During the years of the Obama presidency so far, total federal spending has been rising at the slowest pace since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president after the Korean War in the mid-1950s.
Rex Nutting of Wall Street Journal’s “Market Watch” provides the numbers to back up that statement with links so you can check them against Office of Management and Budget or Congressional Budget Office data.
Nutting doesn’t ignore that the spending numbers would have been higher if the Republican-controlled House had been willing to go along with all of Obama’s spending ideas, although if you think about it, the four Obama years include two years in which Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.
If you look at the bar chart that runs with Nutting’s piece, you’ll note that the really big increases in federal spending over recent history occurred during Ronald Reagan’s first term and George W. Bush’s two terms.
I don’t doubt that the extremely low inflation of recent years has played a role in this. But the main thing that strikes me about it is the power of partisan and stereotypical thinking.
When Mitt Romney referred to Obama’s fiscal record as a “debt and spending inferno,” it wasn’t even treated as a big whopper. Liberal Democrats are fiscally reckless. It only made sense. Just doesn’t happen to match the numbers. So do we change our stereotypes or just disregard the numbers. You tell me.
Ummm
This is only true if you treat the emergency stimulus spending of 2008 and 2009 as regular spending. If you think that it should have been treated as a one time bit of, well ’emergency’ spending, then the spending really has boomed.
If you pay $300 a month on your car (debt payment, gas, etc.) and suddenly have $1000 worth of repair, you don’t figure your monthly car spending to be $1300, do you? If not, then you should reject the phony reasoning going on here too.
Read the article…
(quote)
,,,,,What people forget (or never knew) is that the first year of every presidential term starts with a budget approved by the previous administration and Congress. The president only begins to shape the budget in his second year. It takes time to develop a budget and steer it through Congress — especially in these days of congressional gridlock.
The 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress.
Like a relief pitcher who comes into the game with the bases loaded, Obama came in with a budget in place that called for spending to increase by hundreds of billions of dollars in response to the worst economic and financial calamity in generations.
(end quote)
Never let facts stand in the way of an opinion….
Read the Comment
There is indeed a problem with putting all of the 2009 spending on Bush’s ledger. It ignores the large stimulus package that Obama pushed for as he took office. But you’ll notice that I didn’t actually complain about that. I’m saying that it’s wrong to add emergency stimulus spending to the equation and pretend that this is the baseline. Certainly when we talk about stimulus we’re never told that it represents a new normal for what our spending levels will be.
Look at the graphs
These two graphs illustrate total governmental spending and federal governmental spending over the past three administrations.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/24/think-obamas-a-huge-spender-then-you-need-to-see-these-two-charts/
There is a consistently steeper growth in spending was under the Bush administration as opposed to the Clinton and Obama administration.
And, the majority of growth in spending during the Obama administration occurred in the immediate response to the recession. Since then, it has been essentially flat and has dropped below te trend line of the Bush administration spending.
One Time Spending
So we have a big increase in spending that represents the stimulus spending. If that was a one time deal, then spending should have gone back down to the lower level. It didn’t. Instead it was used to create a new baseline at a higher level.
I’m not arguing about growth levels. The growth level in the Bush admin was steeper. At the time that spending was criticized right, left and center. (Of course it happened while revenues were climbing too, so it didn’t create as large a deficits.) I’m saying that it’s dishonest to look at what was sold as ‘one time spending’ and suggest that it should automatically be the new normal.
Perpetual war
Of course, the Bush budgets included (or should have included) Iraq/Afghan war spending (he originally kept them off the books).
Should this also be regarded as ‘one time’ spending, or are we now in a perpetual state of war?
Inconvenient truth
Amen to Mr. Rovick.
Absolute numbers have increased, since the whole federal budget is – understandably – quite a bit larger now than it was when Dwight Eisenhower took office, but the percentages of increase under different presidents are as Eric has described, the ideological blinders of some readers notwithstanding.