Randall Hoven at the American Thinker has written a very informative article on government spending over the past two presidential administrations. Please read the article, as it has charts and visuals that make it very easy to understand what he is saying. According to the article:
"And who, exactly, voted for these two bailouts in Congress? The stimulus passed with 244 votes in the House (all Democrats) and 60 votes in the Senate (57 Democrats and 3 Republicans). Bush's bailout passed with 263 votes in the House (172 Democrats and 91 Republicans) and with 74 votes in the Senate (41 Democrats and 33 Republicans). That is, Obama's stimulus was 99% Democrat and Bush's bailout was 63% Democrat, going by total votes cast in both houses of Congress.
If we weight the price tags of the two packages by party vote, the Democrats are responsible for $1,315B and the Republicans are responsible for $322B, or a bit more than what actually went to rescue troubled financial assets.
Either way you measure it, the Democrats can claim about 80% of the credit for these two major bailouts totaling more than $1.6 trillion of federal spending, increasing by a third our national debt (held by the public), in less than five months time.
Moreover, the 20% credited to Republicans actually went to troubled financial assets. There is at least a case that this money helped avoid a system-wide breakdown of our banking system, and therefore truly saved us from financial catastrophe. The other 80% is more like very expensive confetti, with entrenched Democratic support groups being the confetti suppliers. They get the real money; we get the confetti and the debt."
Lying about spending in the Bush administration is not constructive for President Obama. The Bush administration overspent--George Bush was not a conservative in fiscal matters, but the charts in the article linked show a very different picture of spending during the George Bush presidency than the one Barack Obama is attempting to create.
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