FACT CHECK: Obama off on thrifty spending claim

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is aggressively pushing the idea that, contrary to widespread belief, President Barack Obama is tightfisted with taxpayer dollars. To back it up, the administration cites a media report that claims federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since the Eisenhower years.

"Federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years," Obama said at a campaign rally Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa.

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.

It also assumes Obama had less of a role setting the budget for 2009 than he really did.

Obama rests his claim on an analysis by MarketWatch, a financial information and news service owned by Dow Jones & Co. The analysis simply looks at the year-to-year topline spending number for the government but doesn't account for distortions baked into the figures by the Wall Street bailout and government takeover of the mortgage lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The MarketWatch study finds spending growth of only 1.4 percent over 2010-2013, or annual increases averaging 0.4 percent over that period. Those are stunningly low figures considering that Obama rammed through Congress an $831 billion stimulus measure in early 2009 and presided over significant increases in annual spending by domestic agencies at the same time the cost of benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare and the Medicaid were ticking steadily higher.

A fairer calculation would give Obama much of the responsibility for an almost 10 percent budget boost in 2009, then a 13 percent increase over 2010-2013, or average annual growth of spending of just more than 3 percent over that period.

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Binge spending.

[Casino67]

Math just wasn't his thing.

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Math just wasn't his thing.

 

Well, he wanted to make sure he spent in all 57 states...

[Draggingtree]

Nuts to Nutting: Under Obama, Real Spending Has Exploded

 

Accounting flimflammery has hidden the ascent.

by

Tom Blumer

May 26, 2012 - 12:16 am

 

On Tuesday, Rex Nutting of MarketWatch, who per his Linkedin profile is the site’s Washington bureau chief, published a column titled “Obama spending binge never happened.” This column will show that it did, but that clever accounting has largely concealed its existence.

Citing historical and projected figures from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Nutting calculated that projected spending in 2013 of $3.573 trillion will only be 1.6% higher than the $3.518 trillion incurred in fiscal 2009, representing annualized growth of 0.4%. To be “fair,” he subtracted $140 billion in stimulus spending from fiscal 2009 and assigned it to Obama, thereby reducing the 2009 total to $3.378 trillion. As adjusted, the 5.8% in projected four-year spending growth ($3.573 trillion divided by $3.378 trillion) works out to 1.4% per year, as seen in an accompanying graph supposedly proving that Obama has engaged in more spending restraint than any president “since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.”

Liberal and administration apparatchiks have of course jumped for joy at Nutting’s nuttiness, with the once occasionally valuable but now completely useless PolitiFact web site, which describes Nutting as MarketWatch’s “international commentary editor,” evaluating Rex’s ruse as “Mostly True.” The correct evaluation of PolitiFact these days is “Mostly Farce,” which will be demonstrated herein.

The simplest riposte to ridiculousaurus Rex is to isolate the discussion to which party has controlled Congress. To do so requires comparing officially reported spending in fiscal 2007, the last full fiscal year with a budget passed by a Republican Congress which was signed by George W. Bush, to fiscal 2011, the last of four full years driven by Democratic Party legislative spending priorities with a budget signed by Oba- … oh, wait Read More http://pjmedia.com/blog/nuts-to-nutting-under-obama-real-spending-has-exploded/

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