No, Cato’s Chris Edwards isn’t parroting one of President Obama’s recurring cases of Bush-bashing. But Edwards does label the 43rd president as a more profligate spender than the 44th.

[S]pending jumped from $1.86 trillion in 2001 to $2.98 trillion in 2008. That’s a 60 percent jump in seven years under Bush, which works out to an annual average growth rate of 7.0 percent. (All data cited here are for fiscal years).

Then comes 2009. Usually this year would be assigned to the outgoing president because the new president comes in part way during the year and typically does not make substantial changes to the current-year budget. But Obama took steps to immediately boost spending in 2009, including pushing through the giant stimulus bill. The CBO has reported that stimulus outlays were $114 billion in 2009.

In Bush’s last budget, he proposed that 2009 spending be $177 billion above the 2008 level, but the actual increase ended up being a massive $386 billion. So you can see that Obama and Congress were mainly responsible for the huge spending leap in 2009, not Bush.

So let’s assign 2009 to Obama and measure his spending from a base in 2008 ($2.98 trillion) to his newly proposed spending for 2014 of $3.78 trillion. Spending increased 27 percent over those six years, or 4.0 percent annually. That’s far too much, but still substantially less than the 7.0 percent growth rate under Bush.

Here is another comparison:

Spending growth in Bush’s first seven years: 4%, 8%, 7%, 6%, 8%, 7%, 3%, 9%.
Spending growth in Obama’s six years: 13%, 6%, 2%, -3%, 5%, 2%.

Partisan Republicans are probably tired of fiscal conservatives and libertarians complaining about Bush’s big spending, especially when Obama has done so much damage to limited government. But Republicans are fooling themselves if they think that the overspending problem has been confined just to the other party. The sooner people understand that overspending it is a deep and chronic disease with bipartisan roots, the sooner we can start finding a lasting cure.

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