Obama's spending: What the numbers really say

last updated 8 January 2015

Even by political standards, Mitt Romney has an utterly shameless disregard for the truth, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. But a new analysis by the financial website MarketWatch.com may have uncovered Romney’s biggest whopper yet: his charge that under Obama, “federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history.” The myth that Obama spends “like a drunken sailor” is so widespread, said Rex Nutting in MarketWatch.com, that even some Democrats believe it. But the numbers, unlike Romney, don’t lie. Set aside the first part of the 2009 fiscal year—which began four months before Obama took office, with a budget largely set by the previous Congress—and federal spending has only increased by 1.4 percent during Obama’s tenure. That’s the lowest spending increase of any president since Dwight Eisenhower. The 2009 budget that George W. Bush handed Obama spent $3.52 trillion; under Obama, in 2010 federal spending actually fell, to $3.46 trillion. Obama’s 2013 budget calls for $3.58 trillion, very close to what the government spent in 2009. Contrast that record with Bush’s 7.3 percent increase in spending during his first term, or Ronald Reagan’s 8.7 percent increase during his first term. The bottom line: The famous “Obama spending binge never happened.”

That’s some creative, and deceptive, accounting, said James Taranto in WSJ.com. It’s true that if you saddle George W. Bush with most of 2009’s federal budget—which raised spending by 17.9 percent—then Obama’s spending increases look rather modest. But 2009’s budget contained about $400 billion in spending for the Troubled Asset Relief Program—the bank bailout. That was supposed to be a one-time emergency measure. The budget for the ensuing years should have been smaller, but Obama carried on spending “as if the 2008 emergency were permanent.” Besides, said Investor’s Business Daily in an editorial, spending measured in raw dollars is useless for historical analysis. What matters is spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, and Obama’s average—23.8 percent of GDP—is “higher than it’s ever been since World War II.”

Now there’s a blatantly misleading argument, said the Tampa Bay Times’ Politifact.com. The main reason we’re spending such a large percentage of our GDP is not that Obama’s a “big spender”—he actually presided over a slight decrease in spending once you adjust for inflation. Our GDP has been dragged down by the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. That crisis, not incidentally, happened on Bush’s watch.

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“This entire conversation is nonsense,” said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. For Democrats to be “crowing” about Obama’s modest spending is deeply disingenuous, since congressional Democrats tried to spend hundreds of billions more—but were blocked by Republicans. The GOP could boast about that, but won’t, since they want to pretend that they’ve had no role in spending and the economy since Obama took office. To see how cynical this whole debate is, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com, consider Romney’s admission last week that he wouldn’t make big spending cuts in his first year as president. “If you take a trillion dollars out of the first year of the federal budget,” Romney said, “that would shrink GDP over 5 percent.” Whoa! That’s a “big fat wet kiss” to Keynesian economics, and an admission that it’s nuts to cut federal spending during a recession. The Republican nominee “just repudiated the central argument his party has been making against Obama for the past three years.” Who said Romney never tells the truth?