Matt-Chicago wrote:For WD-40
Back at MC:
Federal Spending Balloons During Obama's Presidency: Opinion
By Anton Wahlman, Contributor07/10/12 - 12:44 PM EDT
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- There are some claims that are so outrageous that they go beyond the pale. Recently there have been various statements that federal spending during the Obama presidency has either been cut or has risen very little.
One recent example was a graphic that went viral. The graphic summarized a
MarketWatch column.
Politifact.com rated the claim in that graphic "mostly true."
But such claims about the budget couldn't be further from the truth.
The numbers are publicly available to prove it. All you have to do is apply some second-grade math.
The following Web page from The American Presidency Project provides numbers on U.S. federal spending:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/budget.php.
The relevant data are near the bottom of the table, just above the reference footnotes.
Let's begin by determining the average spending per fiscal year during the 2002 through 2009 fiscal years. These outlays cover the administration of President George W. Bush.
(Note that each fiscal year begins on Oct. 1 of the previous year. So the 2002 fiscal year began on Oct. 1, 2001. Presidents typically submit budgets for the coming fiscal year on the first Monday in February.)
Outlays (the third column) go from $2.01 trillion in 2002 to $3.52 trillion in 2009. Add them all up and divide by eight, and you get an annual average of $2.60 trillion.
Then let's add up spending for the four years for which President Obama has submitted budgets. (Note: the fiscal 2013 budget has yet to be agreed upon by the White House and Congress, and numbers for fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2013 are estimates.)
For the first four Obama years, outlays average $3.66 trillion. That's a 41% increase over the average spending during the Bush years.
There are no two ways around this, folks. This is hard, cold math.
There is only one objection that can be made to these calculations. We are comparing an average of eight years (2002-2009 fiscal years) with an average of four years (2010-2013 fiscal years).
That's not fair, you say. You're darn right it's not fair! But for whom? The answer is that it depends on what federal government spending will be the next four years, so we can measure eight years over the previous eight years.
Source:
http://www.thestreet.com/story/11611336/1/federal-spending-balloons-during-obamas-presidency-opinion.html