Who's Socialist Now?

 I wanted to quickly present a few numbers about the George W. Bush administration. (These numbers are rough and rounded, but they work well enough for my purposes.) Under Dubya, adjusted for inflation:

• The size of the federal budget increased by 33%, the largest increase since L.B.J.;
• Defense spending increased 67%, the largest increase since World War II;
• Education spending increased 36%, the largest increase since Johnson;
• Spending on income security programs increased 36%, the largest increase since the Ford administration;
• Spending on general government operations increased 25%, the largest increase since Nixon; and
• The size of the federal budget increased 33%, the largest increase since Johnson.

So, basically, Bush II was the biggest spending president since Lyndon Johnson, who had a couple feathers in his cap—like Medicare and the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act—as well as a very large black eye (Vietnam).

Now, people might say that this doesn't prove anything, because the Tea Partiers have repudiated George W. Bush as a drunken fratboy on a spending spree. There's only one problem in this argument: The Republican Congress that rubber-stamped W.'s agenda.

If you look again at those numbers, but look only at the first six years of Bush's presidency—when Republicans controlled Congress—all but one of those comments remain true. For the overall size of the federal budget, the comparison no longer remains true, because Bush is narrowly edged out by—oh, Irony!—Ronald Reagan.

So, if you want to point fingers at who were the people to expand the size of the federal government by its greatest increases since the Great Society, look no further than John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Bush's other lapdogs in Congress.