The Real Presidential Spending Story
I thought this Wall Street Journal piece did a good job of cutting through all the partisan rhetoric about presidents and their spending records.
According to the writers, Bill Clinton was the lowest spender, at least in modern times: 'President Clinton, in conjunction with a solid Republican Congress, cut government spending by more than any other president in modern times, and oversaw one of the greatest periods of economic growth and prosperity in U.S. history.'
The biggest surge in spending goes to George Bush during his last two years, 2007-2008: "...government spending skyrocketed to 27.3% of GDP from 21.4%. It was the largest peacetime expansion of government spending in U.S. history".
Spending supposedly fell under President Obama, but they credit that with repayment of TARP loans: " While spending did come down in 2010, it wasn't the result of spending cuts but rather because TARP loans began to be repaid, and that cash was counted against spending.".
They give the newer Republican congress credit for not approving around $150 billion Obama had wanted to spend.
That should put an end to all the partisan finger pointing over federal spending, shouldn't it?
posted by Fred Mangels @ 7:25 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
I don't believe it, Obama has outspent Bush 3-1, no doubt
I love how you accept everything in the article, but when it comes to the darkie, you feel compelled to add the word "supposedly."
The amazing thing about opinions is that they are rarely altered by the introduction of facts.
Two ignorant comments in a row. "The darkie"? Won't be reading this blog again.
I miss Bill Clinton. Easily the best president of my lifetime.
That scam of Obama's is being widely panned - fact-checkers all over the place find it to be a complete falsehood.
Excerpted from Forbes: The U.S. has never before had a President who thinks so little of the American people that he imagines he can win re-election running on the opposite of reality. But that is the reality of President Obama today.
Waving a planted press commentary, Obama recently claimed on the campaign stump, “federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any President in almost 60 years.”
Peggy Noonan aptly summarized in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal the take away by the still holding majority of Americans living in the real world:
“There is, now, a house-of-cards feel about this administration. It became apparent some weeks ago when the President talked on the stump – where else? – about an essay by a fellow who said spending growth [under Obama] is actually lower than that of previous Presidents. This was startling to a lot of people, who looked into it and found the man had left out most spending from 2009, the first year of Mr. Obama’s Presidency. People sneered: The President was deliberately using a misleading argument to paint a false picture! But you know, why would he go out there waiving an article that could immediately be debunked? Maybe because he thought it was true. That’s more alarming, isn’t it, the idea that he knows so little about the effects of his own economic program that he thinks he really is a low spender.”
...And Peggy has been one of his apologists.
President Obama: The Biggest Government Spender In World History - Peter Ferrara/Forbes Magazine
The analysis by Internet commentator Rex Nutting on which Obama based his claim begins by telling us “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.” Not exactly.
The previous administration, or President, proposes a budget. The previous Congress approves a budget. And what Congress approves can be radically different from what the President proposes....
in 2008 Congress was controlled by Democrat majorities, with Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, and the restless Senator Obama already running for President, just four years removed from his glorious career as a state Senator in the Illinois legislature. As Hans Bader reported on May 26 for the Washington Examiner, the budget approved and implemented by Pelosi, Obama and the rest of the Congressional Democrat majorities provided for a 17.9 percent increase in spending for fiscal 2009!
Actually, President Obama and the Democrats were even more deeply involved in the fiscal 2009 spending explosion than that. As Bader also reports, “The Democrat Congress [in 2008], confident Obama was going to win in 2008, passed only three of fiscal 2009’s 12 appropriations bills (Defense, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security). The Democrat Congress passed the rest of them [in 2009], and [President] Obama signed them.” So Obama played a very direct role in the runaway fiscal 2009 spending explosion.
Rose, do you spend your ENTIRE day blogging? How many blogs are you running?
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