Do you think Bush would have outspent Obama the last 4 years?

Like usual, this blew up in Jopat's face,

 

war. Repugs were willing to the biggest things you can to bankrupt a country and send 4000 men and countless Iraqis to their grave.

Cheney and Halliburton say Hai.

 

This chart is really misleading. Bush II was obviously terrible, but you'd hope to see negative rates. Basically Obama rate of spending has increased 1.4 times the rate of spending in Bush II's second term. If Obama's rate was 0, that would still mean that the rate of spending is exactly the same as Bush II's second term.

 

Which on a per capita basis would have been less, sicne population is increasing over the same time frame and inflation (though it's been very low).

 

You really don't have any idea how the US government works do you?

Like all Republicans, you blame the President but keep electing the same Congressmen.

 

Any single graph of an immense data set is "misleading" in that you need to read the entire set to get the entire story.

I believe you are very wrong on what the numbers mean. that's an annualized percentage increase.

So no, Bush II did not increase the budget 7x in a single term (!), but he did increase it, on average, by 7%.

Obama's budgets actually do this:
17.9% in "his" first year. (2009 authored by Bush, passed by 2008 congress)
-1.8% in his true first year, 2010. (Yes! The negative sign you were looking for!)
+4.2% in his true second year
+0.7% for his true third year
-1.3% projected for the coming year, according to the CBO's most recent budget estimate.

So, end of Obama's four budget years: budget is projected to be $3.58 trillion
End of Bush's last budget in 2009, budget was $3.52 trillion.

So Obama will have increased the federal budget by $0.06 trillion in 4 years.

You can say he should have done better, but all this hyperbole is sickening. And there are 8 years of evidence showing what Bush would have done in four years.

 

Agree x 100, or even 100% As the thread demonstrates ad nauseum, Obama spent way too much time trying to do Republican things as if that would win him any points with the FOX voting block who either cannot or will not trust mathematics.

 

would have been pretty much the same.. that is what i came to realize.. doesnt matter if its Bush or Obama or even Romney.. not much will change.. so meh

 

As much as Bush sucked, he had the right idea in abandoning his Republican ideologies and passing a stimulus package. I agree with the posters here that the package should have been much larger. Unfortunately, Obama has been way too accommodating to the Republicans.

By all means jopatmc, please fill us in on your budget. Look, Dwight Howard is curious too:

 

I'm extremely doubtful that the increase could be explained away by inflation and population growth. It might be a mitigating factor, but it definitely doesn't account for that entire rate of growth.

 

I don't want you to think I'm defending Bush in any way. Your post is excellent. I'd actually realized that these figures were annual percentage increases after my last post.

 

"Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

--Dick Cheney, said while serving as VP

 

Thanks much, and I didn't mean any of my annoyance at you at all, but rather those claiming that Obama "doubled the deficit," had "doubled the size of government," etc, etc.

There is a cogent attack to the numbers I present. It goes like this (and also appeared, like the original data I gave above, in Forbes.) If you have a friend who is very overweight (end of Bush years.) And you say he has a weight problem, and he agrees, and he basically quits gaining weight (Obama years), he is still just as overweight and in danger of health consequences. What this argument says that if you're overweight and you gain weight at "only" 1% annualized, you're still overweight and still getting worse.

 

I voted probably about the same. As others have noted a lot of the spending credited to Obama was already in the works at the end of the GW Bush Admin.. I also suspect that we would've seen more defense spending along with some sort of stimulus.

One thing I am pretty sure is that the deficit would be the same if not larger as part of a stimulus a GW Bush Admin. likely would've increased tax cuts further reducing government revenues with no cut or increased spending.

 

I dunno, but I think TARP was right and I think Bush deserves credit for, if very little else, appointing Bernanke and especially Paulson.

 

It doesn't really matter if you think that or not. The point is that your concept of zero as appropriately neutral is just not accurate.

Frankly federal govt spending should have increased much more and we would all be better off. Obamas increase was way too low under the circumstances. That's just arithmetic, hell even Milton Friedman would agree with that.