WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday that “Keeping America competitive requires us to be good stewards of tax dollars,” we hoped he would follow that by rebuking his fellow Republicans for their reckless spending. He did not.

In his next sentence the President claimed, “Every year of my Presidency, we’ve reduced the growth of non-security discretionary spending, and last year you passed bills that cut this spending.”

Wonder what he meant by “non-security”? Brian Riedl, budget expert at the Heritage Foundation, notes that 55 percent of the federal government’s $296 billion in new spending from 2001 through 2003 came in non-defense and non-security items. Federal spending has grown twice as fast under President Bush as it did under President Clinton. From 2001 through 2005, Bush and the Republican Congress presided over a 100 percent increase in federal education spending, a 71 percent increase in community and regional development programs, a 61 percent increase in health research and regulation, and an 86 percent increase in housing and commerce.

President Bush has talked tough on spending, but he hasn’t followed through with tough action.

Every year in his State of the Union address, the President has presented unnecessary new spending initiatives. This year was no different. The President proposed new federal spending on (or tax breaks for) energy investments, scientific research and high-school teacher training — each one unneeded and wasteful.

The President asked Congress to control entitlement spending, but he is responsible for the most financially reckless expansion of entitlement spending in a generation — the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Congress won’t control spending on its own. It needs a President so committed to sane budgeting that he is willing — no, eager — to veto bills that irresponsibly saddle the American taxpayers with needless federal programs, services and pork. President Bush has yet to veto a spending bill. He could take a lesson from Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta, who vetoed a financially irresponsible budgetary move Tuesday night, just as Bush was beginning his State of the Union address. (Unfortunately, aldermen overrode the veto.)

President Bush is right that Congress must get entitlement and other spending under control. It would help if he did more than talk about it.

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