Spending Rate Lower Under Obama and Democrats

If I had to guess, I’d say conservatives would tout this as proof of Republican congress’ ability to reign in a fiscally irresponsible executive branch?

I’d like to see proposed vs passed fiscal legislation for the same periods, to presumably put that lie to rest.

The sad thing is that the rank and file republican supporter believes that the opposite of reality is what’s true. If you say something often and loud enough I guess it starts to catch on. The system is tilted to reward the dishonest disproportionately.

I think this Congress’ inability to fund infrastructure will be seen as a key element in the nation’s decline.

But, as so often seems to be the case, the conservative cry is, “Think of the children now! Not when they actually need institutional support!”

Ed, the headline is misleading. You explained it fine in the article, but the “spending rate” is money/time, which is by any measure larger under Obama than any previous president, just as it was under Bush (since the growth rate has been positive for decades). It’s the “relative spending growth rate” money/money/time, that is smaller than Bush’s (absolute growth rate money/time/time may be lower too; I didn’t do the math). You obviously understand the difference so there’s no excuse for the error in the title.

It’s the difference between things getting worse slower and getting worse faster rather than the difference between worse and better, and it’s important to make the distinction, especially when the vast majority of journalists don’t bother, or even understand the distinction.

uncephalized@8:

A very reasonable (and small-c conservative) metric for spending is per-capita constant dollars per annum (money/people-time) and the growth rate would be either (money/people-time-time) or (1/time). No matter which metric you use, the growth rate under Obama has been quite low compared to Bush.

You can pull these yourself from http://www.usgovernmentspending.com

My big personal political theory is that right-wing voters in western democracies are not manipulated idiots but the intelligent and cynical accomplices of their elected officials.

So it should not merely be

absolutely clear by now that the Democrats are far more fiscally responsible than the Republicans

It should also be

absolutely clear by now that the Republican voters never gave a shit about deficit and complained about them because honestly saying “I want to rig the economy so that smarter, brighter, better, more hardworking members of the underclass never have the shadow of a snowball chance in hell to become more prosperous than me” might have increased the hostility of the underclass and its liberals allies beyond any manageable threshold.

Jordan Genso writes:

Can someone explain to me the asterix* in the chart stating that the 2009 stimulus was re-assigned to President Obama? Does that mean the stimulus was added to the 2010 budget (that has total spending only being $3.46 trillion)?

The 2009 fiscal year for the federal government is 10/1/2008 through 9/30/2009. So the analysis correctly assigns all of 2009’s spending to President Bush, with the noted exception; though I think they should always note the attendant Congress as well. Because this analysis is comparing performance by president, the person doing this analysis re-assigned the stimulus spending passed in 2009 all to Obama, including the portion spent during the 2009 budget year. Since we’re gauging presidents this is the correct thing to do; however I wonder if W. Bush passed any marginal increases in spending during the 2001 budget year since we were in the down part of the business cycle in the period of that budget year late-Jan-01 through Sep-01, if so that should have been counted as being under W.’s watch rather than Clinton’s.

Let me be clear that my comparing Obama to Bush II is not to in anyway deny profligate spending under Bush II, or any former president. The last few years under Bush I and most years under Clinton were fairly constrained by historical standards.

jbar, your comment made me curious, so I went and checked out table 15.2 as well. When I calculate the average for “Total Government Expenditures” for FY 2002-2009, I get $4.05 trillion, and for FY 2010-2011 (latest available data) I get $5.19 trillion.

However, these numbers aren’t what’s being discussed in the article. It’s talking about the average increase in spending from year to year. To find that, you first have to take the difference of each year from it’s previous year, then average those numbers. Then divide that average by the Total Expenditure for the year preceding that presidential term. Doing that, I come up with a 7.3% average increase for Bush’s first term, and 8.5% for his second. I think the discrepancy between my numbers and the article’s here has to do with that asterisk, and counting the stimulus spending under Obama rather than Bush. And for the rate at which spending has increased under Obama, I calculate 1.2%.

The reason your numbers differ so much is that you’re averaging 8 years worth of increases into one number (which is kept low by the relatively lower spending of the earlier years under Bush). Then you’re comparing that to two years worth of data for Obama, which is only very slightly higher than the spending in the later years of Bush’s term. The large difference is due to the fact that you’ve pulled that number down by averaging it across Bush’s 8 years in office, when spending increased every year, making the early years much lower than the later years.

So, it’s as if you’ve taken a ramp, and leveled it off at it’s mid point. It should not then be surprising that there’s a large step at the end of it.

That’s why the article instead chooses to compare the average difference of spending per year, without lumping 4 or 8 year periods together.

This article is soooo fundamentally inaccurate (probably intentionally misleading as I can’t imagine that any serious political writer or blogger would be so unfamiliar with the Federal budget process and so unaware that using the Whitehouse’s and Congress’ own data would so clearly show the entire post suggest the very OPPOSITE of what is factually supported).

