<1) Show that the increase in congressional spending offset the deficit. IE, the deficit was no larger than the increases caused by congressional add-ons to the domestic budget. (subtract the proposed budget ala Reagan and cronies from the congressional passed budget).

That is a very good question, and one I was interested in myself. It took a while to dig up Reagan proposed budget numbers, but I found them for 1982 - 1989 fiscal years. Assuming the numbers are accurate, when I ran through your question I found that although sticking with the Reagan proposed budgets would have resulted in smaller deficits, there would have nevertheless been deficits throughout that whole period. And the actual budgets were usually only a little bit bigger than the Reagan-proposed ones--there was no case where the actual budget was more than 5 percent larger than the proposed Reagan budget. In 1984, the actual budget was in fact slightly smaller than the Reagan one!

So while tax receipts did indeed go from about 600 billion to over 1 trillion between FY 1981 - 1990, the additional tax money just couldn't catch up with spending no matter what.

What I found out also was that most of this spending bloat for both Reagan and Congress was mostly due to the mandatory wealth redistribution that occupies most of the budget, and short of major restructuring, is not open to spending cuts by either the President or Congress. Though liberals may then seize on the Reagan defense program as a major cause of deficits, it wasn't defense, or any of the discretionary spending that really ate up the bucks. In constant dollars, defense spending only went up about 34 percent over the ten years, and after 1984, was actually dropping. As an experiment I ran the numbers assuming defense spending stayed at 1982 levels in constant dollars through the whole period. Smaller deficits, but still solid deficits all the way.

So, I found out something quite interesting about the Reagan years, and depressed myself even further with the realization that the logarithmic growth of government seems to be inescapable given its current emphasis on mandatory spending. There is also no evidence that taxing the crap out of our economy would make anything better.

Obviously more has to be done about government spending than just yelling at our President and Congress to "cut spending." The kind of deep-level reforms required to stop the juggernaut may no longer be politically possible.

Sources of numbers:

Historical Budget Tables (a VERY useful document. Should download it to your disk.)

A liberal document that rips Reagan a new one on about every level, but contains useful numbers from real references. And numbers are numbers.