm links to a DHS document on the new warning policy, which states:

• DHS will implement a new system that is built on a clear and simple premise: When a threat develops that could impact the public, we will tell you.  We will provide whatever information we can so you know how to protect yourselves, your families, and your communities.

• The new system reflects the reality that we must always be on alert and be ready.  When we have information about a specific, credible threat, we will issue a formal alert providing as much information as we can.

• Depending on the nature of the threat, the alert may be limited to a particular audience, like law enforcement, or a segment of the private sector, like shopping malls or hotels.

• Or, the alert may be issued more broadly to the American people, distributed — through a statement from DHS — by the news media and social media channels.

• The alerts will be specific to the threat.  They may ask you to take certain actions, or to look for specific suspicious behavior.  And they will have an end date.

• This new system is built on the common-sense belief that we are all in this together — that we all have a role to play — and it was developed in that same collaborative spirit.

The first bullet point embraces maximum information sharing, but things get hazier after that. In the end, it’s not clear when DHS will warn all of us, warn some of us, or just warn police. Nor do we get much indication about what information warnings will include. Unlike Jim, though, I think that’s fine. Actually, there are a couple reasons why I hope DHS winds up being tighter-lipped.

First, most threat warnings are false alarms. A government that publicized every warning received by intelligence agencies would swamp the public with confusing and frightening information that people would have to learn to ignore. Better to reveal only intelligence that has been vetted.

Second, the theory of providing the public maximum information about danger (often a cover for the CYA imperative to have warned the public if an attack does occur) in practice easily degenerates into vague exhortations to be vigilant, which are almost as bad as the color-coded threat warnings. The difficulty is that the threat information is vague and that authorities worry that revealing too much detail will give away sources. The warning issued to Americans going to Europe last October, is an example, as I discussed here.

Given that such general warnings create false leads, cancelled travel, anxiety, and harassment, they may do more harm than good.  In response to this argument, people point to the vigilant airline passengers who subdued the shoe and underwear bombers or the Times Square vendors who called the cops after Faisal’s Shazhad’s car failed to explode. But, at least since 2001, we hardly need the government to tell us to respond to people lighting their underwear on fire on international flights or cars burnings in Times Square. The theory that increased public vigilance is always a good thing needs testing.

Many of the politicians in Washington, including President Obama during his State of the Union address, piously tell us that there is no way to balance the budget without tax increases. Trying to get rid of red ink without higher taxes, they tell us, would require “savage” and “draconian” budget cuts.

I would like to slash the budget and free up resources for private-sector growth, so that sounds good to me. But what’s the truth?

The Congressional Budget Office has just released its 10-year projections for the budget, so I crunched the numbers to determine what it would take to balance the budget without tax hikes. Much to nobody’s surprise, the politicians are not telling the truth.

The chart below shows that revenues are expected to grow (because of factors such as inflation, more population, and economic expansion) by more than 7 percent each year. Balancing the budget is simple so long as politicians increase spending at a slower rate. If they freeze the budget, we almost balance the budget by 2017. If federal spending is capped so it grows 1 percent each year, the budget is balanced in 2019. And if the crowd in Washington can limit spending growth to about 2 percent each year, red ink almost disappears in just 10 years.

These numbers, incidentally, assume that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are made permanent (they are now scheduled to expire in two years). They also assume that the AMT is adjusted for inflation, so the chart shows that we can balance the budget without any increase in the tax burden.

I did these calculations last year, and found the same results. And I also examined how we balanced the budget in the 1990s and found that spending restraint was the key. The combination of a GOP Congress and Bill Clinton in the White House led to a four-year period of government spending growing by an average of just 2.9 percent each year.

We also have international evidence showing that spending restraint - not higher taxes - is the key to balancing the budget. New Zealand got rid of a big budget deficit in the 1990s with a five-year spending freeze. Canada also got rid of red ink that decade with a five-year period where spending grew by an average of only 1 percent per year. And Ireland slashed its deficit in the late 1980s by 10 percentage points of GDP with a four-year spending freeze.

No wonder international bureaucracies such as the International Monetary fund and European Central Bank are producing research showing that spending discipline is the right approach.

This video provides all the details.