Of course Maryland has become more Democratic. The total number of whites in Maryland is going down and the number of both legal and illegal aliens has gone up by a lot. Why do you think that John Allen Mohammad (the DC Sniper) was tried in Virginia before Maryland. The prosecutors that a Maryland jury would believe that the two white guys in the white van really commited the murders and that the government was trying to frame two black men.

The article quoted was from 2004 and was in defense of President Reagan's policies.

Sometimes it is good to get the context first.

Well that's awfully convenient. Deficits were a terrible problem while Obama was campaigning, now they're just self-righteous moralism. It's good to know has Obama solved that problem, way to go Barack!

Maryland has gotten more and more Democratic every year – especially the suburban counties like Montgomery (remember Connie Morrella?), Howard County, and Baltimore County. Even Anne Arundel has gotten more Democratic as the DC suburbs spill over. The only Republican strongholds left are the extreme mountain counties (Garrett, Allegany) and parts of the Eastern Shore. Needless to say, those areas are not growing in population.

No they lost elections because the last eight years have shown that lowering taxes for the wealthy while increasing spending doesn't work. And because they have become more conservative, less open, and unwilling to listen to any dissent. Add in fear mongering tactics and that is why they lost.

“The middle class is the biggest beneficiary of all kinds of entitlements and multiple generations of Americans have now been accustomed to a huge federal government that encroaches into state and local affairs routinely, and is seen by many nowadays as not only a welcome partner, but as their parent.”

Except that the vast majority of states that receive more from the federal government than they pay in taxes are states that tend to vote Republican. Alaska is a great example. Blue states tend to be states where they pay more than they get back from the federal government – they aren't looking for a hand out but rather wanting to make sure that in this country we actually have a social safety net to ensure that people have a minimal standard of living. And liberals are more than willing to pay to ensure that people get to eat.

In other words, now that there's a D in the White House, and deficits are in at least some part known publicly to be in support of lib-Dem goals, then once more we can dust off the ability to disparage the “Great Deficit Scare” or “Myth” as the Dems and libs did before.

It will help once the economy does better and fractions of GDP look better.

“Voters and politicians became anesthetized to big deficits,” Moore recalled. “Reagan was running these big deficits, and liberals argued it was going to be Armageddon. We were going to ruin the economy. Interest rates were going to go through the roof. And none of these things happened.”

The fiscal shift in the Reagan years was staggering. In January 1981, when Reagan declared the federal budget to be “out of control,” the deficit had reached almost $74 billion, the federal debt $930 billion. Within two years, the deficit was $208 billion. The debt by 1988 totaled $2.6 trillion. In those eight years, the United States moved from being the world's largest international creditor to the largest debtor nation.

To some economists, the impact was clear. Interest rates rose in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the economy slowed, then slipped into recession, and productivity barely advanced. Americans feared their nation had slipped into the shadows of Japan and Germany.

Reagan's “economic policy . . . was a disaster,” University of California at Berkeley economic historian J. Bradford DeLong wrote this past weekend on his Web site. “The tax cuts made America a more unequal place, and the deficits slowed economic growth in the 1980s significantly.”

But after the boom years of the 1990s, and the steady economic slides of those international rivals, some economists are reevaluating that version of history. The argument against deficits is more about self-righteous moralism than economics, they say.

Except that under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush the deficit rose, income inequality increased (which in industrialized countries tends to limit economic growth), and job creation was less than than it was under Presidents Carter and Clinton. Even when looking at just GDP growth, under Reagan GDP growth rose on average 3.5% per year. It rose 5.2% under Kennedy, 5.1% under Johnson and even 3.2% per year under Carter. So 3.5% per year was hardly unprecedented economic growth. In fact 2-4% per year is what you would expect in a health, industrialized economy.