But Where Were These People When Bush Was Spending?

I'm reproducing this comment I left on The Rott's blog, mostly because I think people who know the answer but are fumbling for words might benefit from this, and because it's really burried at comment #52 in a thread that grows older by the minute. Not that a lot of people drop by here. But some people do. Web searches brings half of them. (photo from El Marco) And I keep hearing this question:

I do know quite a few American liberals who ask, fairly, why the Tea-Parties are such a recent phenomenon, given that G.W. Bush did absolutely nothing whatsoever to control the deficit for 8 long years.

Personally, I think it’s just a partisan thing. The deficit could grow and grow exponentially but, if a Republican of any race won in 2012, the Tea-Parties would stop overnight.

Well let me answer that, fairly.

Many of them were right here, saying the same thing. Most of us supported Bush because of his stance on Radical Islam. A lot of us muttered [right here on these pages] about many things Bush did. But with the incredible unfair vitriol that was leveled at him, many of us defended him strongly where we agreed with him. Pardon the pun, but people have black AND white — you don’t agree with everything anyone else does.

If you actually go to one of these things (and I’ve been to two and seen footage of many more), Bush’s spending is condemned. It is not blamed on one party. It is blamed on both, and efforts by partisans to use these for their personal political benefit are rebuffed. The speakers and the people there will tell you — it is not Democrats or Republicans, it is BOTH of them and has been for a long time. We are fed up with government size and spending. We’ve been pushed over the edge.

Now let’s put it this way. Most of us here were AGAINST the Economic Stimulus package and the bank bailout under Bush, and, might I add, a Democratically controlled congress. And we said so. Now imagine this. Suppose you let your kid use your credit card when he went off to college, and you didn’t complain much here or there when he spent on some frivolous items because he was studying hard and getting good grades. You mentioned it a few times, but you weren’t going to have to take out a second mortgage on your house yet.

What if, at the change of a semester he suddenly tripled the amount he was spending and vocally made plans to max the thing out on stuff he’s wanted forever but you wouldn’t buy for him before — to where you were not only going to have to re-mortgage your house, but his future house too to pay for it?

You’d drive right up to the school, snatch the card from his hands, and cut it in a million pieces, give him a good chewing out, and cancel the credit card just to make sure he didn’t try using the numbers he’d memorized.

And that, my friend, is the answer to that question.

Let me add to that ... that much of Bush's spending was on the war, which is spending with a time horizon. This administration's vastly more monstrous spending is largely on social programs, which never end.