Bush Lie #1860999: I Controlled Spending

From Meteor Blades at Daily Kos:

As veganpa notes, Kevin Drum has taken a hard poke at one of the lies that probably slipped past 99% of debate viewers and pundits last night. It - along with the "Furious George," "Orwellian George" and "Never Made a Mistake in My Life George" - deserves some attention.

Dubyanocchio's comment:

Non-homeland, non-defense discretionary spending was raising at 15 percent a year when I got into office. And today it's less than 1 percent, because we're working together to try to bring this deficit under control.

This, Drum says, probably caused an aneurysm over at the libertarian-conservative Cato Institute, which, a year ago, described Bush as The Mother of All Spenders.

And from Cato's page directly:

The Bush administration's newly released budget projections reveal an anticipated budget deficit of $455 billion for the current fiscal year, up another $151 billion since February. Supporters and critics of the administration are tripping over themselves to blame the deficit on tax cuts, the war, and a slow economy. But the fact is we have mounting deficits because George W. Bush is the most gratuitous big spender to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter. One could say that he has become the "Mother of All Big Spenders."

The new estimates show that, under Bush, total outlays will have risen $408 billion in just three years to $2.272 trillion: an enormous increase in federal spending of 22 percent. Administration officials privately admit that spending is too high.