Obama Has Lowest Spending Record of Any Recent President

I am so voting for him again.

I would like significant military cuts though....SIGNIFICANT !!!

DD

 

Wow - if this gets out it will really be a problem for the Romney campaign.

 

You need to change lowest to slowest increasing in the title.

You need to ignore the revenues and ignore that Obama fought to spend more.

 

I think it's a little slippery to use 2009 as the base. I get the rational, but it still sets the spending bar pretty high. A bit of fun with statistics and a decent factoid for a debate. But kind of meaningless overall. I don't think the president can credibly run as the austerity candidate. (of course, neither could anyone else in this race).

 

Yeah, wait till after the election if we want, but Dems and liberals need to acknowledge that these spending numbers aren't sustainable.

 

I agree. We should cut defense in half, let the unprecedented tax cuts for the super-wealthy expire, and stop having massive wars off the books. Those darn liberals.

 

this X 10

 

The only prob with cutting the defense budget is that means massive layoffs and would decimate the unemployment figures.

After all, Obama's private sector employment rate looks good. If we hadn't cut government budgets, then unemployment would be fine.

 

A graph for those that suffer from hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia



dominant theme of the national political discourse has been the crushing spending spree the U.S. has ostensibly embarked on during the Obama presidency. That argument, ignited by Republicans and picked up by many elite opinion makers, has infused the national dialogue and shaped the public debate in nearly every major budget battle of the last thee years.

But the numbers tell a different story.

The fact that the national debt has risen from $10.6 trillion to $15.6 trillion under Obama’s watch makes for easy partisan attacks. But the vast bulk of the increase was caused by a combination of revenue losses due to the 2008-09 economic downturn as well as Bush-era tax cuts and automatic increases in safety-net spending that were already written into law.

Obama’s policies, including the much-criticized stimulus package, have caused the slowest increase in federal spending of any president in almost 60 nears, according to data compiled by the financial news service MarketWatch.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/...-spending-stimulus-budget-historic-trends.php

 

yes using 2009 as the baseline is weaksauce, the effing stimulus was part of FY2009 and it gets attributed to Bush, unreal

Even if we play the game where FY2009 spending belongs to Bush:

 

We should be able to cut massively from defense without touching personnel.

 

Yes, just look at the Indian army.



About 25 soldiers on just 7 motorbikes!

 

Only things that were passed by Bush was attributed to him. Notice the blue part of 2009 (stimulus) that is attributed to Obama:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obama-spending-binge-never-happened-2012-05-22



Your % of GDP graph is silly because the reason that goes up is that GDP went down due to a massive economic collapse.

 

Man I hate shoddy reporting (regardless of whose side it pumps), and TPM is as bad as that much criticized news network. Worse, IMO -- but then I'm not blessed with watching cable news shows.

For all its good, the stimulus did not cause less federal spending. And even if it had, it's inconsistent to attribute it to the president when the cost and approval was just assigned to Bush in the data on which the article was based .

Fluff piece. A tenth grader should do better.

major -- the criticism of using 2009 as a base is that it included the TARP stuff. If you looked at average spending over their terms, president Obama comes out about 35-40% higher (very rough math). And, of course we ignore the debt. And spending, and debt are both subject to sooo many more factors than Obama's policies. Republicans probably helped keep the spending down -- while also contributing to increased debt.

 

Except this isn't the case. The original article is from the Wall Street Journal:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obama-spending-binge-never-happened-2012-05-22

As it explains, stimulus (and everything else passed by him) was credited to Obama. The key piece:

Before Obama had even lifted a finger, the CBO was already projecting that the federal deficit would rise to $1.2 trillion in fiscal 2009. The government actually spent less money in 2009 than it was projected to, but the deficit expanded to $1.4 trillion because revenue from taxes fell much further than expected, due to the weak economy and the emergency tax cuts that were part of the stimulus bill.

 

I won't pretend to know how or from whom we successfully legislate more taxes and less spending; but trying to spin current numbers as an accomplishment of any kind is just a partisan misdirect. Liberals happen to be in the White House now, so I don't feel any guilt or even inaccuracy affixing their name to this particular delusion.

 

Per the article $789b of the bank bailout etc was attributed to Bush in 2009, $140b in extras to Obama. Obama's starting point included that bank bailout -- an amount that shouldn't be an annual expense, so it understates (IMO) his spending increases -- much of which would have occurred naturally because of the economy and demographics. The politifact article does a much better job of despinning the facts around spending.

The key piece:

So you're comparing two years of actuals, and two years of projections to a year that was inflated by almost $800b.

Basically, if the conclusion doesn't make sense, the data has probably been manipulated. President Obama is not an austerity guy -- a position I think you support, Major -- and times have not lent themselves to reduced spending. So when the conclusion is that he's increased spending at a slower pace than any other president in 60 yrs, you know somethings up.

I think the original article, and the commentary on it are spinny spin spin. Page view fishing. And that doesn't mean I don't think things would have been worse under (shudder) McCain, or that the president has done a poor job. I just hate pretend analysis, even if it goes viral on facebook.

 

THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT

 

I disagree with this. I agree with the fact that Obama is not an austerity guy and that, if he had full say, the deficits might be much larger. But the GOP argument is that Obama has exploded government spending and that is responsible for these massive deficits (and thus the solution is to shrink government spending a whole bunch). *That* is what these figures challenge. As noted in the article, the budget deficit was going to be $1T+ even if Obama did nothing. The reality is that the budget deficit wasn't caused primarily by spending - it was caused by a huge recession combined with lots of tax cuts (33% of the stimulus, plus more over the last few years). Much of Obama's spending plans during the Dem-led Congress were paid for by other budget cuts, so while he did launch new programs, it wasn't necessarily net spending increases. Spending didn't help things, but it simply hasn't been the huge driver of deficits that people claim.