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Even though Heritage is conservative, it tends to be non-partisan (they have called everybody's baby ugly - Republican or Democrat) if it deserves to be. However, you can check the source and you can also see the growth of mandatory spending (especially with baseline budgeting which is ludicrous - and by the way was initiated by Nixon). Here's the link, but you can see entitlement spending grew faster than discretionary spending (see the chart - it is easy to discern). So to your claim that this was not the way it was - incorrect and inaccurate. But you can check the Brookings Institution as well - the same story.
http://www.heritage.org/BudgetChartbook/mandatory-discretion... The guy did not, as you noted, veto enough of the runaway spending by mostly Democratic Congresses (who really spend the money - not the President).