Some of you will
recall Peggy Lee singing this song written by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields and
was a song in the musical Sweet Charity.
Mitt Romney seems to
be singing his version of the song about President Obama saying, “Since
President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has
accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history.” There are a whole
lot of people out there that believe this is absolutely true. After all, the
Republicans have called the Democrats the “tax and spend” party for countless
years. Where’s there smoke there must be fire right? Wrong!
On May 22, 2012, Rex
Nutting, international commentary editor for the financial website MarketWatch wrote this just never
happened. In fact, federal spending has risen “slower than any time in nearly
60’s years.” That is since the Eisenhower years. That is with even adding $140
billion in stimulus to Obama rather than Bush where it began.
Adjusted for inflation
this is what it looks like.
President
|
Fiscal year baseline
|
Last fiscal year
|
Average percentage increase per year
|
Johnson
|
1964
|
1969
|
6.3
|
George W. Bush
|
2001
|
2009
|
5.9
|
Kennedy
|
1961
|
1964
|
4.7
|
Carter
|
1977
|
1981
|
4.2
|
Nixon
|
1969
|
1975
|
3.0
|
Reagan
|
1981
|
1989
|
2.7
|
George H.W. Bush
|
1989
|
1993
|
1.8
|
Clinton
|
1993
|
2001
|
1.5
|
Obama
|
2009
|
2013
|
-0.1
|
Eisenhower
|
1953
|
1961
|
-0.5
|
Adjusted for inflation
Obama is the second lowest. Or, Nutting pretty much nailed it. You also have to
note that congress kept Obama spending rate lower than he wanted.
In my opinion, we
should be doing more New Deal spending to get the economy rolling.
Many of you have seen the following on Facebook.
This is a hoax and the numbers are cooked. There's one particularly bad year, 2009. Almost all of the year and its spending occurred under President Obama. Yet, this chart and the totals sneak it around so this is counted as a Bush year. I want to see what this looks like with honesty (counting Obama as beginning with his inauguration). This dishonesty is not yours. The deception is by Marketwatch, and many have repeated it uncritically.
ReplyDeleteOf course Obama looks better when they take his $1.4 trillion 2009 deficit and shove it over into the column of a President who had nothing to do with it.
"The federal fiscal year lasts from October 1 to September 30 (It ended on June 30 prior to 1976). So, the 2009 fiscal year ended in September of 2009, eight months after Bush left office. When Obama was sworn into office, Bush had already submitted his 3.1 trillion dollar 2009 budget almost a year earlier. He then signed the stack of resulting appropriations bills submitted to him by Congress throughout 2008 which authorized the federal spending that would take place once the 2009 FY actually began in October. Then, in the fall of 2008, Bush supported and signed additional spending bills providing for various bailouts and stimulus programs that marked the end of his presidency, and which would show up as spending in 2009. Needless to say, the already-enormous 2009 budget that Bush had submitted in early 2008 was not totally reflective of the full impact of the huge spending increases that would eventually be authorized by Bush. Bush's original budget was $3.1 trillion, but once one adds in all the bailouts and stimulus spending also supported by Bush, the number is actually much larger, and this is the number that shows up in the spending figures now being attributed to Obama for FY2009." [Ludwig von Mises Institute]...hardly
Deletea progressive apologist group.
Once Obama got in, though, he had the power to change it. And he did: He piled on even more waste spending.
DeleteBush is only to blame for the waste he presided over. And yes there was plenty, a huge amount, but his part in it ended when he left office.