'Not a decade ago, the Republican evangelists of fiscal rectitude were defending budget deficits – in order to cut taxes'

from the guardian....

"The irony is that, like so many other Republicans who held power during the George W Bush era, Daniels was not terribly concerned about deficit reduction when his party was in office. As Bush's director of the Office of Management and Budget, Daniels presided over a historic turnaround in the nation's fiscal fortunes, in which the $5.6tn surplus that emerged from the Clinton administration morphed into a 10-year forecast for a $2.1tn deficit by early 2003.

The unpaid-for expenses of the Iraq war soon made the country's deficit worse than predicted, but even before the war, Daniels defended going into debt. "It is not the top, let alone the only priority," he observed of the deficit in 2003, when President Bush submitted a budget with a $304bn shortfall. "Would you not try to spur economic growth?" Daniels asked Democrats who complained that Bush's tax cuts, which heavily favoured the wealthy, were going to those who did not need them – and did not take into account an impending war.

Daniels was not the only prominent Republican willing to defend the Bush deficits. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the conservative chairman of the finance committee, took the same stance. "In this budget, President Bush charts a straight forward course for peace and prosperity in America," he declared in 2003"....................LINK