Obama, FDR Set Modern Records for GDP Spending

President Barack Obama said: "Since I've been president, federal spending has risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years." And then he said, "Think about that."

I went to the White House website to see what sort of historical light the data published by Obama's Office of Management and Budget would shine on his fiscal record.

The data says this: Since fiscal 1930, the earliest year for which the government has made official calculation, only two presidents have spent 24 percent or more of GDP for three or more straight fiscal years that started while they were president. They are Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama.

The difference is this: FDR spent more than 24 percent of GDP in fiscal 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1945 -- because the United States was fighting World War II.

Before World War II -- during the Great Depression -- FDR never spent more than 12 percent of GDP. That is less than half of what Obama has spent in each of the three fiscal years that have started during his presidency.

In fiscal 1946 -- which started on July 1, 1945, when World War II was still on -- the federal government spent 24.8 percent of GDP. But that was the last time the government spent more than 24 percent of GDP until 2009 -- a fiscal year that started when George W. Bush was president.

In October 2008, the first month of fiscal 2009, then-Sen. Barack Obama voted for -- and President Bush signed -- a $700 bill bank bailout bill. In February 2009, Obama signed an $831 billion economic stimulus.

In fiscal 2008, the federal government had spent 20.8 percent of GDP. In fiscal 2009, that jumped to 25.2 percent of GDP.

Yet even if you assign to George W. Bush all fiscal responsibility for the post-World War II-record 25.2 percent of GDP the federal government spent in fiscal 2009, Obama is still the post-World War II champion for persistently high spending.

In fiscal 2010, according to Obama's White House Office of Management and Budget, the federal government spent 24.1 percent of GDP. In fiscal 2011, it spent 24.1 percent again. This year, according to OMB, it will spend 24.3 percent.

In the three fiscal years that have started during Obama's presidency, Obama has spent an average of 24.17 percent of GDP.

Leaving aside the fact that Obama cannot get a budget passed in Congress, and that it is not possible to predict how the U.S. economy will grow or not grow next year, Obama's OMB optimistically predicts his administration will spend only 23.3 percent of GDP next year.

Average that in with the first three fiscal years that started under Obama, and his average annual spending would come to 23.95 percent of GDP -- which rounds to 24 percent.

How does Obama stack up against his modern-era predecessors as a spender of taxpayer money?

Whether you take his three-year average of spending 24.17 percent of GDP or his estimated four-year average of 23.95 percent, Obama beats all presidents from 1930 forward -- including Roosevelt.

FDR presided over the start of 12 fiscal years -- 1934 to 1945 (before 1977, federal fiscal years ran from July 1 to June 30). During those 12 years, which included much of the Great Depression and most World War II, the federal government spent an average of 19.35 percent of GDP per year.

It would have been far lower but for the war. In 1942, the first fiscal year of the war, it spiked to 24.3 percent. In 1943, it hit 43.6 percent of GDP. In 1944, it hit 43.6 percent again. In 1945, it hit 41.9 percent. In 1946, it was 24.8 percent. But in 1947, with the war over, it dropped all the way to 14.8 percent. And in 1948, it dropped again to 11.6 percent.

After World War II, average federal spending as a percentage of GDP went up with each successive president as the welfare state -- started under FDR -- matured and expanded, and the Cold War intensified.

President Truman spent an average of 16.89 percent of GDP; Dwight Eisenhower, 17.81 percent; John F. Kennedy, 18.63 percent; Lyndon B. Johnson, 18.86 percent; Richard Nixon, 19.52 percent; Gerald Ford, 21.05 percent; Jimmy Carter, 21.18 percent; and Ronald Reagan, 22.28 percent.

With the end of the Cold War, federal spending started to drop as a percentage of GDP. George H.W. Bush spent an average of 21.93 percent, and Bill Clinton, 19.41 percent.

It began climbing again with George W. Bush. Counting fiscal 2009, Bush spent an average of 20.51 percent of GDP.

Obama said: "Since I've been president, federal spending has risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years." But Obama's average of 24.17 percent of GDP is 17.84 percent higher than George W. Bush's average of 20.51 percent of GDP.

It is true that Obama has cut spending from the 25.2 percent of GDP in fiscal 2009 to the 24.3 percent of this year. Giving Bush all the credit for fiscal 2009, that means Obama has cut spending as a percentage of GDP since fiscal 2009 by about 3.6 percent.

Is even that the best in 60 years? In President Carter's last fiscal year, spending was 22.2 percent of GDP. By 1989, Reagan cut that to 21.2 percent -- a drop of 4.5 percent.

