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WOSG wrote:

I am rather tired of us Republicans parroting the biased DNC talking points like its valid. Bush was not as big a spender as we make him out to be ... now that a REAL BIG SPENDER is on the scene to show how its really done! We are talking double digit spending increases for each year the Democrats are in charge.
The problem is that GOP spending irresponsibility is on the level of the flu the Democrats on the level of cancer and you are calling them both illnesses.

The fact is that both parties have been fiscally irresponsible. Republicans used to be the party of fiscal discipline. Under the first 6 years of Bush, they gave up that claim. Have you forgotten this:

From Big Spending Bush and GOP (CATO institute, May 3, 2005)
President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn’t cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.
Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush’s first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton’s last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush’s first term.

The Republicans can say, "We're just the biggest spenders in the last 30 years, not the biggest spenders ever." But the most of the current Republican party leadership can no longer make a credible claim to being smaller government, fiscally responsible stewards of the taxpayers' money. They had a chance to show that, and they chose to spend irresponsibly instead.

I see your point comparing Republican spending to "the flu" and Democrat spending to (presumably terminal) cancer. But people still die from "the flu." We need a choice that represents good health, not just a less severe (but still potentially deadly) disease.

WOSG wrote:

The last 2 years of Bush’s administration was with the DEMOCRATS in Congress, and Bush was unwilling to spend as much as Pelosi that he vetoed several spending bills, but they STILL came back to spend more. In fact the $430 billion spending bill the Congress just passed and obama signed was a runaraound because Bush refused to sign off on that much spending.

It took Bush 6 years and the loss of the Congress to the Democrats for him to finally find his veto pen. As long as it was Republicans being irresponsible, Bush the GOP leader was fine with it. That's not a Democrat talking point. That's a historical fact.

I'm not sure what the answer is. But the GOP did create a major problem for themselves by giving up the high ground on fiscal discipline during the first Bush term.

You miss the point. This statement: "The fact is that both parties have been fiscally irresponsible." is a matter of degree. Who? And to what exent? What are the numbers and votes? Almost all GOP office holders are MORE fiscally responsible than almost all Democrats. The votes are clear. We saw that with the votes on Stimulus, on the budget, and we saw that even in 2000-2006, when the #1 complaint of the Democrats was that the GOP was NOT SPENDING ENOUGH! They complained that NCLB was underfunded, they wanted to DOUBLE the medicare drug benefit spending, they constantly voted against tax cuts and for more spending, and they insisted on expanding SCHIP (which they did this year).

Such matters therefore are quantitative and I'll leave a graph of quantifying the difference between Bush's fiscal imprudence (which while not good made no threat to our fiscal security) and the massive bankruptcy that Obama has planned:

“The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton’s last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush’s first term.”

While going in the wrong direction, this is not a huge leap considering that we went from an underfunded military to having a multiple-front war on our hands by 2004. Note also that CONGRESS writes the budget and it was a GOP Congress that set the spending in 1999 and 2000 and was underspending what Clinton wanted. It was Bush himself in 1999 who critiqued the Republican fiscal prudence and called his way “compassionate conservatism” (the tipping point was sept 1999, which you can mark down as when the GOP took the wrong turn on fiscal responsibility). One Bush fiscal extravagance that bumped up the total spending was Medicare drug benefit, but the Democrats wanted and voted for a benefit that would have COST TWICE AS MUCH. IN 2005 and 2006 the spending increases were NOT HIGH. That was the last GOP influence.

Yet next year, Obama will make that leap to over 27% a higher number than in the past 60 years, highest in our history save for WWII - and I dont see us with 12 million men in uniform next year like we had in WWII.

The real story is that Bush walked the GOP down the path of ‘triangulating’ the GOP into fiscal imprudence as a failed political strategy to grab the center. It failed politically in part because YOU CAN NEVER COMPETE WITH DEMOCRATS ON SPENDING PANDERS - THEY WILL ALWAYS, ALWAYS OUT-SPEND REPUBLICANS. Even now, the Democrats spread the lie that Bush was for doing ‘nothing’ on education, katrina, health care, etc. - despite the hundreds of billions Bush DID spend. And the Democrats will continue to tax, borrow and spend until the nation is bankrupt, while lying about the Republicans all alont the way. They will lie by saying that Republicans *both* underspent and were deficit spenders - its contradictory but dont ever think a Democrat is logical.

Bush aside, most of the GOP office holders in the past 2 decades were and are responsible fiscally, far more so than Democrats. It’s wrong to obscure this fact and it only helps the Big Govt Party.

“As long as it was Republicans being irresponsible, Bush the GOP leader was fine with it. “

Last point: I think the more correct way of putting it is this:
“As long as it was Bush the GOP leader being irresponsible, Republicans were fine with it. “
Quite frankly, the leader was Bush and he bears most of the responsibility for the spending levels, and he dragged other Republicans along. The medicare drug benefit is a case in point, where the White House twisted arms to pass it.
Republicans went along out of loyalty that was in retrospect misplaced.

It’s a small but important point, because the jist of what I am saying is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If we understand the dynamics and leaders who made it happen, we can shape up the GOP. Bush is gone. So is hastert and others, like Sen Stevens, who were part of the big-spending GOP caucus. Many Republican leaders went astray, but most Republicans are not naturally fiscally irresponsible and many were trying to do the right thing throughout. Club for Growth was cheering this dissident fiscally responsible conservatives the whole time - folks like Rep Pence, Rep Flake, Rep Shadegg, Sen DeMint, Sen Coburn, etc.

For half of Bush’s first term, the Democrats ran the Senate, making budgets bipartisan. Note again ... “His 2006 budget doesn’t cut enough spending..” from your source. The fact that the GOP Congress in 2006 realized and decided to start cutting spending is an indicator of what I mean. Too little too late and now we need to rebuild the credibility with a unified voice on fiscal responsibility.