Yeah, just the other day Bush came back to Washington from visiting the wildfires there and blasted Congress for wanting to spend too much on the SCHIP program. Here’s the skinny from The Hill:

Bush blasted the House for passing an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program that was more expensive than the version Bush vetoed earlier this month.

He also criticized Democratic leaders for not meeting with the members of the administration he had designated to find a compromise with Congress. “Incredibly enough, the Senate will take up the same bill next week, which wastes valuable time,” Bush said.

Now you and I know that money spent on the health of kids makes them more likely to be healthier their entire lives, thus saving us money in the long run. Heck, it’s not just the moral thing to do, but the smart thing to do. But Bush isn’t smart. We’ve got the evidence right in front of us that he’s the biggest spendthrift President since at least Lyndon Johnson, and maybe since FDR. The evidence is from the libertarian Cato Institute, and reported by McClatchy:

George W. Bush, despite all his recent bravado about being an apostle of small government and budget-slashing, is the biggest spending president since Lyndon B. Johnson. In fact, he’s arguably an even bigger spender than LBJ.

“He’s a big government guy,” said Stephen Slivinski, the director of budget studies at Cato Institute, a libertarian research group.

The numbers are clear, credible and conclusive, added David Keating, the executive director of the Club for Growth, a budget-watchdog group.

“He’s a big spender,” Keating said. “No question about it.”

Take almost any yardstick and Bush generally exceeds the spending of his predecessors.

When adjusted for inflation, discretionary spending — or budget items that Congress and the president can control, including defense and domestic programs, but not entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare — shot up at an average annual rate of 5.3 percent during Bush’s first six years, Slivinski calculates.

That tops the 4.6 percent annual rate Johnson logged during his 1963-69 presidency. By these standards, Ronald Reagan was a tightwad; discretionary spending grew by only 1.9 percent a year on his watch.

Discretionary spending went up in Bush’s first term by 48.5 percent, not adjusted for inflation, more than twice as much as Bill Clinton did (21.6 percent) in two full terms, Slivinski reports.

Of course, the Republicans will say they’ve had a war to run, but Cato’s stats go further and note that even excluding that spending the Republicans, led by George Bush for the last seven years, have been spending our money at a record rate. Yes, he has the nerve to say SCHIP is too expensive. Nobody ever said Bush lacked nerve. He lacks shame, but not nerve.

Oh, not to get going on the Ron Paul thing too much, but this issue of spending is why all those rabid supporters of Paul are going to stay home next November. I don’t see them voting for a Democrat, but they’re surely fed up with the Republicans and their Tax-cut and spend policies. Oh, they see it as a basic principle, while I see it as a Republican War on Our Grandchildren, but we come out the same, unable to stomach the Republican spendthrift policies.