George Bush the Big Government Regulator

National Journal reports on George Bush:

From 2001 through 2006, Bush has increased inflation-adjusted regulatory spending by 6.5 percent a year, and increased regulatory staffing by 6.3 percent. You have to go back before President Carter (a deregulator) to find a president who has done as much regulatory spending and hiring as Bush. (Adding the projected figures for 2007 does not substantially change the picture.)

A cruder, but still suggestive, measure of regulatory activity is the annual page count in the Federal Register, where the government publishes proposed and final regulations. Burdensome regulations may be concise, of course, and deregulation can run to hundreds of pages. Still, if the page count moves in the same direction as regulatory spending and staffing, that deepens suspicion that something is really happening. Sure enough, as the right panel of the chart shows, Bush outstrips Carter, the previous record-holder for average annual Register pages.

Just imagine how "progressive" George Bush would be portrayed by the MSM if he was a Democrat.