Can you say sequester?
I still find this hard to believe because of the stimulus plan that was put in place Obama's first year and then baked into the budget in subsequent years.
Also Bush kept the war on terror costs separate from the budget with the expectation that they would go away when the war was over. Obama merged them into the budget so that they could keep spending at that level unquestioned.
crunched budget numbers ? Obama has only had like 1 budget so far
Absurd, the deficit has grown to nearly a trillion every year. This article is a joke.
the mathematica; priciple is simple: redistribution is not spending
Bush started with the national debt at $5.9 trillion and end it at $10.7 trillion.
Obama started with that $10.7 trillion and is currently around $17.5 trillion.
In 2012 the national debt exceeded 100% of the US GDP.
And they say “Figures don’t lie.”.
Whoever said that must have been a liar.
That was the first question that popped into my mind when I read this obvious absurdity: "Did they blame TARP on Bush?" (not that he was faultless in it, not at all). Obviously no POTUS that runs trillion dollar deficits could possibly be even one of the most frugal. The other thing they should correct for is GDP. If GDP increases 6%, and spending is up 2%, that's actually less damning than if GDP is DOWN 1% yet spending is up 1.5%.
Note the famous phrase concerning statistics:
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
BULLSHIT.
He's DOUBLED the National Debt by himself. Tell me again how "frugal" the hnic is.
“Primary Spending Minus Defense and Bailouts”
That’s a lot like measuring inflation minus Energy and Food. If you don’t like a constituent component, just throw it out until you get to an answer you like.
The only thing The Won is frugal with is the truth.
Trashing the value of the dollar helps him greatly in this statistical fantasy.
This kind of article drives me MAD. Here we have a fully competent conservative commentator playing cute with the numbers just to help Obama. Here is the ugly reality that Mitchell for whatever reason refuses to put on the table:
1. Yes, TARP is the only reason that obama begins with any hope of being a limited spender. But Mitchell leaves out a bunch of important factors that go along with this spending:
a. TARP was a TEMPORARY spending measure. It was a banking emergency. The Senate [held by Democrats Mr. Mitchell] refused to pass a budget bill for over 3 YEARS! That institutionalized the temporary spending as a permanent budget addition.
b. Bush required that TARP be paid back with interest to the Treasury. That actually did happen within about one year of December 2008. But Obama took that money and added it to his budgets as if that somehow was his doing. That is completely ridiculous! For Mitchell to not note this is a complete scam.
2. Spending in all of these administrations is highly correlated with party control of Congress. Guess what Mr. Mitchell? When Republicans control the Congress spending is reduced. Many FReepers will try to challenge this but you are just wrong. The biggest reductions in spending happened in the late 1990s after the Gingrich revolution [house flipped Republican] and the Senate followed in the late 1990s into Republican hands. That actually lead to big surpluses for the first time in decades. If you study Republican senate control of spending you find that this is a powerful correlation for the last three decades:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/01/what_republican_senate_control_means_for_america.html
Here again, for Mitchell to play coy on this as if the President controls the budget process is flagrant deceit.
3. All of this kind of deceit to make Demcoratic presidents like Obama look like Budget geniuses destroys public understanding of constitutional politics that lodges spending as a Congressional responsibility. It also feeds a lunacy on the right that falsely believes Republicans are no different than Democrats— an utterly false belief. Using the Presidents as misrepresenting icons of the parties, commentators deceive the public and make the deficit appear to be impossible to contain. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the US economy grew at 4%— which is completely reasonable in a world that stops hating free markets— the deficits would be history.
Mitchell needs to stop with his blind deceit. He buries the lead about the Tea Party that train wrecked Obama into the sequester. Why not pull out the proposed budgets of Obama that got no votes Mr. Mitchell? Do those budgets that he designed show your results? No!
I am still angry.
Liars figure and figures lie
Obama ranks best in “Total Spending” and “Primary Spending.”
But, somehow, even though the Great Recession ended four months after he took office, even though we have historically low interest rates, the economy has had only modest growth, and Obama has racked up record deficits for four out of five years.
I don't understand how that happened.
0% yeah right, the baseline budget was increased 31% within 2 months of inauguration and has been run by continuing resolution ever since. People wonder where the administration gets the money to spend, the 31% turned into a slush fund. Largest increase ever, largest deficits in history, highest ratio of taxation to GDP.