Don't try to find excuses for the guy. He's the biggest spender of all. In fact, the Cato Institute has kept track and finds that he's outspent even LBJ by a country mile.
As David Lightman reports at McClatchy, "Bush's super-spending is about far more than defense and homeland security." But of course defense and homeland security, paid for by us, will put the biggest dollars into the Bush family fortune (a defense-and-security-heavy portfolio) and the fortunes of Bush Buddies.
Take almost any yardstick and Bush generally exceeds the spending of his predecessors.
When adjusted for inflation, discretionary spending — or budget items that Congress and the president can control, including defense and domestic programs, but not entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare — shot up at an average annual rate of 5.3 percent during Bush’s first six years, Slivinski calculates.
That tops the 4.6 percent annual rate Johnson logged during his 1963-69 presidency. By these standards, Ronald Reagan was a tightwad; discretionary spending grew by only 1.9 percent a year on his watch.
Discretionary spending went up in Bush's first term by 48.5 percent, not adjusted for inflation, more than twice as much as Bill Clinton did (21.6 percent) in two full terms, Slivinski reports.
Defense spending is the big driver — but hardly the only one.
Under Bush it's grown on average by 5.7 percent a year. Under LBJ — who had a war to fund, too — it rose by 4.9 percent a year. Both numbers are adjusted for inflation.Including costs for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense spending under Bush has gone up 86 percent since 2001, according to Chris Hellman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
Of the five biggest spenders since 1964, three are Republicans and Bill Clinton isn't one of the other two.
Areas into which Bush has shoveled our tax dollars, apart from defense and security, include: the ear-mark laden highway bill, education, the pharma-phriendly prescription drug bill, the farm bill...
Take a good look at who gets what and you won't find, say, particularly well-educated children (or healthy children, for that matter) or senior citizens who are now able to afford drugs (pharma just pushes the prices up). What you'll find is certain groups in our nation who are particularly friendly to and profitable for Bush and Congressional Republicans getting most of the goodies.
Bush is getting tough on fiscal policy — after running up a record as the most profligate spender in at least 40 years. “The spending did happen,” said [Club for Growth's] David Keating, “and a lot of it shouldn’t have happened.”
