Bush IS a Big Spender, Pt. 2

Further to Dan's post below, here's the McClatchy story arguing that President Bush is the biggest spending president since LBJ. The article got lots of notice — probably because it was linked on the Drudge Report for most of Wednesday. 

The story is mostly old news — I’ve been making the same point for years. But, because it is based on updated data that I provided to the reporter, I’m happy to see the message ripple through the news cycle.

Clearly, the folks at IBD aren't happy with the McClatchy story. They describe the notion that Bush can be called the biggest spender since LBJ as a “dishonest argument.” Their editorial in today’s edition points out that this claim is based on annual growth rates. That’s true, but the authors go on to say that a better measure of whether a president is a big spender or not should be based on how large government is as a share of GDP.

Funny thing is, I agree with them, and I've made that point before. But the argument the IBD editorial makes is misguided. (I won’t stoop to calling it “dishonest.” I don’t allege they deliberately falsified data, something that would obviously be dishonest in every sense. But calling the argument I’m making “dishonest” — well, them’s fightin’ words!)

To illustrate their point, the IBD editors published a chart detailing the average burden of government spending as a percentage of GDP by president. By this measure, George W. Bush has presided over an average spending burden of 20% of GDP during his time in office to date. That puts him around the middle of the presidential pack over the past 40 years.

That may not seem so bad. But a president who reduced government spending from 30% of GDP to 10% over his term in office would get the same ranking as Bush. So would a president who increased spending from 10% to 30%. Wouldn’t we call the latter a big spender and praise the former? Yes, we would and should.

What really matters here is the direction of the change. George W. Bush will likely leave office with a government spending burden higher (around 20%) than it was when he came to office (18.5%). That's the way things trended in his first six years. Presidents Reagan and Clinton, on the other hand, presided over drops in the spending burden by this measure.

What’s stunning is how much smaller the federal spending burden would be if Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress had not drastically expanded all variety of domestic programs. If non-defense discretionary spending had simply increased at the rate of inflation and the Medicare drug benefit hadn't been adopted, the spending burden would be around 18.5% today, just about where it was when President Bush assumed office in 2001. It would have been even lower if the president and Congress had cut some spending when they had the chance.

If signing into law every appropriations bill that crossed your desk in the first six years of your presidency — thereby allowing the federal budget to grow faster than the U.S. economy during those years — still doesn’t make you a big-spending president, I don't know what would.