Washington, D.C., mayor Adrian Fenty released his proposed budget last week. Titled “Moving Forward Faster,” it’s an example of the sort of thing you’d expect from a D.C. mayor who is quite fond of the nanny state.

To avoid having to read the entire document yourself, here’s the punch-line: Government spending – that is, expenditures financed by locally-derived revenue, not federal transfers – grows by a proposed 8.8 percent. By way of comparison, the city’s budget under Mayor Anthony “Baseball” Williams grew by an annual average of 7.5 percent.

But the large increase can be explained by a growing DC population, right? Nope. The most recent Census numbers show that the city’s population fell between July 2005 and July 2006. Even if fewer people flee to Virginia or Maryland this year – or even if more people start actually moving in the opposite direction – it’s virtually impossible that the population growth figures will spike by nine percent. Average annual population growth since 2003, for instance, hasn’t even come close to breaching the one-percent mark.

Fenty describes his budget proposal as “fiscally conservative” in his transmittal letter to the DC Council. Yet maybe we shouldn’t ridicule him for that. Since he’s operating in a city where a Republican president who spends taxpayer money almost as fast as Lyndon Johnson also calls himself “fiscally conservative,” perhaps the mayor is just mimicking the local custom.