July 31, 2006 2:10PM # On What Planet? By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE Peter Beinart writes in the [New Republic](http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060807&s=trb080706): > The struggle that initially roiled the Clinton administration–between deficit hawks and deficit spenders–is basically over; today, even the most liberal Democrats are fiscal conservatives. Stephen Slivinski’s new book does [demonstrate](http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/books/gops_disease_books_e_j__mcmahon.htm) that today’s Republicans are bigger spenders than LBJ. But as the National Taxpayers Union notes in its [latest rating](http://www.ntu.org/misc_items/rating/VS_2005.pdf) of congressional voting, the average Democrat still votes for far more spending than the average Republican. Democrats offer no plan to avert the impending insolvency of the Social Security system. They have denounced the Republicans’ trillion-dollar expansion of Medicare on the grounds that it isn’t generous enough. Even the relatively conservative Democrats at the Democratic Leadership Council recently released a plan to spend hundreds of billions more taxpayer dollars on everything from college tuition to housing to socialized health care for children to McGovern-style “demogrants” for every baby, with no plausible offsetting spending cuts. ##### Related Tags [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).