There's been a sea change in the "wild abandon" in the past few years: http://www.businessinsider.com/us-federal-government-outlays... (Look carefully at the X and Y axes; that's not a traditional chart and time is not X or Y. But it's one of the more interesting ones I came up with.) Bush started it, Obama made pretty sounding noises about fixing it but has doubled down on it, and shows no signs of stopping even though the "recession" excuse is fading away.