It’s official, George W. Bush is a bigger spender than LBJ was:

WASHINGTON — 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.

And let’s ignore the increases in defense spending, even though a good portion of that can be attributed to paying for a badly planned, badly executed war fought largely because Bush wanted to fight it, spending is up even in areas where you’d think Republicans would cut back:

Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, points to education spending. Adjusted for inflation, it’s up 18 percent annually since 2001, thanks largely to Bush’s No Child Left Behind act. The 2002 farm bill, he said, caused agriculture spending to double its 1990s levels. Then there was the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit — the biggest single expansion in the program’s history — whose 10-year costs are estimated at more than $700 billion. And the 2005 highway bill, which included thousands of “earmarks,” or special local projects stuck into the legislation by individual lawmakers without review, cost $295 billion.

And most of this spending occurred when the GOP controlled both the Executive and Legislative Branches. It’s responsible for the bad poll numbers that the GOP continues to get on the national level. And it’s pretty much eviscerated what was left of fiscal conservatism in the GOP. And it is one of the reasons that the GOP will probably lose in 2008, in a big way.

All this makes me wonder why the Republicans who continue to support the President both to continue doing so. You can’t actually believe in the guy can you ? No seriously, I’d love to know.