kane

What about Newt Gingrich?

Here are some highlights of his career:

He had a bunch of ethics charges brought against him. All but one of them were dropped, but that was a pretty ugly one where he supposedly lied about how money going to a tax free non-profit was being spent. "On January 21, 1997 the House voted overwhelmingly (395 to 28 ) to reprimand House Speaker Newt Gingrich for ethics violations dating back to September 1994. The house ordered Gingrich to pay an unprecedented $300,000 penalty, the first time in the House's 208-year history it had disciplined a speaker for ethical wrongdoing."

He was the guy who spearheaded the government shutdown in 1995. There are many who will say this was simply the republicans trying to curb out of control democrat spending and there might be some truth to that. Others say it was them playing petty games. Here is a quote from Tom Delay :
Delay writes in his book, No Retreat, No Surrender:[3]

"He told a room full of reporters that he forced the shutdown because Clinton had rudely made him and Bob Dole sit at the back of Air Force One...Newt had been careless to say such a thing, and now the whole moral tone of the shutdown had been lost. What had been a noble battle for fiscal sanity began to look like the tirade of a spoiled child..The revolution, I can tell you, was never the same."

He did help draft and pass the Contract With America. Most of which the Republican party themselves ended up not following. I understand that in some cases deomcrats fought them, but the republicans themselves could at least stand by many of these beliefs and act on them in their personal lives, but of course most of them don't.

So I guess I'm curious what makes Newt such a good guy?

And I am correct about the spending.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/budget.php

This site shows the budgets put forth by every president since 1930. It shows how much they put in outlays, how much they brought in in receipts and what the deficit/surplus was. Since 1930 there have only been 7 times that there was a budget that was actually smaller than the previous year and the last time it happened was 1948. Since 1980 the federal budget has grown from 517 billion to 3.1trillion. During that same time period the population has gone up by about 33%. So if it increased around 33-40% you could understand that, but it has increased 500%.

How exactly is that not just politicians spending money?