Seriously? Nobody cared to check whether it was President Obama or President Bush that actually signed the FY 09 Budget Appropriation? While it is true that typically Bush would have signed the FY 09 Federal Budget Appropriation(s), he would NOT agree to the Democratically-controlled Congress’ proposed increases and the first quarter and some of FY 09 was funded with continuing resolutions based on the FY 08 budget. The change occurs after Obama, and this is a fact that you can actually look up actually, becomes President. Obama signed the FY 09 Federal Budget Appropriation, NOT Bush.

See http://thomas.loc.gov/home/approp/app09.html

The author here clearly does NOT understand the federal budget process. (1) Presidents are required by law to propose (“deliver”) a Budget to Congress. (2) Both Houses of Congress then draft and eventually (it is hoped) vote on THEIR OWN budget resolutions. If all goes according to plan, the House and the Senate then pass an identical version of the budget resolution. This budget resolution does NOT get presented to the President for his signature or veto. It does NOT become Federal law AND it does NOT control the spending of the Federal government. The budget resolution along with the budget authorization process then is SUPPOSED to guide the Federal budget appropriations process. (3) Congress passes budget appropriation bill(s) and sends them to the President for signature or veto. It is the budget Appropriation(s)–there are supposed to be several of them but it is not uncommon for them to be combined into a ginormous spending bill–that when an identical version passes both houses of Congress is presented to the President for signature. Appropriations (leaving aside the somewhat complicated Social Security funding procedures) are the ONLY laws that result federal government spending. The President’s actual responsibility for controlling spending is primarily limited to his delivery of a budget proposal (almost always ignored by Congress) and his ability to veto appropriation bills.

When Bush delivered his proposed budget to Congress for FY09 his proposal called for a budget deficit of less than $500 billion.

See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/02/AR2008020202042.html

According to current OMB (Obama’s OMB) numbers, the FY09 budget deficit was actually $1.412 TRILLION. More importantly, while the House and the Senate did pass FY09 budget resolutions during the Bush Presidency, they DO NOT become law and President Bush would not and DID NOT have the opportunity to veto them. To say that President Bush is responsible for the passage of a budget resolution that he does NOT even have the opportunity to sign or veto is mistaken at best (more likely disingenuous). The budget resolution that actually passed both houses of Congress (during Bush’s tenure) was HEAVILY amended. Also, it was a Democrat (Senator Conrad) that introduced the resolution–hardly likely that it matched the Bush proposal. While Bush signed a continuing resolution to avoid a governmental shut down the resolution did not differ in any significant manner from the FY08. The changes, meaning explosion in spending, were written into law as part of the FY09 Omnibus Appropriation bill.

See http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d110:40:./temp/~bd6ptC:@@@L&summ2=m&|/home/LegislativeData.php?n=BSS;c=110|

This FY09 budget LAW was passed and signed by President Obama on March 11, 2009. While, typically, this law would be the last step in setting a fiscal year’s budget. A tax and spend liberal like Obama, would certainly want to take a couple extra stabs at increasing governmental expenditures (and by necessity increasing the burden being imposed upon productive citizens and businesses). Sure enough and you can look this up too, three other spending binges were signed into law for FY09 by President Obama.

First came the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the Stimulus–don’t you feel stimulated) signed into law by Obama on February 17, 2009. Second, the “Making supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2009, and for other purposes” (congressional language for “I’m spending your money” also referred to benignly as “2009 Supplemental Appropriation”) signed by Obama and became law on June 24, 2009. Third and last (thank goodness!!), “Cash for Clunkers” aka “Making supplemental appropriations for fiscal year 2009 for the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Program” signed by Obama and becoming law on August 7, 2009 (whew, Obama managed to squeeze still another spending bill (the fourth overall) into FY09 with less than 2 months left in the fiscal year, I wonder if he was hoping that the ill-informed would lay all this spending at Bush’s feet?).

See http://thomas.loc.gov/home/approp/app09.html

To the point of that last parenthetical, the Obama FY09 spending increase was 17.94% (according to Obama’s OMB numbers), a year to year increase only bested 13 times in the last 110 years. To place these other 13 years in context, 3 years surrounded WWI–and were followed by 5 years of dramatic spending decreases; seven years occurred during the Great Depression and WWII–also both interspersed with and followed by a combined 7 years of dramatic reductions in spending; and finally, two years of dramatic increase during the Korean Conflict–followed unfortunately by only two years of modest spending reductions, yes all were followed by REDUCED spending, not just the lessened increase in spending trumpted by Obama. To help with the math, that leaves just ONE year, FY75, actually comparable to Obama and “guess what?” just like Obama, corresponding years of decrease Federal spending did not follow the FY75 explosion in Federal spending.

Obama appears to have (I’d guess that in his mind this was a resounding success), created a new paradigm in Federal government spending. By the way, if you look only to “on-budget” numbers (you’ll have to do your own research on what this means), the Obama explosion in spending was actually closer 20% NOT 17%.