By David Lightman
“He’s a big government guy,” said Stephen Slivinski, the
director of budget studies at Cato Institute, a libertarian research group.
The numbers are clear, credible and conclusive, added David
Keating, the executive director of the Club for Growth, a budget-watchdog
group.
“He’s a big spender,” Keating said. “No question about it.”
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
Current annual defense spending — not counting war costs —
is 25 percent above the height of the Reagan-era buildup, Hellman said.
Homeland security spending also has soared, to about $31
billion last year, triple the pre-9/11 number.
But Bush's super-spending is about far more than defense and
homeland security.
Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a
conservative research group, points to education spending. Adjusted for
inflation, it's up 18 percent annually since 2001, thanks largely to Bush’s No
Child Left Behind act.
The 2002 farm bill, he said, caused agriculture spending to
double its 1990s levels.
Then there was the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit —
the biggest single expansion in the program’s history — whose 10-year costs are
estimated at more than $700 billion.
And the 2005 highway bill, which included thousands of
“earmarks,” or special local projects stuck into the legislation by individual
lawmakers without review, cost $295 billion.
“He has presided over massive increases in almost every
category … a dramatic change of pace from most previous presidents,” said
Slivinski.
The White House counters by noting that Bush took office as
the country was heading into a recession, then reeled from the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks.
“This president had to overcome some things that required
additional spending,” said Sean Kevelighan, a White House budget office
spokesman.
Bush does have other backers.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Hudson
Institute, a conservative research group, blamed a ravenous Congress that was
eager to show constituents how generous it could be. (Republicans ran that
Congress until January. Bush never vetoed a single GOP spending bill.)
The White House points out that, nearly four years ago, Bush
vowed to cut the deficit in half by 2009, and he's well on his way to achieving
that goal. The fiscal 2004 deficit was a record $412.7 billion; the 2007 figure
plunged to $163 billion.
But the deficit drop may be fleeting, experts say, since lawmakers
are likely to extend many of Bush’s tax cuts, which expire by the end of 2010,
and the imminent retirement of the baby boom generation will send Medicare and
Social Security costs soaring in the years ahead.
Now, near the end of the seventh year of his presidency,
Bush is positioning himself as a tough fiscal conservative.
He says Congress is proposing to spend $22 billion more in
fiscal 2008 than the $933 billion he requested for discretionary programs — and
that the $22 billion extra would swell over five years to $205 billion.
Eventually, Bush said, “they’re going to have to raise taxes
to pay for it.”
And so, the president told an
“The Congress gets to propose and, if it doesn’t meet needs
as far as I’m concerned, I get to veto,” he said. “And that’s precisely what I
intend to do.”
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 Keating, “and a lot of it
shouldn’t have happened.”