Please Pass the Prilosec

Tonight on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (transcript excerpt):

David Brooks: Domestic discretionary spending - non-defense spending - non-homeland security spending -- has increased under George W. Bush twice as fast as under Bill Clinton, and faster than under Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Mark Shields: In 12 years from 1980 to 1992, under Republican presidents promising to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, which is the term I heard again this week, we saw that national debt quadruple.

It became an issue in the '92 campaign on balanced budgets raised by Ross Perot and the consequence was that Bill Clinton, Democratic president, working with the Republican Congress, left this George Bush with a budget surplus.

In the four and a half years [George W. Bush] has been there, the national debt has gone from $5.7 trillion to $7.9 trillion. That has to be paid off.

David Brooks: I think Republicans have in their minds we are the anti-government party. We came to shrink government. So they say that out on the campaign trail.

But when you are the majority party actually governing, it doesn't work. People want the problem solved. So instead of having a governing philosophy that will tell them I'm going to spend it here but not there, they have a governing philosophy that is irrelevant to actually governing.

So they take that anti-governing philosophy and they just toss it out the window when they get here and spend like sailors. So what you have is a governing philosophy that doesn't apply to the real world, so they have no sense of priorities, no sense of what's important and what's not, no sense of restraint and where to direct their effort.

Jim Lehrer: Well, that's the charges made of liberals all the time.