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Right, but Bush took office during the tech bust followed by a massive recession caused by 9/11 and a number of corporate scandals. Receipts may have increased,

• AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  The number of people eligible for Medicare and the level of benefits it pays out are basically entirely independent from how many rolls of adhesive tape 3M sells. If they sell twice as much tape, so that the same percentage of their profits is twice as much money, you don't inherently have to expand Medicare in order to spend all the additional money (and then some). But they did. The size of government does not inherently need to scale linearly with the size of the economy. The cost of some services may scale with population, but that's something else entirely. For example, general productivity improvements may grow the economy at the same population level, but they imply needing fewer resources to achieve the same level of government services because the same productivity improvements should make the provision of government services more efficient too. And not all government services even need to scale with population. If we had twice as many citizens, would that really require us to double the military budget? "Government programs expand to consume all available funding" explains why the government budget does expand with the economy, not why it should.