The other day, during a stump speech, President Obama said this: “Federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years.” Now, I don’t pretend to be an expert on the federal budget, but that statement surely didn’t pass my sniff test. In fact, it seemed almost delusional. I mean, how can you run year-over-year trillion-dollar deficits and claim you’re not a profligate spender. And beyond that, claim that you spent less than any other president since the 1950s. Seriously? But there he was, waving a piece of paper and saying just that. Now, one of three things is happening here. Either, A: He really believes he isn’t a big spender. B: He knows better and he is simply trying to deceive voters. Or C: He truly is a low-spending president. Options A and B are not positive. If it’s A, we are left with the scary proposition that the President of the United States hasn’t a clue about the cost of his own policies. If it’s B, we have a president who is deliberately trying to deceive us. But just to be sure, I decided to look into it a bit. I found that the paper the president was waving was an article http://tinyurl.com/c3h6dw3 published in Marketwatch by a writer named Rex Nutting. He wrote that what people tend to forget is that the first year of each president’s term begins with a budget approved by the previous administration. So, 2009’s deficit belongs to President Bush, not President Obama. And when you take 2009 out of the picture, spending has been moderate – only up by a few percentage points each years since. Nutter’s article has been thoroughly debunked by plenty of economic writers. An article in the Wall Street Journal by Art Laffer and Steve Moore points out that while President Bush was no stranger to excessive spending, Congress gets the blame for 2009. That’s because in 2008, when then-Senator Barack Obama was running from president, the Democrats had majorities in the House and Senate. President Bush proposed a 2009 budget with a 3 percent spending increase over 2008. But the budget passed by the Democrats running the show at that time provided for a 17.9 percent increase in spending for 2009. In a story in the Washington Examiner, Hans Bader points out that “The Democrat Congress [in 2008], confident President 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 much for Nutter’s claim that President Obama had no role in the runaway spending of 2009. He had his hands all over it – and more. Peter Ferrara, penned an article in Forbes magazine June 14. – http://tinyurl.com/6ln9uvm Under the headline “President Obama: The Biggest Government Spender In World History,” the article makes a pretty convincing case that President Obama is just that. Ferrara writes that, “President Obama’s first major legislative initiative was the so-called stimulus, which increased future federal spending by nearly a trillion dollars, the most expensive legislation in history up until that point. We know now, as thinking people knew at the time, that this record shattering spending bill only stimulated government spending, deficits and debt.” Then, he notes, President Obama and speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats passed an additional $410 billion supplemental spending bill for 2009, which was too much for President Bush, who rejected it in 2008. Then came the $40 billion in SCHIP (kids’ health) spending. And then came Obamacare in 2010. It is the biggest single spending bill ever. Ferrara notes the law isn’t even counted in President Obama’s spending yet because most of it goes into effect in 2014. The CBO says it will as increase federal spending by $1.6 trillion in the first 10 years alone. Ferrara: “After just one year of the Obama spending binge, federal spending had already rocketed to 25.2 percent of GDP, the highest in American history except for World War II. That compares to 20.8 percent in 2008, and an average of 19.6 percent during Bush’s two terms. The average during President Clinton’s two terms was 19.8 percent, and during the 60-plus years from World War II until 2008 — 19.7 percent. Obama’s own fiscal 2013 budget released in February projects the average during the entire 4 years of the Obama Administration to come in at 24.4 percent in just a few months. That budget shows federal spending increasing from $2.983 trillion in 2008 to an all time record $3.796 trillion in 2012, an increase of 27.3 percent.” President Obama, the first president to preside over a trillion-dollar deficit, has now presided over four of them in a row. Before Obama, the biggest deficit was $458 billion in 2008. Ferrara: “President Obama’s own 2013 budget shows that as a result federal debt held by the public will double during Obama’s four years as President. That means in just one term President Obama will have increased the national debt as much as all prior Presidents, from George Washington to George Bush, combined.” Yikes. OK, I think we can eliminate option C from the list of reasons why President Obama is waving a piece of paper at prospective voters and claiming he’s a frugal president. That leaves A and B. Take your choice.
