Tiptup said:
Reagan was fighting the cold war and the legislature (you know, the part of our government that controls the purse) was in the firm hand of democrats. The same is somewhat true with Bush the elder as well (he claims that he had to go along with democrat spending because he wanted to fight a war). Clinton, then, finally helped control spending by quite a bit, yes, but he campaigned and won as a middle-of-the-road-guy (unlike Kerry or Obama) and, unfortunately, too many of his spending cuts came from destroying our military capabilities.

Reagan once said "I'd rather get 80% of what I asked for than 0%". That's why a lot of his tax cuts came with big spending bills.

As far as Clinton goes, he had a real Republican congress to contend with during 6 of his 8 years. Remember the "Contract with America"? Clinton didn't get to spend nearly the amount he wanted. And his "surplus" was a projected surplus. See this link http://www.letxa.com/articles/16

With Bush the younger, yes, he was way out of control when it came to spending, but that's because he supported and tried to seriosuly fund Democrat programs. It also didn't help that the Republican legislature perfectly immitated the Democrat legislature that came before them by trying to ensure loyalty with wasteful spending. Republicans were out of control and deserved to lose control as they did. However, you can argue that John McCain was trying to fight against the trends of Bush and his fellow legislators at the time; there's no reason to assume he'll be irresponsible on the spending issue and we have plenty of reasons to assume the opposite.

Yep. The Republicans tried to win the hearts of Democrats by turning into Democrats. Unfortunately, it didn't matter. People hate Republicans because they're Republicans, not because of what they do (historically, they've done far more good than Democrats).