The Barack Obama big spender myth A recurring theme in American politics right now is that Obama's wild, uncontrolled spending is dragging a once prosperous nation into a future of indentured servitude. The reality, Neil Macdonald writes, is much different.Commentsview comments in forum Page 1 You need to be a member of CKA and be logged into the site, to comment on news. |
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He's doing that thing where they give you a link and hope you don't check it.
Click Polifact link. From there, click the Washington Post, and Associate Press's critiques.
Basically this guy is doing the tell a lie often enough and it becomes true thing.
I'm not sure I see how this is news either.
Basically the guy is digging up the the Rex Nutting theory from 2012.
He's doing that thing where they give you a link and hope you don't check it.
Click Polifact link. From there, click the Washington Post, and Associate Press's critiques.
Basically this guy is doing the tell a lie often enough and it becomes true thing.
I'm not sure I see how this is news either.
...You sure YOU'RE not the one doing that?
I've done a lot of research on presidential spending myself. Republicans outspend Democrats by a WIDE margin ever since FDR. Look up the "Two Santa Clause Theory"
Basically the guy is digging up the the Rex Nutting theory from 2012.
He's doing that thing where they give you a link and hope you don't check it.
Click Polifact link. From there, click the Washington Post, and Associate Press's critiques.
Basically this guy is doing the tell a lie often enough and it becomes true thing.
I'm not sure I see how this is news either.
...You sure YOU'RE not the one doing that?
Pretty sure. I'm going by the later critiques of the Nutting theory though. I confess, I didn't actually read the whole post in the OP. I quit reading after it started to just look like just another rehash of Nutting. He may have added something fresh. Did he?
But here's the Washington Post fact check of Nutting.
First of all, there are a few methodological problems with Nutting’s analysis — especially the beginning and the end point.
Nutting basically takes much of 2009 out of Obama’s column, saying it was the “the last of George W. Bush’s presidency.” Of course, with the recession crashing down, that’s when federal spending ramped up. The federal fiscal year starts on Oct. 1, so the 2009 fiscal year accounts for about four months of Bush’s presidency and eight of Obama’s.
In theory, one could claim that the budget was already locked in when Obama took office, but that’s not really the case. Most of the appropriations bills had not been passed, and certainly the stimulus bill was only signed into law after Obama took office.
Bush had rescued Fannie and Freddie Mac and launched the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which depending on how you do the math, was a one-time expense of $250 billion to $400 billion in the final months of his presidency. (The federal government ultimately recouped most of the TARP money.) So if you really want to be fair, perhaps $250 billion of that money should be taken out of the equation — on the theory that it would have been spent no matter who was president.
Nutting acknowledges that Obama is responsible for some 2009 spending but only assigns $140 billion for reasons he does not fully explain. (Update: in an email Nutting says he attributed $120 billion to stimulus spending in 2009, $5 billion for an expansion of children’s health care and $16 billion to an increase in appropriations bills over 2008 levels.)
On the other end of his calculations, Nutting says that Obama plans to spend $3.58 trillion in 2013, citing the Congressional Budget Office budget outlook. But this figure is CBO’s baseline budget, which assumes no laws are changed, so this figure gives Obama credit for automatic spending cuts that he wants to halt.
The correct figure to use is the CBO’s analysis of the president’s 2013 budget, which clocks in at $3.72 trillion.
So this is what we end up with:
2008: $2.98 trillion
2009: $3.27 trillion
2010: $3.46 trillion
2011: $3.60 trillion
2012: $3.65 trillion
2013: $3.72 trillion
Under these figures, and using this calculator, with 2008 as the base year and ending with 2012, the compound annual growth rate for Obama’s spending starting in 2009 is 5.2 percent. Starting in 2010 — Nutting’s first year — and ending with 2013, the annual growth rate is 3.3 percent. (Nutting had calculated the result as 1.4 percent.)
Of course, it takes two to tangle — a president and a Congress. Obama’s numbers get even higher if you look at what he proposed to spend, using CBO’s estimates of his budgets:
2012: $3.71 trillion (versus $3.65 trillion enacted)
2011: $3.80 trillion (versus $3.60 trillion enacted)
2010: $3.67 trillion (versus $3.46 trillion enacted)
So in every case, the president wanted to spend more money than he ended up getting. Nutting suggests that federal spending flattened under Obama, but another way to look at it is that it flattened at a much higher, post-emergency level — thanks in part to the efforts of lawmakers, not Obama.
Another problem with Nutting’s analysis is that the figures are viewed in isolation. Even 5.5 percent growth would put Obama between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in terms of spending growth, but that does not take into account either inflation or the relative size of the U.S. economy. At 5.2 percent growth, Obama’s increase in spending would be nearly three times the rate of inflation. Meanwhile, Nutting pegs Ronald Reagan with 8.7 percent growth in his first term — we get 12.5 percent CAGR — but inflation then was running at 6.5 percent.
