Posted by Jonathan Adler:
Big Government Bush:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_01_25-2009_01_31.shtml#1232926639
Nick Gillespie offers a [1]highly critical assessment of the Bush
presidency in yesterday's WSJ. As Gillespie shows, Bush was a "big
government" conservative, and even conservatives who supported the
Bush Administration's foreign policy and counter-terror measures
should be disappointed with other aspects of his legacy.
If increases in government spending matter, then Mr. Bush is worse
than any president in recent history. During his first four years
in office -- a period during which his party controlled Congress --
he added a whopping $345 billion (in constant dollars) to the
federal budget. The only other presidential term that comes close?
Mr. Bush's second term. As of November 2008, he had added at least
an additional $287 billion on top of that (and the months since
then will add significantly to the bill). To put that in
perspective, consider that the spendthrift LBJ added a mere $223
billion in total additional outlays in his one full term.
If spending under Mr. Bush was a disaster, regulation was even
worse. The number of pages in the Federal Registry is a rough proxy
for the swollen expanse of the regulatory state. In 2001, some
64,438 pages of regulations were added to it. In 2007, more than
78,000 new pages were added. Worse still, argues the Mercatus
Center economist Veronique de Rugy, Mr. Bush is the unparalleled
master of "economically significant regulations" that cost the
economy more than $100 million a year. Since 2001, he jacked that
number by more than 70%. Since June 2008 alone, he introduced more
than 100 economically significant regulations. . . .
Mr. Bush's legacy is thus a bizarro version of Ronald Reagan's.
Reagan entered office declaring that government was not the
solution to our problems, it was the problem. Ironically, he
demonstrated that government could do some important things right
-- he helped tame inflation and masterfully drew the Cold War to a
nonviolent triumph for the Free World. By contrast, Mr. Bush has
massively expanded the government along with the sense that
government is incompetent.
That is no small accomplishment -- and its pernicious effects will
last long after Mr. Bush has moved back to Texas.
References
1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123275512887811775.html
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