Judge them by what they've done, or what they do in the future -- not by what they say they're going to do.

Reuters

Entitlements in America are generally associated with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Yet the laws those Democratic presidents signed are but part of the story. "The growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones," AEI demographer Nicholas Eberstadt explains in A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic. "Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential -- but in any given year, it was on the whole over 8 percent higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat .... The Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush administrations presided over especially lavish expansions."

The deficit has exploded under Republican presidents too.

So how has the GOP kept its reputation as the more fiscally responsible party? It's a triumph of rhetoric over results, and due in part to the fact that conservatives can anticipate the ways Democrats will disappoint them so much more clearly than they can anticipate Republican failures, which they underestimate.