In the US, conservatives argue that Obama increased the deficit with stimulus and tax breaks (ok, they don't mention the tax breaks), and liberals argue that the recession that Bush left decreased revenue severely, and that government liquidity was the necessary response to private capital crunch that Bush built with bubble rates. It seems to me that both parties increase the deficit for their own reasons. I want my civil liberties first.
But on the fiscal side, every single Republican president since the mid seventies has grown the deficit as a percentage of our GDP. Every single Democratic president over the same period has shrank the deficit as a percentage of our GDP, with the only exception being Obama who was coming right off the stimulus initiated by Bush. I have to laugh a little when Conservatives argue that they are the party of fiscal restraint. That being said, there's always room for improvement and efficiencies, and just because the deficit as a percentage of GPD shrinks under Democrats, it doesn't mean it shrinks enough, or in the right ways. But again, -civil liberties please. PLEASE.
I do like the quote a friend of mine pointed out with regards to the current size of public services: http://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?......we, the largest, most prosperous nation in human history, have built a government so expensive and so massive, that not even the richest country in the history of the world can afford it...
- ... we ... have built a government so expensive and so massive ...
I'm afraid I couldn't make it all the way through that press release, so I can't tell what the senator is comparing the U.S. government to when he claims it's unusually expensive and massive. According to the CIA World Factbook, our federal expenditures per capita is 40th among countries, and our federal spending per $GDP ranks 153rd. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_bud_exp_pergdp-economy...
But I suppose we're straying away from the spirit of the original article, and I'm not really a trained economist, so my ability to make useful sense of that information is fairly limited. :)