President Bush still spending. Mercatus Center’s Veronique de Rugy tells the whole sad tale in today’s LA Times. If President Bush’s budget for fiscal 2009 is approved in its current form, U.S. government spending will have increased by more than $1.2 trillion since President Clinton left office; adjusted for inflation, that’s a 35% increase. Bush has increased spending at three times the rate Clinton did when he was president, and also has given us the biggest defense budget since World War II — and that’s regularly budgeted defense spending, not counting funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.