Obama Is a Spendthrift— And Here's the Proof

IBD Editorials ^ | May 24, 2012 | Editor

[Kaslin]

Budget: You wouldn't think that, after adding $5 trillion to the U.S.' debt, President Obama would seriously claim he's a fiscal hawk. But thanks to a misleading article on CBS' MarketWatch site, that's just what he's doing.

'Since I've been president, federal spending has risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years," Obama said on Wednesday. "Think about that."

Obama didn't turn to his own Office of Management and Budget to support this fact, or even the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

Instead, he went to a CBS MarketWatch column by Rex Nutting, which claims spending under Obama has risen by an average of just 1.4%.

"Federal spending," he wrote, "is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s."

Nutting even posted a chart to "prove" his case, which appears to show average annual spending hikes under Obama coming in well under that of his predecessors.

Not surprisingly, this "fact" lit up the left-wing blogosphere, with the White House quickly parading the article to dismiss GOP attacks.

There's just one problem. Nutting had it wrong.

[trubolotta]

If the truth hurts, lie. Seems that Obama has the press practicing taqiyya and kitman.

[hosepipe]

Anybody that needs further proof don’t really care at all..
Else they would have noticed a couple years ago...
Noticed that he, was and is, actively trying to destroy our economy...

Its all in Saul Alinskys book, “Rules for Radicals”..
Layed for any that wants to know what is happening.. NOW...

[Signalman]

Nutting is a nut.

[Jvette]

Who you gonna believe? The MSM or your lying eyes?

[Migraine]

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Is brocko saying he’s only spent a niggardly amount????????????

Is it the old smoke/mirror trick of calling spending, “investing”?

Or is it a matter of just ignoring huge amounts of spending because of accounting tricks, like the inflation rate, which is low because everything that is rising in price is ignored?

[WOSG]

The anatomy of Rex Nutting lie about Obama not being a big spender:
1. He put FY 2009 in Bush column, even though Bush never signed off on the full FY2009 budget and the SCHIP expansion and Stimulus were passed under Obama. It was really Obama spending.
2. Counted TARP when it was spent by Obama, requested by him, etc. and counted it as Bush spending. The made the FY2009 numbers bigger and thereby made the rampup in 2010 look smaller. If you take out TARP and look at the real entitlement and discretionary spending accounts they went up by double digits in 2010 and 2011.
3. Didnt account for inflation to make Reagan etc. look like a bigger spender than he was.