The Gipper was the scourge of Big Government, but he was also fiscally near-sighted: He could not see any sign of Big Government beyond the Potomac River! And at that particular moment the Warfare State branch of Big Government was erupting from the fiscal swamplands around the Pentagon in nearly parabolic fashion. The 1980 GOP campaign had lambasted Jimmy Carter for his allegedly wimpy DOD budget of $140 billion that year, but within two weeks of the Reagan inauguration I was suddenly staring at a Pentagon plan to spend 2.5X that amount or $350 billion annually a few years down the road.