The theme of the aWol Bush residency: Spendin' money like there's no tomorrow!!!

Remember aWol's reason for vetoing SCHIP? That it cost too much to expand the health coverage for kids who are at risk of falling between the gaps of Medicaid, which covers the truly poor, and private insurance? What a loathsome, feckless assertion!

There is not a kernel of truth in his assertion. He is just a stone-hearted prick who doesn't give a good-god-damn about anyone else, and certainly not kids.

He puts the brakes on for children's health care, but he is the biggest spender in the last half century, tossing money around like a drunken sailor with 72 hours of shore leave after 12 months at sea. (Would that he had settled for a two-day drunk, a new tattoo and a dose of the clap that would present in two weeks.)

The Cato Institute and the Club for Growth are not amused.

“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.

Indeed. By any metric you choose, Bush has outspent his predecessors dramatically, practically tripling the discretionary spending under Reagan, who oversaw the largest military buildup in history.

From McClatchy:

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.

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.

I feel a rant coming on...

I am old enough to remember the 80's. I was an Air Force wife during the Reagan era, and when spending would come up, my peers were quick to assign all of the blame to the Democrats in Congress. People told me then with a straight face that if a Republican president ever had Republican majorities in both houses, we would by-god see some fiscal responsibility! I snorted. I was snorted at for snorting. (And now that I think about it, I believe I will spend my afternoon googling the people who outnumbered me and send them all "I told you so!" emails...)

Remember that the Democrats have yet to hammer out a fiscal year operating budget. This budgetary trainwreck is 100% on the heads of the Republican party.

Word to the wise for both of my conservative readers...Never, never bitch to me about Democrats and fiscal responsibility. I will take tax & spend Democrats running things over these borrow & spend, paper-hangin' fools, every damned election cycle.