In George H.W. Bush's last fiscal year, spending was 21.4 percent of GDP. By 2001, Clinton cut that to 18.2 percent -- a drop of about 15 percent.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
[Obama's strategy for destroying the economy]
frontpage.americandaughter.com
| August 31, 2008 | Jim Simpson

Liberals self-righteously wrap themselves in the mantle of public spirit. They ardently promote policies promising to deliver the poor and oppressed from their latest misery — policies which can only find solution in the halls of government. But no matter what issue one examines, over the last fifty plus years, the liberal prescription has almost always been a failure.

Why is this so? Why does virtually every liberal scheme result in ever-increasing public spending while conditions seem to get continually worse? There are a number of reasons:

The programs usually create adverse incentives. This is especially true in so-called “anti-poverty” programs. The beneficiaries find government subsidies a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, gainful employment and eventually become incapable of supporting themselves. This in turn creates a dependent culture with its attendant toxic behaviors which demand still more government “remedies.”
The programs create their own industry, complete with scads of “think tanks” and “experts” who survive on government research grants. These are the aptly named “Beltway Bandits.”
They create their own bureaucracies, whose managers conspire with interested members of Congress to continually increase program funding, regardless of merit.
Members of Congress secure votes and campaign donations by extorting them from beneficiaries of such programs, either through veiled threats — “vote for me or those mean Republicans will wipe out your benefits” — or promises of still more bennies.

In short, all develop a vested interest in the program’s survival. But if the result is always more and more government, of government, by government, and for government, with no solution in sight, then why do liberals always see government as the solution rather than the problem?

Similarly, liberals use government to promote legislation that imposes mandates on the private sector to provide further benefits for selected groups. But the results are even more disastrous. For example, weighing the laws or stacking the courts to favor unions may provide short term security or higher pay for unionized labor, but has ultimately resulted in the collapse of entire domestic industries.

Another example is health care. The Dems are always trying to impose backdoor socialized medicine with incremental legislation. Why do you suppose American healthcare is in such crisis? Answer: the government has already become too deeply involved. For example, many hospitals are closing their doors because they are overwhelmed with the burden of caring for indigent patients, illegal immigrants and vagrants who must, by law, be admitted like everyone else, despite the fact that they cannot pay for services. Read about it here — Destroying Our Health Care. The net result is reduced availability of care for everyone, exactly the opposite of what liberals claim to want.

To further complicate things, liberal jurists and lawyers have created new theories of liability that utilize the legal system as a means to further redistribute income. This too, has resulted in higher costs and prices in affected industries, higher insurance costs, or in some cases, complete elimination of products or services.

Liberals’ endless pursuit of “rights” for different groups also does little but create increasing divisions in our society. Liberal policy pits old against young, men against women, ethnic and racial groups against one another, even American citizens against illegal aliens, all in the name of “equality.” The only result is anger, tension and equal misery for all.

How does any of this improve our lot?

Finally, when companies relocate overseas to avoid the high cost of unionized labor and heavy domestic regulation, liberals sarcastically excoriate them for “outsourcing” America. Yet, when it comes to certain domestic industries, liberals in Congress suddenly become free marketers and choose to buy from overseas contractors rather than domestic suppliers. This happened most recently with a huge military contract being outrageously awarded to the heavily subsidized European consortium, AIRBUS, over America’s own Boeing. Since liberals claim to be so determined to “save the American worker,” what gives?

You have to take a step further back and ask some fundamental questions. Why is the liberal public policy record one of such unmitigated disaster? I mean, even the worst batter hits one occasionally. No one bats zero. No one that is, except liberals.

Prior to the Republican takeover in Congress in 1994, Democrats had over fifty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress with substantial majorities most of the time. With all the time and money in the world — trillions spent — they couldn’t fix a single thing, not one. Today’s liberal has the same complaints, and the same old tired solutions. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

When things go bad all the time, despite the best efforts of all involved, I suggest to you something else is at work — something deeper, more malevolent.

I submit to you that it is not a mistake, the failure is deliberate!

There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis…. …the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

[Part II of this article will explore those organizations created to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy and their ties to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.]

The Complete Cloward-Piven Series

The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I: Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III: Conspiracy of the Lemmings
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III — print copy
Hate Crimes Legislation — Back Door Censorship
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Also see (from David Horowitz's DiscoverTheNetworks.org) ...

THE CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY (CPS):

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7522
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Cloward, Piven and the Fundamental Transformation of America

Tuesday, January 05, 2010
By Glenn Beck

Meet Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven,
authors of the Cloward-Piven strategy

"I'm going to give you a hard concept to get your arms around: It's the concept that there are people in this country who want to intentionally collapse our economic system."-Glenn Beck

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,582097,00.html

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