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George W. Bush likes to pose as the Texas president
— in the rough-hewn, rancher model of Lyndon Baines Johnson. However, Bush isn’t actually a Texan — he
was born in Connecticut, went to an East Coast prep school, attended Yale,
and summered in Kennebunkport at his family’s oceanfront estate. Nor
is he a rancher, as LBJ was. Yes, Bush bought a ranchette when he decided
to run for president, but this “cowboy” has no cattle and is
afraid of horses. Yet there is one area where Bush has stood taller
than the real Texas president: federal spending. LBJ was derided as a
big-spending liberal, but he was tight-fisted compared with the current
president. Bush is trying to pretend that he’s a small-government
fiscal conservative, but federal spending in his administration has grown
by 5.3 percent a year, nearly a full point higher than the rate of increase
in the Johnson years and more than double the annual spending growth under
Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Of course, the White House is trying to blame the
billions of dollars that it’s dumping into his “war on
terrorism” for distorting Bush’s spending numbers (perhaps the
Bushites don’t remember that LBJ had a war to finance, too, because
so few of them actually served in it). But Bush spending is not just about
his mismanaged wars. He has also hiked budgets in most agencies, with a
disproportionate share of the increases going to privatization of
government, corporate welfare, and right-wing ideological boondoggles. When free-spending Bush poses as Mr. Frugal and
demands that Congress hold the line on spending, remember that no president
has spent so much and more of your tax dollars and gotten so little for it
as he has.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2008.
