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# Posted 5:22 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

BUSH THE SOCIALIST: Andrew Sullivan writes that

President Bush's massive increases for such subsidies is yet another indicator that, in economic policy, he's much more of a socialist than he lets on. Big debt, deficit financing, huge new entitlements, and bigger subsidies: Bush's economic policy is a Democratic dream. So why are Republicans voting for it?

The answer is simple: Republicans are not economic conservatives. They are tax-cutting revolutionaries who will let nothing get in their way.

The Republican party has inherited its economic platform from the Reagan era. It insists that tax cuts will promote both economic growth and sound government finance. Of course, that idea was implausible in Reagan's time and discredited further by the Reagan deficit; according to a fellow named Bush, it was a classic example of "voodoo economics".

What made Reagan so successful as a tax-cutter, however, was that he knew not to touch the entitlements that Americans have come to depend on thanks to Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. This pragmatism continues to inform Republicanism today, giving it the debt-laden, welfarist character Sullivan rails against.

And so we now inhabit a strange world where the Democratic Party has become the most credible advocate of free trade and balanced budgets, i.e. economic conservatism.

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