It's very easy to look backward and blame Bush for everything... bottom line is that Obama has already spent more money in 30 days than Bush could ever dream. The deficit under Bush was $482 billion and under Obama will be $1.9 TRILLION.

The lion's share of the deficit spending is because of two things

a) the bank bailout (which I personally oppose), which started on Bush's watch

b) the economic stimulus package, necessitated in great part by the failure of the financial system.

It is touching to see these fiscal conservatives crawl out from under the rocks they'd been living under since 2001, when Bush took the budget surplus he'd inherited from Clinton and started simultaneously cutting taxes, raising spending, and, how does one say this properly, turning off any and all meaningful regulation of the financial markets.

The economy is in the crapper because Bush let the banks do as much gambling as they wanted to, while he poured hundreds of billions of dollars (over a trillion, really) into his foreign adventures. It'd be nice to turn all of that off right away, and it'd be nice to get back those pallets of $100 bills shipped to Iraq which disappeared, but that's not going to happen. Obama has to clean up Bush's mess.

And yes, when putting out a fire, there will be a drainage of water reserves. But it seems worthwhile.

As for your criticism of the New Deal, the thinking on the left is that, after the initial spending programs made a dent in the unemployment rate, FDR went back to the conventional wisdom of the time and tried to keep the budget balanced. As a consequence, the recovery stalled until spending programs were ratcheted up more.

I am curious about the economic mentality of people who think that military spending can cure economic woes, but that domestic spending cannot. It really is hard to fathom that kind of thinking. Do any Republicans moan about how government spending is "crowding out private investment" when an order for tanks, aircraft, or submarines is placed? Why is building machines of war better for the economy than building roads, bridges, and schools?

There really is no possible cogent response to this argument. It's why the GOP is failing badly now, because its leaders suffer from advanced cognitive dissonance and are too busy suppressing the inadequacy of their ideas when they are tested in the real world. You would think that, after 8 years of a Republican President who was basically given everything he wanted by Congress, which was mostly controlled by Republicans except for the last two years, that Republicans might sit up and think "hey, you know maybe Bush really was a problem". Certainly that's the attitude taken by the public at large. But thankfully we have the True Believers, who will reject any and all real-world evidence that contradicts their cherished beliefs about the moral and fiscal superiority of "conservatism", whatever that is supposed to mean these days.

"$1.9 trillion budget deficit that is on the books..."

Actually, only $1.2 trillion is "on the books". The WSJ and other "news reporting outlets" just added $700 billion to that figure based on "the projected cost of the stimulus".

Curiously, they never did the same for Bush when it came to the various "supplemental spending bills" for the Iraq war.

As for Reagan, he didn't give a crap about the deficit, and his budgets consistently increased the size of government during his tenure. That's been the ongoing trend for every single President since FDR, though Clinton might get credit at least for turning a deficit into a surplus. (I say 'might' because Congress was Republican, and really, the deficit shrank largely due to the economic boom. Though I think Clinton deserves some credit for that because, at least compared to Bush, he didn't throw a trillion dollars away on foreign adventurism.)

I know a lot of people say "Bush isn't a real conservative". But I seem to recall Rush and Hannity and all the "real conservatives" loved him and helped him get into office. At some point the GOP rank-and-file has to accept that their party is not controlled by so-called "fiscal conservatives" and indeed hasn't been so since the days of Nixon.

Today's GOP is an alliance between social conservatives, corporate conservatives, and fiscal conservatives, and the last group has by far the least power of the three. The social conservatives provide the votes, but the party has been controlled by the corporate conservatives for a long time. And their guiding beliefs are to cut taxes, raise defense spending, fight as many wars as possible, increase government power, suppress dissent, and deregulate, deregulate, deregulate.

Sadly for all of us, their notions of what is good for their corporations often flies directly against what is good for the country as a whole. And really, at this point it's hard to tell what was worse: the Iraq war or the deregulation. The people in positions of power have yet to admit just how bad the financial situation is.