I just wrote about this wild piece in MarketWatch by Rex Nutting, which claims President Obama isn’t the big spender that some folks accuse him of being. Nutting:
Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree. As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.” Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true. Government spending under Obama, including his signature stimulus bill, is rising at a 1.4% annualized pace — slower than at any time in nearly 60 years.
A few more thoughts:
1. As I point out in my original post, if Obama wins another term, spending—according to his own budget—would never drop below 22.3% of GDP. If that forecast is right, spending during Obama’s eight years in office would average 23.6% of GDP. That average is higher than any single previous non-war year in American history.
2. Did we all forget about this from March 2009 when Obama was at the peak of his political power?
Obama signed what he called an “imperfect” $410 billion measure to fund most government agencies through September. He used the occasion to criticize the more than 8,500 projects, costing more than $7.7 billion, that lawmakers inserted into the bill, and he declared that “this piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability that the American people have every right to expect and demand.”
3. Don’t the House Republicans get any credit for fiscal restraint the past two years?
4. Some have pointed out that one reason spending as a share of GDP looks so high is because of the big drop in GDP and slow recovery. Well, Obama could have cut spending or put in place pro-growth policies to boost GDP. Hey, either raise the bridge or lower the river. Every year the CBO lists all kinds of spending cut ideas. For instance, freezing discretionary domestic spending for a decade would save more than $1 trillion.
5. Did we also forget about the $2 trillion in Obamacare spending that doesn’t kick in until 2014?
Bottom line: Obama has been president for the past 3 1/2 years, two of those years with huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Instead of cutting spending or putting Washington on a long-term, sustainable fiscal path, he’s seen the burst of spending around the Great Recession as an opportunity to make those levels a floor rather than a ceiling.
Nutting appears to have forgotten Nancy Pelosi’s 2008 budget maneuver. She withheld a budget until Barry the Great arrived in office. Yet Nutting wants to attribute the 2008 budget to Bush.
Selective memory, Democrats don’t leave home without it.
I was going to point out the same thing. Kind of hard to pin 2009 on Bush when he wasn’t given a chance to participate.
To further point number 4, it doesn’t make sense to just focus on spending. If I took a significant pay cut but kept spending the same amount, I’d be in bankruptcy in no time, but by golly, I held the line on spending!
The only thing that really matters in the end is what the difference is between total income and total spending. The Democrat President and the Democrat congress (primarily from 2009 to 2011) win the irresponsibility prize. And don’t forget the honorable mention of the Senate who has not brought a budget up for over 1000 days (no- a continuing resolution is not a budget).
ARE you paid by the number of lies and manipulations?
You are the clown who, in AUGUST OF 2008, was denying that we were in a recession. .. then, a few months later in October 2008,you were forced to admit we were in recession (since the economy had crashed and the DOW had dropped 5,000 point), decided that the reason the economy tanked and the DOW dropped was because investors were afraid that Obama was leading in the polls, otherwise known as the Goldberg theorem. You later theorized that Obama’s interaction with Joe the Plumber would cost Obama the election. Your crimes against reality and reason are severe ……………but yet, for some reason, he is still held in some regard in some circle-jerks circles.J.Cole
The recession started in September of 2008. Not August. The press was talking about recession for months before it finally came.
Being that you cannot even get a simple fact correct such that the Dow dropped 3000 points from Aug to Oct 2008 not 5000, I suppose stupid is as stupid writes and thats you Sashal.
Your boy Barack has ran up a $5T deficit in a little over 3 years it will be $6T by the time he is kicked out of office in Jan 2012. Face the facts this guy is an unmitigated failure.
Never send a community organizer to do a gown ups job.
It takes a liberal to see a liberal lie, and belive that it is the truth. Obama is the BIGGEST spender EVER in the HISTORY of America. But the liberals still are blaming Bush! It simply is amazing that these guys continue to drink the kool-aid.
Tell a lie long enough and with enough conviction and the masses will believe it to be true, that is the Obama campaign strategy for 2012 and was in 2008. Dems want to call Bush a liar but look at the campaign promises of Obama and see how he has delivered on them, not very well, so is he a liar?
Trashing Bain while taking their money? Isn’t that being dishonest and lying about lobbyists being in his administration? where is the outrage? Attacking Romney because the steel company went out of business after being carried for eight years, What did Obama do with GM, didn’t some dealerships close and people lose their jobs so the company could show a profit? So what is the difference? LIES, Lies and more lies
I was just directed to Pethokoukis nonsense from another website. I can’t believe the amount of sophistry masquerading as reasonable rebuttal to Nutter’s piece in MarketWatch.
Nutter’s facts are indisputable. Which is why Pethokoukis makes no effort to dispute them. Not even one.
Pethokoukis attempts only to rebut Nutter’s conclusions about those facts by tacking away from the foundation of Nutter’s case, which is actual dollars of spending and deficit, to spending/GDP, a comparison that Nutter does not reference.
Pethokoukis only does this because he has nothing else; Nutter’s case is sound.