Victor over at the Dead Parrot Society has performed this interesting analysis of this earlier American Enterprise Institute study (linked in this earlier post via Marginal Revolution) in which the author of the AEI study — Virginia de Rugy — concluded that the Bush Administration compares poorly with other administrations over the past 40 years in terms of reducing the amount of major governmental agency or department spending. Victor focuses on comparing the second Clinton Administration’s spending with the Bush Administration, and concludes as follows:

The numbers are ambiguous. By focusing only on discretionary expenditures, much — but not all — of the cyclical impact of the recession has been removed from the data. When you do this, Bush’s spending looks much better outside of the well documented cases where he has made a conscious push to increase spending (like education). However, he still has not achieved a real reduction in any federal agency.
But if you look at the actual Budget Authority levels, his administration actually has achieved a few reductions.
In both cases, of course, this has occurred in an environment where many agencies are adding homeland security requests to their budgets; I have only anecdotally adjusted for that. Regardless, the overall spending picture isn’t quite as dreary as implied by DeRugy’s original analysis.

Read the entire post. And as noted in this previous post, the prospect is remote that a Kerry Administration would be more restrained in terms of governmental spending than a second Bush Administration.
Quare: Is the difference between the increase in discretionary spending that would likely occur during the next four years under a second Bush Administration as compared to the increase that would likely take place under a Kerry Administration so marginal that it is not really a meaningful reason to favor one administration over the other?