The size of government increases generally no matter who is in office. Both political parties are funded by the same corporate interests and demand the same sorts of paybacks for their support.

Screwing the poor is nothing new (remember the French Revolution), but what is different in the past 30 years is the neglect of the infrastructure.

New Orleans is a particularly dramatic example of penny wise pound foolish, but we have examples all over the country:
Decaying schools, bridges, power grid.
This mindset extends to the private sector as well. The massive shift of manufacturing to the third world is not just driven by cheaper labor, but by the reluctance of industries to do any capital investment in this country.
Instead of concentrating on the hollowing out of our economy the populace is distracted with meaningless discussions of abortion, gay marriage and creationism.
The rest of the world keeps these things in their place and spends their efforts on out competing us.
See my short essay here:
Coming Crash

My condolensces to his family.  And here's wishing the world had never heard of him.  His legacy is not a good one.

Supply side economics is an ideological belief, not sound ecnomics:

Bill Kristol has admitted that supply side economics is a better political theory than economic theory, but Kristol demonstrates that for conservatives political theory trumps economics:

That's a standard fallacy supply siders rely on. They pretend that all credit for economic growth goes to tax cuts and all credit for federal revenue growth goes to tax cuts. Put another way, they are liars and they know it. There is no economics case to be made for supply side economics.

True, there are a good many economists out there trying to do science.  But--notwithstanding the early, individualist exmples of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, etc.--a science is a social enterprise, with institutional foundations, norms and practices that distinguish it.  In a real science, such as physics, there are clear markers to distinguish the real science from the psuedo-science.  

It's a bit tricky sometimes, since real physics inlcudes some really wild stuff, that laymen might well mistake for magic.  But the fact is, this stuff is all solidly grounded in observation, or is clearly marked off as theoretical, with clearly articulated intellectual motivations--such as providing a non-arbitrary, unified account of the fundamental forces and the observed evolution of the universe (the justification for string theory, m-theory and other such work that has very tenuous connections to observation.)  

And, at the same time, there is a familiarity with the vast oceans of ignorance as well, which can be seen in the constant flow of popular science literature aimed at dispelling that ignorance, as well as things such as form letters kept by departments to send out to people who think they've discovered a perpetual motion machine.

But economics is not like this. Some parts of it are. But the field as a whole?  Not a chance. It not only welcomes the economic equivalent of perpertual motion, it actively promotes it, with a side order of "intelligent design."

Just one "little" for instance: Economists have known and written about externalities (aka "neighborhood effects," "spill-over effects," etc.) for over 80 years now.  Yet, to this very day public policy is conducted at all levels as if such things did not exist, and did not even have to be measured or considered.  

Indeed, the magic key to GOP economic policy is the maximization of externalized costs for the benefit of GOP campaign contributors.  The entire "war on terror" is, ultimately, nothing but an externalized cost of the oil and gas cartel.  If we had to pay for all US military involvement in the Middle East out of gas taxes, then we would begin to approach a semblance of economic rationality, at least in this one dimension of public policy.  In turn, realistic gas taxes would radically restructure the phenomena of suburban and exurban sprawl, as well as much else that we take for granted on the domestic scene.

If economics were a real science, economists would virtually demand such policies, and would regard complicity in the existing state of affairs as tantamount to professional misconduct.  

Naturally, such a stance is not something that an individual economist, no matter how prominent, can take on by him or herself.  It has to be a function of the discipline as a whole--which is why I say that the discipline itself lacks the essential qualities of a true science.

If the human race is lucky enough to survive through the coming disasters we have planned for ourselves, the "economics" of this time will be regarded by historians in terms perhaps not that far removed from the ways that anthropologists regard the "cargo cults" of the South Pacific that developed in the wake of Western airplane traffic.  Except, of course--unlike the Polynesians--we have no real excuse for our willful disregard of what are, for us, readily available facts.

Supply-side econ is one of my own personal political windmills because the numbers do not add up and have never added up.  All you have to do is look at the CBOs budget history on its website to realize the truth.