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Are Republicans still the party of small government?

As we move closer to elections this fall, many voters are not so sure.

In his new book Buck Wilde, Director of Budget Studies Stephen Slavinsky

ponders what happened to Ronald Reagan's vision of limited government.

Your new book comes out in August.

Can you tell us about it?

Sure. The book is titled Buck Wild,

how Republicans broke the bank and became a party of big government.

What I'm trying to do in the book is, in a sense, tell the story

of how the Republican Party lost their way.

In a sense to try to explain the

tail spin there in politically right now. Part of the problem is that they've

abandoned the goals of limited government, the kind of thing they used to stand

for under Ronald Reagan and and even before that,

when Barry Goldwater was the candidate back in 1964.

And you of course did see some of this rhetoric in 1994 during the so-called Republican

Revolution.

What's happened since then, however, has been a shift ideologically within the Republican

Party and I would argue it actually started occurring even before George W Bush came into

...