Why? I heard that GW Bush was calling upon congress to raise the limit on govt. spending.
mbs: to maintain a semblance of adequacy, civilian gov spending needs to increase at the same rate as the GDP. under our present leaders, this is not quite the case, although there is an overall increase in store in the non-defense component.
JH: For myself I would much prefer to see the US public sector shrunk, since as far as I can see its principal activity is killing people.
mbs: the precision of this statement rivals the original report on the ice shelf. I commend to you the fascinating documents of the U.S. federal budget, all available for downloading as PDF's at zero charge. If the U.S. used all $3 trillion of its annual public funds to kill people, you would have heard about it.
JH: I'm happy to oppose cuts where these are an attack on people's living standards, but it doesn't seem obvious to me that government expenditure is per se good. Is spending on military, police, prisons, subsidies to industry, bailouts of banks ... or currencies a good thing? Even most welfare spending is degrading in its character, representing what Marx called the institutionalisation of poverty.
The things you list I estimate -- off the top of my head -- to amount to less than 20 percent of US public spending. And I would not discount the entirety of any of these items' usefulness.
The purportedly "degrading" part of public welfare spending has been pretty well stamped out. For instance, Food Stamps are being replaced with electronic benefit cards that you swipe at the checkout counter, just like a credit card. Our second largest benefit program now is the Earned Income Tax Credit, wherein the IRS mails you a check. Even granting your characterization, under capitalism there isn't much of an alternative.
Certainly more is not inevitably better. But less is probably worse. Fretting about regressive tax changes on the margin doesn't really get to the central issues, including the ones you have raised.
mbs