One common way to measure federal spending is to compare it to the size of the overall U.S. economy. That at least puts the level into context, helping account for population growth, inflation and other factors that affect spending. Here’s what the White House’s own budget documents show about spending as a percentage of the U.S. economy (gross domestic product):
2008: 20.8 percent
2009: 25.2 percent
2010: 24.1 percent
2011: 24.1 percent
2012: 24.3 percent
2013: 23.3 percent
In the post-war era, federal spending as a percentage of the U.S. economy has hovered around 20 percent, give or take a couple of percentage points. Under Obama, it has hit highs not seen since the end of World War II — completely the opposite of the point asserted by Carney. Part of this, of course, is a consequence of the recession, but it is also the result of a sustained higher level of spending.
We sent our analysis to Carney but did not get a response. (For another take, Daniel Mitchell of the Cato Institute has an interesting tour through the numbers, isolating various spending categories. For instance, he says debt payments should be excluded from the analysis because that is the result of earlier spending decisions by other presidents.)
UPDATE: The Associated Press also dug into the numbers and came to the same conclusion as we did. “The problem with that rosy claim is that the Wall Street bailout is part of the calculation. The bailout ballooned the 2009 budget just before Obama took office, making Obama’s 2010 results look smaller in comparison. And as almost $150 billion of the bailout was paid back during Obama’s watch, the analysis counted them as government spending cuts,” the AP said. “It also assumes Obama had less of a role setting the budget for 2009 than he really did.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fac ... ct-checker
If Bush comes into office and doubles or triples our spending, then Obama takes over and spending goes up 5% it's easy to say his increase is the most monetary wise. But it's not easy for a president to come in and slash budgets back by half or 2/3rds.
Hence the 2 Santa Clause strategy of the Republican party ever since Reagan.
What that lacks is the spending gap year over year.
If Bush comes into office and doubles or triples our spending, then Obama takes over and spending goes up 5% it's easy to say his increase is the most monetary wise. But it's not easy for a president to come in and slash budgets back by half or 2/3rds.
Yet Harry Truman did exactly that in the post-war era. FDR spent $151 billion in 1945 and by 1947 Truman had trimmed that down to $41 billion.
Yes, the big difference is that a war had been on. Yet at the end of the war both Congress and the President initiated a deliberate recession by cutting over 2/3 of Federal spending.
Given that the 2008 economic crisis was LESS serious than a world war then there's even less excuse for not cutting back spending to pre-crisis levels.
Oh, and I utterly despise Bush for bailing out the banks and I despise Obama even more for campaigning against corporate bailouts only to turn around and make Bush look downright .
at the end of the war both Congress and the President initiated a deliberate recession by cutting over 2/3 of Federal spending.
It kept the wages of returning veterans down for a time, I'll bet.
at the end of the war both Congress and the President initiated a deliberate recession by cutting over 2/3 of Federal spending.
It kept the wages of returning veterans down for a time, I'll bet.
It did. It also got prices down and ended up stabilizing the economy by tackling the inflationary war economy. It was short term pain for long term gain and Truman is rightfully lauded for this. <-- That's me complimenting a .
Politicians these days would not have done such a thing. Instead they'd try to keep spending at peak levels to 'stimulate' the economy and keep the party rolling. Never mind the long term harm they'd be creating.
He speaks very highly of you.
So, you're not a fan of Keynes, then?
He speaks very highly of you.
Keynes' ideas apply in an industrial economy where industry and workers produce goods to serve the consumer population.
In the world we now live in almost everything in our economies is now . We have a financial economy now where banks are now the central features of our economies and the old rules about government intervening in markets to deliver stability have been cast aside. Now we have government intervening in markets to preserve the market value of bank investments. Whether or not that serves the producers or consumers is not the point. The point is that our entire economy now serves the banks who use pervasive interest and charges to parasitize everyone else.
Thus the recent and growing pressure to move to a cashless society in which banks will profit from every transaction.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57399610/
Celik says he gets charged about 5 Swedish kronor ($0.80) for every credit card transaction, and a law passed by the Swedish Parliament prevents him from passing on that charge to consumers.
"That stinks," he says. "For them (the banks), this is a very good way to earn a lot of money, that's what it's all about. They make huge profits."
So, you're not a fan of Keynes, then?
He speaks very highly of you.
Keynes' ideas apply in an industrial economy where industry and workers produce goods to serve the consumer population.
In the world we now live in almost everything in our economies is now . We have a financial economy now where banks are now the central features of our economies and the old rules about government intervening in markets to deliver stability have been cast aside. Now we have government intervening in markets to preserve the market value of bank investments. Whether or not that serves the producers or consumers is not the point. The point is that our entire economy now serves the banks who use pervasive interest and charges to parasitize everyone else.
Thus the recent and growing pressure to move to a cashless society in which banks will profit from every transaction.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57399610/
This is very true what you write. The Service sector doesn't produce "real" wealth, just foo-foo dust wealth ... sort of like giving workers raises by printing more dollars.